"Only four took him up on it, and two dropped out, saying ChatGPT's responses weren't 'long enough or deep enough or interesting enough,' Vogelsinger said. For the others, it did 'a good job of pointing out what parts of the text they should be thinking of.' With ChatGPT, students have 'this little AI friend who is going to bat around ideas with them — that's how I look at it,' Vogelsinger told Axios."
From "Friend or foe? Teachers debate ChatGPT" (Axios).
The teachers are going to have to find a way to make AI a "friend," because it can't go away. I'm afraid young people will stop learning to write. They will only learn to interact with machines. There's no way to keep the machine in the position of "little friend" who is going to bat around ideas with me. But the teachers — some of them — are going to try to keep AI in the the "little friend" position.
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46 comments:
"I can see how this steam machine would be useful for keeping the mines dry, but we have to make sure things don't get out of hand. For underground use only?"
"I'm afraid young people will stop learning to write."
That happened some years ago. You probably didn't notice, as your students were post-grad (which is to say only a few of them may not have been able to write coherent sentences). I noticed pre-pandemic that a shocking number of my students simply could not write coherent sentences. In the 23 years I've been doing it, it has gotten much much worse.
Seems like ChatGPT is replacing the teacher quite readily.
In law school, we had all essay exams. No computers. You had to write your own essay answers. And in a numbered blue book with anonymous grading except for that one woman who was bopping her Contracts professor.
I am looking at GPT taking away my job someday. My colleagues are asking it to write computer programs in C++ and CUDA, and it does a halfway decent job.
In ten years we may see it write a substantial amount of code for companies all over. The major item to slow it down will be arguments over copywrite and ownership.
Crimso said...
a shocking number of my students simply could not write coherent sentences.
Why that problem? Stuednts dont need write. With AI everything done for. School for sucks. Mom says Im cool.
And since AI "learns" by reading existing content, as more and more of what has been written is done by AI, what will be the result? Less humanity. Hell, I don't know.
---I'm afraid young people will stop learning to write
Thy've already stopped reading, at least in one particular sense. Even pretty smart younger people can't watch older movies where one line of dialogue may contain a huge clue to a plot development or psychological point. They don't pay enough attention to it, and thus miss the key point. Or they are simply not attuned to traditional drama. For either of those reasons, I blame -- possibly ignorantly -- current movies. Many seem to be graphic extravaganzas with no drama or psychology of any significance. Others hammer home their points with music, repetition, and other devices to make sure the audience can't miss it even if they've been looking at their phones.
So classic Hollywood is out of reach. B&W is a killer but even if they get past thatt, they miss the points too often to enjoy it. How do they handle Sophocles and Euripides? I have no idea and no idea whether any of them ever hear about them. But drama, when it involves any subtlety, seems beyond their focus or attention spans.
"little friend".
"Friend"? Maybe, hopefully, but "little"? As the terminators say... "we'll see".
Fifty percent of a very small sample rejected the AI. Encouraging.
I don’t think kids should be allowed near computers until they have mastered a lot of fundamental skills, but for grownups who understand what they are doing, AI chat is pretty cool. You have to break down your questions though, since open ended question lead to pablum, and it does seem to bullshit and infer answers it doesn’t know, and not always correctly.
I agree. This will not go away. I applaud the teacher for his creativity. Hope this does not backfire.
A relative, born in 1974, was not a good student and bad with math, was told by math teachers not to memorize his "times tables" because he had calculators. That shocked me then and shocks me now. I worry writing and/or creativity will be made worse by AI and the like. But I could be wrong. If used in the best way, maybe writing could be strengthened by AI devices.
All I know about it is from the Get Smart episode "Tequila Mockingbird," the recovery of a valuable mockingbird statue. Split over two episodes, as I recall. It's not up there with The Claw though.
Do you know what they call me, Mr. Smart?
Lefty?
No, The Craw.
The craw?
Not craw. Craw!...
"I'm afraid young people will stop learning to write. They will only learn to interact with machines."
LMAO! That boat has already sailed away and returned to port.
Ms. Althouse should use ChatGTP to write some of her blog posts and see if her readers can tell which is AI and which isn't.
“So I’m like, you know, kinda thinking about the paper? You know, the assignment, like, I think it’s the book report or—well, anyway, it was really kind of stressing me and then I just talked to the AI chat thing and, whoa, it was really pretty cool how the ideas came together, and with, like, full sentences. Yeah. Like that.”
