Devonya: Welcome to another episode of Hotel Bar Sessions. I’m Devonya Havis, and I’m joined by my co-hosts, Leigh Johnson and Rick Lee. And today, we’re talking about authority. But before we get started with that, I want to find out what you’re drinking, Leigh, and whether or not you’re ranting or raving.

Leigh: Thanks, Devonya. I am drinking a Bloody Mary today, and I’m going to be raving about the fact that we all still call X “Twitter.” It’s very hard to get human beings to change long entrenched habits, and this is evidence of one of those that I really do appreciate. You know, I remember when they said that GIF was pronounced “jiff” and nobody changed their mind. And you know, Rick’s from Chicago: how long has the Sears building been called the Sears building? And I don’t think it’s actually been the Sears building since 2005 or something like that. And the Chicago Bean is still called the Chicago Bean, even though that’s not actually the name of it. So, I really respect the resistance of human beings to changing their habits.

Devonya: And how about you, Rick? What are you drinking and ranting or raving about?

Rick: I’m going to have a Kir Royale today, I am raving about the life and work of Jerom Kohn. Jerry was a teacher of mine at the New School He was the founder and the founding director of the Hannah Arendt Center at the New School for Social Research, and he has been a lifelong proponent of the philosophy of Hannah Arendt. I just found out recently that he passed away. He reached a ripe old age. But I just want to mark, he was an amazing teacher, a wonderful human being, and everyone who knows him says that he was a kind, warm, and generous person. So my sympathy goes out to his family, and especially to his partner, Gerard. Here’s to you, Jerry.

Devonya, what about you?

Devonya: Well, I think I’m going to have a good old-fashioned cup of black coffee to get my brain going. It may not be your usual bar fare, but I think today is the kind of day where I need it. It’s been a little cloudy in Buffalo, off and on. Those who are from this region know how cloudy Buffalo can be and how we worship the sun when it finally decides to come out.

And I’m following the trend of raving today. In particular, my colleague Noemi Waite, who started an organization called Colored Girls Who Bike Too. It is among the organizations that she’s engaged with that teach about biking, bike repair, and STEM in particular, focusing on principles of physics. It is a rather bold and innovative way of engaging people, but more importantly, it’s a way of aiding folks in getting transportation to and from work and other important places that they need to go to when public transportation is not conducive to meeting their needs.

Rick: That’s amazing.

Devonya: Today, our conversation is about authority, and I want to look to Leigh to kick us off and tell us how this conversation is going to go. Well,

Leigh: Thank, Devonya. I’m really excited about today’s topic of authority, But, before we all start imagining political figures of institutional power or power structures, let me just clarify the direction I want to take today. I’m not so much interested in explaining traditional political authority—the  kind that comes with a uniform, a position, or a title—as I am in unpacking how authority relates to personhood, to authorship, and to authenticity.

When we think of authority, we often imagine some external force, someone in charge, someone calling the shots, but I want us to take a step back and ask, where does authority really come from in the first place?

Now, the word authority shares its roots with author, and both of them are derived from the Latin auctor, meaning originator or creator. So, to have authority can mean variously to be the originator of an idea, the one who crafts a narrative, or the person who is recognized as a source of meaningful insight.

That raises interesting questions about authenticity. Why is it that when we perceive someone as the verifiably authentic origin or creator of something, as the “true author,” we tend to trust them more and grant them more authority over our understanding of a topic, even over how we think about ourselves? In this sense, authority isn’t just something imposed from above, it can be something we claim for ourselves, through self authorship. Maybe authority emerges when we take control of our own story, our own sense of who we are and what we stand for.

And yet, of course, it’s never completely up to the individual. Authority also depends on recognition from others. Who gets to speak authoritatively often has as much to do with society’s ideas of who counts as a full person as it does with wisdom, talents, or moral insights. And then there’s the ever pressing and ever urgent question of technology. The digital age has drastically changed the pathways to becoming an author, and thus, an authority. Thanks to online platforms, anyone can publish, and yet, who do we consider trustworthy when so many voices are competing for our attention?

Think about the curated authenticity of social media influencers, the rise of AI generated content, and the erosion of traditional editorial gatekeepers. What happens to credibility and the rational discourse of the public sphere in an era of fragmented media?

So, in this episode, we’re going to open up this conversation well beyond the usual suspects of kings, generals, or politicians. To borrow a line from Tennyson’s poetry: “authority forgets the dying King.” That is, power begins to slip from the grasp of political authorities as they weaken, as respect for and obedience to them wanes.

Now almost 60 years after Foucault announced the “death of the author,” we might actually be living through what he imagined. And when “King Authority,” the very idea of authority, is either dying or being dethroned, What we have to figure out, I suppose, is whether AI is an actual usurper or just a pretender to the throne.

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Devonya: Your opening discussion, Leigh, about authorship as creation and originality really makes me think about the points where Sartre and Foucault come together, talking about the ways in which we create the self, much like a work of art, and that there is an engagement in this creative production of who we are. Not simply as an aesthetic practice, but genuinely engaged in the art of living itself as a production of a certain kind of life in a certain way of being, where we seek to be original and we seek to be authentic in those broad senses. And, definitely Sartre leans more into authenticity than Foucault, because I think Foucault is constantly trying to figure out the ways in which we are self-inventing.

