DYKELECTICAL MATERIALISM

why is the human body composed of such capricious tubes

j lorand matory's 'the fetish revisited' would still be my intro rec on the concept of the fetish (sexual, religious, &c) as derived from racial anthropological discourses

people love the idea of the mean girl nurse pipeline because it problematises medical abuse as a personal perversion rather than understanding it as a product of broadly held ableist values and its like, if this was only about ontologically evil teenage girls choosing to enter a profession because of their unique sadism then you really wouldnt expect to see the exact same forms of abuse pervading all arrangements of paid, unpaid, formal, ad hoc, and familial caretaking as well -- its more comforting to believe the nurse was just a preexisting bad person than that most of the world broadly hates disabled people and will abuse, neglect, and gaslight them if given power over their care

wow this post already has the most annoying notes on earth. "its the system" explicitly what im saying here is its not just a matter of overwork, burnout, or poor support for medical staff -- these things are also issues but none of you ever want to deal with the problem that a medical profession in an ableist society will be ableist, thats not an anomaly or an accident. better funded medical institutions in conditions of capitalism will just be better at doing more ableism because thats what they exist for, the reason capitalist states fund medicine is not because theyre philanthropists its because they need labourers, & this places them intrinsically at odds with the idea that people can become disabled and lose physical capacity. the 'mean girl nurse' is a way of distinguishing yourself (virtuous) from the bad people who staff hospitals. what im saying is you are not different to them, you also believe the things that make them abuse patients, these are not anomalous values to hold but ideas constantly ground into all of us from the bottom up. one day you will probably be someones caretaker in some capacity, and you will probably also need a carer in some capacity, and if you are still of the belief that you and your friends and family will be better at this simply by virtue of not being caricatures of evil girls who got nursing degrees, then i worry for all of your sakes

there literally isn't a way you can detect "AI generated text" from regular text. it's just text. I could pretend to write like chatGPT and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference because like. there isn't one. it's not Ontologically Marked With AI Soullessness. Trying to ferret out who is "using AI to write stuff" regardless of what kind of stuff it is, is a losing battle, and one in which people will resort to the academic equivalent of hitting the computer with a blunt instrument to fix it.

I sit on an integrity board where we hear a lot of AI cases, and the amount of times professors are stunned when we say the writing replay/version history is the single most effective tool we have to make a determination… unless it says “sure, I can do that for you!” or similar dialogue, it’s fuckin hard to tell. I’m currently trying to get version history to be a required piece of evidence for every case.

I understand that difficult position you are in with your job and particular field, which is why we shouldn't allow technicians to run society. I do not think that the solution to the problem of AI-assisted academic material is to increase the amount of invasive surveillance that students should have to submit to.

I think what generative AI does is aggravate an already implicit contradiction of the higher ed industry — the contradiction that degrees exist essentially as both checks of competency as well as ways of paywalling access to higher earning jobs. There is a material interest in people cheating, and this has always been the case. The reality is that higher education has a bourgeois character that exists with tension with its nominal functions. This is an expression of an ongoing degradation of the functions of capital to replicate its own conditions. AI exacerbates an already extant problem in higher ed, and this problem cannot be resolved until the relationship between higher ed and labor and capital are changed on a fundamental level. In terms of immediate actions, I think the reality is that nobody has a good solution yet because generative AI is a technology which has not been settled with its relation to the social conditions of capital. I don’t think that the solution is to not care, simply pointing out that surveillance is a half-measure implemented in service of the interests of capital primarily, which students pay the cost of.

Further, is gen AI is a tool capable of being used correctly to augment education and research, why shouldn’t it be? Wikipedia and internet research used to be considered anathema to a proper day at the library. We now understand the internet to be a tool, and have measures to, at least nominally, check its use as an assistive tool. If an AI thesis, for example, is bad, it will be known that it’s bad by the fact that it’s bad. And if it’s good that reveals a different problem with the system. A lot of CS students are graduating with an incapacity to actually program bcz they’ve spent 4 years “vibe coding.” The problem here isn’t the tool — it’s the fact that these people will be checked on their competency in the field and will fail. As a preliminary thought, it might be valuable idea to develop better, more direct methods of competency checks, if that’s the concern, but the problem isn’t intrinsic to the technology. I am not someone who studies pedagogy closely so I doubt I am the one to know the answer, but there are answers possible which understand AI as an assistive tool.

Society has always moved and developed by increasingly socializing labor and production such that people are less independently responsible for all elements in the process of production. This is a historically progressive force.