Fifteen Minutes Magazine: March 2023

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ChatGPT, Ch eati ng, an d th e Future of E ducation March 2023

F M C HA I R S Io Y. Gilman ’25 Amber H. Levis ’25 E D I T O R S - AT- L A R G E Michal Goldstein ’25 Kaitlyn Tsai ’25 A S S O C I AT E E D I T O R S Maya M. F. Wilson ’24 Mila G. Barry ’25 Hewson Duffy ’25 Sammy Duggasani ’25 Jade Lozada ’25 Benjy Wall-Feng ’25 Graham R. Weber ’25 Jem K. Williams ’25 Dina R. Zeldin ’25 WRITERS Talia Kahan ’26, Sage S. Lattman ’25, Maya M. F. Wilson ’24, Hewson Duffy ’25, Sam E. Weil ’25, Ben Y. Cammarata ’25, Anya Sesay ’25, Benjy Wall-Feng ’25, Elyse D. Pham ’23, Sarah W. Faber ’24 FM DESIGN EXECS Sophia C. Scott ’25 Max H. Schermer ’24 FM PHOTO EXEC Marina Qu ’25 PHOTOGRAPHERS Jennifer Z. Liang ’23, Ben Y. Cammarata ’25, Julian J. Giordano ’25, Joey Huang ’25, DESIGNERS Pema Choedon ’25, Sophia Salamanca ’25, Sami E. Turner ’25, Amber H. Levis ’25 PRESIDENT Cara J. Chang ’24 A S S O C I AT E M A N A G I N G E D I T O R Meimei Xu ’24 M A NAG I N G E DI TOR Brandon L. Kingdollar ’24

EDITOR’S NOTE Dear Reader, We weren’t quite sure how to open this note, so we turned to ChatGPT for help. It suggested we tell you, “While the weather outside might be unpredictable, the articles in this glossy are sure to provide a delightful forecast of diverse topics ranging from science and technology breakthroughs to culture and arts, and everything in between.” We aren’t quite sure what it means to “provide a delightful forecast of diverse topics,” but, hey, we now have an opening.

The scrut for this glossy looks into none other than ChatGPT and its potential to become a perfect tool for cheating. HD and SEW talked to professors and students, hoping to understand how they are responding to the emergence of AI that can write and code fluently. Along the way, they examine some limitations of ChatGPT, consider the future of AI, and end up learning a little bit about learning. No matter what your take on ChatGPT is, read this scrut! ChatGPT — and its impact on the classroom — may not be exactly what you think.

THK reports on a Wintersession program where students learned to build a honryōsen, a Japanese flat-bottomed river skiff, without speaking a word. SSL goes behind the scenes at Lowell Tea, diving into its history, and documenting the sights, sounds, and (most importantly) the smells of the rising ciabatta and baking snickerdoodle cookies that students flock to Lowell Tea for. MMFW explores ManRay’s history and goes to the club for a lovely night out — despite, or perhaps because of, the piss on the seat. In a photo essay, BYC graces us with beautiful photos of birds in Harvard’s Ornithology Collection, exploring the beautiful plumages of several different species.

AS writes an introspection about the overwhelming grief that comes with Black death. In a lighthearted but also deeply profound introspection, BWF writes about children’s agency and Poptropica, the 2000s-era browser game. EDP explores the embodiment racial fetishization as she recounts her own experiences with fetishization and reflects on her conversations with Asian woman porn stars for her senior thesis. And finally, SWF closes out the glossy with her crossword “Virtual Reality.”

So hold onto this glossy (the first of the year!), take it in, and be grateful that ChatGPT didn’t write the rest of this magazine.

Sincerely Yours, IYG & AHL

FIFTEEN Minutes 03

HOW 12 STUDENTS BUILT A BOAT IN NEAR SILENCE

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BEHIND THE SCENES AT LOWELL TEA

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THE ROAD TO MANRAY’S RESURRECTION

Talia Kahan

Sage S. Lattman

Maya M. F. Wilson

CHATGPT, CHEATING, AND THE FUTURE OF

09 EDUCATION

Hewson Duffy and Sam E. Weil

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BIRD BRILLIANCE: EXPLORING HARVARD’S ORNITHOLOGY COLLECTION Ben Y. Cammarata

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WHEN WE LET GRIEF LINGER

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POPTROPICAPITALIST REALISM

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TO REVEL IN AN AN ASIAN BODY

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CROSSWORD: VIRTUAL REALITY

Anya Sesay

Benjy Wall-Feng

Elyse D. Pham

Sarah W. Faber

How 12 Stude Boat i n N ear S TALIA KAHAN

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t 9 a.m. on Monday, Jan. 9, Carlo Y. Hensch ’24, a History of Art and Architecture concentrator, entered an unfamiliar kind of workshop. Though other Harvard studios often buzz with chatter, the students in this workshop were completely silent.

This was the beginning of an approximately twoweek-long project to build a honryōsen, a type of Japanese flat-bottomed river skiff, in the basement of CGIS South. Douglas A. Brooks, a researcher and boatbuilder trained in the practice, led Hensch and 11 other students in their two-week workshop, a Wintersession program called “The Art and Craft of Japanese Boatbuilding with Douglas Brooks,” which was sponsored by the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies. Students were tasked with constructing a boat using Japanese tools and methods while abiding by principles of traditional Japanese apprenticeships, which require silence, and diligent observation from apprentices.

“It became like working in your own little world for a little bit,” Hensch says.

Honryōsen were once a standard boat model for fishermen and farmers in the Shinano River delta.

After World War II, however, honryōsen became obsolete: the region was drained and developed, and irrigation canals surrounding the delta were replaced by roads and highways. Before long, the skiffs — locally known as itaawase, which translates to “plank-built” — became a rarity.

Brooks is one of the few living people trained in this method of boat building. “I was the sole apprentice for seven of my nine teachers,” Brooks says. “There was just a missing generation of apprentices.”

Throughout his apprenticeships, Brooks’ masters emphasized the importance of nusumi-geiko, which translates to “stolen lessons” — a practice by which apprentices are required to steal techniques from their masters, rather than receiving direct instruction.

Brooks recalls finding the requirements of traditional Japanese apprenticeships “shocking” at first. “‘There will be no speaking whatsoever in the workshop,’” he remembers his teachers telling him. “‘You cannot talk to me. You cannot ask me anything.’”

During his two weeks at Harvard, Brooks conducted a similar, albeit slightly less intense, workshop with the cohort of 12 students, who. worked non-stop for four hours every day.

On a typical workday, Brooks would demonstrate different techniques and direct students’ efforts. Students would rotate their tasks, which varied from hammering planks together, to sharpening tools, to sweeping the floor, remaining quiet for the duration of the morning. At the end of the four hours, everyone came together for lunch, where they could rest and, finally, chat.

Getting used to the silence was “a little bit difficult at first,” says Sachiko J. Kirby ’26 . Kirby was initially drawn to the program because of her interest in Japanese history and culture, herself half-Japanese and Tokyo-born, as well as her enthusiasm for architecture.

She left the workshop with more than just practical carpentry knowledge. “You just had to trust your own instincts a little bit, which teaches you a lot,” she reflects.

For Hensch, the apprenticeship-style of the workshop felt freeing. “Within studio classes I do for HAA, I am bogged down by the fact that I am being critiqued by the result of all the work that I do,” Hensch says. “The only thing that is thought about is the end result.” “‘You are the agent of the resolution you desire,’” Hensch remembers Brooks telling him.

Meanwhile, Brooks is unsure about if his Wintersession program was intense enough. He jokes that, if the students did not hate him by the end of the workshop, then he “failed them.” He firmly believes that apprenticeships should be adequately

“‘There will be no speaking whatsoever in the workshop,’” he remembers his teachers telling him.

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e nts Bui lt a Si le nce challenging because learning how to overcome obstacles is a key part of his pedagogy.

“In an early class, we came to this kind of impasse,” Brooks says. “I said ‘I refuse to save you.’

And for some reason that clicked.

Everybody went, ‘Oh, I get it.’”

Similarly, Kirby describes a dichotomy between her experiences in school and this workshop. “Students ask questions to almost prove something,” she

says of Western education. “Maybe it’s not even a question they really have, but they want it to be known that they’re thinking about a certain aspect of something, and then it starts to get competitive.”

“What I really enjoyed about this workshop is that the idea about not speaking is that whatever you’re trying to figure out, either wait and you’ll see, or wait and you’ll hear,” Kirby says.

“I’ll make a political statement:

more tools, less books,” Brooks says.

One final step remains: according to Gavin H. Whitelaw, the Executive Director of the Reischauer Institute, the Harvard Women’s Rugby Team will carry the honryōsen out of its current home in CGIS South in April as the apprentices, waiting on the bank of the Charles river, watch the launch of the flat-bottom river skiff they built by hand.

A honryōsen, a type of Japanese flat-bottomed river skiff. This one was built by students during Wintersession using Japanese tools and methods and principles of Japanese apprenticeship. Photos by Jennifer Z. Liang 4

BE H I N D TH E SCE N ES AT LOWE LL TEA SAGE S. LATTMAN

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itchenAid mixers are whirring to the beat of Taylor Swift’s “Wildest Dreams” while four students bustle about the kitchen, cracking eggs and kneading dough. They’re so focused that I almost feel bad for disturbing.

