The rise of AI has exacerbated the post truth problems of today. Knowledge feels uncertain and displaced. In this volatility, the university has the opportunity to position itself as a safe house that is real and embodied. For many of us, the university is a transitional space, a ritual site for coming of age, where we begin to shape how we think, work, and exist. It is a halfway point between the protected classroom and the real world, and for that it needs to maintain its trustworthiness. Within this tension, Writing for the Media takes place.
Writing for the Media is a module fortunate to have an object that is ever-changing. Media is so intimately connected to the advancements of science and technology, and as the latter innovates, so must the former expand. In this iteration of the module, a particular experimental attention has been given to the rise of AI, specifically machine learning in our case, reacting to real-time weekly developments. The generation of students in this class have grown indigenous to the digital age. We feel the mass commercialisation of generative AI is sudden, transformative and beyond our control. Furthermore, we hold an underlying nausea for the system. From our humour, culture, style and language, we confront its paradoxes with ambivalence to avoid being subsumed. I believe this module captured these sentiments, and the manifesto attempts to break away. Through the exploration of theories and the material realities of AI systems, we slowly began building knowledge and understanding upon former intuition.
The projects reflect an enormous amount of effort, dedication and interpretation into our chosen topic and genre. We are a diverse class coming together to digest a problem felt by students and educators across the world. Each project’s peculiarity developed a principle within the manifesto, and I recommend considering the video essays and the podcasts as context to their respective principles.
While we uncovered the biases, the inequalities, and the logics of a product of a flawed system, we importantly, and to some extent, alarmingly, understood how mystified the phenomenon remains. The way AI is being integrated into society has the dangerous potential to erode the presence of human value - its labour, affects, friction. But all things natural are evolutionary, and the youth by definition carry the changes of time in their bones. So the decision to produce a manifesto is both deliberate and methodological. It is our critical response and intervention to the fetish of AI in education, where change reflects kairos.