Special Session

Professional and Pedagogy / Languages and Linguistics

Piers Armstrong (Santa Monica College)
Arms@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

Campus power politics 101. Critical Thinking (CT) is a conceptual totem in college mission statements. It is rhetorically invoked by administrators and evoked by diverse disciplines, including "Extinction Revolt" instances including traditional foreign language, philosophy and even English departments. Enter, in the thickening twilight of these sacred arts, an Oppenheimeresque chain-reaction which might yet obliterate the humanist atmosphere: AI, as used by students to leapfrog the paradigms of anointed learning paths and everything we thought mentally solid, organic and "sound"; AI as artiste; AI as opportunity. The power of tech algorithmic mapping leads to a derangement beyond any formalist estrangement: we who were the translators are now the translated; once-were-warriors are now data points. Subject and object, protagonist and medium, are inverted. Quantitative metonymy prevails over qualitative metaphor. Endgame? The survival of the humanist species depends on critical interrogations and insights which are politically astute long-term. Speculative answers welcome. Over.

How have college teachers experienced the AI transformation of student submissions in domains including composition, foreign language learning, and subjective essays on literature and cultural topics?

Interwoven through these is translation, whether literal or figurative (and the difference matters). Regarding AI, many of us (this author included) do not understand how AI "translates" (aggregated data into topic specific responses), much less the character of its "thought," or, more crudely, its "attitudes", and what conceptual knots of human sentiment and humanist sensibility remain indecypherable to it.

If foreign language and ESL students are submitting work where computer translation replaces their own, what consequent issues are more crucial? How to ensure and verify student cognitive autonomy and competence? How traditional student learning could be enhanced by what we have discovered, through our curation of machines, about the human learning of human languages? Whether there is a key distinction between computer "tools" and AI?

Regarding linguistics: is it the case that the main linguistic academic project of the twentieth century – Chomsky's Generative Grammar model – was superseded by tech algorithmic paradigms which are conceptually alien to the former, and, if so, what is the significance for theoretical and empirical science, and what is the political import?

Regarding composition: if we assume that AI will inevitably outfox essay graders, and provide richer assessment, what then? Is this an existential threat? Will our performance expectations of students and teachers simply adapt and evolve toward new demands, so that the overall human economy remains? If the 5-paragraph high school argumentative essay is a sitting duck for AI colonization, does the informal criticism of literary and film reviews afford a quirky, deliberately subjectivist and unpredictable rhetorical model of the essay which AI cannot replicate?

While AI is a shape-shifter, "Critical Thinking" is the key motif at the center of these debates. While it feels intuitive and seems roughly consistent over time, it is an interdisciplinary and politically mutable concept, variously colonized by different disciplines and interests.

In the face of the new frontier of AI, this session anticipates and welcomes a heterogeneity of themes and angles on language, literature and translation and their value for critical thinking more broadly.