Leigh: Yeah, I mean, I’m often reminded of this famous poem “Invictus.” It concludes with this phrase: “It matters not how straight the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”

And I think that actually captures in many ways the, I say postmodern, but I mean, “after the modern,” I mean the modern sense of authorship, there is a authority to self-authorship that is In some ways, unchallengeable, maybe self-evident, and I want us to challenge that.

Rick: But don’t we have some settled pieces of philosophy on the podcast, and isn’t one of them that the separated, isolated, atomic individual is a fiction, and we need to dispense with that?

And so, in such a case, if there isn’t an individual who is a fiction, Is what they are independent of their relations with others and so on. If there isn’t such a thing, then wouldn’t the author always be plural? Like, wouldn’t there always be authors that there’s no me there that could be the sole authentic originator of my life, my actions and so on?

Leigh: I mean, yes, of course, I agree with that, but all three of us are in academia. Would you accept a multiply authored essay from a student as their authorship? No, you absolutely wouldn’t! I mean, let’s just get down to the nitty gritty right here at the very beginning.

Devonya: I think it depends on the parameters of the assignment, because I very much am increasingly a fan of people thinking together, learning the task of thinking together to produce better thinking. And by better thinking, I mean deeper thinking, less surface thinking, raising more questions. And to Leigh’s point, I do think that that is distinctly different than what in academia is always frowned upon the self-published manuscript, right?

Leigh: I really appreciate you pointing that out, and I think that you are a innovative pedagogue for doing that. But I imagine even you still have some qualitative assessment of what counts as “cheating.”  If one of your students turned in a paper and they said, “yeah, okay, I didn’t write this, but a lot of us were having a conversation at the bar…maybe somebody else wrote it, but it was a collective thought.” I mean, would you accept that as a final paper?

Devonya: I think these are two different parts, like, who actually wrote it.? versus who contributed to the ideas that are captured in the writing.? And I want to think of those as separate.

Leigh: Yeah, and I think, just going back to Rick’s point, we can’t actually separate those. None of us are originators of ideas. None of us are sole authorities ex nihilo. Institutions of “authority” have been established and regulated in order to more or less secure certain power structures.

Devonya: Absolutely. And the parameters around what counts as legitimate or authentic production within the context of those institutions is definitely skewed in one direction.

One of the things that I talk about often with my students is that there’s certain things—folk wisdoms or cultural wisdoms—that students are often discouraged from bringing into their academic experiences, even though those are the kinds of wisdoms that have gotten them to their success.

How do we begin to think about authorship more broadly? How do we think about the authority of folktales or creative productions in ways that inspire greater creativity, but that also alter these staunchly rigorous academic standards? I don’t want to throw out all the standards, but some of them, I would like to say, come from a time when academic publishers needed more books to publish. Maybe there was a different financial way in which those books were published?

Leigh: There wasn’t.

Devonya: Okay, pie in the sky dreaming.

Rick: I’m now searching the MLA guide to find out how to cite folk wisdom in a paper. It turns out there is no way!

Devonya: No, you say it’s a story. When I cite these things in work that I’m writing, it’s a “familiar black cultural saying” or something like that. Often these things are very authoritative in terms of their analysis of power relations and structures and so, for me, I think the authenticity has something to do with the astuteness and the accuracy of the analysis.

Rick: Yeah, but if I could pull out something Leigh said earlier, we can’t lose sight of the fact that, especially in academia, we do place a huge value on your work is “original,” in two senses of original: “you are the author of it,” and “you thought of something no one else thought of.”  The second one we emphasize way too much, I think to the detriment of what you were saying, Devonya earlier about group thinking and collaboration and disseminating knowledge in other ways, like in a podcast. When we produce a podcast on a certain topic, are you the author of it, Devonya? Is Leigh? Are we all together? Is “Hotel Bar Sessions” the author?

I think these are all complicated questions, but I think when we start reflecting on it, they’re the same questions we have to ask about the individual. Is Kant the solo author of the Critique of Pure Reason?

Leigh: Yeah, and I think this gets us back to the author function.

So, Michel Foucault, French philosopher, stresses that the idea of the author is neither timeless nor universal. The way we think about an author—what they are responsible for, why their names matter—developed historically, and before the modern era, texts often circulated without attribution or concern for the identity of their creators. It’s only under particular conditions—the rise of modern notions of intellectual property, individuality, and literary canon formation—that “the author” as we now know it comes to the forefront.

Rick: We could refer back to last season when we were talking with Jeff Jarvis, the author of The Gutenberg Parenthesis, who raised questions about how authority and authorship were constructed on the basis of the printing press. You were just turning to Foucault to note that the invention of the printing press brings with it all sorts of problems of authority that then needed new institutions because at least his argument is that in the Middle Ages, in a scribe society, authority is based on, I’ve known this person all my life. You know, this is my grandma’s sister. This is the postman’s wife. And that’s where authority came from.

