Dynamic Subspace

Author: Jason W. Ellis

  • BMCC Forum on Generated Text and the Future of College Writing Yesterday Was a Great Success

    Yesterday, about twenty faculty and students gathered in BMCC’s Fiterman Hall room 1304 to discuss the effects of Generative AI on college writing, higher education, and society-in-general for the Spring 2025 Robert Lapides Faculty Forum. I was honored to have been invited to participate.

    From left to right, Lisa Sarti, Professor of Italian Studies at BMCC; me; and Carlos Hernandez, Professor of English at BMCC and SF writer started the discussion, but soon almost everyone in attendance had something to contribute: observations, personal experiences, and questions.

    For my part in the conversation, I came at the issue from four vectors: as a science fiction scholar, a writing instructor, a technical communication instructor, and computer hobbyist. My desire to learn how Generative AI works and to pass on what I have learned to my students is informed by my adherence to William Gibson’s axiom, “the street finds its own use for things,” which is coupled with Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and claiming the tools of technology for our own purposes to build the network, community, and world that we want.

    While it was scheduled for only two hours, we ran over by 20 minutes–something the organizers said hadn’t happened before. I think that if time hadn’t been called, we might still be there into the wee hours.

    The BMCC students in attendance demonstrated their engagement and concern about these technologies in the classroom and their everyday lives.

    I closed my comments in response to a question about how we might use Generative AI to fight back against authoritarianism. I offered an assemblage of open source generative AI, a bit of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965), and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985).

    Besides the substance of the discussion, I think meeting colleagues at BMCC might have opened doors for further work on AI matters and the annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium. Stay tuned!

  • Second Reading of Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2

    Jean-Léon Gérôme’s Pygmalion and Galatea, 1890.

    Before this Wednesday’s upcoming forum discussion, I wanted to revisit Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2, which I had read 14 years ago for my PhD dissertation titled, “Brains, Minds, and Computers in Literary and Science Fiction Neuronarratives.” On rereading Powers’ novel, I paid more attention to the iterative development of Helen. What I’ve learned about AI and developments in Generative AI in the past three years provided a stronger foundation for considering the technical aspects of the narrative. Lived experience gave me a better understanding of some of the non-technical aspects of the narrative, too.

  • Forum on Generated Text and the Future of College Writing at BMCC, April 2, 2-4pm

    decorative flyer, text in body

    I’ll be speaking on a discussion panel about Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, and College Writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY (BMCC), Fiterman Hall 1304 on Wednesday, April 2 from 2-4 PM. If you’re free, it would be great if you could join us for what I think will be a lively in-person conversation. Details are below and the event flyer is posted above and below.

    The Spring 2025 Robert Lapides Faculty Forum

    Wednesday April 2 Fiterman Hall 1304 (245 Greenwich St.) 2-4 pm

    A Step Toward the Unified Macro-Mind or a Cybernetic Lawnmower in the Groves of Academia? :
    Generated Text and the Future of College Writing

    Recently, Large Language Models and generated texts have sent shockwaves through the academic community. Do they represent the initial glimmerings on a new horizon of transhuman creativity or are they, in Noam Chomsky’s phrase, merely “glorified autofill,” a “high-tech plagiarism” based on a self-cannibalizing database? Where old-fashioned plagiarism now seems like a relatively simple matter of ethics and originality, Artificial Intelligence and the looming specter of the Literary Chatbot bring a whole host of more tangled issues of Perception, Knowledge, Autonomy, and Class Warfare into the classroom.

    Many believe the neural net models of cognition don’t begin to pierce the mystery of the mind—Roger Penrose and others remain unconvinced that human thinking can be reduced meat-puppet computation, while John Searle’s Chinese Room parable undermines the idea that mere symbol-juggling can ever result in emergent consciousness. Still, techno-optimists believe we are at the precipice of an age of cyborg enhancements in which human potential will be radically expanded and the primate mind will be uploaded into Cloud-dwelling immortality.

