ChatGPT will end high-school English

Article in the NYT that discusses a little about what UF is doing. The in person writing seems to be the only way to avoid the use of technology assistance.

Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach

 

Those will be the overlords in society.

 

A couple things come to mind almost immediately. If two students type in the same prompt from the same class, will it spit out identical papers?
Also, from the example that @PerSeGator did, it seems really dry and doesn't add any emotion or opinion. I think that is where teachers should change up the assignment a little to include the student's perspective.

 

If a pupil reads what is generated and learns from it, I don’t necessarily see it as bad thing.

 

I’ve a question: is that an app? I’d like to try it out for kicks.

 

I played around with it awhile back and seem to recall getting different answers for the exact same question. And you can tell it how many words to write, change the style, etc. One red flag would be if a C student starts writing with no grammar or spelling errors lol.

Another thing that impressed me is that it’s better than any translation app I have used.

 

https://chat.openai.com/

 

This reminds me of a fav essay written by a human


Thomas Pynchon

As if being 1984 weren't enough, it's also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow's famous Rede Lecture, ''The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,'' notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into ''literary'' and ''scientific'' factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people's attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.

Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever ''beyond'' the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy and access fee these days can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one's own specialty.

What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of long-ago high- table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow's immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, ''If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.'' Such ''intellectuals,'' for the most part ''literary,'' were supposed, by Lord Snow, to be ''natural Luddites.''

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ''people who read and think.'' Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?

 

Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it's hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn't sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ''people who read and think.'' Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?
The above was a quote of a post by docspore. Below is my ramblings.


I know what a Luddite is a follower of the anti progress advocate Ludd. I can’t remember anything else about him. Was his first name Robert or maybe Thomas and I think he was a latter half of the 19th century British intellectual but I wouldn’t put any money on it.

 

I have recently re-read Ted Kaczynski‘s manifesto “Industrial Society and Its Future”. As a younger person, I could see he was an accomplished intellect and capable of a cogent argument; however I dispatched his central ideas as manipulative. Upon my re-read, I see him even more as a loon than a great thinker.

Humanity is not lost. Technology will not replace our souls. Technology will enable humans to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe.

 

IT folks are using ChatGPT to write scripts. That's pretty impressive. From what I've heard, it does a good job.

 

I will say that the technology has come quite a ways.

I forced a bot to watch over 1,000 hours of Trump rallies and then asked it to write a Trump rally of its own. Here is the first page.

 

That is beautiful. Just perfect

 

Ouch

 

Ouch.

Automation is a blessing/curse. I'm glad my role involves hardware, specifically network switches and servers. I'm actually passing time right now waiting for backups to finish running so I can shutdown that server and install a HBA into it. With AI and outsourcing getting more prevalent, it's good to have a skill that can't be done remotely or by AI.

 

That's the first thing that came to mind for me too.

 

I don't think the sky is falling here, and this technology was probably inevitable. Teachers can still do in-class assignments to test vocabulary, grammar, and spelling, though I suspect take-home writing assignments will be more challenging. Of course students should still learn the fundamentals of writing and research, for example, but I am not sure it's that much different than our reliance today on calculators. I can usually ballpark things in my head so I know if I've input the wrong numbers or if the result is silly, but when's the last time any of us did long division by hand? I also think AI is going to be increasingly helpful for learning a foreign language. Imagine wanting to learn French and essentially having your own native-speaking robot tutor?

 

Was going to ask this exact question. Seems like it would only work if a single student used it, otherwise it should be pretty easy to tell.