But, once I’m reading a book written by someone who I don’t know who the hell they are, suddenly I want to know where the hell do you get off saying this? That’s what the question of authority comes down to is: how do I know you have the right to say this?

Leigh: And I think that gets back to Devonya’s point when she’s talking about folk wisdom. The author function, according to Foucault, serves as a principle that helps us categorize and give coherence to certain discourses. Like, when we refer to Shakespeare, that allows us to unify a set of plays and poems under a single conceptual umbrella. Same with Homer. The author’s name acts as a label that brings dispersed text together and makes it easier for readers and scholars to organize and interpret them. And we’re not very good about doing the same with “folk wisdom.”

Devonya: There were also times when people who followed a particular thinker would assume the authority of that particular thinker and author things under that person’s name. So, if I was thinking about something explicitly Platonic, rather than putting “Devonya Havis” on it, I might assign it to “Plato” as a follower of Plato’s thinking. I agree that in the modern age, that is far less acceptable, probably for reasons of copyright, and as we noted earlier, questions of citation.

Philosophers have a certain body of knowledge that we reference as canonical, regardless of our relationship to it. It is the moving canonical way in which we look at things to disagree, maybe to agree. But it’s a reference point.

Leigh: I completely agree with you. You know, last season, we had this really great conversation with Tuhin Bhattacharjee, where he mentioned that in ancient Indian texts, they often have the opposite problem that we have, the West, which is there isn’t actually an author ascribed, so it’s not the problem of is this plagiarized? That is not a problem. So the “author function,” as Foucault would call it, involves the ways in which discourse assigns the idea of an author to a text, but even if we know biographical details about the writer, the “author function” highlights how the author is less a real person and more a conceptual figure put there to help us interpret meaning.

The author serves as a placeholder in our understanding of a text. We treat certain sentences, ideas, or stylistic choices as belonging to the author—which in turn influences how we value and interpret them—but, actually, the “author” as a living, breathing, human person, identifiable in only one sole human being, is really unimportant. So, the author function really just plays a gatekeeping role.

It helps us set the boundaries of what counts as a work, a legitimate work. It determines what is included or excluded from an author’s official oeuvre, and it influences which interpretations of that are deemed valid.

Devonya: The way in which you’re talking about the author function as being less about the living, breathing, embodied person who crafted a work makes me think about the controversy that arose with the sequel book that came out after To Kill a Mockingbird, where people were disillusioned by the protagonist because they had come to know him in a certain noble way in To Kill a Mockingbird only to discover that he harbored racist tendencies.

And this is ostensibly the same author, and had they not made such a big deal out of this being a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, people would have said, “No! this book couldn’t have possibly been authentic. It doesn’t fit the format” this author has provided.

And maybe that’s a long-winded way of leaning in again to the kinds of questions that Leigh been raising about where we begin to set parameters that are not merely gatekeeping, but parameters around how we take something seriously or raise questions about it in terms of authorship.

I do think there’s the problem of author as gatekeeping function, but I think part of that function is to ask for a certain kind of rigor. Where do we begin to index this moving away from gatekeeping, but maintaining a rigor around the material that we’re engaging with?

Leigh: Yeah, you’re exactly right. If a text doesn’t fit well within the expected style or genre or themes associated with a certain author, that discrepancy is going to spark debates about not only authorship, but also authenticity.

Rick: That’s the negative side of this author function and the role of authorship. I remember on the blurb in one of my books, someone wrote: “Only Rick Lee could have written this book.”

That can go two ways, right? Like, “this is so peculiar to the kind of thinking that Rick Lee has that his voice is all over it.” And it could also mean “this is so crappy, no one else would have written such.”

Leigh: Oh, stop it. Stop it.

Devonya: But it could also be that the unique constellation that makes you who you are gives you this unique perspective in ways that provoke different kinds of thinking.

Rick: I think we should put a pin on the notion of curation.

You were pointing out earlier, Devonya, that that I have a style, that an author has a style, is also a straitjacket. The moment I no longer write in that style is the moment where either, as Leigh just said, my authenticity is called into question, or my authorship is called into question. Like, did I plagiarize this?

Leigh: Yeah, and I think in essence, Foucault’s author function is his way of drawing our attention to the fact that authorship is not a “natural” given. It’s a rather specific social and cultural mechanism. It helps us understand why we privilege certain voices, how we make sense of certain texts, and how the name of a certain author operates as a key interpretive device. But it’s not. more than that.

It’s merely pointing to a flesh and blood individual who did the writing, and that might not be the most important thing.

Rick: Okay, but if not, then what might be more important than it?

Devonya: It’s location in the power in discursive structure that allows it to achieve meaning. Like, if we play a folk song, does it matter who authored the folk song? Or is there something that each artist brings to that folk song that is unique and that the folk song emerges from particular moments and it’s taken up at different kinds of moments? And so in a way, you’ve got a communal form of authorship that stands as well, which leans into this idea of the author function.

