"I just don't think there's anything we are learning here, and it makes me sad that someone has chosen to machine-generate aesthetic output to then pore over for such a purpose. It's insignificant, and it is a very disempowered research stance."
@inquiline It doesn't help that every single academic position being advertised this year in every single field of study is exclusively for scholars of AI, something almost none of these people were even thinking about, much less educated in, before a year or two ago. Cool academic future we're building!
@inquiline This is exactly what happened to digital humanities. It's a real field full of people doing actual scholarship! But sudden overinvestment that does not track with the speed of that scholarship ends up producing a lot of people pretending to know something about that field, which, within a few years, will be 95% people who trained to do other things but have to churn out scholarship in that area for tenure.
@inquiline When I was at FDU, we desperately needed to hire in philosophy or religious studies, but the dean insisted it must be a DH position. So we had two candidates who were basically misrepresenting their work as DH, and one who does very hardcore DH, and guess who came across as competent and sane? The guy whose DH project we could in no way actually support with real funding and tech, who quietly ghosted his assistant professorship, leaving us with no one. AI studies will be the same.
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