As a literary executor I promised to maximise diffusion of my mentor’s work to extent I could without damaging its integrity. Now receiving requests from publisher to license training on the books. This certainly aids diffusion by increasing visibility within the model but does it damage integrity? We still lack a conceptual framework for thinking about how existing hierarchies of attention will be restructured by visibility or its absence within a model. I find it easy to see how the implications could be complex and multifaceted, in ways we urgently need to understand for higher education.
For example my blog now gets lots of traffic via Perplexity & ChatGPT because it’s clearly identified as a high authority source. ChatGPT can answer questions about me with sufficient detail that I suspect it was trained on my blog. These have non-trivial implications for academic visibility/status. It’s hard to explore these issues conceptually and empirically if the debate is polarised into abolitionists and solutionists, such that if you’re not one you are immediately suspected of being the other.
Mark Carrigan 