Leigh: I’m so glad you bring up this exact point, Devonya, because. I have had a longstanding argument with many of my music friends that Memphis has a very unique form of the very common cover bar song “Proud Mary.” So,everyone knows the song Proud Mary.

If you hear a cover band, and I’m talking about like just a regular bar band playing cover songs, play “Proud Mary,” they’re pretty much going to play it exactly like the Ike and Tina recording of it. But if you come to Memphis, you will hear a very different version of “Proud Mary.” And I have many videos of different bar bands playing the song in Memphis. We’ll put the link to my argument in the show notes, you can see it. I promise you will hear the difference.

But, my point here is that what we have is clearly a song with an actual author that we all know, but somehow communally, in Memphis, together, musicians over the course of the last 30, 40, 50 years—I don’t know when “Proud Mary” was written—have collectively authored a cover of this song that is, weirdly, the “Memphis version” of “Proud Mary.” Again, please reference our show notes, I promise you will see it yourself.

Where can we tell the difference between just copying something, just repeating something, and “taking on the influence of something” as a way to create something that is also, weirdly, kind of still belonging to the authorship of the original person.

Rick: On the other hand, there are things we want people to copy. I don’t want people to originate on the Pythagorean theorem.

Leigh: Definitely not. Don’t do that. Or the polio vaccine.

Rick: Right. I don’t want my doctor “originating” on human anatomy. So there are times in which copying is really what we want. And this brings me back to Devonya’s point about folk tales and wisdom that has been passed down by a community.

That’s a community saying “look, this is something you need to keep in mind.” And, of course, there are going to be variations on the tales, as different people tell them, and so on, but what’s important is that we repeat this for some reason. What’s important about math is that, you know, you can’t originate your own.

Leigh: There’s no “riffing” on it!

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Leigh: I don’t think that we can have a conversation about this topic without talking about. AI and large language models and chat, GPT, et cetera.

 Rick: Quelle surprise!

Leigh: Shifts in not only authorship, but authority that have happened really, let’s admit it, in a very short amount of time, like the last five years or so, and ask the question: how has digital media changed who can be an author or who is recognized as an authority? I think there’s a lot of questions we can ask here.

One is, does it matter if someone uses AI to help them author a publication, or a video, an idea, or an argument, or whatever? Does that make the person who asked AI to help them less of an authority? Or we could ask, does that make AI an authority?

Rick: Can I take this back a couple of steps? I want to take it back to a case in which I was in Florence and I was sitting in a piazza, a town square there under, let’s call it, this isn’t the case, but let’s just, for my example, say an exact replica of Michelangelo’s David.

And this exact replica is in the original place that Michelangelo’s David was. It replicates it down to the minutest detail. It is an exact copy. And I was telling a friend that I didn’t get a chance to go to the museum where the statue is, but I’m sitting here. And they said, “Oh, well, that’s not the same thing.”

And I said, “okay, so then tell me what the difference is.” What’s the difference between that statue in the museum and this one out here? And the answer is, “well, that one’s by Michelangelo and this one’s not.”

Leigh: That’s such an interesting.

Rick: Well, does the fact that Michelangelo’s hands—and we don’t even know, like, in those days, the artist was not sometimes even touching the things that they were the “artist” of, it was a studio collaboration and so on. There’s nothing in the thing itself that says “Michelangelo was here.”

How do we know that the one that’s in the museum is not also a duplicate that was made somewhere along the line and we didn’t realize it?

The reason I put this back to the copying of Michelangelo’s David is, in a sense, one thing that technology allows us to do is to copy a lot and really rapidly. And so, what I’ve backed us into is basically the argument that Walter Benjamin makes in his essay, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” namely, that we’re living in an age in which the original and the copy, we can’t tell the difference. His argument is that doesn’t matter.

We’ve lost what he calls the “aura” around the work—I think that’s in many ways attached to the author of the work—and one question is, what do we do now in an age when we can’t tell who is the originator of this? Do we give up on its importance, or do we try to reclaim it?

Leigh: This goes back to our episode on Baudrillard’s Simulation and Simulacra as well.

Devonya: I take “aura” to be that unique and special thing that is taking place in the historical moment when the artwork emerges.

Rick: Yeah, and part of his argument is historical: that, in the West, artworks were originally in churches, places of worship, then in civic buildings or palaces, and then museums. And each of those locations lends an aura around the work of art that actually doesn’t belong to the object itself, but comes from its cultural and physical location.

Devonya: I think that is part of what Foucault wants to capture with the author function and the discursive notion as well.

I remember when hip hop began sampling, and there were these intense debates about whether or not sampling was merely copying, or it was a unique a artistic creation and I have this discussion with my daughters about Kpop for example because it’s really taken up a lot of the motifs and themes of Motown and combined them with cultural aspects of Korean folk music and harmonics. For me, there’s a difference between a copy, a variation, and a riff… and I want to lean into that because for me the creativity of the enterprise is also a part of what it means to author something

Leigh: Okay, so at the risk of maybe devaluing human creativity…

I do want to say that, at least in music, there are only so many variations of tonal sounds that you can make and, obviously, in different cultural contexts, there are different cultural themes that you see in the way that music is organized. But in the West, for example, there really are not that many variations.