It’s a Thursday afternoon in the Lowell House Faculty Deans’ kitchen, and bakers are whisking, sifting, and pre-heating in anticipation of a beloved house tradition: Lowell Tea. A group of eight students spend these afternoons helping Faculty Deans David I. Laibson ’88 and Nina Zipser prepare for the event.

Meanwhile, most Lowellians are still in class, pining for the puff pastries and black tea they’ll be served later that afternoon.

“It’s the best student job on campus,” says Connor Chung ’23 as he prepares an onion-olive ciabatta bread. “You get paid to spend several hours each Thursday just chilling.”

But “chilling” is a strong word for the busy afternoon ahead of him. After finishing the ciabatta, he’ll start up on a Sicilian flatbread. Later, he’ll be baking olive-tapenade danishes.

“You’re definitely running around a lot,” says Christy Zheng ’25 as she makes a batch of white chocolate chai snickerdoodles. “Our main focus is yielding a bunch of desserts, so it is pretty fast-paced.

But I think you get used to it after a bit, and it’s a fun environment.”

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Photos by Julian G. Giordano.

The team is spearheaded by Emma Kagan-Moore ’19, Lowell’s Residence Manager. Kagan-Moore has been involved with Lowell Tea since she started as a student baker in her sophomore year.

“There’s definitely been a lot of evolutions in the time that I’ve been involved,” she says.

Kagan-Moore first baked for the teatime tradition under former Lowell Faculty Deans Diana L. Eck and Dorothy A. Austin, who left the position in 2019.

When Lowell underwent renovations, tea moved from the Deans’ residence to The Inn at Harvard.

Then, while indoor gatherings were restricted during the pandemic, tea was served in the House’s courtyard. Now, tea has returned to its traditional locale: the Dean’s residence.

Connor Chung ’23 plates his olive tapenade danishes.

But for all the evolutions, Kagan-Moore believes that her work for tea is “really just greasing the wheels of a good machine,” she says. “I try not to do a lot of reimagining of tea as an event and just think about how we can run it most effectively as it is.”

The Lowell Tea tradition has had a long run since its inception in the 1940s under Elliott Perkins, Class of 1923, the second faculty dean of Lowell House, Eck says.

When Eck and Austin became Deans in 1998, they realized they would need help keeping the tradition alive. Although one of their predecessors,

Mary Lee Bossert, used to bake for tea, neither Eck nor Austin — who both held full-time jobs at Harvard — had time. “It seemed right to have a team of student bakers,” Eck says.

Eck says the event reached another “turning point” in 2013 after the tradition was featured in Lowell’s Housing Day video, which soon went viral.

The video opens with Eck and Austin sitting in their foyer, holding porcelain tea cups.

Delicate piano music plays in the background.

“We invite you to come to tea on Thursdays at five,” Austin says.

“You’ll love it.”

Eck, who is holding up her teacup, suddenly drops it to the ground. “Whoops,” she says sarcastically as the video dramatically shifts tones and transitions to a parody of “Get Low” by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz.

Over the next few weeks, an influx of students came to tea, following Austin’s advice. And they loved it. The video turned what was a small Lowell House affair into a college-wide event

with attendance in the hundreds.

“It was a way of relating to students and being welcoming to students who may not have had anything like that in whatever house they lived in,” says Eck. Before the event starts, most of the baked goods are out of the oven, lined up on ornate silver trays. A large pot of black tea brews on the stove, steaming like a cauldron. The bakers and servers move to scatter a few plates of baked goods around Laibson and Zipser’s home.

Students file into the residence, which comes alive with chatter.

Once all the pastries are snatched up, a baker will carry out another tray to replace it.

It’s hard to miss the moment this happens. When Chung brings in his first plate of danishes, the students’ conversation halts, and everyone moves to swarm him.

They follow him until he sets the tray down and pounce at the pastries.

Gabrielle R. Brown ’23, the server in charge of making the salsa and sour cream dish, says she relishes the swarming.

“Obviously I have to act

mad and be like, ‘Oh my gosh, everyone. Excuse me, excuse me,’” she says. “But I love it. I used to be one of the swarmers. I think it’s fun and funny.”

Baked goods are brought out one tray at a time for a reason: bringing out the baked goods continuously “creates a little more momentum for sticking around,” Laibson believes.

Students like Julia E. Blank ’24 have grown to appreciate the event as a time to connect with other students, not just another desperate free food grab.

“Everyone in the House descends at some point,” says Blank, who also lives in Lowell.

“It’s so good to see people you haven’t seen all week.”

But the pastries are also a draw.

“I don’t know anywhere else on campus where you can get quite the assortment of high-quality baked goods,” Lowell House resident Zachary M. Foltz ’24 says.

When I ask Foltz another question, he says: “I’m mid-bite, give me a second.”

“That pretty much describes it,” he says. “You’re always mid-bite.”

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Th e Road to Man Ray's resurrection Maya m. F. Wi lson

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here’s so much piss on the seat. I can’t really be mad — that’s the beauty of all-gender restrooms. I give it a wipe before I perch.

Other than that, it’s surprisingly clean for a club bathroom. The bathroom of a club. White-tiled oasis from the dirty stinky sticky sweaty jungle of the dance floor. Whatever your longing might be: a space to cry, a private spot to dip a finger into the baggie in your friend’s bra, somewhere a stranger might attempt to help you get the wine out of your satin leopard print shirt that, of course, you were saving to debut on Thursday Campus Night, and which, of course, you ruined the second you stepped away from the bar. The sexy enby bartender definitely saw.

But the club you’re walking into isn’t the same that it used to be. ManRay NightClub originally opened in 1983, attached to another venue, Campus, which was a gay club. Therefore, at least initially, ManRay was LGBTQ+ adjacent. It was a place for the self-identified freaks and geeks, the goths and the sloths. They had more mainstream nights, New Wave and techno for the normies on Saturdays, but they also had nights for all kinds of weirdos (non-derogatory): BDSM and fetish nights, fashion shows, art exhibitions. It was a big deal. Nirvana played there once, and RuPaul took the stage years before Drag Race.

As Susan Welsh, ’87 puts it, “It was a little bit edgy for Cambridge back then. It wasn’t very edgy, it was a little edgy. Countercultural, subcultural, not

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mainstream. It was a little bit cool, and I liked to pretend to be cooler than I was.”

Welsh seems pretty cool to me, even just over the phone. When she was a student in Adams House — which she describes was “arty, gay, and harddrinking” in the 80s — she was also a gogo dancer at ManRay. Every Friday night, she danced on the stage in an acrylic cage for four hours.

In 1986, Welsh was quoted in the Crimson saying, “I wonder, when I’m middle-aged will I still have this same fascination with nightlife and teen boogie?”

And Welsh did keep boogying. Cambridge, not as much.

Two decades later, ManRay closed its doors. It wasn’t for any good or glamorous reason — the building’s owner wanted to turn the space into apartments. A 2005 auction ad in the Boston Globe listed the wares they were left to sell: nightclub sound and lighting systems, smoke machines, gothic decor, six disco balls, fetish/dungeon equipment. A month later, self-proclaimed club kid Emily Sweeney eulogized her favorite venue in the Globe’s “Last Word” column. She mourned their pregame rituals, their cab rides, the familiar crowd of drag queens, goth DJs, gay boys, and queer girls. She mourned the longest spiked hair anyone’s ever seen, the purple and black striped tights, the pinstriped pants and studded belts. On Sweeney’s way out of her beloved ManRay for the last time, she said to her friends: “ManRay, this

exact place, will always be open… in our hearts.” She added, “I was shooting for sardonicism as I grinned and placed my hands over my chest in an overly dramatic gesture — but I meant it.”

Sweeney’s prescient optimism was an exercise in delayed gratification. There were a few false starts on the road to ManRay’s resurrection — it seemed like the club might re-open in 2009, and then again in 2013. Red tape got in the way each time. A recent editorial in the Globe credits owner Don Holland’s relentless persistence for ManRay’s longawaited rise from the ashes, finally reopening in January of this year to those familiar throngs around the block.

Everyone was talking about

inside me and outside me at once.

We follow the light of the disco ball like it’s our beacon. It is our beacon. We close our eyes and raise our arms and walk in time to the beat.

The new is just the old and the present is just the past. Queer is no longer a slur. I like seeing the old queers! I think they like seeing us too. DJ Chris Ewens tells me outside between puffs of a cigarette that he’s ready to school us new kids on the block on the ManRay lifestyle and tunes.

It seems that Cambridge club kids, young and old, are relieved and enthused by the return of a genuinely popping spot to the otherwise sleepy Central Square.

Welsh is certainly delighted to hear that there are still dancers

The only thing Susan didn’t like about the job was the physical drain. When you’re up in the cage, you can’t just sit down when you want a break, or sneak off for a moment of solace in the bathroom stall. Welsh was quoted in her 1986 Crimson profile saying, “At times, I wonder if I shouldn’t just blow it off and have normal Saturday nights like everyone else, go to Pudding parties or something. But this way I get $40, and that way all I get is a hangover.”

I’m pretty sure I’m going to be hungover tomorrow, but I don’t really care. I’m having a blast on the dance floor. My friend is having a blast on the dance floor.

Surrounded by tall men, gays from (guess where) Provincetown.

