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Part 1 can be found here. Part 3 is scheduled for next week.
Panelists: Vida Cruz-Borja, Gabi Francisco, Carljoe Javier; Moderator: Kenneth Yu
Kyu: Two follow up questions in one: does this mean that cultures may lose what makes them unique due to this, and, to play devil’s advocate, shouldn’t this make people see that they share more in common than not? Again, the second question is taking a more contrarian view in an attempt to see if there’s anything positive from this.
Carljoe: Well, one of the things I talk about when I teach AI ethics is we need to be aware of how most of these frontier models are built on Western culture and texts written in English. So if we use these, we should be aware that they do not represent us. One of the things I advocate for is that we need to build our own models that are built on our history, language, experience, etc. If we don’t then that’s further homogenization and flattening.
I also don’t think that “we share more than we think” is a thing that you bring about by flattening differences of culture. In fact it’s in the specificities of artistic expression of other cultures that I come to understand my own more. Like when you look at the beautiful formal garb from Indonesia and it’s so similar to the barong, but it’s rooted in different traditions, different designs, you know more and wind up thinking about the different events in history that make our cultures unique.
Vida: Absolutely, cultures can lose their uniqueness over this. We don’t need to go further than students who reached undergraduate thesis level with barely passable Tagalog and a very Western upbringing. All the politics of Philippine languages aside, Tagalog is a gateway to many more inherently Filipino experiences i.e. the experiences you get by touching grass in reality. It’d be a real shame to lock yourself out of those just because you don’t have the “pakikisama” that comes with speaking a Philippine language.
Having put together some virtual conventions in a more Western/USian BIPOC space, what I’ve learned is that while we should acknowledge that we have more in common than we think, we also shouldn’t seek to erase our differences. Our differences make us unique, our differences give us our identities. The friction in trying to understand those differences is part of what makes us human.
And then you have AI, which as Carljoe said has models built on Western culture and texts written in English. AI will seek to flatten our cultures more than the internet ever did. I had this period a few months after my baby was born where all I did was listen to Youtube videos on European royal history, just for kicks. I would inevitably end up listening to videos read by AI voices and whose scripts were obviously AI-generated. I got fairly decent at being able to tell which ones were made with the help of AI because I listened to so many, and they all have the same tics in the voice, in the words, in the visuals.
Gabi: My perspective is that of someone helping young folks get a sense of who they are, and a big part of that is teaching them the cultural legacy they belong to. To know thyself, you must first know thy country and countrymen. We hope to teach unique Filipino values, and it’s getting harder to do so when very young kids speak in the curated accents of social media influencers, and adopt their manner of dress and unthinkingly mimic their values systems. Schools impart not just academic skills, but the pakikisama that Vida mentions. I’d argue that these soft skills are even more important, as any home-schooled child can learn the curriculum’s demands, but they have a much more difficult time adjusting when they have to work with other folks in the future.
Carljoe: When you guys are talking about knowing thyself and discovering culture and stuff like that, it has me thinking. Because there’s so much “content” and I say that as someone who, when I started teaching, I would ask students what their top books of other cultures were and I would still know what they were talking about. But now it’s some obscure anime or book or manga or whatever. At the same time, it seems like there’s just something for everyone, there’s less cultivation of taste. And I know again taste can come off as an elitist thing. But taste is essential to the development of an artistic point of view. So that’s something I see, and I worry about whether there’s a lot of intake but not a lot of taste or not a lot of variety.
And like if you want to be great at an artistic medium, you take things in to develop your taste within that medium. Then you study what others in other mediums do and see what that does to your medium. You take in “bad’ or “failed” work because there’s always something to learn. And so on. But again, it’s like access to everything, but limited engagement.
Old man thing, but do people rewatch films or TV shows to study their craft? Mark up and reread their books to see how a writer manipulates language? And so on. Or is it this constant hamster wheel of trying to keep up with “the culture?”