So when you say, for example, that Alan Thicke’s song, “Blurred Lines” copied Marvin Gaye’s “Gotta Give It Up,” there’s a really difficult parsing that you have to do there, right? Because it is in some ways a matter of sampling, and where it becomes copying is actually a matter of intellectual property. It’s not a matter of real philosophical distinguishing. There is a way in which all pop, blues, gospel, folk songs are all copies of one another. They’re just rearrangements of one another. It’s very hard to say that any one is absolutely original. They’re all obviously in some ways, as you said earlier, Devonya, evidences of folk wisdom, like, they’re just re-confabulations of a certain set of tropes that are shared by community, that make sense to that community, and that are meaningful to that community. That’s what American music is at its heart, is just these re-confabulations.

But, at the same time, we could still say, should there be ownership of a particular arrangement of something or another? And I’m not sure that I want to say that there should be.

This gets us back to the question of our students. Our students are working with tools they have available to them that none of us had available to us that are allowing them to improve their own work by running it through a collaborative process with, in this case, an artificial agent that allows them to make their essay sound better.

What is the difference between them doing that and them having a regular human tutor or them having an office meeting with me?

Devonya: I think the difference for me is intent. Am I trying to not do the work by using artificial intelligence, or am I trying to improve my work?

Leigh: But how’s that any different than them scheduling an office meeting with me? You know, they’re trying to improve their work by talking to me.

Devonya: It’s not the idea of improvement that bothers me. It’s what am I bringing to it? Am I attempting to evade reading philosophy in general and use AI to summarize these difficult texts so that I get all the key points and then I can write up something that will satisfy what the professor is saying the professor wants? Or am I really using these key texts to think about these questions and issues and relate them to my life experiences in meaningful ways? That’s a difference.

Yes, work can be improved at both sites in that configuration, but am I trying to not do the work, or am I wanting to do the work, but in need of assistance? For me, that’s a distinction.

Rick: Isn’t that, though, a question of us wanting to know whether you, the student, can do the thing? Whether the thing is writing an essay or thinking, whatever that might mean, or critically evaluating, and so on. All of these things that in my university we call “learning outcomes,” that our courses are assessed on, on the basis of whether we deliver these learning outcomes as if we’re producing widgets.

Devonya: And as if we can deliver them! I mean, as if they are not some kind of communal thing that takes place. You can’t deliver a learning outcome.

Rick: Right. But in the case in which we’re trying to find out whether you, student, can do thing X, we want to try to be sure that they’re the ones doing it themselves. But Leigh’s point, as I heard it, is we want to say, “well, with help from others, but not too much help.”

Leigh: Human others.

Rick: Yeah. With help from others, as long as they’re human, and as long as it’s not too much. And I’ll tell you, not to throw my sister under the bus, but I’m going to throw my sister under the bus. Dave’s wife, Kelly…

Leigh: Oh my god, he’s naming names, Devonya!

Devonya: Uh oh.

Rick: When she was an undergraduate, I was a grad student at the New School and once in a while, I would get a call from her. You know, “hi, how are you? Blah, blah, blah.”

“So, you know, do you know anything about Kierkegaard?” And I’d say, “yeah, you know, he blah, blah, blah, blah.” And she’d be like, “uh huh. Uh huh. Yeah. Oh, and do you know anything about what Kierkegaard says about X?” And I’d say, “oh yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah”. And she’s like, “uh huh. Uh huh. Uh huh.”

And it turns out I was writing her paper on the phone! And once I discovered that, I’m like, okay, just call and say, will you write this paper? And we’ll go through it on the phone. And then she had her friends do that.

Now, that was a human helping another human. And to the extent that they took down my exact words, they were copying, but I’m not sure that they weren’t doing something that is also a relevant task that we want humans to perform.

Leigh: I completely agree with you. And I know this is going to be an unpopular claim, but I think that to say to students, “don’t use ChatGPT” is the exact same as to say to students, “don’t use the library.” I really do. It is a tool to help you be better at doing what you’re doing.

Now, can people use that to cheat? Yeah. Can people use libraries to cheat? Yeah. Can people use their friends to cheat? Yeah. But that’s not the point. The point is that we want, I hope, to give students every possible tool available to them to be the best kinds of thinkers and writers and interlocutors that they could possibly be. If we actually spent as much time teaching students how to effectively use chat GPT as we did telling students not to use ChatGPT, we would get much better students.

Rick: And I think cut and paste is way more insidious as a technology than ChatGPT. I think cut and paste has made plagiarism not only easy, but it’s produced really dumb instances of plagiarism, where students don’t even change the font or the line spacing and so on.

Leigh: You know, I want to relay this example of my experience as a grad student slash instructor at Penn state when I was a grad student, there was literally a shop—and I’m not kidding, it was a “shop”—across the street from the Penn State University campus that sold notes, exams, and everything else from particular classes. So, you could go in there and you could literally buy an exam from my class or notes from my class and basically purchase a way to pass a class.