My friend looks so cute in their

ManRay hasn’t been open for years, but the music is the same. The DJs are the same. The rules are the same. The feeling in the pit of your stomach is the same.

ManRay. Obviously I was going to end up there. The first night I went, I didn’t know what to expect. The building itself is on an otherwise nondescript corner in Central.

My friends and I are slaying down the block. We know where we’re going. We look hot. Slay past the boys smoking outside. Slay right by the bouncer and their mohawk.

Slay through coat check, slay our way straight to the middle of the dance floor, through the double doors. A sparkly feeling starts in my tummy and spreads down my arms and legs. I see bodies and lights. Everything is happening

on the pedestals. She tells me that her gogo application process was impromptu — she was simply recruited from the crowd. Yes, I did quake with envy to hear that.

Somebody’s brother worked there, and helped her seal the deal. She loved taking on the personality, she loved the tease, but mostly she just loved to dance. She still loves to dance. When I asked her what exactly she liked about it, she couldn’t put her finger on it — maybe because it’s just so obvious. “I’ve always been a little bit exhibitionistic,” she says with a shrug.

dark green T-shirt. They look happy but actually, mostly, they look free. Uninhibited. I want to eat them up. We go back-to-back and bounce our butts together.

I want to take a shot. They want to take a shot. We get two shots.

The bartender is out of salt. We grimace and toss them back. What can you do?

It’s the Art of Nightlife.

That’s actually how ManRay has been describing itself since the beginning. I roll my eyes, but I can’t deny it. It’s the archetype. It’s the destination. It’s the piss on the toilet seat.

8 Design by Amber H. Levis and Maya M.F. Wilson

ChatGPT, Ch eati ng, an d th e Future of e ducation H EWSON DUFFY & SAM E.. we i l Article Designs and Cover Design by Pema Choedon

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n the depths of fall term finals, having completed a series of arduous exams, one student was exhausted. The only thing between her and winter break was a timed exam for a General Education class that she was taking passfail. Drained, anxious and feeling “like a deflated balloon,” she started the clock. The exam consisted of two short essays. By the time she finished the first one, she had nothing left to give. To pass the class, all she needed was to turn in something for the second essay. She had an idea.

Before finals started, her friends had told her about ChatGPT, OpenAI’s free new chatbot which uses machine learning to respond to prompts in fluent natural language and code. She had yet to try it for herself. With low expectations, she made an account on OpenAI’s website and typed in the prompt for her essay. The quality of the results pleasantly surprised her. With some revision, she turned ChatGPT’s sentences into her essay. Feeling guilty but relieved, she submitted it: Finally, she was done with the semester.

This student and others in this article were granted anonymity by The Crimson to discuss potential violations of Harvard’s Honor Code and other policies out of concerns for disciplinary action.

Since its Nov. 30, 2022 release, ChatGPT has provoked awe and fear among its millions of users.

Yet its seeming brilliance distracts from important

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flaws: It can produce harmful content and often writes fiction as if it were fact.

Because of these limitations and the potential for cheating, many teachers are worried about ChatGPT’s impact on the classroom. Already, the application has been banned by school districts across the country, including those of New York City, Seattle, and Los Angeles.

These fears are not unfounded. At Harvard, ChatGPT quickly found its way onto students’ browsers. In the midst of finals week, we encountered someone whose computer screen was split between two windows: on the left, an open-internet exam for a statistics class, and on the right, ChatGPT outputting answers to his questions. He admitted that he was also bouncing ideas for a philosophy paper off the AI. Another anonymous source we talked to used the chatbot to complete his open-internet Life Sciences exam.

But at the end of the fall term, Harvard had no official policy prohibiting the use of ChatGPT. Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana, in a December interview with The Crimson, did not view ChatGPT as representing a new threat to education: “There have always been shortcuts,” he said. “We leave decisions around pedagogy and assignments and evaluation up to the faculty.”

On Jan. 20, Acting Dean of Undergraduate Education Anne Harrington sent an email to Harvard

educators acknowledging that ChatGPT’s abilities have “raised questions for all of us.”

In her message, Harrington relayed guidance from the Office of Undergraduate Education. At first glance, the language seemed to broadly prohibit the use of AI tools for classwork, warning students that Harvard’s Honor Code “forbids students to represent work as their own that they did not write, code, or create,” and that “Submission of computer-generated text without attribution is also prohibited by ChatGPT’s own terms of service.”

But, the email also specified that instructors could “use or adapt” the guidance as they saw fit, allowing them substantial flexibility. The guidance did not clarify how to view the work of students who acknowledge their use of ChatGPT. Nor did it mention whether students can enlist ChatGPT to give them feedback or otherwise supplement their learning.

Some students are already making the most of this gray area. One student we talked to says that he uses ChatGPT to explain difficult mathematical concepts, adding that ChatGPT explains them better than his teaching fellow.

Natalia I. Pazos ’24 uses the chatbot as a kind of interactive SparkNotes. After looking through the introduction and conclusion of a dense Gen Ed reading herself, she asks ChatGPT to give her a summary. “I don’t really have to read the full article, and I feel like it gives me sometimes a better overview,” she says.

Professors are already grappling with whether to ban ChatGPT or let students use it.

But beyond this semester, larger

questions loom. Will AI simply become another tool in every cheater’s arsenal, or will it radically change what it means to learn?

Will AI simply become another tool in every cheater’s arsenal, or will it radically change what it means to learn?

‘Don’t Rely on Me, That’s a Crime’

Put yourself in our place: It’s one of those busy Saturdays where you have too much to do and too little time to do it, and you set about writing a short essay for History 1610: “East Asian Environments.” The task is to write about the impact of the 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear meltdown in Japan. In a database, you encounter an image of a frozen clock in a destroyed school.

Two precious hours pass as you research the school, learning about the ill-prepared evacuation plans and administrative failures that led to 74 children’s deaths. As you type up a draft, your fingers feel tense. It’s a harrowing image — you can’t stop envisioning this clock ticking down the moments until disaster. After spending six hours reading and writing, you finally turn the piece in.

But what if the assignment didn’t have to take so much time? We tried using ChatGPT to write this class essay (which, to be clear, was already

turned in). After a minute or two refining our prompts, we ended up with a full essay, which began with: Ticking away the moments of a typical school day, the clock on the wall of Okawa Elementary School suddenly froze on March 11, 2011, as the world around it was shattered by a massive earthquake and tsunami.

The clock, once a symbol of the passage of time, now stood as a haunting reminder of the tragedy that had struck the school.

In less than five minutes, ChatGPT did what originally took six hours. And it did it well enough.

Condensing hours into minutes is no small feat, and an enticing prospect for many.

Students have many different demands on their time, and not everyone puts academics first.

Some pour their time into intense extracurriculars, pre-professional goals, or jobs. (People also want to party.)

Yet the principle underlying a liberal arts curriculum — one that’s enshrined in Harvard’s mission — is the value of intellectual transformation.

Transforming yourself is necessarily difficult. Learning the principles of quantum mechanics or understanding what societies looked like before the Industrial Revolution requires deconstructing your worldview and building it anew. Harvard’s honor code, then, represents not just a moral standard but also an expectation that students go through that arduous process.

That’s the theory. In practice, many students feel they don’t always have the time to do the difficult work of intellectual transformation. But they still care 10

about their grades, so they cut corners. And now, just a few clicks away, there’s ChatGPT: a tool so interactive it practically feels like it’s your own work.

So, can professors stop students from using ChatGPT? And should they?

This semester, many instructors at Harvard prohibited students from using ChatGPT, treating it like any other form of academic dishonesty. Explicit bans on ChatGPT became widespread, greeting students on syllabi for classes across departments, from Philosophy to Neuroscience.

Some instructors, like professor Catherine A. Brekus ’85, who teaches Religion 120: “Religion and Nationalism in the United States: A History,” directly imported the Office of Undergraduate Education’s suggested guidance onto their syllabus. Others, like Spanish 11, simply told students not to use it in an introductory lecture. The syllabus for Physical Sciences 12a went so far as to discourage use of the tool with multiple verses of a song written by ChatGPT: “I’m just a tool, a way to find some answers/ But I can’t do the work for you, I’m not a dancer/ You gotta put in the effort, put in the time/ Don’t rely on me, that’s a crime” Making these professors’ lives difficult is that, at the moment, there is no reliable way to detect whether a student’s work is AI-generated. In late January, OpenAI released a classifier to distinguish between AI and human-written text, but it only correctly identified AI-written text 26 percent of the time. GPTZero, a classifier launched in January

by Princeton undergraduate Edward Tian, now claims to 11

correctly identify human-written documents 99 percent of the time and AI-written documents 85 percent of the time.

Still, a high likelihood of AI involvement in an assignment may not be enough evidence to bring a student before the Honor

Council. Out of more than a dozen professors we’ve spoken with, none currently plan to use an AI detector.

Not all instructors plan to ban ChatGPT at all. Incoming assistant professor of Computer Science Jonathan Frankle questions whether students in advanced computer science classes should be forced to use older, more time-consuming tools if they’ve already mastered the basics of coding.

“It would be a little bit weird if we said, you know, in CS 50, go use punch cards, you’re not allowed to use any modern tools,” he says, referring to the tool used by early computer scientists to write programs.