Vida: Taste is also generational! I remember when Carljoe and I were co-teaching a class together. There was very little in common in terms of media in the Venn diagram between him and the students, but I had a little more in my Venn diagram with them, so there were times that I acted like the bridge. I would have to “translate” one media in terms of comparisons with other media from a certain period between them. As for studying media to improve craft, I go the nerdy route and read books on the writing craft. The titles I recommend are as follows:
- Craft in the Real World by Matthew Salesses
- Appropriate by Paisley Rekdal
- Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction by Jeff Vandermeer
- Spring, Summer, Asteroid, Bird: The Art of Eastern Storytelling by Henry Lien
- Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative by Jane Alison
- Write Like the Masters: Emulating the Best of Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, and Others by William Cane
- How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them—A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide by Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman
- And of course, Mapping New Stars: A Sourcebook on Philippine Speculative Fiction edited by Anna Sanchez, Gabriela Lee, and Sydney Paige Guerrero
Gabi: In many philosophies of education, we are taught that only the very best is good enough to present to the child. Taste HAS to be taught, in all things. In Philosophy class, taste/aesthetics is lumped together with ethics, showing how essential assigning value is. If everything is beautiful, then beauty loses meaning. If everything is art, then nothing is.
Kyu: So, a proliferation of choices may not be a good thing? From my perspective, I am Chinese by blood, but I was born and raised here, and I am a Filipino citizen, and yet I respect my Chinese heritage alongside my Filipino upbringing, and I am also aware of how the West has influenced me. But I grew up before today’s circumstances. What if your children/students/mentees see and choose, say, “I would like to be more like _____,” and it’s this blended, homegenized version, what would you say?
Carljoe: We don’t get to choose our background or upbringing. So those are the first frameworks that we build from, our parents, our ethnic identities, school, whatever socializing factors around us which are not our choice. I consider that our OS/firmware. But then there’s nothing stopping you from updating your OS, patching, adding new software. There’s some stuff we will never be able to change, trauma, our first language, and so on. But in terms of culture and how we engage, and in developing our tastes, that’s something we have control over.
As a personal example, I was born in the Philippines, raised and educated in the US, and then finished my schooling and stayed here. One outcome of this is that I’ve often been accused of “not being Filipino enough.” But that took me on various journeys, both in trying to learn how to be “more Filipino” but also in accepting this identity and embracing that not being “Filipino” that a traditional literary expectation would impose is not a thing I am anyway, so why try to be one? Then I figure out “how to” by myself.
So I encourage students to use artistic expression as a way to be themselves and to discover more about themselves. Again though, you can only do that if you are doing the work of trying to be more reflective both of the self and in exploring how you can use the artistic medium to find ways of expressing. The concern that I would express here is the thing we keep coming back to, which is that the way that culture is flattened doesn’t encourage this as much as we would hope.
Also the caveat I have here is that I have some amazing students who I know will be better writers than I will ever be, but they are the ones doing the work. When I speak of the issues, I’m talking more of the typical experience rather than the high flyers.
Vida: I agree with what Carljoe said. I think we just have to keep exposing the younger generations to more experiences. Certainly, I had a very sheltered upbringing growing up. But when I started attending writing workshops, especially those that required I take an airplane to get to the venue, that was when my world started broadening by leaps in bounds. I attended Silliman and Iligan in 2012 and 2013, and then the Clarion Writers Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop in San Diego, California in 2014. I spent the first two years being judged for being “not Filipino enough” by my own people and then when I got to San Diego, I was suddenly not Westernized enough, either. So I made a choice to engage more with Filipino culture from then on and it’s been such a rewarding experience. In fact, sometimes students ask me after talks and lectures how they can write better stories and capture moments better, and all I can tell them is to live their lives more—basically, touch grass again and again. There is more to the world than the internet.