Devonya: If you had disposable income, right?

Leigh: If you had disposable income. But, like, that to me is way more insidious than what we’re facing today, and weirdly met with way less moral outrage than what we’re seeing today.

Rick: My first job was at Penn State, and I know the place you’re talking about quite well, because a student produced a piece of writing that was just so bizarre.

I was talking to them, and I’m like, how did you ever think that this is what was said? And they said they went to this place and they bought the notes. Well, the notes are submitted by students who are in the class. And we all know how we’ve taken notes. Students take bad notes or peculiar to them.

So, I said to them, do you pay the students to take notes? And they said, yeah, we do. I said, OK, pay me and I will give you the notes because if you’re going to sell them, I want you to sell accurate notes. And they said to me, I’m not kidding, we can’t do that.

Devonya: Wow.

Leigh: And Rick’s whole side gig was…

Devonya: writing accurate notes!

To your point, I think in a world that is increasingly neurodiverse, it is important to think a lot about some of our “call outs” of plagiarism. Other kinds of resources become useful tools in aiding people to achieve what they are capable of in an academic setting.

Leigh: A million percent. Yeah.

Devonya: That is super important to think about these kinds of tools that are more openly available than me having to have the spare cash to pay whatever amount of money I would need to pay to go to the note assembly paper shop to buy it. So, I think the idea of things being available, accessible in a much more democratic way are important.

My big concern is the capacity to discern what is credible information, what is accurate information. This is my concern around AI, because I know when I pull it up, and everything nowadays seems to have some kind of AI engine built into internet search engines, and the kinds of things I get at a glance, if I’m looking at something related to work I’m doing or something I’m teaching, I can run down what credible and accurate or what is in line with what I’m teaching from things that are just kind of random consolidations of spurious information that makes ultimately no sense at all in the way that I’m trying to put it together. And that, for me, is a major concern when students are relying on these kinds of materials.

Leigh: Million percent agree with you here. And I wonder if maybe this shouldn’t be reason for us to redouble our efforts at teaching students critical thinking, like the way to determine good resources from bad resources, and not spending all of our time trying to tell them “don’t use resources that you have,” like ChatGPT, to produce research.

I get that my position is an unpopular one. I’m not unaware of that.

Nevertheless, I am so concerned with the fact that academia is so concerned with “cheating” that (a) they’re missing the value of teaching students how to use these new technologies, and (b) that they’re missing the whole point of their emphasis on so called “authentic authorship” by making it tied to this entirely outdated idea of an individual author individually creating an original idea.

Rick: That point shows how the phenomenon of recency bias also plays a role in technology, because I would say that the technology for producing a ton of questionable information came way before AI and maybe even the internet.

I just have to point to the retraction crisis. Now, I know it’s getting more and more widespread that papers have to be retracted, but what also is more widespread is our ability to gobble up more and more data and sift through it.. and I am sure that the printing press is the technology that allowed the dissemination of information of questionable credibility.

That being said, as Jeff Jarvis has argued and I pointed out earlier, it was because of the invention of the printing press that you get things like editors and presses and peer review and all of these gatekeepers to try to ensure the authenticity and originality and credibility of the work that these human authors are producing. And so, I’m not sure it’s true. Chat GPT that’s producing this. I think the technology was already there.

Leigh: And what the technology cannot produce is firsthand accounts of real human experiences. Sorry, I’m an existentialist at heart, but that’s where we have to go back to existentialism.

And when we read people like Fanon or Jean-Paul Sartre even, and they say: This is what happened to me. This is how it happened to me. There’s no way that ChatGPT can reproduce that. Period. Just like ChatGPT can’t reproduce for students an account of their own experience. Period. It just cannot.

Devonya: Well, can it give a sort of narrative?

Leigh: Yeah, good point. It can definitely do that. And maybe this gives me a second to retract something that I just said.

Of course, ChatGPD can reproduce stories of real life human experience. But just drawing this back to the question of authorship and authority and authenticity and the relation between those, ChatGPT doesn’t have anything resembling real life human experiences, and so can’t author those in the same way that our students can, for example, and anything that it authors that sounds like such an experience would not have the “authority and authenticity” that an author would have, a human author.

Devonya: This is the part where I need to learn a whole heck of a lot more about Chet GPT as a professor, but I’m also seeing people take it up to do precisely that, tell a story about my experience. “This happened to me.” You know, and have Chet GPT write it out.

And I do not think at this point we should, as one of my colleagues says, be allowing judgment to be automated. That is one of the things that bugs me about artificial intelligence without the teaching of critical thinking.

I agree with you, Leigh, about the human experience and these things that are specific to what happens when we’re thinking, when we’re engaging critically, when we’re telling stories about embodied experiences.

Leigh: I could not possibly agree with you more. Like, that is absolutely true. We should not allow Chat GPT to mimic and reproduce as authentic, as authoritative, human experience. And that is the humanist in me saying that. Like, I have no philosophical grounds for saying that.