My guess at how the classroom conversation goes.
It’s way too late to sound the alarm. Until language is again prized as an instrument to shape and share thought efficiently, accurately and precisely —until people pay a price for failing to master that instrument— we’re done here.
I'm surprised to learn "To Kill A Mockingbird" is still being taught in an american public school. I believe this article is what's referred to as "burying the lede".
Steve Sailer experimented with ChatGPT referencing Huxley's novel 'Chrome Yellow' and said that the results were pretty lousy unless you gave very detailed prompts. I think the idea that this will allow students to turn in essays without doing a reading is sort of alarmist.
I can see how a student who understands a subject could use the AI to do the actual drudgery of writing about a subject. If they can write a good enough bare bones prompt to get a reasonable essay that indicates that we have a quantity over quality problem in our schools at all levels.
"I'm afraid young people will stop learning to write. They will only learn to interact with machines."
The same could be (and has been) said about the internet, the personal computer and/or (in a slightly different context) the typewriter.
The arrow of progress points forward although one often needs a longer view than that of The New York Times ...
ChatGPT's responses weren't 'long enough or deep enough or interesting enough,'
Sounds like a ChatGPT… shortcoming.
Teenagers don’t understand the thrill of making a first blog post comment.
Or, they found out ChatGPT doesn’t spit out enough volume to constitute a complete assignment.
Soon we will have robot teachers teaching robot students while humans sit in a chair getting fat and living in the Metaverse.
In law school, we had all essay exams. No computers. You had to write your own essay answers. And in a numbered blue book with anonymous grading except for that one woman who was bopping her Contracts professor.
I remember the hardest part of the Bar exam being actually holding and manipulating a pen for eight straight hours. Couldn't un-claw my hand for several days.
Teacher’s surname is “Vogelsinger,” literally “Bird-singer.” How appropriate for an English teacher trying to get his students to find their own voices, even if they need to rely on a ghost in a machine.
Also his first name is “Brett” which means “Brit” or “of Britain; English.”
“English bird-singer” —> teaching kids how to use their native tongue of English.
Uncanny.
There's no way to keep the machine in the position of "little friend" who is going to bat around ideas with me. But the teachers — some of them — are going to try to keep AI in the the "little friend" position.
"Say 'Hello' to my little friend!"
Elon Musk: he owns 3 of the most important corporations in the world...Space X, Twitter, and OpenAI/ChatGPT. amazing.
Space X we know. twitter, may be the incipient form of the ~Global Brain. And now ChatGPT: the advent of low cost, easy to access artificial intelligence...which may be as important as the wheel or the printing press or the internet. things sure seem to be moving mighty fast.
I’ve taught Bible & Theology at the bachelor’s and master’s level for a long time, and my students often review books in those fields. After asking ChatGPT to generate some book reviews, here’s what I found:
1. The bot can’t review specialty books like those in my field because it doesn’t know them.
2. When the bot doesn’t know a book, it tells me that it can’t look it up on Amazon.
3. When it reviews a classic like Moby-Dick, the review goes like this: general intro, summary of the book, positive features of the book, summation (mostly repeats the general intro).
4. The review comes out at about high school level, except for the perfect grammar and spelling.
I’d never suggest this to students, but they could get some benefit from ChapGPT by using the bot’s review as a framework for a more thorough review. For example, if the bot says, “Captain Ahab was obsessed with killing the Great White Whale,” the student could support the statement by describing a scene or two that illustrates Ahab’s obsession. Also, I encourage students to describe the audience for any book they review: general reader, college student, specialist, etc. I haven’t seen the bot do that, but it’s something else that the student could provide.
As so often with tech breakthroughs, I see no reason to panic and no reason to rejoice. ChatGPT won’t kill student writing; it won’t replace it; but it just might help marginal students learn to write.
"I'm afraid young people will stop learning to write"
Why should they? Why be afraid?
How many learn to write today? In what sense of write and learn?
Is anyone actually judged today on the quality of their writing? In the anti-meritocratic Ivy League, in the White House, in electronic-recording medicine, in finance or software engineering?
How does the quality of ChatGPT output relative to human student work vary by student IQ? Any research?
If we don’t read, the inability to write will follow.
As the oracle said… ‘I hate giving people bad news.’
