We are the Messy Miracle

I have been making comments about AI to my students this semester, but I’m not great at this sort of thing as a professor. What I am pretty good at, weirdly, is sports metaphors about writing. I asked them if they’d be upset if their friends invited them over to watch a game on TV, but then instead of a real game, the friend ordered up an AI simulation of a game. The students were outraged about this made-up scenario, especially the young men, and leaped to try to articulate what’s great about human sports.

The conversation went in a different direction than I thought, which was great. The students focused on how the mistakes in sports create the drama; the almost is the best part. Which, come to think of it, is also a great point. But no one watches writers compete to write the best sentences.

What I was trying to get to with the sports metaphor was also the fact that AI is 100 percent average. In addition to being made up, it’s predictive, so it hoovers up the internet and then spits out a distilled slush that is an average of all that, so it’s C writing. It’s predictive, not intelligent; it doesn’t understand what it’s writing and can’t fact check. While humans create meaning from observing patterns, AI scans our output for patterns. It is a simulacrum of logic, the haze that surrounds thinking. AI writing is vague and abstract. It misses images in writing, as in it doesn’t understand how they contribute to meaning. An image turns one thing into another, and it misses pivotal detail. It sees image as decoration and eliminates it.

But then I was trying to write into the heart why students are enthralled with AI. I didn’t do it as well as Joseph Fasano’s beautiful poem, For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, with its genius line, “What are you trying to be free of? The living?” which I’m going to start including on my syllabi. Here’s my in-process document:

Dear friend,

I know that it is fascinating to stare at the robot face, but is it a face? I know that it is devilish fun to put on the robot mask, to imagine yourself as you but also better, smarter, stronger. I know that no one thinks they are good enough. I know that you, especially, having been born into this weird world, are especially stabbed with this question. What good is a human? We need sleep, we get foggy, water falls from our faces and we need such specific things, a certain temperature: 98.6 degrees. Humans are not built for a warming world. People might tell you to try on your own as a human, but they are screaming out the other side of their apps and their mouths that you are not strong enough, not smooth enough, and you do not look enough like a pink sunset with a cocktail.

Plus, I know you are thinking: if I could just have more time. If I use the robot face this one time, then people will love me more, and that will buy me some time to catch up to the robot’s reputation, if there was just a minute somewhere ahead of me where I could catch my breath. There’s not enough time to think, and humans have created this ticking clock, have asked each other to be robots. So let the robot write this one thesis, this one love-letter, this one last will and testament. In a way, you’re turning into the robot baby your mother always wanted.

As a robot baby you would never make a mess. As a robot adult you would bound out of the robot car carrying documents written by robots, and all would be well. It would be vague, but well. And where would you be? You would be inside that robot, living inside a tiny room inside that large robot, and you would not see your robot spouse’s face, but you would see via screens the image of the robot that contained your love, and everyone would feel better because everything was perfect, and there would be no messes and shame and everything would be vaguely delightful, even if you had signed on the dotted line that you would not learn anything or make yourself stronger as a human, because the robots recommend we do it this way, because everything would be optimized.

Or you could be selfish and difficult and messy. The most audacious thing you can do is to write a shitty document all on your own, on your growing messy own, to quantum leap to a pizza socket wrench metaphor all unsightly and opossum. Bust in my screen door, forget how to punctuate, find your face—your own face, your own, your opossum wild pizza socket wrench canine incisors face and snap your jaws for the life of your own flawed secret flower face.

So that’s one try at a thing I will probably not give my students, just like I rarely give out the Shadow Syllabus that continues to go around the internet. (Amy Glenn has put it online as a PDF with the swears taken out, which is nice!) Since it was even hard for me to find in my own website, I’ll put it here, too, just to have it on substack.

Shadow Syllabus

1. I’ll tell you exactly how to get an A, but you’ll have a hard time hearing me.

2. I could hardly hear my own professors when I was in college over the din and roar of my own fear.

3. Those who aim for A’s don’t get as many A’s as those who abandon the quest for A’s and seek knowledge or at least curiosity.

4. I had bookmarked a citation for that fact, and now I can’t find it anywhere.

5. The only way to seek knowledge is to open your hands and let your opinions drop, but that requires even more fear.

6. The goals and outcomes I am required to put on my syllabus make me depressed; they are the illusion of controlling what cannot be controlled.

7. I end up changing everything halfway through the semester anyway because the plan on paper is never what the living class ends up being about.