    We will be discussing these issues and many others in an open symposium with CUNY professors Jason Ellis, Carlos Hernandez, Lisa Sarti, and Shane Snipes. We encourage our colleagues to come to voice their concerns and hopes on this increasingly crucial and urgent matter.

    pictures of four scholars speaking at the event

    The event is named in memory of Robert Lapides, a past English department professor at BMCC. Reading his obituary, you get the sense that he did good work that saved voices from the past from erasure, and created space for voices in the present to carry the work forward.

    “Robert Lapides, professor emeritus in the English Department, husband of Professor Diane Dowling, died on January 1, 2021. At BMCC for over 40 years, Professor Lapides will be remembered for his passion, his life-long fight for social, economic, and racial justice, and his commitment to building communities where differences can be expressed. Never afraid to speak up or ask questions, he was genuinely interested in his students and colleagues. His intense curiosity about people, places, politics, history, literature, psychology, religion–about what it means to be human–informed all his efforts. He encouraged his students to embrace their humanity, including the parts of themselves they felt they needed to hide, building their courage to write honestly. His legacy can be found in his influence on the many students and colleagues he worked with, the online communities he created, in his faculty magazine Hudson River, and for editing Lodz Ghetto, collected writings left behind by Jews confined to the Lodz Ghetto in WWII. Until the end, he was working on his book about the creative development of Charles Dickens, which will be published posthumously” (from Ellen Moody’s Under the Sign of Sylvia blog, 25 Mar. 2021).

  • Creating a Digital Signature With Your Phone’s Camera

    cursive text: making your digital signature

    Last week, I showed my students how to create a digital signature that they can insert into letters that they write in their word processor of choice. It’s very easy to do and simplifies things if you need to send a PDF of a letter without having to print, sign, and scan it.

    Follow these steps:

    1. Take a clean, white sheet of paper and sign your name using a black pen or marker.
    2. Lean your paper on a completely flat, inclined surface and avoid a light behind you so that you don’t cast a shadow over your signature.
    3. Take out your phone and enter the camera app. Carefully align your camera so that it takes a photo of your signature straight on (meaning, your camera’s photo sensor should be parallel to the piece of paper with your signature). It can be helpful to zoom in slightly with your camera app so that you don’t have to be very close to the paper with your signature. If there’s any question about focusing, take the time to tap your signature on the screen so that the camera app focuses on your signature.
    4. Open your signature photo in your phone’s image editing app. First, crop the image to just your signature. Then, maximize the brightness and maximize the contrast, which will make the paper appear pure white and your black signature pops. Save this edited version of your photo.
    5. Email your edited version of your signature photo to yourself so that you can download it on your computer.
    6. Drag the saved image into your word processor document where you left space between your closing and typed name, or use your word processor’s image insert option. If the image appears very large, click on a corner of the signature image and drag to resize the signature.
    7. Depending on your word processing software, you might need to change the image alignment settings for the signature image (so that it is placed where you want and the typed text of your letter doesn’t fall behind or around it in a strange or unexpected way.
    8. Save your document and export it as a PDF to email to wherever it needs to go.
    9. As a bonus, save your signature image someplace safe so that you can reuse it as needed.
    screenshot of a business letter featuring what appears to be a real signature but is in fact an image of a handwritten signature

  • Octavia Butler’s Observation on Leaders in Parable of the Talents

    Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006), the celebrated science fiction writer, imagined a near-future dystopia set approximately in the United States of our time now. As I tell my students, she was extrapolating from her here-and-now to write stories set the future. While she was imagining what the future might be like, she was also writing about her present due to it being her initial starting conditions. For her novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998), she wrote in recognition of the effects of climate change–especially in California, concern for the push for de-regulation by the wealthy, and response to an earlier president who used the campaign phrase “Make America Great Again,” Ronald Reagan. The following passage is the epigraph to chapter eleven in Parable of the Talents. It has stayed with me. All of her points can allude to today and serve as a warning for considering our leaders in the future:

    Choose your leaders
   with wisdom and forethought.
To be led by a coward
   is to be controlled
   by all that the coward fears.
To be led by a fool
   is to be led
   by the opportunists
   who control the fool.
To be led by a thief
   is to offer up
   your most precious treasures
   to be stolen.
To be led by a liar
   is to ask
   to be told lies.
To be led by a tyrant
   is to sell yourself
   and those you love
   into slavery.