Harvard Medical School

professor Gabriel Kreiman feels similarly. In his courses, students are welcome to use ChatGPT, whether for writing their code or their final reports. His only stipulation is that students inform him when they’ve used the application and understand that they’re still responsible for the work. “If it’s wrong,” he says, “you get the grade, not ChatGPT.” Kumaresh Krishnan, a teaching fellow for Gen Ed 1125: “Artificial & Natural Intelligence,” believes that if the class isn’t focused on how to code or write, then ChatGPT use is justified under most circumstances.

Though he is not responsible for the academic integrity policy of the course, Krishnan believes that producing a nuanced, articulate answer with ChatGPT requires students to understand key concepts.

“If you’re using ChatGPT that well, maybe you don’t understand all the math behind it, maybe you don’t understand all the specifics — but you’re understanding the game enough to manipulate it,” he says. “And that itself, that’s a win.”

The student that used ChatGPT for an open-internet life sciences exam last semester says he had mastered the concepts but just couldn’t write fast enough.

ChatGPT, he says, only “fleshed out” his answers. He received one of the highest grades in the class.

While most of the teachers we spoke with prohibit the use of ChatGPT, not everyone has ruled out using it in the future.

Harvard College Fellow William J. Stewart, in his course German 192: “Artificial Intelligences: Body, Art, and Technology in Modern Germany,” explicitly forbids the use of ChatGPT. But for him,

the jury is still out on ChatGPT’s pedagogical value: “Do I think it has a place in the classroom?

Maybe?”

‘A Pedagogical Challenge’

“There are two aspects that we need to think about,” says Soroush Saghafian when asked about ChatGPT. “One is that, can we ban it? Second, should we ban it?” To Saghafian, an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School who is teaching a course on machine learning and big data analytics, the answer to both questions is no. In his view, people will always find ways around prohibitive measures.

“It’s like trying to ban use of the internet,” he says.

Most educators at Harvard who we spoke with don’t share the sense of panic that permeates the headlines.

Operating under the same assumption as Saghafian — that it is impossible to prevent students from using ChatGPT — educators have adopted diverse strategies to adapt their curricula.

In some language classes, for example, threats posed by intelligent technology are nothing new. “Ever since the internet, really, there have been increasingly large numbers of things that students can use to do their work for them,” says Amanda Gann, an instructor for French 50: “Advanced French II: Justice, Equity, Rights, and Language.”

Even before the rise of large language models like ChatGPT, French 50 used measures to limit students’ ability to use tools like Google Translate for assignments. “The first drafts of all of their major assessments are done in class,” Gann says.

Still, Gann and the other

instructors made additional changes this semester in response to the release of ChatGPT. After writing first drafts in class, French 50 students last semester revised their papers at home. This spring, students will instead transform their draft composition into a conversational video. To ensure that students don’t write their remarks beforehand — or have ChatGPT write them — the assignment will be graded on how “spontaneous and like fluid conversation” their speech is.

Instructors were already considering an increased emphasis on oral assessments, Gann says, but she might not have implemented it without the

pressure of ChatGPT. Gann welcomes the change. She views emergence of large language models like ChatGPT as a “pedagogical challenge.” This applies both to making her assignments less susceptible to AI — “Is this something only a human could do?” — as well as reducing the incentive to use AI in the first place. In stark contrast to the projected panic about ChatGPT, Gann thinks the questions it has posed to her as an educator “make it kind of fun.”

Stewart thinks that ChatGPT will provide “a moment

to reflect from the educator’s side.” If ChatGPT can do their assignments, perhaps their assignments are “uninspired, or they’re kind of boring, or they’re asking students to be repetitive,” he says.

Stewart also trusts that his students see the value in learning without cutting corners.

In his view, very few of the students in his high-level German translation class would “think that it’s a good use of their time to take that class and then turn to the translating tool,” he says. “The reason they’re taking that class is because they also understand that there’s a way to get a similar toolbox in their own brain.”

To Stewart, students must see that developing that toolbox for themselves is “far more powerful and far more useful” than copying text into Google Translate.

Computer Science professor Boaz Barak shares Stewart’s sentiment: “Generally, I trust students. I personally don’t go super out of my way to try to detect student cheating,” he says.

“And I am not going to start.”

Frankle, too, won’t be going out of his way to detect whether his students are cheating — instead, he assumes that students in his CS classes will be using tools like ChatGPT. Accordingly, he intends to make his assignments and exams significantly more demanding. In previous courses, Frankle says he might have asked students to code a simple neural network. With the arrival of language models that can code, he’ll ask that his students reproduce a much more complex version inspired by cutting-edge research. “Now you can get more accomplished, so I can ask more of you,” he says.

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Other courses may soon follow suit. Just last week, the instructor for CS 181: “Machine Learning,” offered students extra credit if they used ChatGPT as an “educational aid” to support them

in actions like debugging code.

Educators across disciplines are encouraging students to critically engage with ChatGPT in their classes.

Harvard College Fellow Maria Dikcis, who teaches English 195BD: “The Dark Side of Big Data,” assigned students a threefold exercise — first write a short analytical essay, then ask ChatGPT to produce a paper on the same topic, and finally compare their work and ChatGPT’s. “I sort of envisioned it as a human versus machine intelligence,” she says.

She hopes the assignment will force students to reflect on the seeming brilliance of the model but also to ask, in her words, “What are its shortcomings, and why is that important?”

Saghafian also thinks it is imperative that students interact with this technology, both to understand its uses as well as to see its “cracks.” In the 2000s, teachers helped students learn the benefits and pitfalls of internet resources like Google search. Saghafian recommends that educators use a similar approach with ChatGPT. 13

And these cracks can be easy to miss. When she first started using ChatGPT to summarize her readings, Pazos recalls feeling “really impressed by how fast it happened.” To her, because ChatGPT displays its responses word by word, “it feels like it’s thinking.”

“One of the hypes about this technology is that people think, oh, it can do everything, it can think, it can reason,” Saghafian says. Through critical engagement with ChatGPT, students can learn that “none of those is correct.” Large language models, he explains, “don’t have the ability to think.” Their writing process, in fact, can show students the difference between reasoning and outputting language.

A Troublesome Model

In the Okawa elementary school essay written by ChatGPT, one of the later paragraphs stated: The surviving students and teachers were quickly evacuated to safety.

In fact, the students and teachers were not evacuated to safety. They were evacuated toward the tsunami — which was exactly why Okawa Elementary School became such a tragedy. ChatGPT could describe the tragedy, but since it did not understand what made it a tragedy, it spat out a fundamental falsehood with confidence.

This behavior is not out of the ordinary. ChatGPT consistently makes factual errors, even though OpenAI designed it not to and has repeatedly updated it. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Despite impressive capabilities, ChatGPT and other large language models come with fundamental limitations and potential for harm.

Many of these flaws are baked into the way ChatGPT works. ChatGPT is an example of what researchers call a large language model. LLMs work primarily by processing huge amounts of data. This is called training, and in ChatGPT’s case, the training likely involved processing most of the text on the internet — an ocean of niche Wikipedia articles, angry YouTube comment threads, poorly written Harry Potter fan fiction, recipes for lemon poppy seed muffins, and everything in between.

Through that ocean of training data, LLMs become adept at recognizing and reproducing the complex statistical relationships between words in natural language. For ChatGPT, this might mean learning what types of words appear in a Wikipedia article as opposed to a chapter of fanfiction, or what lists of ingredients are most likely to follow the title “pistachio muffins.” So, when ChatGPT is given a prompt, like “how do I bake pistachio muffins,” it uses the statistical relationships it has learned to predict the most likely response to that prompt.

Occasionally, this means regurgitating material from its training set (like copying a muffin recipe) or adapting a specific source to the prompt (like summarizing a Wikipedia article). But more often, ChatGPT synthesizes its responses from the correlations it has learned between words. This synthesis is what gives it the uncanny yet hilarious ability to write the opening of George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in the style of a SpongeBob episode, or explain the code for a Python program in the voice of a wiseguy from a 1940s gangster

movie.

This explains the propensity of LLMs to produce false claims even when asked about real events. The algorithms behind ChatGPT have no conception of truth — only of correlations between words.

Moreover, the distinction between truth and falsehood on the written internet is rarely clear from the words alone.

Take the Okawa Elementary School example. If you read a blog post about the effects of a disastrous earthquake on an elementary school, how would you determine whether it was true? You might consider the plausibility of the story, the reputability of the writer, or whether corroborating evidence, like photographs or external links, were available. Your decision, in other words, would not depend solely on the text of the post.

Instead, it would be informed by digital literacy, fact-checking, and your knowledge of the outside world. Language models have none of that.

The difference between fact and fiction is not the only elementary concept left out of ChatGPT’s algorithm. Despite its ability to predict and reproduce complex patterns of writing, ChatGPT often cannot parse comparatively simple logic. The technology will output confidentsounding incorrect answers when asked to solve short word problems, add two large numbers, or write a sentence ending with the letter “c.” Questioning its answer to a math problem may lead it to admit a mistake, even if there wasn’t one. Given the list of words: “ChatGPT” “has” “endless” “limitations,” it told us that the third-to-last-word on that list was:

“ChatGPT.” (Narcissistic much?)

