AI Issues

Two personal examples and six links to Substacks I'd recommend

Photo by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash

Decided if I’m going to keep posting about AI issues (which I am), I need an image! (Search term: surveillance).

Personal example #1:

So I got the following email this morning (sender name, AI name, and especially link redacted):

Dear Robin

A Tolkien scholar just asked about tolkien scholarship:

“Which journals accept Tolkien papers from independent scholars?”

They’re not alone: Tolkien scholars keep asking questions you could answer while sharing your newsletter, and you haven’t seen any of them yet.

See what they’re asking: REDACTED

It’s a first!

And completely bogus although me being me, I sent Sender my answer (basically that as far as I know all academic journals accept papers from anybody; the evaluation system, double-anonymous (what is more widely known as “double-blind”) is based on the quality of the work not the identify of the author, and that anybody who truly existed/wanted to ask me a question could do so via Substack message or in comments.

And then I told Sender (who did have a name and title and who actually may be a human, or, well, exist somewhere in that company) that I would never use any material generated by an AI in my work, sent the reply, and blocked the email address.

Personal Example #2:

A friend of mine with a job that requires them to work with AIs for academic purposes sent me the results of a search (query) using an AI that is linked to an academic publisher and supposed to be able to do a “sophisticated search” of scholarly sources (again, not naming names!).

Here is an excerpt from the results to the query: “What scholars have criticized the representations of women in Tolkien’s works?”

- **Repressed Misogyny**: The glaring absence of women in “The Lord of the Rings” has led some feminist scholars to interpret this as repressed misogyny. The few female characters present are often childless, reinforcing a sense of desolation and infertility in Middle-earth [4] .

- **Misogynistic Reputation**: Since 1971, many feminist scholars have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate, labeling him a misogynist. This criticism has persisted over decades, reflecting ongoing concerns about the representation of women in his works [5] .

Despite these criticisms, some scholars have defended Tolkien, arguing that the few female characters he created could be considered role models and that the absence of women serves to highlight certain thematic elements in his stories [4] . However, the predominant scholarly view remains critical of his portrayal of women, emphasizing the need for a more nuanced understanding of his works [5] .

4. “A Bleak, Barren Land”: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings Henderson, D.L.

Mythlore, 2023

5. “Perilous and Fair” in “A Bleak, Barren Land”: A Feminist Responds to Dylan Lee Henderson’s Essay Reid, R.A. Mythlore, 2024

The results listed five publications which, to be fair, are all academic ones (appearing in academic journals); four of the five are peer-reviewed articles I’m familiar with; the fifth is my publication which is a “Note/Response” so is in the category of “editor-reviewed.”

First, citing only five articles in 2025 (which is when the query was done) is a fairly pathetic showing. A recent chronological bibliography I did for my feminist killjoy bibliographic essay that covered publications through June 2026 had 141 publications, but even my completely-out-of-date-the-year-after-it-was-published bibliographic essay from 2015 listed forty essays. Relying on an AI instead of doing an actual database search would probably not end well.

Second, the “summaries” are mostly shit.

The “summary” of my response to Henderson’s article is the exact opposite of what my extremely LONG response argues; as I recall, the essay itself is over 10K, and there’s an online supplement which couldn’t fit into the hard-copy journal, so yeah, probably more like 12K.

Click on the link below to access the full essay:

- **Misogynistic Reputation**: Since 1971, many feminist scholars have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate, labeling him a misogynist. This criticism has persisted over decades, reflecting ongoing concerns about the representation of women in his works [5] .

For those not wanting to read a feminist academic rant, here’s my abstract which kinda shows the source for the AI summary:

Dylan Lee Henderson’s 2023 essay in Mythlore (vol. 42, no. 1) titled “A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings,” claims that “many feminist scholars [since 1971] have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate and denounced Tolkien himself as a misogynist” (88). In my response, I argue that Henderson’s essay reduces a fifty-plus year history of scholarship (much of it by feminists) exploring the complex, contradictory issues of Tolkien’s female characters to a single negative stereotype. I described that stereotype in my 2015 essay in Perilous and Fair (Croft and Donovan) in my conclusion which argued it was more than time to “move beyond the perceived need to defend Tolkien (whether the author, the body of work, or the human being) from the outdated stereotype of ‘feminist critics’ who exist only to rend and destroy” (39). In addition, while Henderson cites a number of essays to support his point, I would encourage those interested in the topic to read the original sources for themselves to get a better sense not only of the scholarship on Tolkien’s female characters.

I could probably go to Henderson’s essay and pick out the sentence or two that forms the basis for the AI Summary (his was source #4), but I don’t need to get irked by reading his essay again—I spent enough time on it while writing the response.

