IThe start of term is fast approaching. Parents are starting to worry about packed lunches, uniforms, and textbooks. School leavers heading to university are wondering what welcome week will be like for new students. And some professors, especially in the humanities, are anxiously wondering how to handle students who are already more adept at Large Language Models (LLMs) than they are.
They have good reason to be worried. Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media, said: and He studied Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis. it is“If the first year of AI College ended with a sense of disappointment, the situation has now descended into absurdity. Teachers struggle to continue teaching while wondering whether they are grading students or computers. Meanwhile, the arms race in AI cheating and detection continues unabated.”
As expected, the arms race is already intensifying. The Wall Street Journal Recently reported “OpenAI has a way to reliably detect if someone is using ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper, but the company has not disclosed it, despite widespread concerns that students are using artificial intelligence to cheat.” This refusal has infuriated a sector of academia that imagining admirably that there must be a technological solution to this “cheating” problem. Apparently they have not read the Association for Computing Machinery's report on “cheating”. Statement of principles for developing generative AI content detection systemsstates that “reliably detecting the output of a generative AI system without an embedded watermark is beyond the current state of the art and is unlikely to change within any foreseeable timeframe.” Digital watermarks are useful, but they can also cause problems.
The LLM is a particularly pressing problem for the humanities because the essay is a critical pedagogical tool in teaching students how to research, think, and write. Perhaps more importantly, the essay also plays a central role in grading. Unfortunately, the LLM threatens to make this venerable pedagogy unviable. And there is no technological solution in sight.
The good news is that the problem is not insurmountable if educators in these fields are willing to rethink and adapt their teaching methods to fit new realities. Alternative pedagogies are available. But it will require two changes of thinking, if not a change of heart.
First, law graduates, like the well-known psychologist from Berkeley, Alison Gopnik says They are “cultural technologies”, just like writing, printing, libraries, internet searches, etc. In other words, they are tools used by humans. AugmentIt's not an exchange.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, the importance of writing needs to be reinstated in students' minds. processI think E.M. Forster once said that there are two kinds of writers: those who know their ideas and write them, and those who find their ideas by trying to write. The majority of humanity belongs to the latter. That's why the process of writing is so good for the intellect. Writing teaches you the skills to come up with a coherent line of argument, select relevant evidence, find useful sources and inspiration, and most importantly, express yourself in readable, clear prose. For many, that's not easy or natural. That's why students turn to ChatGPT even when they're asked to write 500 words to introduce themselves to their classmates.
Josh Blake, an American scholar, Writes intelligently about our relationship with AI Rather than trying to “integrate” writing into the classroom, I believe it is worth making the value of writing as an intellectual activity fully clear to students. you If you think about it, naturally they would be interested in outsourcing the labor to law students. And if writing (or any other job) is really just about the deliverables, why not? If the means to an end aren't important, why not outsource it?
Ultimately, the problems that LLMs pose to academia can be solved, but it will require new thinking and different approaches to teaching and learning in some areas. The bigger problem is the slow pace at which universities move. I know this from experience. In October 1995, the American scholar Eli Noam published a very insightful article: “The bleak future of electronics and universities” – in ScienceBetween 1998 and 2001, I asked every vice-chancellor and senior university leader I met in the UK what they thought about this.
Still, things have improved since then: at least now everyone knows about ChatGPT.
What I'm Reading
Online Crime
Ed West has an interesting blog post Man found guilty of online posts made during unrest following Southport stabbingIt highlights the contradictions in the British judicial system.
Ruth Bannon
Here is an interesting interview Boston Review Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris Discusses Steve Bannon's Dangerous 'Dharma' his consciousness of being part of the inevitable unfolding of history;
Online forgetting
A sobering article by Neil Firth MIT Technology Review On Efforts to preserve digital history for future generations In an ever-growing universe of data.
Source: www.theguardian.com
