“There’s something kind of indelible, if inscrutable, about human voice and the way it gets expressed in writing” said Tim Robbins, assistant English professor, during the Faculty Lecture series on Sept. 10 at Kirkwood Community College.
Robbins said he had been thinking a lot about the effects of generative AI in higher ed. He revisited an article published in 2015 on Emma Goldman’s use of Walt Whitman’s poetry in her anarchist propaganda, highlighting Goldman’s advocacy for free speech.
His lecture contrasted Goldman’s approach with modern examples of AI generated content, stressing the need to maintain the human elements of reading and writing in any form of education.
“Walt Whitman and Emma Goldman are kind of hugely present in all the activist rhetoric, images, and discussions that are going on at the time, so just as discovering Leaves of Grass per anarchism and other essays text was really transformative for me as an undergraduate,” said Robbins.
He spoke on passages and discussions on Goldman’s anarchist re-readings of Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” and her belief that art was a cause in the world itself.
Robbins discussed Goldman’s argument that the relation between the writer and the reader becomes more intimate and human in the printed word.
Whitman’s radical undertones in his poetic project and Goldman assertion that Whitman’s work is a living human being with all its contradictory impulses highlighted, adding to Robbins reasoning for including the works of Goldman and Whitman, and why art is only concidered art because it comes from the human mind and not from a generative engine.
“I never read the lectures of Emma Goldman, but it’s fun to see that new, know you, perspectives on things you have never experienced before,” said Wes Duggan, Liberal Arts major. “There is always something you don’t know, and there’s something more to learn, and there’s something more to engage with than whatever you are used to and comfortable with.”
Robbins’ main takeaway from his lecture was about how students should be cautious when approaching AI generative technology in educational fields, and how human voice should always be the main way of transmitting knowledge and art.
“That’s the great trick of generative AI, that any feeling of uniqueness or randomness that its giving you is simply the reordering of slightly different tokens, not the emergent individual differences of human thinking and language,” said Robbins. “So if we surrender reading and writing to synthetic engines, we surrender what precisely what Goldman and Whitman fought for.”
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