If this is a fair sample of that AI’s work, I could call it completely “unsophisticated” (it’s hard to find language that doesn’t anthropomorphize the machines). In fact, if I were grading the summaries and other text in a class assignment, the grade would probably hover between a D and an F (depending on the class level—certainly it would be an F in a graduate course). (And then students could read my feedback and revise for full credit!).

One aspect of academic writing that my students struggled with over the decades was the need to summarize views that the author disagrees with (and how to summarize them as fairly and in as neutral a tone as possible) especially if one plans to present a counter-argument.

And linked to that problem was the ongoing problem of students assuming that whatever was in the first paragraph of an essay was the argument (which may apply to the five-paragraph essay format, but when you’re looking at a full-on academic essay which may run twenty pages, not so much).

Unfortunately, as Henderson’s essay shows, humans can also fail as badly as AI (although in more words).¹

I am glad that I escaped from Texas (and teaching) in 2020.

But given the extent to which AI is slithering all over the place, I’ve been reading about the issues (and not just in education—it’s EVERYWHERE). Here are half a dozen posts (on Substack) from authors I subscribe to that I’ve saved and now recommend:

How Republicans Are Using AI to Put Women Back in Their Place

Blade Runner 2049: The Detector That Decides Who Counts on Substack

Sloppelgängers

Understanding the Luddites in the age of AI

Misplaced panic over AI progress

The growing AI backlash

1. The three paragraphs from my essay that need to be read to understand the overall argument follow.

Unfortunately, this outdated stereotype of women and/or feminist critics as shrewish man-haters appears early (in the second paragraph) of Dylan Lee Henderson’s 2023 essay, “A Bleak, Barren Land’: Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings,” and shapes his overall argument. He opens his two-paragraph long “Background” section, which serves as a basic review of literature, by saying that “many feminist scholars [since 1971] have condemned Tolkien’s depiction of women as inadequate and denounced Tolkien himself as a misogynist” (88, emphasis added). This sentence ends with a superscript number referencing a footnote citing my essay, “The History of Scholarship on Female Characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Legendarium: A Feminist Bibliographic Essay” (Croft and Donovan, Perilous and Fair [subsequently P&F]). The footnote reads, in its entirety: “For a more detailed history of this debate, see Reid” (88n2). Henderson choosing to cite my essay at the end of a sentence that is his own argument implies that my essay makes the same, or similar argument, only with more “details” about the many feminists who have “condemned […] and denounced Tolkien himself as a misogynist” (88).

While my essay does provide more details about more of the relevant scholarship than Henderson cites in his essay, my analysis of the scholarship differs a great deal from his. My goal in the essay, as with any bibliographic essay, is not to make an argument about Tolkien’s work (let alone the author himself) but to analyze the types of arguments made in the scholarship about his work. In order to achieve that goal, I analyze changes in the “development of scholarship on [Tolkien’s] female characters over time, including not only the increasing attention paid to these characters, but also a growing application of newer critical theories and methods” (13). My analysis includes, but is not limited to, all the essays in P&F, seven of which were reprints of earlier essays. But I also cover all the published essays on the topic that I could find in order to identify areas of agreement and of disagreement in the scholarship as well as gaps that needed filling. Some scholars do characterize elements of Tolkien’s fiction as sexist, even misogynistic, but many do not, presenting a range of different arguments and drawing on different critical or feminist theories. At no point in the essay do I use loaded language like condemn or denounce.

My conclusion includes a suggestion for the future of Tolkien scholarship on women and female characters which is to: “move beyond the perceived need to defend Tolkien (whether the author, the body of work, or the human being) from the outdated stereotype of ‘feminist critics’ who exist only to rend and destroy” (39). It is frustrating to see this stereotype asserted nearly ten years after the publication of P&F, and even more frustrating because Henderson cites, in addition to my essay, seven of the fifteen chapters in the collection (this count includes the “Introduction”) which present a more complex picture of the scholarship than he conveys (255-56)

Henderson’s claim that MY bibliographic essay supported HIS sexist claim was what tipped me into pure full-blown ragewriting at such length although I still would have called him out for the rest of the problems in his essay.

The rest of my essay and the online supplement is a lot of evidence showing how Henderson either ignored (did not cite) scholarship that did not agree with his argument, or (extensively) cherry-picked short quotes that seemed to show the cited scholarship was making the same argument he did.

Oh, yeah, and pointing out that he was wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong (picture me jumping up and down on a hardcopy PDF of his essay and you’re got the picture) in his evaluation/description of feminist scholarship.

Clare Moore and Leah Hagan also published an excellent response to Henderson’s essay, identifying additional problematic aspects of his argument and cherry-picked evidence: Moore, Clare and Hagan, Leah. “A Bleak, Barren Take: A Response to “Women and Fertility in The Lord of the Rings”,” Mythlore, vol. 43, no. 1, article 13. 2024, dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol43/iss1/13.