When James C. Glaser ’25 asked ChatGPT to compose a sestina — a poetic form with sixline stanzas and other constraints — the program outputted stanzas with four lines, no matter how explicit he made the prompt. At some point during the back-andforth, he says, “I just sort of gave up and realized that it was kind of ridiculous.”

Lack of sufficient training data in certain areas can also affect ChatGPT’s performance. Multiple faculty members who teach languages other than English told us ChatGPT performed noticeably

Despite its ability to predict and reproduce complex patterns of writing, ChatGPT often cannot parse comparatively simple logic. worse in those languages.

The content of the training data also matters. The abundance of bias and hateful language on the internet filters into the written output of LLMs, as leading AI ethics researchers such as Timnit Gebru have shown. In English language data, “white supremacist and misogynistic, ageist, etc., views are overrepresented,” a 2021 study co-authored by Gebru found, “setting up models trained on these datasets to further amplify biases and harms.”

Indeed, OpenAI’s GPT-

3, a predecessor of ChatGPT that powers hundreds of applications today, is quick to output paragraphs with racist, sexist, anti-semitic, or otherwise harmful messages if prompted, as the MIT Technology Review and others have shown.

Because OpenAI has invested heavily in making these outputs harder to reproduce for ChatGPT, ChatGPT will often refuse to answer prompts deemed dangerous or harmful. These barriers, however, are easily sidestepped, leading some to point out that AI technology could be used to manufacture fake news and hateful, extremist content.

In order to reduce the likelihood of such outputs, OpenAI feeds explicitly labeled examples of harmful content into its LLMs. This might be effective, but it also requires humans to label thousands of examples, often by reading through nightmarish material to decide whether it qualifies as harmful.

As many other AI companies have done, OpenAI reportedly chose to outsource this essential labor. In January, Time reported that OpenAI had contracted out the labeling of harmful content to Kenyan workers paid less than $2 per hour. Multiple workers recalled encountering horrifying material in their work, Time reported.

“Classifying and filtering harmful [text and images] is a necessary step in minimizing the amount of violent and sexual content included in training data and creating tools that can detect harmful content,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Time.

Even with the viral popularity of ChatGPT and a new $10 billion investment from 14

Microsoft, legal issues loom over OpenAI. If, in some sense, large language models merely synthesize text from across the internet, does that mean they are stealing copyrighted material?

Some argue that OpenAI’s so-called breakthrough might be illegal. A class action lawsuit filed just weeks before the release of ChatGPT alleges that OpenAI’s Codex, a language model optimized for writing code, violated the licenses of thousands of software developers whose code was used to train the model.

This lawsuit could open the gates for similar proceedings against other language models.

Many believe that OpenAI and other tech giants train AI systems using massive datasets

indiscriminately pulled from the internet, meaning that large language models might be stealing or repurposing copyrighted and potentially private material that appears in their datasets without licensing or attribution.

If OpenAI could be sued for Codex, the same logic would likely apply to ChatGPT. In the past year, OpenAI doubled the size of their legal team. “This might be the first case,” said Matthew Butterick, one of the attorneys representing the software developers, in an interview with Bloomberg Law, “but it will not be the last.”

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

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As ChatGPT and LLMs grow more popular, the question of what to do about these flaws only becomes more pressing.

‘A Life Without Limits’

When you’re watching a disembodied green icon spit out line after line of articulate, seemingly original content, it’s hard not to feel like you’re living in the future. It’s also hard not to worry that this technology’s capabilities will render your education obsolete.

So will ChatGPT transform learning as much as the hype would have us believe?

It’s undeniable that ChatGPT and other LLMs — through their ability to generate readable paragraphs and functioning programs — are revolutionary technology. But in their own way, so were calculators, the internet, Google search, Wikipedia, and Google Translate.

Every professor we talked to cited at least one of these tools as having catalyzed a similar paradigm shift within education. German and Comparative Literature professor John T. Hamilton likens ChatGPT to an “interactive Wikipedia.”

Saghafian, the HKS professor, views it as playing a similar role to Google.

People have been adapting to these technologies for decades. Children growing up in the 2000s and 2010s were told, “Don’t trust everything you see on the internet.” Gradually, they became digitally literate. They saw the value, for example, in using Wikipedia as a starting point for research, but knew never to cite it.

Like Google and Wikipedia in their earliest stages, people are currently using

ChatGPT to cut corners. But as experts highlight its flaws, teachers are beginning to promote a kind of AI literacy. (This would prove essential if an LLM professes its love for you or says it will hack you, as the AI-powered Bing Chat did to Kevin Roose in his New York Times article.)

To Barak, the computer science professor, a liberal arts education can help prepare students for an uncertain future.

“The main thing we are trying to teach students is tools for thinking and for adapting,” Barak says. “Not just for the jobs that exist today, but also for the jobs that will exist in 10 years.”

While ChatGPT currently can’t follow simple logic, tell true from false, or write complex, coherent arguments, what about in a year? A decade?

The amount of computing power devoted to training and deploying machine learning applications has grown exponentially over the past few years. In 2018, OpenAI’s stateof-the-art GPT-1 model had 100 million parameters. By 2020, the number of parameters in GPT-3 had grown to 175 billion. With this pace of change, what new abilities might GPT-4 — OpenAI’s rumored next language model — have? And how will universities, not to mention society as a whole, adapt to this emerging technology?

Some instructors are already imagining future uses for AI that could benefit students and teachers alike.

“What I’d love to see is, for example, someone to make a French language chatbot that I could tell my students to talk to,” Gann, the French instructor, says. She says an app that could give students feedback on their

accent or pronunciation would also be useful. Such technology, she explains, would allow students to improve their skills without the expensive attention of a teacher.

Saghafian believes that ChatGPT could act as “a sort of free colleague” that students could talk to.

Silicon Valley researchers and machine learning professors don’t know where the field is heading, but they are convinced that it’ll be big.

“I do believe there is going to be an AI revolution,” says Barak. In his view, AI-based tools will not make humans redundant, but rather change the nature of jobs on the scale of the industrial revolution.

As such, it’s impossible to predict exactly what the AIpowered future will look like. It would be as difficult as trying to predict what the internet would look like “in 1993,” says Frankle, the incoming CS professor.

Underlying these claims — and the perspectives of many professors we talked to — is an assumption that the cat is out of the bag, that AI’s future has already been set in motion and efforts to shape it will be futile.

Not everyone makes this assumption. In fact, some believe that shaping AI’s future is not only possible, but vital. “What’s needed is not something out of science fiction — it’s regulation, empowerment of ordinary people and empowerment of workers,” wrote University of Washington professor Emily M. Bender in a 2022 blog post.

Thus far, the AI industry has faced little regulation.

However, some fear any form of constraint could stifle progress. When asked for

specific ideas about regulating AI, Saghafian, the public policy professor, muses that he wouldn’t want policymakers “to be too worried about the negative sides of these technologies, so that they end up blocking the future, positive side of it.”

In a regulation-free environment, Silicon Valley companies may not prioritize ethics or public knowledge.

Frankle, who currently builds language models like ChatGPT as the chief scientist for an AI startup called MosaicML, explains how at startups, the incentive is not “to publish and share knowledge” — that’s a side bonus — but rather, “to build an awesome product.”

Hamilton, however, urges caution. Technology empowers us to live as easily and conveniently as possible, he explains, to live without limits: we can fly across the world, read any language just by pointing our smartphones at it, or learn any fact by tapping a few

“We care because we’re so limited.”

Hamilton says, “A life without limits is ultimately a life without value.” words into Google.

But limits, Hamilton says, are ultimately what allow us to ascribe meaning within our lives. We wouldn’t care about gold if it was plentiful, he points out, and accordingly, we wouldn’t care much about living if we lived forever. “We care because we’re

so limited,” Hamilton says. “A life without limits is ultimately a life without value.”

As we continue to create more powerful technology, we may not only lose sight of our own limits, but also become dependent on our creations.

For instance, students might be tempted to rely on ChatGPT’s outputs for critical thinking. “That’s great,” Hamilton says. “But am I losing my ability to do precisely that for myself?”

We think back to the Okawa Elementary School essay.

ChatGPT’s version wasn’t just worse than the student-written one because it repeated cliched phrases, lacked variation in its sentence structure, or concluded by saying “in conclusion.”

ChatGPT’s draft was worse because ChatGPT did not understand why what transpired at Okawa Elementary School was a tragedy. It did not spend hours imagining such an unfathomable chain of events. It did not feel the frustration of its initial expressions falling short, nor did it painstakingly revise its prose to try to do it justice.

ChatGPT didn’t feel satisfied when, after such a process, it had produced a work approaching what it wanted. It did not feel fundamentally altered by its engagement with the cruel randomness of human suffering.

It did not leave the assignment with a renewed gratitude for life.

ChatGPT, in other words, did not go through the human process of learning.

If we asked ChatGPT to write us a longform article about ChatGPT and the future of education, would it be worth reading? Would you learn anything?

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L

ined with endless rows of white cabinets, Harvard’s Ornithology Collection is imposing — even mausoleum-like — upon first glance; it’s only after opening the drawers that the true colors of the collection are revealed. Since it was founded in 1859, it has become the fifth-largest ornithological collection on Earth, boasting around 400,000 specimens and 8,300 species — over 85 percent of all known bird species.

