A brief note on artificial intelligence

 

I rarely comment on the generally misnamed phenomenon known as artificial intelligence. Mainly, my silence on the matter stems from a lack of expertise, combined with a plethora of scholars better placed than myself to opine on the issue. I will confess, however, that I am largely sceptical – not so much to the phenomenon itself, but to many of its uses, and a all-too-pervasive notion that artificial intelligence is the answer to a vast range of problems. Currently, however, I am forced by circumstance to keep artificial intelligence in mind, and the circumstance is the chatbot ChatGPT, which is being used by students to generate papers by putting together bits and pieces of whatever is available online, and whatever is judged by the algorithm to be relevant to the topic or to the question at hand. As the chatbot is used, so its range of available material and its sophistication increases, and it is increasingly hard to distinguish a paper written by a student from one generated by this artificial intelligence. And given a combination of high pressure on the students and poor understanding of what purpose such papers actually serve – namely to train to student to become a better writer and thinker – the temptation to use the chatbot is very high.   

To the best of my knowledge, I have been spared the problem of ChatGPT, in that none of the exams and dissertations I have graded this year have been generated by artificial intelligence – at least not that I have been able to detect, although there is that ever-looming risk of being fooled. There was, however, one instance this spring which both gave me severe pause, and highlighted to me why using ChatGPT to generate student papers is, in my opinion, a deeply immoral thing to do.

The case in question was a BA dissertation, one among several which I was tasked with reading and grading. Normally, such a task is relatively swiftly done. We have a set time allotted to read and grade the dissertation, and with some experience it is usually very easy to swiftly determine what grade the text deserves. By looking at issues such as formal requirements, thesis question, structure, and the frames of the discussion, it is possible to arrive at a just and fair grade without too much dithering. One dissertation deviated from this norm, however, and it forced me to spend a lot more time than I was supposed to.  

The story unfolded in May of this year, a time when reports told of ChatGPT improving, but still being at a stage where its prose was far from as undetectable as it has been feared that it will become. I had read samples of exam papers generated by this chatbot, and the quality of the prose was indeed so laughable as to ensure the hypothetical student an easy fail, which I believe to be a suitable punishment for this kind of cheating. It was exactly this unpolished aspect of ChatGPT’s prose and grasp of formal essay requirements that made me hesitate when reading this particular dissertation. Not only was the writing quite rough at times, but there were several footnotes that were notably incomplete – some were simply lacking in formal details, while others were so general as to be impossible to check, at least within the time I had available. Rough writing and bad footnotes are both hallmarks of inexperienced students operating under a lot of stress, and before the golden age of artificial intelligence I would not have paid it much attention but adjusted the grade of the student as I deemed necessary.

The spectre of chatbots made me nonetheless check some footnotes, and I found the first to be quite imprecise, although not completely wrong. Another footnote was completely wrong at first sight, but it turned out that the student had used an older edition of the textbook, and a laborious check allowed me to ascertain that the reference did indeed make sense. A third footnote was even more cumbersome to check, because the work was not digitally available, at least not to me, and so I was preparing to head to the library on the other side of campus to take a third sample and see whether I could determine whether the text had been produced by a human or by a generator. Luckily, I decided to stop by the office to my colleague who had supervised the dissertation, and thanks to a chat about the student, their writing process, and the finished product, I could in the end rest assured that the roughness of the dissertation was the result of inexperience and stress, not cheating. This chat, in other words, saved the grade of the student and avoided an unjust failing on my part.

The main problem in this story was that the chatbot had attained a level which made its writing indistinguishable from poor student writing, and this is a level of quality quite prevalent among student papers. I do not say this to be either cruel or condescending, because I am very aware that this low level of quality very often comes down to factors that are not to be blamed on the students, namely high pressure, lack of training, and various diagnoses that make the first two factors all the more harmful. The uncertainty about he root of rough writing is caused by the rise of chatbot programmes, and this uncertainty puts extra pressure on those of us who are grading essays, exams or dissertations, because you sometimes need to spend much more time than you should in order to arrive at a more solid basis for grading the paper. Moreover, due to the roughness of the prose, chatbots like ChatGPT cast an added shadow of doubt over those students whose prose is similar to that of the text-generator. If the grader does not have enough time to dig into the details, the result might easily be that the inexperienced student is judged unfairly and failed, not because of the roughness of the prose but because that roughness has now become suspicious. Chatbots, in other words, make life harder for those students who are already vulnerable, and this reason is enough for me to utterly despise and reject such technology.   