But that’s for adults. What do we do about kids? I often talk with my husband about how we’re going to raise our baby and of course, his upbringing was very different from mine—and ultimately, we’re going to go with the way he was brought up, which is to expose our baby to different hobbies, musical instruments, sports. Even places, if we can. Our baby will have tried many things by the time she’s in college, and she’ll be able to make her choices from there. And we’ve promised not to impose our own wishes on her. To sum up, we’re going to give her a safe space to experiment with her identity—which is something Web 1.0 had and which is a lot more difficult to find today because social media has made it so that a kid’s early mistakes will shadow them forever.
Gabi: I like how Carljoe mentioned Choice. This whole LLM/AI culture smacks of laziness to think for one’s self, hence the removal of choice and…the removal of the very notion of an independent self.
AI/LLM culture also removes the choice because it is slowly making all the food on the buffet table exactly the same. Folks embracing it think they are exercising free will by typing in the prompts, but when they are fed by hallucinations prone to error, then it’s the blind leading the blind.
Carljoe: Can I pop in here with a challenge? What if the reliance on LLMs/AI is actually reflective of a general push against people studying ethics and philosophy? We live in “nosebleed” culture, smart-shaming, etc. Being smart is “not cool.” So again there’s something more here and it speaks to the whole automaton approach where we want people who can easily slot into jobs without really thinking of them as humans with a full range of experience (which I will acknowledge is a privileged and elitist perspective, but why not put it on the table that everyone, should they choose to, should have access to a humanities-driven education?). Self-reflection is not rewarded as much as streaming your random unexamined thoughts.
Gabi: I agree again with Carljoe’s assessment that the current changes in the national curriculum seem more bent towards manufacturing employees for positions abroad, than educating Filipinos to be more humane.
Kyu: What of the age-old argument that we need to attend to practicalities first before we can see to these “other things” like the humanities? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and all…
Carljoe: Oooh wait, are we starting here with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Because I mean if we are going to invoke that: 1) totally valid but then that kind of puts most of the things we are talking about higher up on that pyramid and really shows the kind of privilege with which we speak and yet; 2) I will contend that even when some of our needs are not being met, the nourishment offered by art can be incredibly meaningful in shaping how we can be with the world.
Gabi: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs can be discussed as an issue of prioritization. In our current education world’s set up, decisions to embrace AI wholesale are actually framed as a matter of practicality: not enough trained teachers? Organizations will now have AI teach reading to kindergarten kids (without considering the rise of virtual autism and the harm screentime does to younger children). Some of the policies seem to prioritize admin/teacher comfort instead, when the priority should be asking whether it is best for the child. Often, the right thing to do is the harder thing to do. Ethics shouldn’t depend on practicality alone (unless you’re a pragmatist, where right/wrong changes depending on the situation).
Carljoe: LOL perhaps I need to bat away Maslow as not the most essential framing here, since it’s like a pyramid where you climb up the specific needs. I do think prioritization becomes the bigger question/challenge. Because basically with where we are, we need everything and we need to catch up, and we are so far behind, and our teachers are so under-resourced, and kids are so woefully prepared. So maybe it’s not necessarily that hierarchy of needs but the question–if that’s what we are being asked–is where do we put what, given that everything is limited?
In which case, we are actually making an argument for finding spots to put technology. But like, is the question: should we be teaching kids how to read using AI? Or is it something bigger, like maybe how do we build better systems for parents so that they can provide support for their kids at home? (and these would include even digital infrastructure; do parents have the media literacy that we are trying to teach the kids?) So yeah I am not sure where to take this question specifically, but there’s lots where we can go. Like how do we lighten the teachers’ load? What can we do so that students get the attention they need? Can we provide daycare and extra services?
I can cite one example I heard, which is that AI can help track and keep updated data on efforts to address student health and malnutrition. So you can use AI systems to more easily track whether students are receiving food subsidies, which should then lead to better learner outcomes. I don’t think anyone would oppose that kind of system, as long as you are able to secure the student data of course. Another is using computer vision and other tracking AI to monitor whether classrooms are being built and if the schedules are on track, lagging, etc.
