Gen-AI assignment
Honestly, I really loved that article, and it was a pretty good read. It reminded me a little of the Netflix Series, The Haunting of Hill House, when James said, “Women writers were particularly invested in the figure of the ghost as an apt metaphor for women’s ‘spectral’ existence in Victorian society, powerless and peripheral, but also idealized and morally elevated” (204). Nelly Vance, may you rest in peace. She was the Bent Neck lady from her younger self’s nightmares, and she was also the symbol of death when her husband died. When she dies, she realizes that she was the person who haunted her childhood. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in the whole world. It was a recurring symbol that no one in her life was really listening to her plight until it was too late.
On to the actual assignment, I used ChatGPT to summarize the paragraph here:
In “Menopause and Hysteria in Victorian Medical Texts and Rhoda Broughton’s ‘Mrs. Smith of Longmains’,” Louise Benson James examines how nineteenth-century medical discourse connected menopause with hysteria and female psychological instability, and how these ideas appear in literature. She explains that Victorian physicians often treated menopause as a dangerous “crisis” in a woman’s life, when changes in the reproductive system were believed to cause nervous disorders, emotional instability, or hysteria. James then analyzes how these medical assumptions are reflected in Rhoda Broughton’s short story Mrs. Smith of Longmains, whose middle-aged narrator experiences visions that might initially seem like symptoms of hysteria. However, the story ultimately reveals that the narrator’s visions are genuine rather than pathological. Through this twist, the text challenges Victorian medical authority and questions the tendency to pathologize women’s bodily experiences. James argues that Broughton’s story both reflects contemporary anxieties about menopause and subtly critiques the cultural and medical assumptions that labeled older women as irrational or unstable.
Was it good? Sure. Did it cover all the basics? Yes. Would I say that this beats out reading the article itself? No.
The thing about this summary is that I already read the article before being asked to run it through generative AI. Where I felt the summary was a little vague, I already had context for it. This is also a shortened summary of what it had given me. Some of the original blurb, which was about 2 pages longer, gave some information about what the author had written in the past. If I had not read the article, I would have assumed those pieces were in it, but they were not. Some of what the AI had given me was not at all what I had asked about. Other parts were pretty accurate, but when I played around a bit, I found that it would lie to me about what was in the article or correct itself when I found a mistake. Again, I would only catch it because I had already read the article.
Would I use it as a tool? I mean, it did a pretty good job on a one-paragraph summary, but other than that, probably not. It explained the concept pretty well, but it is hard to feel like I can trust it when it lies to me when I ask questions. Personally, I would maybe ask for a summary once before reading as a precursor, but otherwise, I don’t think AI is at the point where it can read and analyze academic work correctly.
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