I’m on sabbatical, but this post goes out with an affirmation of solidarity with everyone getting down to fall teaching in this low dishonest decade. It’s a bad time for teaching. On top of social and political crisis, there’s AI. Or rather, as part of said crisis, there’s AI. It is exhaustingly present everywhere you turn, even when you have retreated to your sabbatical bunker—perhaps especially there, if you are in your sabbatical bunker, as I am, to study the institutions of genre fiction. I am studying how, for a century, Anglophone culture and society developed a system of (apparently) formula-bound text production which, whatever its limitations, many people have turned to for its seeming copiousness and its openness even to those with few literary and economic resources. Meanwhile, in the past decade, Anglophone culture and society have developed a system of (apparently) formula-bound text production which, whatever its limitations, people are turning to in order to fill the internet with garbage text while filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and filling the pockets of some astonishingly awful people with more money than you can imagine. So here’s my idea: like the development of genre fiction, “AI” is the product and beneficiary of a significant transformation of literacy—that is, the production and use of writing—and its role in the distribution of social rewards.
What Might Have Been
Pierre Bourdieu, pioneer of quantitative literary analysis:
Pour vérifier la correspondance entre l’espace des positions et l’espace des prises de position, nous avons recensé 537 textes de 510 auteurs publiés par les éditeurs retenus dans notre étude, qui ont été traduits en français entre juillet 1995 et juillet 1996 et retenu, pour chacun des titres, les variables suivantes : genre (roman, nouvelle, récit, conte), éditeur d’origine et et d’arrivée, langue d’origine (pour l’anglais on a distingué entre «anglais» et «américain»), nom du traducteur, nom et sexe de l’auteur, année de parution de l’édition originale, de la traduction française (1995 ou 1996), jugements de la critique, prix, nombre de pages, nombre total d’auteurs étrangers publiées par l’éditeur concerné, nombre d’auteurs ayant la même langue d’origine nationale. L’immensité des recherches nécessaires pour le mener à bien nous a conduits à abandonner ce projet.
In order to verify the correspondence between the space of positions and the space of position-takings, we took a census [survey?] of 537 texts by 510 authors translated into French between July 1995 and July 1996 which were published by the publishers in our study, considering the following variables: genre (roman, nouvelle, récit, conte [novel, short story, (non-fiction) narrative, (fantastic) tale]), original publisher and French publisher, original language (for English we distinguished between “English” and “American”), name of translator, name and sex of the author, year of publication of the original edition, of the French translation (1995 or 1996), critics’ judgments, prizes, number of pages, total number of foreign authors published by the publisher in question, number of authors having the same original national language. The immensity of the research necessary to carry this project off led us to abandon it.
("Une révolution conservatrice dans l’édition," Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 126, no. 1 [1999]: 3–28; here 18n31.)
Nothing beside remains….
(thanks to @rania_tn on twitter for help translating genre terms; I alone am responsible for errors in translation above)