A conversation with Dr. Chris Gilliard, Co-Director of The Critical Internet Studies Institute, about his approach to writing, privacy, and “artificial intelligence.” We are joined by professors Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander to discuss our experiences teaching and learning, and Chris starts by explaining his stance as an “AI abolitionist.” He shares his critiques of the many aspects of “AI”: their creation, use, and the culture that produces these digital tools. Chris asserts that ideology is built into digital technology, and he quotes Rob Horning: “GenAI is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.” Chris goes on to observe: “Some of the worst people in the world want us to use these tools.”
Chris taught rhetoric and composition in community colleges for decades, but left to pursue other opportunities before the explosion of “AI” in academia. This has allowed him to be an absolutist: he hasn’t used LLMs or ”AI” at all. Chris insists that writing must be embodied and cannot be generated by algorithms. He is currently writing “Luxury Surveillance,” defined as “consensual surveillance that users pay for directly, and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits that they are likely to celebrate” on the Critical Internet Studies Institute website. In our conversation, Chris summarized it as “Ankle monitors and Apple watches are essentially the same thing.”

Resources

The Critical Internet Studies Institute
https://www.criticalinternet.org/

Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities;
The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing;
More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI;
All by John Warner
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-warner/more-than-words/9781541605503/

Defining AI by Ali Alkhatib 06 December 2024
https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

Rob Horning AI – GenAI is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/practico-inertia
https://robhorning.substack.com/p/artificial-intentionality

David Golumbia
https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace

Brian Merchant
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/openais-studio-ghibli-meme-factory

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

Facebook Has a Genocide Problem by Alex Shephard March 15, 2018
https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-problem

Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University by Emily J. Levine
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo22804958.html