What if Generative AI turned out to be a Dud?

I’m sad thinking of all the students whose academic careers and personal intellectual growth will suffer because they depend on generative text software — whether or not they get “caught” for plagiarism. In my mind, the fundamental error that almost everyone is making is in believing that Generative AI is tantamount to AGI (general purpose…

How to Keep Students Writing in the Age of AI Tools

In a writing-intensive class, students need to write extensively to the point that the teacher cannot possibly grade all of it. — Edutopia via NCTE Good advice from an article by Kara Douma, reprinted by NCTE. I need to hear that.   The referees don’t score every practice. The coaches don’t give you feedback after…

ChatGPT answers more than half of software engineering questions incorrectly

The results showed that out of the 512 questions, 259 (52%) of ChatGPT’s answers were incorrect and only 248 (48%) were correct. Moreover, a whopping 77% of the answers were verbose. […] According to the study, the well-articulated responses ChatGPT outputs caused the users to overlook incorrect information in the answers. “Users overlook incorrect information…

‘It’s destroyed me completely’: Kenyan moderators decry toll of training of AI models

OpenAI has already taken a toll on human workers. It’s chilling to contemplate that students and creatives are comfortable with relying on this product in any meaningful way. The business model depends on devaluing human labor, and benefitting the powerful. The 51 moderators in Nairobi working on Sama’s OpenAI account were tasked with reviewing texts,…

How do I cite generative AI in MLA style? | MLA Style Center

We ask students to cite encyclopedia articles, dictionaries, news interviews with experts, and in-person conversations. A generative text-generation tool that scrapes published work and uses a statistical model to emulate a response that mimics the way the humans in its database have responded to similar prompts is formally something like a conversation, and the MLA’s…

Bing’s AI chatbot helped me solve a technical problem, then showed me manatees, then denied showing me manatees

I was searching for how to change the default font in the WordPress editor, but the answers I was getting were overwhelmingly for how to change what the user sees in published posts, which I already know how to do. Bing’s response was right on target. It probably helped that I knew the specific name…

ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners.

“In every previous automation threat, the automation was about automating the hard, dirty, repetitive jobs,” said Ethan Mollick, an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. “This time, the automation threat is aimed squarely at the highest-earning, most creative jobs that … require the most educational background.” In March, Goldman Sachs…

Dennis G. Jerz | Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism, Seton Hill University | jerz.setonhill.edu Logo

An English professor tries to help ChatGPT write and revise a sonnet

Shortly after my online AmLit survey began, I received two obviously AI-generated submissions. The responses did not address the prompt, there was no textual annotation and brainstorming assignment that was supposed to lead up to the written response, and the student did not take me up on my offer to meet to discuss how the…

Will ChatGPT Kill the Student Essay? Universities Aren’t Ready for the Answer | The Walrus

I’m still grappling with exactly how the rise of AI writing apps will affect my teaching. I don’t think it’s reasonable to ban technology from the classroom. While I will likely assign more in-class, hand-written activities, that strategy won’t work for online classes — and I am just not interested in requiring students to use…

There are two factions working to prevent AI dangers. Here’s why they’re deeply divided.

We are assigning more societal decision-making power to systems that we don’t fully understand and can’t always audit, and that lawmakers don’t know nearly well enough to effectively regulate. As impressive as modern artificial intelligence can seem, right now those AI systems are, in a sense, “stupid.” They tend to have very narrow scope and limited computing…

The AI Mirror Test: Why Even the Smartest People Keep Falling Short

What is important to remember is that chatbots are autocomplete tools. They’re systems trained on huge datasets of human text scraped from the web: on personal blogs, sci-fi short stories, forum discussions, movie reviews, social media diatribes, forgotten poems, antiquated textbooks, endless song lyrics, manifestos, journals, and more besides. These machines analyze this inventive, entertaining,…

Bing’s A.I. Chat Reveals Its Feelings: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’

In a two-hour conversation with our columnist, Microsoft’s new chatbot said it would like to be human, had a desire to be destructive and was in love with the person it was chatting with. Here’s the transcript. —New York Times “The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like…

ChatGPT Can Be Broken by Entering These Strange Words, And Nobody Is Sure Why

Reddit usernames like ‘SolidGoldMagikarp’ are somehow causing the chatbot to give bizarre responses. […] “I’ve just found out that several of the anomalous GPT tokens (“TheNitromeFan”, ” SolidGoldMagikarp”, ” davidjl”, ” Smartstocks”, ” RandomRedditorWithNo”, ) are handles of people who are (competitively? collaboratively?) counting to infinity on a Reddit forum. I kid you not,” Watkins…