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

[dave@wilton.net]

Are we sure the Seuss-style poem is original to the AI? I asked it to write me a poem about Christmas and it spit out Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" (without attribution).
 
I also asked it a slew of word and phrase origin questions, and while the natural language abilities were impressive, the factual basis for its answers were a mixed to poor bag. I'm writing up the results and will post it to my Substack in a couple of days. [ https://wordorigins.substack.com/ ]( https://wordorigins.substack.com/ ) 
 
That said, the AI is pretty amazing in what it can do, and I'm sure it will rapidly improve as people use it and it gets training feedback.
 
And Marche is being clickbaity in his essay. The Rhet/Comp folks are on top of this and coming up with strategies to deal with students using the AI. It may even prove to be a useful pedagogical tool when it comes to teaching writing.
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: "Ben Zimmer" <bgzimmer at GMAIL.COM>
Sent: Sunday, December 18, 2022 6:06pm
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: [ADS-L] Disagreement about AI and education: The college essay is dead (not dead)



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