Savannah Downing

The purveyors of these tools treat this as a kind of freedom: you’ll never have to think alone again. Your teachers can’t force you to spend hours chipping away at a single essay — you can plug their essay prompt into an app and then use your time however you want. But while startups like Cluely promise freedom, they’re actually selling a form of voluntary subjugation. Because if you never learn to think — if you never spend enough time in intercourse with yourself to really get to know who you are —then you’ll never act freely. You’ll become one of those who, to again quote Arendt, “dispose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience or situation is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand.” That is not the life of a free person but of an automaton. Or, more accurately, it’s the life of an ideal totalitarian subject.

On chatbots: publiccomment.blog/p/you-ll-nev...

One day after the White House environmental justice website went dark, please join me in welcoming the father of environmental justice to Bluesky. Yes, sociologist @drrobertbullard.bsky.social literally defined the concept in his 1990 book, Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality.

My refusal to use/assign/allow AI in class is a refusal from the perspective of a human worker. I cannot ethically support an increase in demand for a technology that benefits You Know Who and aims to replace You and Me. Hell no. And I am being neither paranoid nor sorry.

I want to read slow research. I want to read slowly developed ideas and thoughts. I want to read slow work. I don’t want to read “fast fashion” style research, and I don’t want incentives to write it.

The take is hot and correct

A narrative. And it seems like for each of the 4 categories there are like 8-10 evaluative criteria

10 min of my life during finals week: Student drops by with a gift. I cry. As we walk out of my office, I lock my keys inside. She asks if “that’s the one” on the floor. My wallet has spilled open. I pick up everything while saying “this is future Savannah’s problem. See you at graduation!” 🙃 lolll

The human responses said things like “get to know your classmates so you have friends to cheer you on” and “the outline seems scary at first but I promise it helps!!” And chat gpt said “Familiarize yourself with your online learning platform.” Lol what

For the last (open-note, open-book) public speaking quiz, I asked a gimme question about advice students would give future pub speaking students. Some were so lovely! But a few were chat gpt’s advice. Why would you let AI give *your* own advice? It’s so sad to me?

AI does not belong in intro-level communication courses. I want to read what’s in students’ brains and how they’re making sense of what they’re learning about relationships, media and culture. I am so over a chat gpt response to a literal question that asks what do *you* think. It’s all I wanna know

This must be the cat parent equivalent of just stopping for McDonald’s lol mine love when the chewy order is behind, too 😂

Toward reproductive justice rhetorics of care: state senator Jen Jordan’s dissent of Georgia’s heartbeat bill As we emerge into a post-Roe landscape spurred by state-level “heartbeat bills,” the stakes are high for rhetorical scholars to identify rhetorical topoi that have the capacity to intervene in legi...

Offered some reproductive justice rhetorics within institutional dissent that can push against the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy (we can argue for abortion care and access while reckoning with a 6 week old fetus as life) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

The AI discourse that wants to frame itself as it's all inevitable, particularly in higher ed, is at the root of the problem. To not understand that makes me truly fear of any ability to do the work of education that society so desperately needs.