Bi rd Bri llia

Explori ng Harvard's Orn ithology

Jeremiah Trimble, a curatorial associate and the manager of the collection, helps coordinate the work of anyone seeking to use the collection.

“The specimens are used in all kinds of ways.

They’re used in anything from artists creating field guides,” he says, “to taking feather samples to look at isotopes to understand diet or environmental contaminants.”

17

Each specimen affords valuable insight into the history and future of birds. “The specimens provide a snapshot in time about a species and where it occurred,” Trimble says. “People can use them to look at how genetics have changed within a species over time.”

The collection houses a bee hummingbird (Mellisuga helenae), which is hardly larger than a penny. Weighing in at under two grams, the bee hummingbird is the smallest species of bird on earth and can only be found in Cuba.

Another bird in the collection is the rhinoceros hornbill (Buceros rhinoceros). Native to the forests of Malaysia, Java, Sumatra, and Borneo, this species can be easily identified by its distinctive horn, also known as a casque, used to attract mates and increase the intensity of their calls. However, the casque has also made the bird a target for poachers.

ance:

y Collection BE N Y. Cam marata Photos By Ben Y. Cammarata

Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University; ©President and Fellows of Harvard College 18

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The vulturine guineafowl (Acryllium vulturinum) may not have an impressive casque like the hornbill, but it makes up for this with its incredible feathers. Decorated with countless white speckles and an electric blue collar, this ground-dwelling species is a standout in the savannas of northeastern Africa. Social by nature, the vulturine guineafowl can be observed in small- to medium-sized flocks as it searches the parched scrub for invertebrates and seeds.

Driven by sexual selection and geographic isolation, the king birds-of-paradise (Cicinnurus regius) are some of the flashiest birds in the sky. Come mating season, the male birds sway side to side, holding up their iridescent disk-shaped tail feathers to seduce females.

19

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Similarly, the tail feathers of the Wilson’s bird-of-paradise (Cicinnurus respublica) have evolved into delicate spirals in order to help attract mates. These bright plumes help cut through the darkness of the shadowy forest floor where these birds reside.

The collection features one of the few remaining specimens of the now-extinct black mamo (Drepanis funerea). These birds used to live on the island of Molokai; however, invasive species destroyed the black mamo’s natural habitat and preyed upon their young.

The last black mamo was collected in 1907. Though Harvard’s Ornithology Collection may be filled with beautiful displays, it also serves as a poignant reminder of the way humans have impacted the environment and those living in it.

vectMuseum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University; ©President and Fellows of Harvard College 20

Wh e n we let gri e f li nge r ANYA SESAY

I

felt resentful about the rain at first. It was the do anything but grieve it. And just a few feet away, wreckage of my prayer for Tyre Nichols. I I could see another wave, ready to drown me in wanted a sunset. Dripping down the sky and grief all over again. It was frightening, and it was skating across the horizon, for Tyre. I wanted ceaseless. And such permanence and inexorability the sun. Blanketing my grief with a divine hallelujah, have hardened my heart. spread across the skyline with an unbroken stretch of I’ve been told not to grow weary, to shove away the hope, reaching worlds over. Instead, we got the rain: whispers of exhaustion, as I would an incessant fly. clouded, murky, and miserable. Yet as I walked toward I’ve been told that I don’t have time to grieve for long, Tercentenary Theatre for Tyre’s vigil, I found myself that it is my obligation to fight emotional fatigue and resonating with the sky. She, too, was crying. She was suppress weariness. In the back of my head often hovering over my grief, and the grief of my people, in buzzes the notion that if I allow my pain the liberty solidarity. Then, I wondered, why of being felt, it will consume me; is it that even when the sky cries it will slow my progress and my with me, it isn’t enough? Why is it In the past, to see Black fervor for justice. that even when the clouds share The same buzzing, I’ve found, in my anguish, the burden I carry death, to hear of it, was vibrates through these ivy-covered feels no less heavy?

— in culture, more than in all-consuming: a wave walls There is something perpetual law. No one has necessarily told about Black death, for me. that reached just below me that I cannot feel, nor have they Something claustrophobic me to suppress my pain. heaven before it came forced and inescapable and choking, Yet a clock seems to hang over something unbreathable and crashing down on me. my grief. Even at the vigil, I heard violent and bleak. That even if whispers of looming meetings all the world were to cry, even hovering over some people, if the earth’s screams could exorcize the misery like white noise muffling the sound of their grief of my innocence lost so young and the heartache screaming for catharsis. They had somewhere to be, that comes with every Black life taken, it wouldn’t something to lead, someone they owed something. be enough. For the bullets would continue raining So they packaged their grief away because they felt and the concomitant silence would drown us in the like they had to. I wondered, then, what it would be blasphemy that nothing ever happened at all. like if even when we had to, we didn’t.

I have felt more numbed than astonished by it as The capitalist clock, more often than not, binds of late. In the past, to see Black death, to hear of it, my Blackness. And in times of Black grief, it dawns was all-consuming: a wave that reached just below on me in an uncannily frightening way. The glass heaven before it came crashing down on me. I felt ceilings, built to exclude and oppress my people, powerless to do anything but watch it, powerless to have made their way into my heart and my mind.

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They confine my catharsis to a moment in time, my mourning to a schedule, my humanity to a transactional politic, marketed by a mass email assuring all eyes that thoughts and prayers did, or will at one point, center Black grief. And then the clock chimes, insisting the end of my grief, expecting production as usual. The violent silence prevails once again, and we wait, numbly, for the next wave to come crashing down.

But sorrow does not exit at the ring of a bell. At the closing of a ceremony, grief does not leave me. It comes in waves by nature. And in the case of Black death, the ability to suppress each wave fluctuates. Even in times of numbness, pain only lies dormant, waiting for the whispered allowance of catharsis. Or, it lies in a kind of desensitization, slowly eating away at my humanity.

Suppression is not a solution;

it’s not some radicalized ideal of strength and bravery and sacrifice.

It’s inauthenticity and alienation and poison. It’s claustrophobic and unbreathable and choking. It is a loss, a denial of your humanity. It is, in itself, a kind of Black death.

Therefore, emotional expression is a kind of resistance; catharsis is akin to liberation. In the act of taking space to grieve, I’ve learned, is the art of welcoming my whole humanity. There, sounds the whispers of revolution.

Tyre Nichols’ vigil was a place of crying and breathing, of sharing in community even if you had nothing left to give. Our time together honoring his life closed with a song and a final word. But even after, many of us lingered. We held each other, in a sense. And we stayed, sitting in our lamentation for a little while longer. There was something powerful about that act — liberating our lingering grief.

There were points during and after the vigil, however, when it felt like people couldn’t spend any more time grieving. There seemed to be a sense that one’s schedules, plans, and meetings could not bear the weight of their healing. At that moment, I wished for time, but I also wished for strength. Strength to choose humanity whenever and wherever I could. Strength to break the capitalist clock; to paint, to write, to call my beautiful Black family; to cry, to sleep, to sit in a comforting silence; to cook, to shop, to laugh, and to laugh more.

To put aside what is expected of me and liberate my lingering grief.

Grief comes in waves, by nature.

And with each wave, I wish for the time to lament. I wish, also, for the strength to liberate whatever lingers when the capitalist clock chimes.

Design By Sophia Salamanca 22

Poptropicapit Be njy Wall-Fe ng “It’s easier to imagine the end of [Poptropica.com] than the end of capitalism.” — Mark Fisher

young enough to feel like I was the one flying. *** In the real world, children have very little power. have dreamt of flying: up over the city and And for media interested in telling stories about between the clouds, chasing a woman with spiky children, this is a problem. How do you give a pink hair who flies beyond me, just out of reach. powerless character narrative agency? Some plots She is called Betty Jetty. I am an eight-year-old resolve this with luck (say, you stumble upon a ticket video game character named Shifty Hamburger. How to a chocolate factory) or inheritance (say, you are the did we get here? bastard son of a Greek god) or wishful thinking (say, Poptropica was a free browser-based game created you live in a world without capitalism). Video games

by Jeff Kinney, the author of “Diary of a Wimpy Kid.” might still allow you to participate in economies You played as a randomly generated six- to 15-year- through an artificial restriction of latitude, as in the old who traveled by blimp between a number of self- Pokémon franchise, where you can amass nearly contained worlds (“islands”). By finding inventive limitless wealth and clout as long as they further your uses for gathered objects, solving puzzles, and helping narrow goal of capturing weird little animals. strangers with odd jobs, you completed each island’s Instead, Poptropica ignores the question entirely. plotline and racked up as many medallions (the Your goals are as wide and varied as the narrative reward for doing so) as possible. requires. While capitalism shapes It was contradictory, dense, and the places you explore, it does not To be conferred agency deeply weird, and for most of my shape you. You might find a fivechildhood — really, most of my life without first having ob- dollar bill stuck in a tree, exchange — I was obsessed. for a sports drink at the general tained status, experience, itstore, This was a result of where I had and give the drink to a thirsty landed in the uncanny valley of or capital meant something gardener in return for his shears the internet, born too late to be that I did not yet have the — but for narrative purposes, the a Tumblr girl and too early to be bill could have been any other words to express. an iPad kid. What we had instead object of similar value, and other was this game where knowing the than in rare moments like these, right sequence of people to talk to and services to you do not interact with money at all. The game is exchange could land you on reality TV or the moon. profoundly uninterested in explaining why your I could explain what this looked like to my character can jump, barter, and wheedle their way elementary-school self in the form of a list: of the into saving the world. hegemonic cultural tropes the game dipped into For me, as a kid, this was the coolest thing ever. to streamline exposition (pirate island, Wild West Not only was this a world in which I could realize island, feudal Japan island), or the Poptropica- my long-held dreams of living in a walkable city, specific tropes that recurred across worlds (opaque owning a laser sword, and being a girl, but this was incentives, plot-twist villains, lots of exploration), or a world in which doing so was normal, rather than the social phenomena that mediated them (huddling subversive enough to require internal justification. in hallways and after-school programs to determine To be conferred agency without first having obtained who had solved what parts of which quest). But you status, experience, or capital meant something that I have to see it for yourself. did not yet have the words to express.