Vida: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is all well and good and it does underpin my explanations whenever I point out to someone who is either working hard or crashing out that they need to take a break. But I feel like it’s more useful to think about how new technologies end up undermining or even poisoning the hierarchy and the prioritization of the hierarchy–and like Carljoe said, what systemic solutions can we enact to counter these. Which is not to say that the new technologies can’t help alleviate these problems. But in the case of Generative AI, not only do I think that the technology is not there yet, but solving social issues wasn’t what Gen AI was invented for in the first place. (It was profit, always profit.)
Carljoe: Hmm, I would just nuance this point for accuracy to say that Gen AI as a scientific discovery was really research. I mean it was built on a theory by Geoffrey Hinton and his collaborators like Ilya Sutskever that if you could train systems to learn using what they were calling neural networks, then AI could learn faster and in a way that was totally different and closer to human cognition (I am of course just trying to get the gist here). So this discovery, building out neural networks and throwing huge amounts of data at them which leads to generative AI was still research. What makes it this profit-driven race was the success of ChatGPT. And there’re court filings now where even the founding of OpenAI (which built ChatGPT) was rooted in other things like existential fears of ASI/Singularity. Suffice to say even if we are where we are now, where all of this was ten or fifteen years ago did not have all this crazy tech boom race vibes to it.
However once the models were released out into the world and the valuations started rising, that’s when you saw the turn from all this being niche research to stuff that was really just a new channel for venture capital and wild speculation.
Kyu: Any potentialities for positive outcomes from this? We have been pointing out the negatives but…could there be something positive that may come out of this? Or is this clearly a negative?
Vida: Hahaha, so I work with tarot cards but I certainly can’t tell you the future (and that’s not what the cards do, either). I’ll tell you instead what I’m wishing we could do with Gen AI–and it’s all to do in the areas of health and medicine. I wish Gen AI could write the blueprint to give me new, functioning kidneys. Or even figure out how to reverse the genes that gave me faulty kidneys in the first place. Or figure out the cure for Long COVID. I am disabled and chronically ill, and I think those are the areas in my life where I am in desperate need. Notably, there is nothing I can think of with regard to integrating Gen AI into any of my creative processes, but that’s because I enjoy every stage of the work I do and I am intentionally trying to live a slower life.
Carljoe: There’s some talk now from people like Demis Hassbis that he wishes instead of this crazy AI arms race, that there was just more focus on the research and we were doing things like solving cancer. Honestly, that’s where I wish this was going, because I want to believe it is still possible to have a Star Trek future. Unfortunately, what we are seeing is how the tech-broligarchy really views the rest of humanity, and man, is it so eugenics-coded (take note even concepts like intelligence and IQ have similar historical ickiness). But I’m with you here. I used to be a techno-optimist but then modern tech is so extractive and rent-seeking and it isn’t empowering.
Gabi: As a teacher, I like how assessments have changed in order to adapt to the times. There is a decrease now in the typed output done at home, and a return to handwritten essays, live performance tasks (to demonstrate the skill in front of the teacher). And of course, if something has to be typed (like a research paper), the majority of what we grade now is the oral defense. It undercuts the homework dishonestly being done by parents/tutors, that was happening even before the rise of LLM’s.
It clarified the teaching philosophies of certain institutions. It forced even veterans to learn new things, and then redefine fundamentals: what kind of student do we want to help create?
We’re seeing a global pushback against the wholesale embrace of technology in the classroom. We’re seeing a return to paper and pen, going back to textbooks over screens. Adults are coming together to create new safeguards for our kids online.
As a reader, I’m mainly scared that I might inadvertently read something wrought by AI, but right now I appreciate how the reading/writing/publishing community is drawing lines in the sand. It’s forcing all of us to ask, what do we read for? A lot of uncomfortable yet necessary dialogue is ahead, to be sure, to discuss the stages of book production where AI is permissible… but dialogue is always positive.
