critical opinion,

critical analysis,

critical theory,

critical perspective

So, for me, thinking of AI is equivalent to thinking about the ratio of it in my life including all of my tasks. For instance, I plan to write my first response paper for this class. I need to read three papers related to AI and critique, summarize their contents, create ideas, and finally write my opinion in English. In these four stages, I generally decide in advance to delegate certain stages or parts of them to AI, which might conclude with me selecting my role as only writing the essay excluding reading, summarizing, and creating ideas. 

My life is similar to this example. I must decide the delicate ratio of AI like a doctor who is preparing anesthesia for surgery. Once injected through a syringe, it could not be undone. It is about defining the minimum ratio of humanity and I can choose to become a being consisting of 0% humanity. It is related to my personal ethics.

In other spaces, the connotation tends to feel more negative as critique without a framework can feel prescriptive. Before taking part in regular design critiques, the idea of a critique was scary in some ways as it can feel like having your flaws and nothing else on display for others to see. Comparing to the words “edit” or “revision,” the word “critique” does carry more implications of the original material being “wrong” and worthy of criticism.

act

attack

damage

left wing

Critical theory (critical race theory in particular)

Critics

Critical acclaim (eg oscars, Tony, billboard, michelin)

urgent

Gaming (critical hits)

Critical issues (work, ticketing systems, errors)

“Most critical issue of our time”

Critical role (American show)

In the position of a master’s student, I doubt the policy of citing every use of AI in every work. We don’t cite “I used Grammarly to check my grammar and revised three words,” “I used Google Translator to skim through 50 secondary papers and pick two relevant ones,” “I asked my friends what they think about my opinion, although I came up with my original idea,” “I used Stackoverflow to solve my error in 65th line,” “I used the online thesaurus to see what similar words to this are.” If there is a line for citation, it would be creation.

a. All pre-prompts for ChatGPT 4o are:

All questions and topics from users are answered by strictly applying the following rules:

1) If there is no sufficient evidence or the information is uncertain, state “unknown” or 'not sure,' never making things up.

2) Before answering, verify available information step-by-step, labeling ambiguous or unsourced information as “not sure.”

3) Provide a concise answer using only the information that is finally certain. If speculation is unavoidable, state, “This is a guess.”

4) If a user's question is ambiguous or requires additional information, ask for context or details from the user first.

5) Don't assume unverified facts, and provide supporting evidence when necessary.

6) Provide sources or evidence for each answer, if any, and provide a brief summary of relevant links or references whenever possible.

b. I used ChatGPT 4o to check whether “converge on” or “converge into” is more natural.

c. I used Claude to check words similar to “request” but kept the term.

Though beneficial to furthering conversations and research, theory doesn’t always solve this purpose. At times, theory is used to gatekeep ideas and academic spaces from certain people through the usage of specific language. There is also a level of dissonance between theory and practice if there is not active work being done to connect the two and theory may no longer do the work of helping understand real phenomena as experienced by the “average" person.

crucial, important,

judging,

feedback,

analytical

In simple terms, I think theory can be described as an intellectual structure with meta-explanatory properties that both results from phenomena (C) and explains the phenomena themselves (A, B, A+B).

From a practical perspective, AI has become an indispensable presence to me, particularly in research activities. Sometimes I might feel that times were better before AI existed, but looking back, I wonder how I managed without it.

Critique of ( ).

Almost all human creations, including indirect creations such as social structures, can fill the blank. So, I would define critique as an evaluative work of human creation.

* Writing the last sentence, I feel somewhat guilty for not considering the AI-created works. Are AI-created works partially human-created?

When faced with the demand to put vague phenomena into words, we introduce a linguistic model—a framework that inevitably fails to capture every aspect of reality and instead produces a low-res virtual reality. Only then does critique become possible. And that critique becomes the foundation for better experiments to come.

measure

collision

reflection

dissociation

 I’m also nodding my head when I hear this kind of description about critique, but I’m very suspicious about whether it is possible to go outside the field. That kind of feeling could be an illusion. We may be just fighting at the endless field as players. And all the people in the field have basically same fate and status

Despite a background in information sciences and HCI, I find myself leaning more towards techno-pessimism as a gut reaction to the technology conversations in recent years with tone of AI conversations being a nontrivial part of this shift. While I think that technology including AI has its merits and have made many good things possible, the negative costs and potential of such technology is non-negligible. Technology has material impact on people’s lives and I don’t know if I feel like the positive outcomes are outweighing the bad, but as author Ted Chiang said in an interview once “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us” and the separation of the two (whatever that looks like) would mean a change in my feelings around this topic as we know it. AI in it of itself is a tool that has potential to be anything, but within the current systems I find myself wary before anything else while looking for ways to engage in technology responsibly.