The first time I kissed someone — sorry, God Still, I want to acknowledge that this is a — it was a boy named Kyle with whom I co-owned ridiculous, indefensible panegyric for a game that a Poptropica account. My summers were spent does not deserve half as much; anyway, if children’s squatting underneath my grandparents’ dining table, media cannot be art, and video games doubly cannot hidden by its draped plastic cover, dodging Betty be art, then what is the point of this kind of analysis?

Jetty’s energy attacks on the old PC my Ye Ye hadn’t I am obviously not suggesting that the people who yet convinced himself to get rid of. It was old enough made Poptropica did so with consciously political that instead of a trackpad there was this nipply red intent. I am only, as anyone ever is, trying to explain circle in the center of the keyboard that you pressed how something used to make me feel. *** 23 your finger into to move the mouse around; and I was

I

talist Realism And what that feeling was. It followed me into high school, where every three to six months in social studies or my friends’ bedrooms, I would check back in on my old character, looking alongside her for something I couldn’t quite find. The feeling followed me into the beginning of the pandemic, where I would spend hours at once lying on the floor, clicking through forums and Flash games that I remembered from when I was younger, riding their diminishing waves of nostalgia. But eventually it stopped.

When Adobe discontinued Flash Player a couple years ago, Poptropica ported a few of the newer islands to a different software and deleted most of the old ones. (You can buy some of the deleted content for $20 on Steam.) I was replaying Mythology Island (2010), a favorite of many of my childhood friends and one of the few “classic islands” to have survived the transition from Flash. In that transition, I realized eventually, its edges had been sanded down

to make the gameplay more linear.

Challenging puzzles had been removed; instead of letting the player explore on their own terms, characters gave you important items and told you exactly where and when to use them.

This oversimplification — not just its fact, but the lack of acknowledgment that it had happened at all — was what drove me away. I thought about how you can buy something that should last forever and know it might last closer to two years, and that the thing you replace it with may have a life even shorter than that. Think of home appliances, or Apple devices, or clothing, which are built to stop working but are otherwise indistinguishable from older versions of themselves. Or think of a piece of media that you return to year after year for the faith it puts in your own agency, and which you discover, on one such occasion, has changed from a work of unwittingly radical fiction into something like a consumer product. What does that say about its continued existence? And what might it say about you?

*** In Super Power Island (2008), you are the vigilante tasked with apprehending six implausibly named criminals who have gained superpowers and broken out of prison. Some of them are obviously bad guys — like Copy Cat, who clones herself to rob a bank, or Sir Rebral, who levitates huge rocks and hurls them at civilians — but their ringleader, Betty Jetty, is not.

Her file notes that she is wanted for “flying without a license,” and when you hunt her down, indeed, this is all that she is doing.

It took me a while to realize I was jealous: of Betty Jetty, for one thing, but also of the distance between her character and mine, of losing the chase scene and restarting it over and over in anticipation of a different result, of the idea that we might reach that spectacular future from this speculative present. One name for this is planned obsolescence; another is longing. For years, anyway, I didn’t remember what happened when you actually caught her. What had stayed with me was the moment of flight.

The author at age nine. Design By Benjy Wall-Feng

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To Reve l i n an asian body E lyse D. Pham Designs by Sami Turner

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n my 21st birthday, I spoke on a Sex Week Suddenly, at a forum intended to inspire honesty panel called “Race and Relationships.” and empathy, I was grateful that the mic would pass Oversharing to an audience of strangers through a few more people before it got to me. I fit seamlessly into the celebrations didn’t want to be the first to admit that I gave off a — it was the holy grail of an activity, one that different, more penetrable, more fetishizable aura. would allow me to channel my affinity for silly Answering “yes” to being fetishized transformed exhibitionism into something actually meaningful. from a moment of vulnerability to a deflection My friend was moderating the panel, and together, of responsibility. And when I said it, I had the we pranced from brunch at Blue Bottle to Boylston disheartening realization that I was embarrassed.

Hall. We were excited to commune with peers who *** were similarly submerged in the The night before the panel, muddy waters of desirability I’d done some reflecting on politics. Perhaps narcissistically, anecdotes from my young Over the years, I — like adulthood, mining them for we were also excited that the takes we’d developed while most women of color — commentary beyond the idea procrastinating might finally of racial preferences as simply had accumulated a small being harmful. Over the years, have a broader audience.

My friend’s first question cut I — like most women of color but nagging reservoir straight to the point: “Have you — had accumulated a small but of romantic and sexual ever felt fetishized?” nagging reservoir of romantic experiences that seemed and sexual experiences that For me, the answer was yes, but. Yes, but sometimes it’s more seemed racialized. A few were racialized. of a rumor than fact. Yes, but the so on the nose that they felt like associated shame often derives caricatures. more from what being fetishized When I was newly 18, still signifies socially than from the tentatively, shakily stepping into fetishization itself. Yes, but the feeling can vary my sexuality, a guy reassured me after our botched drastically from instance to instance, in gravity or attempt at a one-night stand: It’s okay; it’s always urgency, and popular discourse doesn’t offer a space harder for Asian girls at first, but don’t worry, that to explore that unevenness. means it’s better in the long run.

But the first answer made me wonder if Even then, I knew his assertion was ridiculous. my planned bid for nuance was a thinly veiled My friends and I couldn’t stop laughing over the admission of weakness. A panelist responded to the implication that he must’ve taken the virginity of prompt with: “I’ve never personally been fetishized every Asian girl in the world in order to understand because I don’t allow that to happen to me. I kind of their anatomy so perfectly. He fell, without a doubt, have an aura that prevents it.” into the camp of men who hold damaging ideas

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Because we’re aware of Orientalism’s deep and expansive roots, desire for Asian women is difficult to imagine as untainted by fantasies of sexual submissiveness, exoticism, or danger. about Asian women and who should therefore be blacklisted from the pool of viable hookup options.

Stories like these abound — in online think pieces about the dangers of “yellow fever,” in critiques of films that unabashedly cast Asian women as dragon ladies or lotus blossoms, in historical analyses of how the Opium Wars birthed the mythology of tight Asian vaginas. These stories are old news by now. We all know that Asian women are fetishized interpersonally and culturally, and we know that it is bad.

On a liberal college campus, racial fetishization is as ubiquitous as it is universally maligned. News of yellow fever is nothing more than gossip — or, if you run into an acquaintance at a party and she shouts over the music to tell you who she’s hooking up with, a bit of bad news to deliver with the appropriate amount of pity and a dash of cringe. It’s rarely the subject of prolonged discussion. What is there to say? If the historical roots and cultural persistence of fetishization are obvious, the prescription for when it happens is even more so. Being fetishized is blatant and offensive. Its possibility lurks in every first kiss, every nervous butterfly, and every midnight booty call. Its subjects, then, should steel their auras against it.

But as I reflected on my own relationship to racial fetishization, I discovered that it was overwhelmingly forged through ambiguity: ambiguous interactions, ambiguous responses, and ambiguous feelings. The instances that prompted my immediate, visceral disgust felt secondary to the instances that left me uncertain, on the precipice of being shoved into a tired cultural script but clinging to the hope that I’d hold my ground.

Once, a friend brought up that a guy I’d been seeing had a reputation for yellow fever.

She joked, “Time

for you to put that one to bed!” A clear solution to a clear infraction. Her tone carried a loaded yikes, the accusation that I had, indeed, heard this before and hadn’t yet put it to bed after all. She was right, and in the group setting we were in, I flushed with shame. It felt like the wrong time to divulge that I’d agonized over the rumors for months.

As far as I could tell, these were the facts: He’d hooked up with a few Asian women, but also a few more non-Asian women. The mere presence of Asian women mixed into someone’s dating history — the incriminating evidence that my friends had pointed to — didn’t register as a cause for concern in itself.

I wanted to be cautious and discerning. Still, some of the warnings seemed to pulse with an almost smug incredulity — disbelief that Asian women could unproblematically be subjects of desire. It was like a parawnoia towards racial fetishes had led to the collective internalization of the assumptions that undergird them. Because we’re aware of Orientalism’s deep and expansive roots, desire for Asian women is difficult to imagine as untainted by fantasies of sexual submissiveness, exoticism, or danger.

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fought the urge to insist, No, why can’t you imagine that he just likes me because he thinks I’m hot? The irony, of course, is that I’d probably want to say those same words to a guy with yellow fever. Why can’t you just like me because you think I’m hot?

