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…
In October, 2002, I was blogging about The stupidity of explosions in space movies The Chronicle of Higher Education rescues the briefly defunct Arts & Letters Daily The superiority complex An anti-telemarketing script An “I Love Lucy: bible study Why whitespace matters when creating a sign The coming air age of 1955 (as envisioned in…
Students who cheat with ChatGPT can look forward to these $15/hr jobs training the AI that they relied upon to get them their degrees. The students who actually did the work themselves should be much be better prepared to demonstrate how their work differs from the mediocre stream of bot-produced content. Savreux is part of…
Do the headlines encourage empathy, or do they “other” the victims of crime? (Click to zoom in.)
Occasionally, when I don’t know exactly what to search for, I have found it somewhat useful to describe a problem to Bing and see what topics it searches for as it assembles its answer. But decades of experience with search engines means I don’t usually need a bot to tell me what to search for.…
In September, 2002, I was blogging about “The Science of Scientific Writing” (1990) from ‘pong’ to ‘pac man’ Michigan Police fall for The Onion satire about terrorist telemarketers “Ebonics” (ebony + phonics) Silly alarmist story about recessive blonde genes A scientist undone by plagiarism Google News (when it was new) Mel Gibson’s plan to film…
From October: A man who was arrested over a Facebook parody aimed at his local police department is trying to take his case to the Supreme Court. He has sought help from an unlikely source, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief on Monday. –The New York Times,Area Man Is Arrested for Parody. The Onion Files a…
In July, 2002, I was blogging about Intelligence Officers Read Between the Enemy Lines A great headline for an LA Times story about interrogation and document analysis during the military campaign in Afghanistan. Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your Newsroom Journalism was still a print-first medium at the time, and local TV reporters were…
Microsoft limits long conversations to address “concerns being raised.” […] These deeply human reactions have proven that people can form powerful emotional attachments to a large language model doing next-token prediction. That might have dangerous implications in the future. Over the course of the week, we’ve received several tips from readers about people who believe…
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,…
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…
According to screenshots posted by engineering student Marvin von Hagen, the tech giant’s new chatbot feature responded with striking hostility when asked about its honest opinion of von Hagen. “You were also one of the users who hacked Bing Chat to obtain confidential information about my behavior and capabilities,” the chatbot said. “You also posted some…
Even the most rebellious poets follow more rules than they might like to admit. A good poet understands grammatical norms and when to break them. Some poems rhyme in a pattern, some irregularly and some not at all. Poetry’s subtler rules seem hard to program, but without some basic norms about what a poem is,…
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…
Today I met a class of English majors who love writing, and who expressed concern that AI writers will put them out of a job. Human- and machine-generated prose may one day be indistinguishable. But that does not quell academics’ search for an answer to the question “What makes prose human?” […] “Think about what…
Not only is this a fantastic story about language and culture and colonialism, it’s also a great example of how a talented PR writer used journalistic storytelling strategies to turn a scholarly study into an appealing narrative. We start with a very specific, very personal story about a man returning home for his father’s funeral.…
I’m about 1/4 through teaching an online American Lit course. Some students are commenting on the use of “men” to mean “people,” as if it’s brand new to them. Others helpfully explained to their peers that in an era when only men could vote or hold office, it would have been in some cases historically…