The young already do not know how to write. I was seeing that start to crumble apart back in the late 80s reading applications from prospective employees. It was noticeable then. It's the way of things now.
"...saying ChatGPT's responses weren't 'long enough or deep enough or interesting enough,'..."
They will be, soon enough. And it will be the end of homework. It'll also have half of the best selling books on any list at any given time. Humans who can write will be rare and possibly not needed for much. More or less for underground groups or collectors.
"I'm surprised to learn "To Kill A Mockingbird" is still being taught in an american public school."
What? It's taught everywhere! They think it's Great Art! It's the Uncle Tom's Cabin of our time!
It may be difficult for AI to appreciate the nuances of words. For example, it may tend to replace words like “obtain”, “receive”, and “garner” with all-purpose plain-vanilla “get”.
"I'm afraid young people will stop learning to write."
That train left the station years ago.
@Kai Akker
So Antonin Artaud was right?
Sebastian said...
Is anyone actually judged today on the quality of their writing?
well, i Sure see a LOT of commercials for the grammarly co
Compose bold, clear, mistake-free writing with Grammarly’s new AI-powered desktop Windows app
I doubt there'd be much of a demand, for an AI to correct your writing, if
a) people didn't need to be able to write
b) people COULD write
If AI can’t “read” a book and at a minimum list it’s characters, it’s not AI, it’s a regurgitation tool for Wikipedia, and no, it can’t, I have experimented with it, if it says it does, it’s lying.
Future voters disinformed and diseducated.
All is going to plan.
Have you read any essays by college age students? That train left the station long ago.
Calculators. Been there, done that.
Teaching will change. Homework will be "read x chapters", classroom work will be interactive discussion and in-room short writing. A lot of my 70s era classes were like this.
Unless the unions and Dept. Ed. folks get involved, sigh...
Just to echo what a lot of folks here are saying: my undergraduates, who tend to be English majors, can generally barely write a coherent line of idiomatic English prose. Their use of AI, which I encourage/require, significantly improves their writing “output,” immediately and profoundly. If they read their own work—which may be almost all that they read—at least it will be reasonably well-organized and correctly punctuated. Perhaps they will take note.
It’s impossible to blame them. They’ve been institutionalized for fifteen years or so by the time I meet them, because I teach upper level courses. They’ve suffered what must be almost unbearable boredom and constant lying and bullying (by faculty and administration) for that entire time. They are aware of the paucity of their knowledge and education and (mostly) properly ashamed of it. They haven’t been gifted with the tools to address it, so there are few ways for them to “bootstrap” themselves to meaningful literacy. And the vast majority of them are sweet and thoughtful and surprisingly inventive, once they know the shackles are off.
I teach at a Midwestern land-grant university, though, populated by public school graduates. Maybe it’s different at elite schools.
So they're still making kids read that treacly garbage?
--- So Antonin Artaud was right?
VG point! Yes, Artaud may finally have found his audience in the new subliterates. Although I think most would choose "Spiderman VIII" over any Theater of Cruelty.
I had to read the whole Wiki page you linked to teach and remind myself. Artaud was once de rigueur as an "influence" for every writer and artist who styled himself as avant garde. Obviously you remember. But I really knew almost nothing else about him. He got only one production mounted for his Theater of Cruelty and it ran 17 performances. (Which is 14 or 15 more than I would have thought.)
He loved his medium and thought about its purest form. Those 1930s theorizers sound so exciting on the page! But less so when put into the real world. Sergei Eisenstein wrote at least two books on cinema theory, and he accomplished 100x more in his medium than Artaud. Eisenstein's theories sound pretty good; but the theories were almost entirely bypassed by the actual development route movies took. Montage became just a way to show the passage of time in Hollywood; calendar pages spinning off, scenes dissolving into others. From the center of Eisenstein's aesthetic to a passing gimmick in reality.
Which just goes to show ya.
I managed to get out of high school without reading To Kill a Mockingbird. My younger siblings weren't so lucky.
All I know about it is from the Get Smart episode "Tequila Mockingbird," the recovery of a valuable mockingbird statue.
Get Smart also turned a film of the day, The List of Adrian Messenger, into the "Mess of Adrian Listenger."
It's funny the odd things you remember years later.
I'm pretty impressed that his students found the Chat Bot effort lacking. That means he's doing a pretty good job as an English teacher.
People are going to have a lot of trouble realizing that it's easier for a machine to write than to drive a truck.
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