Saint Olaf in Skjervøy

 

Yesterday, July 29, was the feast of Saint Olaf, one of the most widely venerated Scandinavian saints. As I have done, and continue to do, a lot of research on Saint Olaf and his cult, I take the opportunity to present one of the many surviving sources to Olaf's medieval cult. The source in question is the Skjervøy altar from after 1515, brought to the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo from the church of Skjervøy in Troms, Northern Norway. The altar is likely the product of a workshop in Northern Germany or the Netherlands, made after specifications from the commissioners, as this was common for a lot of church art in late-medieval Norway. 

The altar can be closed as a cupboard, and one door has since been lost, as has the traditional axe held by Saint Olaf. The axe is only suggested by the empty fist of the saint, holding an object that is no longer there. Based on the iconography typical of the era, we can surmise that this axe was a halberd. Olaf is also seen carrying a jar, whose iconographic significance is not clear. Beneath the saint, we see another iconographical feature which became widely common in the depictions of Saint Olaf from at least the thirteenth century onwards, namely the defeated beast. In this iteration, the beast has the head of a man, and wears a crown. The beast still defies interpretation, and the most important hypothesis seems to be that there are numerous ways to understand the meaning of this beast. 

The Skjervøy altar 

The Museum of Cultural History, C3000, Oslo

What is particularly important about the Skjervøy altar is that it highlights the status of Saint Olaf in the collegium of saints, at least in medieval Scandinavia. Olaf stands on the viewer's right, but the left of the group of figures, which is traditionally the lowest rank. The figure in the middle is God the Father supporting the Son, apparently after being taken down from the cross, if we are to judge from the wound in the side. To the right-hand side of God is the Virgin Mary, holding the Christ-child, and occupying that place of seniority which the Nicene creed affords to the Son, 'ad dexteram patris'. Olaf, then, holds the lowest position in the group, but the group itself is so high-ranking that even this position attests to the importance of the holy king.  

Olaf's appearance in such groups of holy figures is common, and the configuration of each group is different and much be understood on its own terms. Not all groups can as easily be interpreted as evidence of the importance of Olaf over most other saints, and Olaf's importance - while widely common - also depended on the preferences at each church. The Skjervøy altar, however, is one of the clearest examples of the Olaf's high rank in medieval Norway. 

Saint James the Elder and Saint Olaf - a brief comparison

 

Today, July 25, is the feast of Saint James the Elder, one of the most famous saints of Latin Christendom, and arguably the most famous saint of Spanish history. One of Christ's apostles, medieval legend placed his shrine in Compostela in Galicia, Northern Spain. At the beginning of the twelfth century, Compostela was the locus of one of the most intense bouts of mythopoiesis - myth-making - in the Middle Ages, where the clergy at Compostela created a legend that tied their place with biblical history, the legend of Charlemagne, and with the contemporary, twelfth-century world. This myth-making process created one of the three main pilgrim sites in the Latin Christian consciousness, with Rome and Jerusalem being the other two. Part of that process was the erection of the great Romanesque cathedral of Compostela, which is now largely supplanted by a later Gothic one, and the corpus of hagiographical material that is compiled in the Liber Sancti Jacobi (Book of Saint James), whose main textual witness is the twelfth-century Codex Calixtinus. Since James the Elder was known throughout Christendom due to his appearance in the Bible, and since his sanctity was accepted by all Christians, Compostela's claim to be the apostle's resting place resulted in durable myth that has continued to work its effect into our own times. Saint James, or Santiago, has become in effect a patron saint of Spain and of Spanish imperialism. The historical development of the cult is complex, but a very simplified summary of the evolution of Saint James' iconography can be found in this old blogpost. In short, however, we should note that Saint James goes from being an apostle, to a pilgrim, to a battle-helper. This is an evolution that demonstrates, in a typical fashion, the plasticity or malleability of saints.   