8. I desperately needed A’s when I was in college because I didn’t know what else I was besides an A.

9. Our flaws make us human; steer toward yours. I steer toward mine. That won’t always be rewarded in “the real world.”

10. “The real world” isn’t the real world.

11. I realize that I, as the authority figure in this room, might trigger all kinds of authority issues you have. Welcome to work and the rest of your life.

12. I have a problem with authority figures myself, but I’ve learned how to work with it. Watch my cues.

13. I think I have more to teach you about navigation than about commas, although I’m good at commas.

14. This is about commas, but it is also about pauses and breaths and ways to find moments of rest in the blur of life’s machinery.

15. I hope we can make eye contact.

16. One of you who is filled with hate for this class right now will end up loving it by the end.

17. One of you who I believe to be unteachable and filled with hate for me will end up being my favorite.

18. One of you will drive me to distraction and there’s nothing I can do about it.

19. Later I will examine the reason you drive me to distraction and be ashamed and then try to figure out my own limitations.

20. There will always be limitations, and without my students I wouldn’t see them as easily.

21. Sometimes I will be annoyed, sarcastic, rushed, or sad; often this is because you are not doing the readings or are trying to bullshit me.

22. Students are surprised by this fact: I really really really want you to learn. Like, that’s my THING. Really really a lot.

23. I love teaching because it is hard.

24. Someone in this classroom will be responsible for annoying the heck out of you this semester, and it won’t be me.

25. Maybe it will be me. Sometimes it is, but often it is not.

26. I won’t hold it against you unless you treat me with disrespect.

27. If you are that person, you should rethink how you treat the people who bring you food at McDonald’s, as well as how you treat your teachers.

28. I hope you are able to drop the pose of being a professional person and just settle for being a person.

29. Everyone sees you texting. It’s awkward, every time, for everyone in the room.

30. Secret: I’ve texted in meetings when I shouldn’t have and I regret it.

31. Secret: I get nervous before each class because I want to do well.

32. Secret: when I over-plan my lessons, less learning happens.

33. Secret: I have to plan first and THEN abandon the plan while still remembering its outline.

34. Secret: It’s hard to figure out whether to be a cop or a third-grade teacher. I have to be both. I want to be Willie Wonka. That’s the ticket. Unpredictable, not always nice, high standards, and sometimes candy

35. What looks like candy can be dangerous.

36. Secret: Every single one of your professors has been at a point of crisis in their lives where they had no idea what the fuck to do.

37. Come talk to me in my office hours, but not to spin some thin line of bull, because believe it or not, I can see through it like a windowpane.

38. Some of you will lose this piece of paper because you’ve had other people to smooth out your papers and empty your backpack for as long as you can remember, but that all ends here. There’s no one to empty your backpack. That’s why college is great and scary.

39. Maybe there’s never been anyone to empty your backpack. If there hasn’t been, you will have a harder time feeling entitled to come talk to me or ask for help.

40. I want you, especially, to come and talk to me.

41. You can swear in my classroom.

42. Welcome. Welcome to this strange box with chairs in it. I hope you laugh and surprise yourself.

I wonder about why I am shy to give these documents out to my own students, even though they are the intended audience, and my feeling in the classroom is what generates such things.

I am shy as a writer in my writing classrooms. It’s my full-time job, and yet there’s a part of me that cringes and withers a bit whenever I talk about my own experience, even though it’s my experience that generates much of the teaching framework.

I think, maybe, that I too am aware of so much of the pull on their attention. They have more interesting things to look at on TikTok. I’m a live human, probably with a coffee stain on my jeans and a whole messy personality and so many limits and then my cringe—I’m embarrassed about my embarrassment. Which, now that I think about it, is the same sentiment I’m worried they’re enthralled by. So I suppose, as is usually the case, these pieces are also for me. They are me trying to work out what it means to be a messy, fallible human at the front of the classroom, instead of an automated content-delivery module.

I know that in so many areas of my life, self-forgiveness and self-confidence come, ultimately, from embracing who you are, who I am: this wet-wired creature with an incredibly complex emotional warning system, and with multiple firewalls so that often, I cannot know a lot of what drives my actions. It’s all shorthand. We are computers who roam the surface of the planet and eat random stuff that grows out of it, and we can be carbon-neutral in an ideal setting, unlike the thirsty programs that drink the water meant for this planet. We are the messy miracle, capable of the shame and admiration and horror—complex algorithms honed for survival—that guide us toward an end we don’t understand. I am the messy miracle. You are the messy miracle.