EXCAVATIONS.

feminist research against AI + a memoir workshop announcement

Hi friends - 

I’m going to be honest with you, this is mostly a note to promote my upcoming workshop, EXCAVATIONS, but I’m writing more than a usual marketing pitch because everyday I get more upset about AI, and I think memoir is an incredibly potent tool to combat the worst of it. See, I just read “The Substack AI Report,” which summarizes the responses to the newsletter platform’s survey of those who publish through its site. Certainly the people most likely to answer questions about AI are going to be those who are very for or very against the environmentally devastating, mind-rotting technology (can you tell which camp I’m in?). And on a site for writers, I was glad to see that those of us who are decidedly skpetical-to-enraged about AI seemed to respond the most….But only by a margin. 

“Out of about 2,000 surveyed publishers:

• 45.4% said they’re using AI

• 52.6% said they’re not

• 2% were unsure”

Before I rant about how disheartening this is, I want to say upfront that I know how easy it is to get self-righteous about a thing that doesn’t tempt you. Having not eaten (or been tempted to eat) meat in over 20 years makes it easy for me to emphasize the perils of factory farming; not having children, for example, likely makes it easier for me to not buy from (or be tempted to buy from) Amazon; knowing that Sabra hummus tastes gross makes it easier to boycott, and so on. That AI’s biggest selling point is doing the work that genuinely feels like my soul’s purpose (making sense of things in the world and putting those reflections into words), I am not tempted to use AI. Greetings from the high horse! 

But….I still haven’t canceled my Spotify, mainly because of convenience; I make occasional appointments at the medspa because I like it; and despite knowing the labor required to make an iphone, I just got a new one. I trust very much that there are people who use AI who have some reason that makes it feel worth the moral compromise, and while I don’t celebrate that choice, I get it. I do hope—in the same way I have been convinced to change behaviors (including canceling Spotify, that’s happening soon)—that people might reconsider their engagement with it. 

Okay, so what does this have to do with memoir exactly? Let’s look at the writers who told Substack they do use AI. Here’s what they said they use it for: 

As soon as I saw “research,” my heart sunk. Certainly as an academic, I enjoy and value research, and it’s another thing that comes easy to me; again, this means I won’t be as tempted to use AI as someone who didn’t spend two decades getting trained in researching. But the only time AI offers citations seems to be when they are prompted to. In general, the vague summaries they provide would never pass a college class assignment unless the students learned how to request citations (which of course we know they are doing). But I’m less concerned with defending college papers (would if I could remove all graded assignments and instead just fill semesters with juicy discussions and papers the students feel inspired to write if they want to) and traditional academic citations (though arguably important, who gets to be considered valuable in an academic bibliography is an always-already exclusionary list). 

More important than formal citations, what we lose when we use AI for research is a practice of honoring lineage. And I think—despite memoir often bearing the brunt of sexist criticism for being “navel-gazey”—memoir is an incredible showcase for honoring lineage. Let me explain: when we write about and make sense of our lives, we are writing about what we’ve learned through and with other people, books, movies, music, land, and so on. No one can write a memoir and not share the wisdom of our lineage of knowledge. Someone writing about their mental illness diagnosis will show us their research: the scientific articles they read, the reddit posts they obsessed over, the mad pride zine their friend gave them. Someone writing about their relationship to a city will show us their research: the city planner they spoke to because their ex-girlfriend’s dad is one, the smell of the lake in which they spent their formative years swimming, the story of the school getting razed to build a highway they learned about from their great grandmother. 

If I want a statistic, I can use google. If I want to do research, I want to follow the trails of my lineages. People who read me know they will get a dose of the academic texts I’ve been trained in (primarily cultural studies and feminist/queer studies); they also know they’ll get a bit of anarchism, and probably some pop culture references. This is my world of research material, this was the Works Cited landscape of my memoir. When I read Alicia Kennedy, I know I am going to get her lineage of semiotext(e) writers, food studies, and first-hand knowledge of her past and present homes. When I read Cameron Steele, I know I’m going to get rigorous occult wisdom, I know I am going to get critical disability theory combined with lived experience of illness and the lens of a parent. When I read Hanif Abdurraqib, I know I am going to get the view of someone who moves through life as a sports fan, who knows the punk scene, who lost a mother, and who has a knack for idiosyncratic historical research trails about aviation or the mob. 

I don’t want to read a writer summarize a computer’s synthesis of the entire internet (which is full of a lot of bad and simply incorrect information), I want to read what people learned from where they’ve been. In talks I’ve given about my memoir, I call this “epistemologies of kinship” which is just a fancy way of saying that knowledge is made in relationship. 

Feminist studies taught me that objectivity is a myth, even if—especially if—a computer is doing the reporting. AI is trained on (steals from) humans, and humans are fallible products of our surroundings. Feminist standpoint theory offers another approach: let’s name our limitations, let’s name our positionalities (yes our gender/race/class, but also our indispensable political commitments, favorite authors, and so on), then let’s do the studying and writing knowing our view is incomplete. I want to learn from people not because I want to stay in a bubble or read “biased” information, but because I trust my own critical thinking skills to engage with what I read. AI is asking us to shut down that part of the learning process. To trust what it tells us, even though the technology is completely unmoored from a history. I want my research to reveal a path, one I know is insufficient, but one that will set me on my own trails of curiosity. I want to read information that came from a life. 

Memoir demands that the particularities of a life be taken seriously. Memoir showcases a way of making sense of the world that offers the richest kind of research: experience. 

EXCAVATIONS is a six-week memoir course designed to help you begin your book or personal essays. The details are below. Paid subscribers to the newsletter will receive a discount code after the paywall. Information is below. I would absolutely love to hang out with you for six dreamy writing weeks this fall. <3 

(Here’s some more of my cultural studies lineage shining through: “EXCAVATIONS” is inspired by the Walter Benjamin essay in which he asserts that one must return to one’s past like a “man [sic] digging.”)

Signing up sooner than later is advisable, limited spots available!

Register today. <3

Paid subscribers get 10% off the workshop fee. Use the code below!