Devonya: And can that be the anxiety that academic institutions are having about CHET GPT?

Leigh: No, academic institutions are only concerned about GPT. I mean, let’s be honest.

——–

Rick: I want to tease apart two things because I am incredibly suspicious of Leigh’s falling back on a notion of authenticity, because I think if authenticity is a problem here, then it’s a problem everywhere. If we can’t adjudicate it here, then it’s going to be difficult or impossible to adjudicate it anywhere.

I agree with you, and I think Devonya as well, unless I’m wrong about what you were saying. There’s something in my gut that I want to say: we need to hold on to something that, right now, as far as we know, humans do particularly well in relation to humans and that is, and I love that Devonya you brought up this word, judgment.

I’m not sure that judgment and authenticity are necessarily related, but I do think there are values, there are ways of being, ways in which we strive and hope to achieve something, that I think belong to humans and not any other animal or technology that might do something that we would all admit is thinking.

Devonya: See, I want our non-human kin to have in on this thinking thing, too.

Rick: What I’m trying to say is they can be in on this, but I’m not sure that a koala is going to make the best judgments about what human life ought to look like.

Leigh: Fair enough. I agree with Devonya that I want our non-human kin to be in on this, too, and I don’t think this is opposed to what you’re saying, Rick. I think that what you’re saying is that we need to think more seriously about how we parse distinctions between so-called authentic authority and simulacra.

Devonya: And the question of when authority is “authoritarian,” because I don’t have issues with us having conversations about adjudicating originality or creativity or assessing something around judgment.

Leigh: Wait, don’t you though? Because you have literally been talking about your worry about students using ChaptGPT…

Devonya: No, I’m saying having conversations about it. I think they need to be ongoing conversations. My problem is when we start asserting authoritarian barriers that either disrupt those conversations or totally throw out the importance of those conversations.

Rick: And then we see now a full circle in the relationship between author and authority because, as you were saying that, Devonya, I started thinking: boy, I’ve heard in my lifetime an awful lot of disciplinary policing, you know, “that’s not philosophy.” And who has the authority to police that? It’s people who have been authors and therefore have established their authority. As I say about a lot of things, I didn’t get into this discipline to be in the police. And so, I have nothing at stake in what is or is not philosophy.

Leigh: Yeah, and as I said in the introduction, I think we’re at the moment where we have to decide is AI a usurper of that Kingdom of Authority or is it a pretender to the throne?

——–

Rick: Let’s go back to the issue of judgment, because we raised earlier the prospect of, let’s say, chat GPT submitting—well, it wouldn’t submit—but someone submitting an essay or a book written by ChatGPT to a press, right? So, if a student can submit an essay in our class and we don’t know whether it’s written by chat GPT, then it stands to reason that someone could also submit something to a press and someone could submit something to a journal.

Shouldn’t the question there not be: yeah, but did you write this? Shouldn’t the first question be: is this good work? Is this well written? Does it advance the field? Does it bring together ideas in an interesting way?

That seems to me to be the first question. And maybe down the line, because journals and presses have to deal with copyright issues, the question of who wrote this should come up.

Leigh: I a million percent agree with that, and I’m genuinely asking this question: What difference does it make if I wrote it without the aid of ChatGPT, and if I wrote it with the aid of ChatGPT?

Legitimate question.

Devonya: You’re saying if it rises to the standard of contributing something important, if it meets all the measures for accuracy and reasonable interpretation in readings, what difference does it make, then, if we have met the basic criteria?

Leigh: I’m saying if I write an essay and it gets accepted by a journal in philosophy, under peer review, what difference does it make if I wrote it with the aid of ChatGPT? Am I not still the author? Is it not still authoritative? Does it not still deserve to be published?

Rick: I struggle with this because, and I know, Leigh, you don’t like on the one hand and on the other hand, but this is the only way I can describe my struggle.

Leigh: Just one hand. You only get one hand.

Rick: No, I need two, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a struggle!

So, on the one hand, I agree with you that there should be no problem at all. Why is that different than the fact that a friend of mine, a former guest on the podcast, Christopher Long, he and I write things together, and recently we’ve come up with a pseudonym that is the two of us together. Why is that different than you using Leigh Johnson as a pseudonym for you and ChatGPT?

Leigh: Or a library?

Rick: I get that. On the other side, the Kantian in me comes to the fore and says, yeah, but you’re lying.

Leigh: I’m not, though. I’m not, though! I wrote it.

Devonya: Well, if I use spell check, am I lying about who produced the paper?

Leigh: Thank you, that’s such a good point!

Devonya: As someone who is a horrific speller, I must say the introduction of grammatical checks radically improved what my papers looked like and my ability to accurately spell things and to check terms and substitute words. I am writing those papers, and so my question is not “are you writing it only in conjunction with ChatGPT?,” but where is the burden of production?

So, to me, it’s a different thing for ChatGPT to help me improve something that I have written, or that I am in the process of writing, as opposed to saying, “ChatGPT, write this for me.”

