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

[Ben Zimmer]

That bit in the Slate piece links to a tweet screenshotting ChatGPT's
Seuss-style history of London -- judge for yourself:

https://twitter.com/punk6529/status/1598422898166865936

This Twitter thread collects a few of my ChatGPT prompts from when it went
public: "Write a history of crosswords in the style of a conspiracy
theorist," "Tell me about Occam's razor but get increasingly cranky,"
"Write a story about Mothra joining the cast of 'Jersey Shore.'" I was
impressed with the results (and it really does "spit them out").

https://twitter.com/bgzimmer/status/1600586047221600260

Try it out yourself: https://chat.openai.com

On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 4:30 PM Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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]
>

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