Bridge over Troubled Water
Postscript No. 15 | Owen Yingling on AI at UChicago, the art of the polemic, and everything of any significance
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*Submissions for the first New Critic essay contest are due Wednesday, May 27th! On the occasion of our graduation, the New Critic founding editors seek a proper commencement address — one that answers “What Was College For?” The winning essay receives a $1,000 prize!*
*What follows is a conversation between Owen Yingling and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Owen’s essay “The Great Zombification.”
Owen is likely the heavyweight champion of our young generation’s polemicists — his previous essays have taken on the decline of literary fiction, the confessional-essay-industrial complex, and the absence of the Great Millenial Novel.
Now Owen — an assistant editor of The New Critic and a junior at UChicago studying Philosophy — has taken on the one great specter to rule them all: AI.
Below we discuss why we should punish students more for cheating, dusty intellectualism, UChicago mythos, stern hands, 1920s Paris, Wikipedia, scenesters, Scott Alexander, internet criticism, modernism, LessWrong, how not to produce great art, the Bridgewater interview process, Saint-John Perse, removing oneself from literary endeavors, and the impossibility of grad school.
In short, we cover everything of any significance.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*
*You can access the entirety of Postscript — this conversation in full, new weekly installments, and the complete archive of our gen z interview series — for only $30 a year.*
RUFUS How has UChicago distorted your sense of the American youth culture at large?
OWEN It’s done terrible things to me. Not everyone is going to Jimmy’s and talking about Derrida. But still, nobody there would ever think about our own college sports. But, Elan, no offense, you did stereotype us a little bit.
I live in my fraternity house. I’m in touch with whatever part of UChicago is closest to actual youth culture. But even in the frat, I was coming up the stairs when I heard there was a debate going on about the Spanish Inquisition, and I pitched in with some stuff about Netanyahu’s father’s revisionist book about the Inquisition, and we argued about that for a while. That was a bunch of frat brothers messing around. It does make you think that there’s this vast group of American youth who do read a lot of books.
RUFUS So where does your anger come from?
OWEN The anger comes from the fact that if Chicago is very, very intellectual, then that’s still not a good baseline. And it’s going downhill. It’s largely because of the way AI is used with the Core [Curriculum at Chicago]. A frat brother telling me that he “Chatted” every single essay he wrote for the Core? That’s a direct attack. The school has also introduced easier Core classes, like a social studies class where you just read research papers. The foundation is eroding, and even without AI, it would be eroding. The Core got smaller in 2001-2002, and it’s going to keep shrinking. AI is this rot that is accelerating this process. There is an image of old Chicago versus new Chicago — that it was once this quirky, weird humanities place that existed until 2020, and since then, it’s been classes full of investment banking, finance people.
RUFUS Then they started over-indexing prepsters…
OWEN I am sort of in favor of this. If old UChicago is an academic sandcastle, then letting in these people is like pouring a river on it that sweeps up some of the sediment with the water. The sandcastle is going away, but it means exposing more of the world to the Chicago ethos. Before, it was sequestered. This is not a bad trade-off. The problem is that, with AI, the river becomes a more existential threat.
Here’s a crazy AI thing. Someone I know used ChatGPT on purpose to produce UChicago admission essay prompts and submitted them to the admissions office. One of his AI-generated prompts won their contest, and it was going to be featured as one of the actual application questions until the admin found out because he posted about it on LinkedIn, which is ridiculous and maybe emblematic of something.
RUFUS But I feel like you’re contradicting yourself, because with your sandcastle metaphor, you’re praising this change in Chicago’s ethos, but it’s the Business-Economics people that use AI — a supermajority don’t care about the learning, and the ones who do will be on their Kindles reading Tacitus anyway.
OWEN You’re right. It is a weak point. But I think it’s good to force people to engage with the Western tradition, even if they don’t take it up. I suspect part of the flowering of English literature was due to most intelligent Anglosphere men in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries being forced to learn Greek and Latin in grammar school, even if they had no interest. Selection is not enough. People will select out of the humanities too early.
RUFUS But it seems that the student culture — not administrative action — motivates reading. The classes where I have felt intellectually stimulated are those in which there was a collective sense that, “I should have done the reading,” because everyone is interested in the subject at hand. The weak points are the Chads who say, “Who the fuck care about Hobbes and Locke? I want pussy, and I want to get drunk.”
OWEN I agree. The key nuance is that UChicago choked itself out on dusty intellectualism. I think many of the students who come from prep schools — like myself — would be willing to do their reading if a stern hand is applied. Without a stern hand, they will default to using AI. This can be fixed, to some extent, with administrative action.
RUFUS I took a Latin class in high school in which we translated Caesar and the Aeneid. At the end of the term, I remember hearing that some guys in my class had been cheating with each other to figure out which lines would be on the test, or something like that. And I had been in my room for hours studying these Latin lines, which I will never use again. That moment ruptured the incentive structures of school for me. I thought, “This is inane. Why am I in my room studying these lines?” It burst whatever film had been pulled over my eyes. And I just thought, “How meaningless.” And it’s really that sense of meaninglessness that pushes someone to use AI.
OWEN I think the best solution is to punish students, to scare them — but not too much — it can’t be to the extent where teachers and TAs don’t want to punish them. The most annoying example of AI use I’ve seen was in the fall. It was my Heidegger class with Robert Pippin, who is the top Heidegger and Hegel scholar in the country. For our first essay, he said, “Oh, there have been so many reports of AI use on this essay that I’m just not going to count it for a grade.”
No! Pippin, I want you to punish every student who used AI on this essay right now, because they deserve it. Instead, my first essay doesn’t count. My first essay was good. I got an A- and I would have maybe gotten an A in the class had that essay counted. This pissed me off. But the reason he didn’t do it is because if he was to refer these cases to the University, the punishment each student would get would be a three- or four-quarter suspension. Pippin is a nice old man. He doesn’t want to do that and put up with the administrative work or deal with individual AI cases or, like, giving kids a year-long suspension on a “more likely than not” criteria. It’s like “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” There are 25 kids a year who take the brunt of disciplinary punishment that should really be meted out to 2,500 of them.
ELAN I have a question about this. I proctored a Blue Book exam today. I was not told to take peoples’ phones. It was a two-hour exam. During the exam, people got up to go to the bathroom more often than I think one normally has to go. So at least one person cheated, although I think they all did. I saw one student take an extra-close look at the exam sheet before going to the bathroom. I could have sent it to the professor, but —
RUFUS — but who cares?
ELAN Exactly.
RUFUS That’s my point about the Latin translation. It was meaningless.
ELAN Miniature transgressions, when so widely accepted, build up to a generalized apathy and rot.
RUFUS I think these transgressions are so endemic at Dartmouth that cynicism, apathy, materialism, they permeate everything: the humanist liberal arts fall apart when there’s a crack in the edifice.
ELAN Owen, tell the story of your decline of literary fiction piece. How did that come about?
OWEN I’m 95% sure I’m allowed to talk about it — it just may give people an unfair advantage in the Bridgewater interview process.