Like the legend of Mark Twain's premature obit. (But that, evidently, is not quite what Sam Clemens said.)
Ian Bogost says "ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think-Treat it like a toy, not a tool."
"When OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public last week, the first and most common reaction I saw was fear that it would upend education. “You can no longer give take-home exams,” Kevin Bryan, a University of Toronto professor, posted on Twitter. “I think chat.openai.com may actually spell the end of writing assignments,” wrote Samuel Bagg, a University of South Carolina political scientist. That’s the fear...
Imagine worrying about the fate of take-home essay exams, a stupid format that everyone hates but nobody has the courage to kill." --Ian Bogost, Atlantic
Or maybe I can just continue to trust most of my students to do their own work, and verify that they've done so the old-fashioned way: by talking to them and getting to know them.
Better that, I think, than allow the small fraction of would-be cheaters to dictate the terms of our classroom activity.
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"I Can’t Stop Talking to My New Chatbot Pal"
ChatGPT makes a lot of mistakes. But it’s fun to talk to, and it knows its limitations. ["Knows" as in "understands"? No.]
...One primary criticism of systems like ChatGPT, which are built using a computational technique called “deep learning,” is that they are little more than souped-up versions of autocorrect — that all they understand is the statistical connections between words, not the concepts underlying words. Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus in psychology at New York University and a skeptic of deep learning, told me that while an A.I. language model like ChatGPT makes for “nifty” demonstrations, it’s “still not reliable, still doesn’t understand the physical world, still doesn’t understand the psychological world and still hallucinates.”
... nyt
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What Would Plato Say About ChatGPT?
"I Can’t Stop Talking to My New Chatbot Pal"
ChatGPT makes a lot of mistakes. But it’s fun to talk to, and it knows its limitations. ["Knows" as in "understands"? No.]
...One primary criticism of systems like ChatGPT, which are built using a computational technique called “deep learning,” is that they are little more than souped-up versions of autocorrect — that all they understand is the statistical connections between words, not the concepts underlying words. Gary Marcus, a professor emeritus in psychology at New York University and a skeptic of deep learning, told me that while an A.I. language model like ChatGPT makes for “nifty” demonstrations, it’s “still not reliable, still doesn’t understand the physical world, still doesn’t understand the psychological world and still hallucinates.”
... nyt
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What Would Plato Say About ChatGPT?
A.I. can be a learning tool for schools with enough teachers and resources to use it well.
...As Plato was wrong to fear the written word as the enemy, we would be wrong to think we should resist a process that allows us to gather information more easily.
As societies responded to previous technological advances, like mechanization, by eventually enacting a public safety net, a shorter workweek and a minimum wage, we will also need policies that allow more people to live with dignity as a basic right, even if their skills have been superseded. With so much more wealth generated now, we could unleash our imagination even more, expanding free time and better working conditions for more people.
The way forward is not to just lament supplanted skills, as Plato did, but also to recognize that as more complex skills become essential, our society must equitably educate people to develop them. And then it always goes back to the basics. Value people as people, not just as bundles of skills.
And that isn’t something ChatGPT can tell us how to do... nyt
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Will ChatGPT Make Me Irrelevant?
...Educators are spooked, recognizing a specter on the horizon — no, right in front of us — that makes plagiarism look quaint. Last week, The Atlantic published an article, by Stephen Marche, titled “The College Essay Is Dead.” That was followed just three days later by another article, by Daniel Herman, titled “The End of High School English.” I figure “Curtains for the Seventh Grade” will be out next week and, fast on its heels, “Is Literacy Obsolete?”
And I can tell you that here in the lofty precincts of elite academia, conversations about whether a significant fraction of students would be turning in papers generated by A.I. segued quickly into conjecture about whether professors would respond by grading those papers with A.I.
Let’s take human endeavor out of the equation entirely. It’s such an inefficient, unnecessary thing.
But it’s also, well, everything — not by the dictates of productivity, but by measures much more meaningful. It’s the font and province of originality. It’s the cornerstone of identity. We are what we do, and by that I don’t mean the labels affixed to our professions. I mean the stamps of our idiosyncratic contributions, no matter their nature or context. That’s how we bend the universe — our butterfly effect — and how we register that we were here. If we outsource it to A.I., don’t we erase ourselves?
Maybe not. Maybe this is the cusp of a new utopia, in which machines not only assemble our appliances and perform our surgeries but also plot our novels, draft our legislation and write our op-eds while we pop our soma or chew our lotus leaves and congratulate ourselves on the programming and the prompts behind it all... Frank Bruni
Will ChatGPT Make Me Irrelevant?
...Educators are spooked, recognizing a specter on the horizon — no, right in front of us — that makes plagiarism look quaint. Last week, The Atlantic published an article, by Stephen Marche, titled “The College Essay Is Dead.” That was followed just three days later by another article, by Daniel Herman, titled “The End of High School English.” I figure “Curtains for the Seventh Grade” will be out next week and, fast on its heels, “Is Literacy Obsolete?”
And I can tell you that here in the lofty precincts of elite academia, conversations about whether a significant fraction of students would be turning in papers generated by A.I. segued quickly into conjecture about whether professors would respond by grading those papers with A.I.
Let’s take human endeavor out of the equation entirely. It’s such an inefficient, unnecessary thing.
But it’s also, well, everything — not by the dictates of productivity, but by measures much more meaningful. It’s the font and province of originality. It’s the cornerstone of identity. We are what we do, and by that I don’t mean the labels affixed to our professions. I mean the stamps of our idiosyncratic contributions, no matter their nature or context. That’s how we bend the universe — our butterfly effect — and how we register that we were here. If we outsource it to A.I., don’t we erase ourselves?
Maybe not. Maybe this is the cusp of a new utopia, in which machines not only assemble our appliances and perform our surgeries but also plot our novels, draft our legislation and write our op-eds while we pop our soma or chew our lotus leaves and congratulate ourselves on the programming and the prompts behind it all... Frank Bruni
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