And with the rise of in-person book club meetings all over, with the desire (especially from younger readers) to have organic discussions about books that aren’t dictated by the algorithm…there is hope!
Carljoe: As for positive outcomes for storytelling, I honestly think that between AI Slop and Dead Internet theory, it might be a good thing that people get sick of reading things on the internet that are just on their social media. I want to imagine that there will be a pendulum swing and people will be more discerning.
I’m not sure that will happen. I mean people are happy to consume slop (it’s an accurate term after all). But what I imagine is that creators who really are doing something real and meaningful will have small, dedicated followings. And I want to imagine that there will be vibrant communities that come out of this because humans will (hopefully) always want to connect each other.
Gabi: I’m seeing this now in the rise of in-person book clubs! Grabe ang dami! And run clubs.
Carljoe: With storytelling and writing specifically, I think that there will be so many observable cliches that creators will be forced to be unique and to find distinct approaches to be artful. I’m a believer, too, that anything can be used as a conduit at this point, so even Generative AI could be used to explore the limits and definitions of art.
Vida: What Carljoe is saying reminds me of a set of videos that made me super positive at the beginning of the year, despite everything. They were made by YouTuber Medieval Mindset, and I recommend watching them in this order: 1, 2, 3. I hope he’s right. I am seeing–in my circles and many in my generation at least–a return to slower hobbies (and hobbies in general).
Kyu: From your own knowledge or insights, can you cite similar changes you glean from history? Example: oral to written. Mass printing (the printing press). Radio, to film/tv. Newspapers. The early Internet. Social media. How did that affect storytelling? Or is there nothing comparable to what is happening now?
Carljoe: This is a good question, but also I think I will as usual not answer it properly LOL.
I think I would actually cut this into two different ideas, which is “How does storytelling adapt to the technological progress of today?” Or “How does storytelling respond to technological innovation when those innovations are blindingly fast?”
And the second question is, are the technological innovations and impacts comparable to anything in history?
Easy one first, which is that there are a good number of technologies that very clearly we can look at. Often the advent of writing and the Socrates’s moral panic that people would no longer remember anything because they could write things down. Photography as a demonized technology and something that could “never be art” and yet I would argue that the most impactful cultural products of the 20th century have been visual: photography, film, TV, alongside print media and music.
Gabi: I would like to comment randomly that there was a documentary I watched on how cultures that prized oral literature had people with an insanely huge capacity for memorization lose much of that once they learned to write.
Carljoe: The difference I’m seeing now is stories are so much longer. Like my students’ stories are hella’ long. I give them 3,000 words and they complain it’s not enough because they need more words. But at the same time, those 3,000 words are often not used economically. So I think the lack of mechanical and physical aspects to creative writing affect literary production.
Unconstrained by publishing limits, physical space demands, etc. we see longer works. And you see that a lot in the online stuff that goes chapters and chapters. As someone whose training and specialization was in the short story, this isn’t my kind of thing. I understand people enjoy it because the volume of production can feel immersive. But I always think powerful craft and what’s left off the page works just as well.
I also observe (and caveat, I have some students who are amazing writers and their stuff is probably better than mine and will only get better, so they aren’t part of this answer) that when student writing isn’t yet there, often it’s because they are writing as if the scenes are part of some visual media. So the writing reads like cut scenes from a video game that are hyper-emotional. In video games those things are earned through playing, so when you get to a cut scene you’ve already invested time and meaning. But in literature, you have to build it up. They write like cut scenes, or like scenes from an anime or TV show but something is missing, they aren’t describing the things that need describing, sometimes there’s a lack of physicality and spatial awareness. There are just some things, again, I could go on.
Vida: Just jumping in to say that what Carl is saying is that many students don’t know how to do scenework anymore. How to set a scene in writing, basically. But it’s also a problem among some adults–including some of my own clients–and I blame TV brain writing once again. When we were co-teaching a class, the way Carl and I tried to address it was to make the students act out scenes with each other in front of the whole class, just so that they know what it’s like to embody a character with a goal that might be in conflict with that of another character, in a certain time and place.
