Librarian Abe Nemon provocatively argues that there can be no such thing as Ethical AI or AI Literacy without what he terms genre-style literacy. Genre theory posits a closed system of language in which all human ideas and symbols are simply repetitions and recombinations of other human ideas and symbols; everything in the system of discourse already exists inside the system. Generative AI automates the closed system genre theory posits, combining randomness and repetition (stochastic gradient descent) to reproduce regularities in language, art, and thought; and functioning (in a very real way) as genre-reproducing machines.
But although humans (like GAI) participate in the existing system of discourse, they are not limited by it. Human language and thought are abstractions of nature (that are also part of it), while nature is ambient, spatio-temporal, and superabundant. This means there is a meaningful ethical distinction between where human ideas and actions come from, and the resources generative AI draws upon to source its ideas, with comcomitant conclusions to be drawn about what we should teach students about originality, what sources deserve credit, and what tasks (or parts of tasks) generative AI is and is not helpful for.
Abe argues that genre-style literacy and genre-style analysis can serve as a forensic tool to enable students not only to evaluate media that may increasingly be AI-generated, but also to distinguish between reality and misleading abstractions of it.
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