From a Norwegian perspective, there are notable similarities in how Saint James the Elder became a focal point of myth-making in Spain and how Saint Olaf became a focal point for a similar process in Norway. The myth-making centred on Saint Olaf gained momentum from the 1150s onwards, after the establishment of the Norwegian Church Province in 1152/53, where Trondheim - Saint Olaf's resting place - became the metropolitan see of a church organization that stretched from Oslo to Greenland. By the mid-twelfth-century, the sanctity of Olaf had become an accepted part of Scandinavian historical thought, and he was venerated throughout the Norse world, largely thanks to the Nordic diaspora whose members continued to tell stories about him. From the 1150s onwards, however, these stories became more fixed as they were committed to writing, and the clergy at Trondheim used the legend to anchor Norway and the Norwegian Church both locally within Norway, within a wider European context, and also within a universal history that reached back into biblical times. Saint Olaf became the patron saint of Norway, and his cult enjoyed a stable and widespread popularity well beyond the Reformation, and he remains an important point of reference in our own time. (He is even featured - although as a historical figure rather than as a saint - in the TV series Beforeigners.) Like Saint James, Olaf has also undergone an iconographic evolution, being presented as a warlord, a battle-helper, and as a Christian ideal king. Also like in the case of Saint James, while these representations accrued over time, they also co-existed and made for a very composite and complex image of the holy figure.  

The two saints were both important focal points in their respective geographies, although the similarities between the two cults are out of balance due to the much more widespread fame and status of Saint James the Elder and of Compostela as a holy site. Many of the mechanisms between the two cases of myth-making are similar, however, and it remains an academic fantasy of mine to have those two myth-making processes carefully compared through an international project. For the time being, however, I will have to be content with noting, as people have done before me, that these similarities exist, even though there are very few zones of contact between the two cults. While Saint James was venerated in Norway, there is little reason to think that Olaf was known in Spain, even though the twelfth-century miracle list, known as Miracula Olavi, claims that a Galician knight came to the shrine of Saint Olaf to be liberated from his chains.   

As far as I know, the Norwegian mythmakers drew inspiration from the general practices of Christian mythmaking, and not from one single cult in particular. It is unclear whether any of the clerics and monks involved in the Norwegian mythmaking drew on the corpus of legends connected to Saint James, but the gist of this corpus was indeed known in twelfth-century Norway. This knowledge is demonstrated by a detail from a reliquary in Hedalen stave church, which contains a relic of Saint Thomas of Canterbury (d.1170; can. 1173). One of the short sides of the reliquary contains two figures, namely Olaf and James the Elder, the former recognizable through his axe and crown, the latter recognizable through his pilgrim's garb. This depiction of James shows that the Compostela legend - which formulated him as a pilgrim - was known in Norway. 

The Hedalen reliquary 
Photo by Nina Aldin Thune; courtesy of Wikimedia

Detail from the Hedalen reliquary 
Photo by Trond Øigarden
From an exhibition at the Oslo University Library curated by José Maria Izquierdo, autumn 2021

Saint Knud Rex and negative cultural memory in twelfth-century Denmark

 
Today, July 10, is the feast of Saint Knud Rex, who was killed in Odense by rebellious Danes in 1086. In 1095, his bones were moved from the floor of the Church of St Alban, where he was buried after his death, to the crypt in the new stone cathedral which was then under construction. A synod of the bishops of Denmark declared him a saint, and the cathedral was dedicated to him. This translation of Knud's relics was the starting point for the official cult of the royal martyr, although I am personally convinced that the clerks at St Alban's in Odense - which was the cathedral church prior to the building of the new cathedral in stone - venerated the murdered king from the day of his killing.  

The early cult of Saint Knud has left a plethora of sources: One commemorative inscription placed in his shrine, one poem, two saint-biographies, and one liturgical office, all composed in the period 1086-c.1120. From the 1130s onwards, the cult's momentum within Denmark was hampered by the outbreak of dynastic strife, which came to dominate the development of Danish history for the subsequent two decades. Since Saint Knud's cult was associated with one part of the struggle, his cult was largely reduced to a local cult centred in Odense, although it was celebrated, and probably with a high liturgical rank, in all Danish dioceses. The details concerning this shift in the cult's importance to the royal family are not needed for this particular blogpost, but some of the articles in this article collection will provide a good sense of the situation.

