More Marx

Further adventures in understanding the usefulness of Marx. See one adventure here Wages, salaire & Marx.

Philip Kerr uses the notions of use value and exchange value to look at some claims in educational technology.

I want to use a statement in this discussion of ChatGPT:

"Open AI is trying to come up with ways to exclude stereotype and things like this by having a human oversight process. And they're exposing third world workers to unsavoury message board posts. They're working on it but the way they're addressing the issue itself is causing problems of morality." Paul Raine, GPT and ELT: Productive, Disruptive, or Destructive?, 2023, 1:32:49

This is an interesting example of the mystification of the social basis of production. The claim "the way they're addressing the issue itself is causing problems" obfuscates the fact that, even granting the good faith intentions of Open AI, any company would still have to exploit workers (in a capitalist system) as all production is social.

In contrast to the previous feudal era where individual production dominated (think of the artisans), one of capitalism's innovation has been social production.

A lot of the English language teaching discussion on ChatGPT, AI and technology in general arguably falls under a framework of individual teachers leveraging these tools, mainly as a way to save time and often exercising our creative abilities. As Gavin Mueller writes:

"The romance of “DIY” obscures the reality that nothing digital is done by oneself: it is always already a component of a larger formation of socialized labor." Gavin Mueller, Digital Proudhonism, 2018

Another point to raise is that one of the benefits of ChatGPT is the help for "non-native" English users - whether as learners of grammar/composition or as expert users when drafting texts. In the case of learners this is arguably valid however consider the case of expert users.

Yes ChatGPT can be used to help with editing documents but the issue of say discrimination against expert users of English i.e. "non-native" English users cannot be addressed by technical fixes. These arise from social structures such as gate-keeping. A poignant example is this person who reports of a rejected paper on which one reviewer comments - "wonder if this is generated by ChatGPT".

More Marx and more skepticism needs to be raised as Philip Kerr does:

"What we are doing is participating in the hype exercise in many ways even organising an event of this kind we're contributing to the marketing of this particular product. The second thing we're doing by playing around with it is we're giving OpenAI a huge amount of data which they will be using and analysing to try to find out other ways to monetise this whole thing." Philip Kerr, GPT and ELT: Productive, Disruptive, or Destructive?, 2023, 1:35:55