Leigh: What is the difference between asking ChatGPT to help you improve the writing of something…

Devonya: I have to have something already written. I have to have already curated, so to speak, what it is I’m going into and that strikes me as very different. I also think the capacity to discern what is going to be productive material for my enterprise versus not, or accurate versus inaccurate material. When internet engines became big—see  how old I am—and students would be like, can we use the internet to write this paper? For the most part, students who use the internet to write the paper got themselves in far bigger kerfuffles than students who just read the material and wrote from the material.

Leigh: No, I get what you’re saying, but I’m still not seeing what the difference is between asking ChatGPT to help you edit your paper. So, assuming that you’ve written a paper…

Devonya: Yeah, I don’t see that as any different than spell check or grammar check…

Leigh: But can we just all agree that this is how, actually, ChatGPT is or should work?

Devonya: As an aid. And not a substitute.

Leigh: No, I get it. But I think that, as professors, there is this imaginary “monster” that proposes to us that students are going into ChatGPT as absolutely ignorant people about everything and just saying “produce knowledge for me” and they’re getting it, somehow, fully formed.. and that is what we get as papers. I mean, that’s crazy.

Can we all agree that’s crazy? Like, that’s not how it actually happens.

Devonya: I agree that that’s crazy, but it’s not the student who is using ChatGPT to improve a paper that they’ve written that disturbs me or makes me lose sleep at night.

Leigh: But can we just like for a moment consider that it might be that the student that we are scared of that’s using ChatGPT is actually the student who’s using ChatGPT smartly to improve a paper that they’ve written.

Devonya: I’m not afraid of that student. That’s what the technology is for. I’m afraid of the student who’s not using it smartly. That’s the student that scares me.

Rick: And I’ve had, last quarter, one essay submitted, completely written by, not ChatGPT, was written by, and Devonya referred to this earlier, the Google AI generated search results that are now at the top of every Google search. You know, I just had to put in the prompt for my essay and this was the first thing that she then just cut and pasted verbatim.

And for me, the problem there is not that she wasn’t the author or even the cheating or lying or anything. For me, the problem was she used the tool badly. And so she deserves to get a lesser grade for using a tool badly.

Leigh:  A million percent. I am a million percent agree with that… and that is not actually the philosophical problem that we’re facing about authority right now. And one of the things that I am so frustrated about seeing over and over and over again from people in our profession is that is they’re telling these doomsday stories about papers that they read that they’re 100 percent convinced were written by ChatGBT and this is, you know, like the end of everything. This is the end of the whole era of legitimate academic scholarship.

That’s just crazy.

Devonya: The sky is falling, Chicken Little?

Leigh: So Chicken Little, right? I mean, the fact is, is that most students, if they’re using ChatGPT in a productive way, are using ChatGPT in a way that (a) you probably can’t detect and (b) even if you could detect it, is not objectionable. That’s the real point.

The bigger issue here, I think, is that we are so tied to this idea of authority, this very medieval idea of authority, that we can’t just let loose of it a little bit and say, hey, actually, we’re living in an age where our students are not going to be “authorities”—or, “authors” in the way that we normally think of authors. Can we just reckon with that fact?

Rick: And, I know we’re running up against last call, but i just want to say that this goes back to the question of judgment. I don’t mind students using ChatGPT as a writing aid along the lines of spellcheck and Grammarly and other writing aids. I don’t even mind students using it as a research aid. What I think has to come along with that is a judgment about the credibility of something, and that is in an age in which we no longer have authors and the authority that comes along with authors, because everyone is an author today.

And so, in a context in which there is so much out there that is passing as information, I think the burden on all of us is to then judge the import and credibility of what I’m reading now is.

Leigh: And I would say our efforts are better spent directing students towards critically examining resources, and not being plagiarism police.

Devonya: Yeah, the gatekeeping aspects are always unsettling to me because power dynamics contribute to gatekeeping.

Needing something to be copywritten in order to produce revenue from it, or only certain things being able to be philosophy because there’s a whole other body of consideration and conversation that we want to exclude from our disciplinary conversations.

I can hear in Leigh’s questioning whether or not our ideas of authorship are archaic, also a question about whether or not these kinds of technologies offer us a way to pivot into more democratic, and by “more democratic” I mean more inclusive ways of existing in the world and thinking about authorship.

I don’t think, two decades ago, there were as many academically co-authored papers as there are now. To me, that’s a positive trend that we have academics thinking together, and I would like to think producing better work, not as single individuals thinking in a room alone, but thinking with people together and being engaged with the wide world.

—–

Leigh: Well, I’m always glad to hear people say that they are on board with not thinking of professors as police.

Unfortunately, we are running out of time. Our bartender has given us last call, but I’m assuming that my position is going to be unpopular. I think give the students all the tools that they have available to them, including all the AI tools… and let’s see what kind of knowledge we can produce. I’m not that concerned with verifying authorship or authority, but, uh, we’ll see how that works out.

Rick: All right. Well, Good night, y’all.

Leigh: Good night. Bye, guys.