The main topic of the present blogpost is the matter of Saint Knud Rex's negative cultural memory. While he was venerated in Odense - and accepted as a saint throughout Denmark - there were nonetheless stories about the dead king which cast him in a much more negative light. The oldest surviving witness to this negative memory comes from the Chronicon Roschildense, the Roskilde Chronicle, written by a canon in the diocese of Roskilde around 1140. The chronicle covers the history from the late ninth century until the mid-twelfth century, and the canon's opinion of Saint Knud is quite clear: He had been a strict and miserly king, who burdened his subjects with heavy taxes, and his sanctity was solely due to his repentance in his hour of death. Interestingly, the chronicler refers to Knud's law of taxation as 'nova lege et inaudita', a new and unheard-of law. This expression is also found in Gesta Swenomagni, the second saint-biography about Knud, and one written by Aelnoth of Canterbury in the mid 1110s. In Gesta Swenomagni, however, this term, and the accusation that it contains, is attributed to the rebellious Danes. The Roskilde chronicler has, in other words, probably read this term in a saint-biography but decided to level it against the saint. Importantly, however, the Roskilde chronicler does not deny Knud's status as saint, only the basis for this status.  

That such a negative depiction of a saint is put into writing is interesting, especially because it does not deny the sanctity of the person in question. It is possible that this depiction is based on a tradition that was widespread outside of Odense, at least within the diocese of Roskilde (which covers the island of Sjælland). Considering that the chronicler recorded this opinion close to sixty years after the king's death, at a time when few of those who were adults by the time of Knud's reign can be expected to have still been alive, the negative opinion has been passed down at least one generation. As such, the opinion can be said to have become a cultural memory, kept alive by people who did not themselves experience it, but who learned it from their elders. This negative cultural memory suggests that the cult of Knud Rex began as a top-down enterprise, at least as it was disseminated outside Odense diocese (which covers the island of Fyn and some smaller islands as well). Since the rebellion against Knud spread across all of Denmark, starting in the north of Jutland, we should expect that it was not just in the diocese of Roskilde where this negative cultural memory was vibrant, but also, and perhaps even more strongly, in the Jutland dioceses.    

Saint Knud Rex 
Detail from the wall-painting programme of the Chapel of the Three Holy Kings in Roskilde Cathedral

The Roskilde Chronicle is not the only source to this negative cultural memory concerning Knud. A glimpse of it can be detected in the Historia Compendiosa by Sven Aggesen from around 1180, but the clearest evidence is Saxo Grammaticus' account of Knud Rex in his Gesta Danorum from the turn of the twelfth century. Both Sven and Saxo were patronized by Archbishop Absalon of Lund, who had previously been bishop of Roskilde.

In Gesta Danorum, Saxo lambasts those who still claim that Knud had only merited his sanctity because of his repentance at the hour of dying, and he is making sure that the reader is well acquainted with the holiness of the dead king. We might interpret Saxo's correction of affairs as a way to counteract the historiographical tradition, or it might be seen as a measure aimed at eradicating a more widely held view. To put it differently, we do not know whether Saxo saw this belief as an error still thriving among the laity, or whether he knew of the error from the diocesan church's own historiographical tradition. 

The case of Knud Rex's negative cultural memory provides an interesting counterweight to our understanding of the cult of saints in twelfth-century Denmark. I have argued elsewhere - in a soon-to-be-published article which I will announce on the blog once it comes out - that the cults of Danish saints were strongly local in their reach, and that what we see in official documents such as saint-biographies, liturgical calendars or letters does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the broader width of medieval society.  

With regards to Knud's popularity, however, we are in murky waters. There are sources suggesting he was popular among traders in mid-twelfth-century Denmark, not only from Odense but also elsewhere. There are sources claiming that pilgrims flocked to Odense from all over Denmark. What we do know, however, is that by the end of the fourteenth century, when the Kalmar Union was established under the aegis of Queen Margaret I, Knud gradually came to represent Denmark in the union, and his cult became more widespread throughout Denmark. By that time, the negative cultural memory seems to either have faded or to have been suppressed.