The Sasquatch Lobby has been trying to ban teaching about them for years.
As a southpaw, i always loathed essay exams in school going all the way through bar exams. My penmanship was never good and my hand would be covered in ink.
5 Likes
Yup, those AI checkers mostly look inconsistencies in written speech patterns which are totally weighted against people on the spectrum and those who didn’t learn english as their native language.
7 Likes
8 posts were merged into an existing topic: Systems of education and its discontents
Ug. I thought that this whole issue was finally settled once and for all:
10 Likes
So this whole description was obviously written by AI. I think that’s fairly self-evident in the writing style but using the word “delve” is certainly a dead giveaway. Apparently it’s one of the words that ChatGPT is known to over-use compared to human writers:
7 Likes
3 Likes
I teach high school English (specializing in creative writing), and this last year, I started a section on how to use machine learning systems to assist in writing, pointing out what they do well and what they do not. It’s here. You can’t stick your head in the sand, and screaming about it won’t help. What you can do is learn how to work with it.
7 Likes
So, um, what do they do well? I was kind of thinking check grammar and spelling, although honestly I’m frustrated by them constantly reacting to things that are not mistakes. Anything else?
5 Likes
For creative writing it can come up with concepts to be expanded on. I’ve found it very useful in my own writing to give me a suggestion of a location or a scene. It isn’t good enough to be used ‘as is’ because it needs to be fitted into whatever you’re writing, but as a source of prompts, it can be excellent when fighting writer’s block
My teaching team (high school English) does use ChatGPT generated pieces on a topic mixed in with some pieces on the same topic I wrote. The first assignment this semester was for the students to identify who wrote what and why they thought that and write that up as a critique of the pieces.
2 Likes
Back in the Stone Age when I was a creative writing student we got prompts like “create a poem from the text on the back of a box of some item in your kitchen or bathroom”.
Prompts are easy. And they’re merely a warm-up exercise, not the start of anything worth sharing. Using a human brain (and heart) to delve into deep emotions and feelings via ‘painting’ a picture with words is something oppositional to AI.
3 Likes
But as I noted upthread, AI friggin’ loves to “delve.”
1 Like
This is another form of the Van Halen “Brown M&M” contract rider detail
6 Likes
Arguably, canonical the real monster’s name is Victor Frankenstein.
At another level, arguably, the real monster is god, for doing the same thing as Victor- creating life, then condemning it for its actions.
6 Likes
I am confused now.
Are you Dr. Cleo Markham’s mother, and did I claim my £5 from the wrong person?
4 Likes
I’d require the students to use ChatGPT to do the essay, but then they also have to correct any factual errors, and cite sources that agree with what the essay is saying, then turn in both the Chat GPT result and a version with their corrections. I suspect that going through that exercise once would dissuade them from using it in the future. The instructor should run the assignment through as a prompt themselves to see what the AI responses look like.
4 Likes
Were they being dicks about it, or were they being really clever?
It feels like that’s a larger critique of society.
1 Like
I can’t see how either is a larger critique of society, but both do seem clever, albeit in different ways.
The explanation there of Van Halen’s demand their accords with what I’ve heard before about it-- while it seems dickish, it was actually clever:
The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide a simple way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read and complied with.
3 Likes
But after careful research, Doug Mack of the Snack Stack newsletter offers a different explanation, Van Halen just wanted to be assholes.
It’s a shortcut. It would take too much time to verify that the allegedly important parts of the contract were completed, so in the least technical portion, a trap is set. Instead of breaking the contract into little chapters so the caterers could do their jobs, and the stagehands could do their jobs, the entire contract has to be first read through by one individual to check for traps, which means that everybody is in a fucking rush to please the prima donnas.
Once the secret is out, the M&Ms could be sorted, leaving the riggers and electricians room to do a slipshod job.
3 Likes
