[Ads-l] Disagreement about AI and education: The college essay is dead (not dead)

[Jonathan Lighter]

If it can "spit out" a history of London "in the style of Dr. Seuss," it's
doing a lot more than just making writing "easier."

The operative word is "if."

JL

On Sat, Dec 17, 2022 at 5:15 PM ADSGarson O'Toole <adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Website: The Atlantic
> Article: The College Essay Is Dead
> Article subtitle: Nobody is prepared for how AI will transform academia.
> Author: Stephen Marche
> Date: December 6, 2022
>
>
> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/12/chatgpt-ai-writing-college-student-essays/672371/
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> The essay, in particular the undergraduate essay, has been the center
> of humanistic pedagogy for generations. It is the way we teach
> children how to research, think, and write. That entire tradition is
> about to be disrupted from the ground up.
>
> Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto,
> tweeted in astonishment about OpenAI’s new chatbot last week: “You can
> no longer give take-home exams/homework … Even on specific questions
> that involve combining knowledge across domains, the OpenAI chat is
> frankly better than the average MBA at this point. It is frankly
> amazing.” Neither the engineers building the linguistic tech nor the
> educators who will encounter the resulting language are prepared for
> the fallout.
> [End excerpt]
>
> Website: Slate
> Article: A.I. Could Be Great for College Essays
> Author: Daniel Lametti
> Timestamp: Dec 7, 2022 at 5:50 AM
> https://slate.com/technology/2022/12/chatgpt-college-essay-plagiarism.html
>
> [Begin excerpt]
> Every year, the artificial intelligence company OpenAI improves its
> text-writing bot, GPT. And every year, the internet responds with
> shrieks of woe about the impending end of human-penned prose. This
> cycle repeated last week when OpenAI launched ChatGPT—a version of GPT
> that can seemingly spit out any text, from a Mozart-styled piano piece
> to the history of London in the style of Dr. Seuss. The response on
> Twitter was unanimous: The college essay is doomed. Why slave over a
> paper when ChatGPT can write an original for you?
>
> Chatting with ChatGPT is fun. (Go play with it!) But the college essay
> isn’t doomed, and A.I. like ChatGPT won’t replace flesh and blood
> writers. They may make writing easier, though.
> [End excerpt]
>
> Garson
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org