Presentation Planning and Conference Skipping; or, Guilt but No Regret

Two currents of activity-anxiety vex me this evening.

The first: I've started the crushing information download of articles and books necessary for me to feel ready to talk a week from tonight at a special event on deepfakes (scarily realistic-looking fake videos of real people produced by AI). I'm giving a paper at our university library about it as part of their digital security month. This is way out of my normal scholarly sandbox. I'm a bit freaked out about sharing the stage with some people who, you know, actually know something about designing and developing machine learning programs.

I'm invited thanks to an article I wrote last year sorta sounding an early alarm about deepfakes. It was not, as reviewers noted, a great example of original scholarship. That is, I did not make the usual gesture of identifying and intervening into an extant critical conversation. I was basically, Y'all, this is scary! I synthesized information and news from a variety of sources, translating a lot of background material about AI, machine learning, and other such stuff into layperson's terms.

My poor editor at the journal had to keep pressing me to go forward with it. I had no confidence in the piece.

It's now one of the more downloaded articles from the journal. Go figure. Plus, from what I can tell, it's still one of the first academic articles about the phenomenon. I don't really know how to follow up.

So I'm nervous, doing my usual last-minute thing of absorbing an obscene amount of information, filling up my mental thinktank with data that I can hopefully use to craft a halfway decent presentation (which no one I know will see thanks to the presentation being cross-scheduled with a science and performance event across campus).

The other anxiety is that I'm likely-probably not applying to a big conference that I've been intimately involved in for over a decade. I'm just not going this year. I think I probably could devise a good abstract for it. I'm pretty well-known in that conference, so I'd probably get in. But--well, I'm tired, for one thing. And for another thing, my funding just isn't stretching as far as it used to. To be clear, I have nothing to complain about. That I have funding at all puts me into an elite group.

That said, if I want to do more Better Angels conferences over the next year, I'll need to make some sacrifices elsewhere, namely this conference.

But, boy, is the Guilt strong here.

I recently stepped back from directing a show I had agreed to direct this fall. I had reasons. My chair understood them. But still: guilt. I was upset about it, depressed about it. And then my therapist asked if I regretted the decision. That is, if I could, would I go back and make a different decision, keep my original commitment to direct? The answer flew from me: Not. At. All. I had plenty of guilt--no regret.

I'm hoping such is the case here. Guilt but no regret.

We shall see.

JF