Dynamic Subspace

Tag: BMCC

  • 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!

  • 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).