Being fetishized can feel like the invalidation of your desirability: You’re chosen on the basis of stereotypes associated with your race, not your unique individual assets. What’s less acknowledged is that the constant projection of fetishization onto your body can feel like that, too.

This is what my ideal self would’ve said back then, to my friend or on the panel. But the line between merited inquiry and making excuses is razor-thin;

unambiguously alienating. I wince at the unabashed invocation of stereotypes and slurs, at the use of the adjective “Asian” as a signifier of eroticism. If I was disgusted by the Asian virginity expert who alluded to tight Asian vaginas, how do I write about women who market themselves through “Asian pussy”?

Taking my interlocutors’ self-articulations seriously, then, has required that I resist the impulse to resent them for validating power dynamics that nauseate me. It’s an exercise in looking at instances of racial fetishization that appear the least ambiguous, the most plainly victimizing, and excavating what might be invisibly complex about them. The women’s narratives often brim with a

These conversations have forced me to consider being fetishized as a messy, lived-in thing, irreducible to a single axis of value or harm.

I’m still trying to walk it. Obviously, I don’t want to defend racial fetishization as okay, but I’m not very concerned with the act of fetishizing at all. Instead, I want to explore the embodiment of being racially fetishized — one that may be more capacious than the focus on subjugation and demands for personal defensiveness allow for. *** For my senior thesis, I’ve interviewed 20 women who make their livelihoods through inhabiting this embodiment. The work of Asian woman porn performers articulates the linkage of Asian femininity and sexual desire more explicitly, more vividly, than would be acceptable in any other form of media. Arguably, they don’t just articulate it. They amplify and reinforce it. From deploying Asian-related keywords to wearing ethnic garb, many of these women solicit an experience that others condemn as a primary source of violence.

Being fetishized emerges as a powerful means toward capital.

Still, despite all my pontificating on ambiguities, the act of browsing PornHub’s Asian category feels 27

bristling awareness of these complexities. Most of them know that the visual fact of their undulating bodies carries social significance, regardless of whether they lean into their Asian-ness or not.

Some of them feel guilt, some feel uncertainty, some feel indignance, and some feel empowered to capitalize on a part of them that would likely be fetishized anyway. Many feel a tangle of these emotions at once.

These conversations have forced me to consider being fetishized as a messy, lived-in thing, irreducible to a single axis of value or harm. For Asian woman porn performers, it brings discomfort but also money; frustration but also reclamation. *** When I was little, I wished that I was white.

I valorized Eurocentric beauty standards and believed that the coveted status of crushed-upon was reserved only for those who met them. But at some point, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction and stayed there. Still kneeling at the altar of vanity, I became supremely glad that I was Asian.

Maybe it was around the beginning of college when I found myself in a more diverse and social

friend group than I’d ever been in. We were obsessed with the obnoxious idea that we could be hot girls who went to Harvard. Leaning into this required that we were confident in our desirability, individually and together — or at least, that we told ourselves we were. Over time, my confidence settled; it grew less exaggerated and less performative. Certain mindsets naturalized from aspirational to real: I felt uniquely not insecure relative to white women.

White beauty standards were unappealing to me.

I loved how I looked, and I loved being Asian.

Those two things weren’t causal but inextricable. I didn’t love how I looked because I was Asian, but obviously being Asian had something to do with it. Many women of color I know can identify this precise boomerang in their own self-esteem.

Only recently have I considered the specifics of what it means to revel in my Asian-ness as beautiful.

Iterations of this self-love mantra are common and uncontroversial, a defiant response to the hegemony of whiteness. These days, thank God, I think that the features I would’ve chosen to swap out as a kid are better than the ones I yearned for. I find pleasure, power, satisfaction in my almond eyes and small stature, my dark hair and tan skin.

That last sentence, I’ve realized, must have always been implicit in the kind of racialized confidence that’s buoyed me throughout college. But to write it out is jarring. Frankly, it echoes the ramblings of a racist guy with yellow fever posting to a scary Reddit thread. If a sexual partner were to ever mention those traits, I would be horrified.

And yet, the sentence remains true for me. I look in the mirror; I see an Asian girl; I think that’s hot.

This, I suspect, is one of the trickiest parts of desire. We want our sexualities to be pure. Any association of race with sexuality is immediately tainting, pathologizing — and much of the time, it should be. But if attraction is, in many cases, based on appearances — making eye contact across a bar, swiping on Hinge — then it’s also difficult to separate from race entirely. What someone looks like, and what makes them attractive, inherently includes race.

In my sophomore year, an Asian friend and I

betrayed this to be our worldview without knowing we held it. We noticed that the guys who were into her had a monolithically different vibe than the guys who were into me. So half bitsy, half serious, we developed what we called our “Oriental question.”

We wondered whether we embodied our respective Asian-ness differently, and whether that might explain the phenomenon. Maybe one of us was Asian in a sultry way, whereas the other was more of a bubbly Asian, we hypothesized. We asked for input from several acquaintances that we certainly were not close enough to ask.

For the purpose of this bit, Asian-ness was the locus of interrogation — not personality, not style.

These factors only played a role insofar as they contributed to our speculatively distinct veins of Asian. Race, in other words, felt like a constitutive aspect of our desirability. It shaped how we conceived of boys conceiving of us — and, necessarily, how we conceived of ourselves in relation to them. The “Oriental question,” then, could easily be characterized by an outsider as an outgrowth of defeated acceptance.

But honestly, we found it all hilarious. We were fascinated and amused and occasionally flattered by people’s answers.

The instinctive relationship we grasped between our Asian-ness and our desirability was the object of curiosity, even fun — even pleasure, in the most lighthearted and frivolous sense. *** “I love sexy Asian women gyrating in bikinis on stage in Miss Saigon,” writes Celine Shimizu in the opening of her book, “The Hypersexuality of Race.”

“I love Asian women porn stars delivering silly lines in broken English while performing in dragon lady fingernails, long black wigs, and garish yellowface makeup that exaggerates slanted eyes.”

Shimizu is one of the only scholars to theorize the subjectivities of Asian women in pornographic films. Her book explores sexualized portrayals of Asian women through the analytic framework of “race-positive sexuality” — a way of understanding of the entanglement of race, sex, and representation that accounts for “their subjugating power but also the possibilities of their equally intense pleasure.”

I loved how I looked, and I loved being Asian. Those two things weren’t causal but inextricable.

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I, too, often just want to be in my body — a body that is most certainly Asian — and enjoy the pure embodied feeling of its desirability, guiltlessly and uninhibitedly, without explaining that to anyone at all.

That last part — the insistence on pleasure — is where Shimizu stakes her intervention in the literature. She claims that in spite of its historically violent origins, racialized sexuality can be a site of self-authored desire for Asian women, found in its performance or its consumption. Recognizing the potential for counterintuitive pleasure, she continues, allows us to recognize Asian women’s sexualities as vehicles for “powerful social critique.”

It’s a kind of politicization that can only occur when we discard the “moralistic” lenses of racialized sexuality as pain, or pleasure in racialized sexuality as false consciousness.

I’m not sure that I agree with the extent to which Shimizu ascribes pleasure with political meaning — and especially the extent to which she casts Asian women’s bodies as laboratories for revolutionary sexual subjectivities. This is a decidedly nonacademic gripe, more so a visceral, personal sense of indignance. I don’t want my sexuality to be socially meaningful or my pleasure to be politically important. That feels so laborious. I just want that particular part of life to be fun. I actively would not defend the Oriental question, or continuing to see the guy who may or may not have had yellow fever, or reveling in the Asian-ness of my sexuality as having anything to contribute to transformative sexual politics.

Still, Shimizu’s work gestures toward a truth that rarely feels kosher to explore beneath the dominant perspectives on racial fetishization. Race is always already formative in Asian women’s sexualities; sexuality, in turn, is “part of Asian American women’s everyday identities and subject formation,” she writes.

If all of this is true — and I’d wager that it is

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— then the relationship between race, sexuality, and desire can’t be solely constituted by shame.

Instead, pleasure might exist there. There might be confusion, or ambivalence, or a fed-up refusal to think about any of this stuff.

In every thesis interview, I asked the performer how she grapples with the racial fetishization inherent to her job. One performer, who once made a video instructing viewers on how to fuck a pumpkin, responded, “Why can’t I just be in my body and have fun making silly pumpkin-fucking videos, without all of this other significance tied to me enjoying myself, enjoying my body?”

Sometimes, it seems like there are only two options: to be on guard against the diffuse creep of fetishization, or to accept your place within a depressing, centuries-long legacy of fetishized Asian women. But her question rejects a sexuality defined by the fantasies of Orientalism; it also rejects a sexuality defined by victimhood, paranoia, and the moral imperative to internalize both. She doesn’t insist on an external utility to her onscreen performances. In fact, she seems to hate it, “all of this other significance” — the consideration of her body as a political object that might give off some racially questionable aura, rather than a vessel for enjoyment that belongs to her alone.

Or maybe that’s me projecting. I wrote her quote down immediately — not in my thesis notes document, but in a random note on my phone titled “RELATABLE.” I exclaimed in agreement and thanked her for saying it. Because I, too, often just want to be in my body — a body that is most certainly Asian — and enjoy the pure embodied feeling of its desirability, guiltlessly and uninhibitedly, without explaining that to anyone at all.

Vi rtual Reality Sarah W. Fabe r

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