Carljoe: Now if the question is, is there anything comparable, especially since social media turned into surveillance capitalism, and you have to “put yourself out there” and “game the algorithm” and all this stuff. No, I don’t think there is anything in history that is comparable to the time that we are living in. Literally, we are living in a sci-fi dystopia, elements of which have been described in books from the last 50 years. And instead of those books serving as warnings, broligarchs read them and said, huh, it would be cool if I built it. I mean top of mind as I am re-reading Snow Crash, in case someone missed it, the world that houses the metaverse is a dystopia.
Brains are fried because of algorithmic manipulation, dark patterns, we lose track of time when we scroll, we hate ourselves when we scroll so much and yet we do it for hours. This affects the kinds of stories that can even exist in the world today, because our interactions are so mediated by the platforms that we use to communicate. And that mediation and what can or can’t be done in those platforms defines the kinds of interactions we can have. Even weirder, when we get offline, we are using online lingo and we reference memes to answer each other. So yeah there’s never been anything like this, I think, in terms of how fast the culture moves, but also how sort of unstable meaning is, and how much attention we give away while also attaining very little depth.
Vida: I would add to the above that material concerns have always shaped the creation of anything. For example, I learned that many East Asian media have long-ass titles that tell you everything you need to know about a story because of the formatting of the websites where they were first posted. You can’t upload covers on these sites, so that’s why (among many other reasons listed in the article) they gotta make the title count for readers who are browsing for something new to read!
But as with any technological advancement in history, we risk losing the context and the precious knowledge gained behind why people did things the way they did in the first place. For example, I’ve heard that basic computer education has been removed from the curriculum of many schools. That’s because most kids use tablets now, right? But they won’t know how to root around the files manually (especially to patch a program), reskin icons manually, mess with shady programs to find the needle in the haystack that did what you needed it to do. Basically, they largely won’t know how to fix the tool when it’s broken, or find twenty workarounds using the same program (because that’s all you have), or even just decorate the look the way you want to. There’s value in knowing the skills of the past but the people at the top who make the decisions that shape our future often don’t think about carrying over things we’ve learned in the past if they don’t exactly keep pace with the hot new tool.
Gabi: The urge to create meaning by forming narratives has always been there, it’s just the tools that change. I think the interconnectedness of the internet has made the change almost overnight, so fast that the ethics and rules are being created after the horse has bolted from the stable. In terms of occupations, technology has made some jobs obsolete (Victorian lamp lighters and knocker-ups, a.k.a. those guys that wake you up by tapping on your window, for a fee) with the rise of electricity and clocks. And perhaps it’s only natural that AI will really make a lot of current jobs obsolete. So it’s up to us now to decide whether we will allow our storytellers to go extinct.
As a basic ed teacher, the effect is: kids no longer read the assigned texts. We have to adapt to shorter everything: attention spans, ability to write by hand, etc. The technology has made kids “lazy” compared to previous generations. So we adapt. We show videos and movies, we read excerpts instead of the whole book. It becomes a new challenge: how to light the fire of interest, so that they will be motivated to research/read up on their own. Goodbye Socratic method, hello old-fashioned full on teacher performance.
As a reader, this morning I read a 2025 local physical book that was published in a sans serif font, which is usually reserved for screen reading. I thought it was unique, and could be the publisher’s attempt to adapt to readers used to reading from screens (the book is “Fudge My Life” by Agay Llanera, published by Adarna House).
Kyu: Just a comment, not a question: I have this strong feeling that tech advances tend to increase output, as Carljoe pointed out. From handwriting to typing, the increase in word count must have gone up. From typing to word processing, the word count must have gone up again. And now, from word processing to AI, it’s gone up once more. Just an observation. Which brings me to what Vida said: we might have lost sight of why we are inclined to tell stories in the first place.
This ends Part 2. Part 1 can be found here and Part 3 will be posted next week.
