Explaining Yourself
/Never explain yourself: Your friends don't need it and your enemies won't believe it. -Ziad Abdelnour
The Past vs. Possibilities
/When I encounter a $2.89 cup of coffee, it’s all too easy for me to recall what I paid for coffee the day before and not so easy for me to imagine all the other things I might buy with my money.
Because it is so much easier for me to remember the past than to generate new possibilities, I will tend to compare the present with the past even when I ought to be comparing it with the possible.
And that is indeed what I ought to be doing because it really doesn’t matter what coffee cost the day before, the week before, or at any time during the Hoover administration. Right now I have absolute dollars to spend and the only questions I need to answer is how to spend them in order to maximize my satisfaction. If an international bean embargo suddenly caused the price of coffee to skyrocket to $10,000 per cup, then the only question I would need to ask myself is:
“What else can I do with ten thousand dollars, and will it bring me more or less satisfaction than a cup of coffee?”
Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness
20 quotes worth reading about students using AI
/For students who do not self-identify as writers, for those who struggle with writer’s block or for underrepresented students seeking to find their voices, it can provide a meaningful assist during initial stages of the writing process. Inside Higher Ed
Let’s be honest. Ideas are more important than how they are written. So, I use ChatGPT to help me organize my ideas better and make them sound more professional. The Tech Insider
Students could (use AI to) look for where the writing took a predictable turn or identify places where the prose is inconsistent. Students could then work to make the prose more intellectually stimulating for humans. Inside Higher Ed
If you’re a college student preparing for life in an A.I. world, you need to ask yourself: Which classes will give me the skills that machines will not replicate, making me more distinctly human? A.I. often churns out the kind of impersonal bureaucratic prose that is found in corporate communications or academic journals. You’ll want to develop a voice as distinct as those of George Orwell, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and James Baldwin, so take classes in which you are reading distinctive and flamboyant voices so you can craft your own. New York Times
Imagine if the platform extracted campus-specific information about gen ed and major requirements. It could then provide quality academic advice to students that current chat bots can’t. Inside Higher Ed
ChatGPT may be able to help with more basic functions, such as assisting with writing in English for those who do not speak it natively. Tech Radar
What if the platform had access to real-time local or regional job market data and trends and data about the efficacy of various skills certificates? It could then serve as initial-tier career counseling. Inside Higher Ed
On TikTok, the hashtag #chatgpt has more than 578 million views, with people sharing videos of the tool writing papers and solving coding problems. New York Times
The student who is using it because they lack the expertise is exactly the student who is not ready to assess what it’s doing critically. Some argue that it’s not worth the time spent ferreting out a few cheaters and would rather focus their energy on students who are there to learn. Others say they can’t afford to look the other way. Chronicle of Higher Ed
It used to be about mastery of content. Now, students need to understand content, but it’s much more about mastery of the interpretation and utilization of the content. Inside Higher Ed
Don’t fixate on how much evidence you have but on how much evidence will persuade your intended audience. ChatGPT distills everything on the internet through its filter and dumps it on the reader; your flawed and beautiful mind, by contrast, makes its mark on your subject by choosing the right evidence, not all the evidence. Find the six feet that your reader needs, and put the rest of your estate up for auction. Chronicle of Higher Ed
A.I. is good at predicting what word should come next, so you want to be really good at being unpredictable, departing from the conventional. New York Times
We surpass the AI by standing on its shoulders. Boris Steipe, associate professor of molecular genetics at the University of Toronto, for example, encourages students to engage in a Socratic debate with ChatGPT as a way of thinking through a question and articulating an argument. “You will get the plain vanilla answer—what everybody thinks—from ChatGPT,” Steipe said, “That’s where you need to start to think. That’s where you need to ask, ‘How is it possibly incomplete?’” Inside Higher Ed
Students can leverage ChatGPT as a tutor or homework supplement, especially if they need to catch up. ChatGPT’s ability to make curated responses is unparalleled, so if a student needs a scientific explanation for a sixth-grade reading level, ChatGPT can adapt. New York Magazine
The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to tell the algorithm what your topic is and ask for a central claim, then have it give you an outline to argue this claim. Depending on the topic, you might even be able to have it write each paragraph the outline calls for, one by one, then rewrite them yourself to make them flow better. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Marc Watkins, lecturer in composition and rhetoric at the University of Mississippi: “Our students are not John Henry, and AI is not a steam-powered drilling machine that will replace them. We don’t need to exhaust ourselves trying to surpass technology.” Inside Higher Ed
These tools can function like personal assistants: Ask ChatGPT to create a study schedule, simplify a complex idea, or suggest topics for a research paper, and it can do that. That could be a boon for students who have trouble managing their time, processing information, or ordering their thoughts. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Students who lack confidence in their ability to learn might allow the products of these AI tools to replace their own voices or ideas. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Students describe using OpenAI’s tool as well as others for much more than generating essays. They are asking the bots to create workout plans, give relationship advice, suggest characters for a short story, make a joke and provide recipes for the random things left in their refrigerators. Washington Post
Basak-Odisio will use it only, he said, if he has procrastinated too much and is facing an impossible deadline. “If it is the day or night before, and I want to finish something as quickly as possible — ” he said, trailing off. “But,” he added, “I want to be better than that.” Washington Post
Also:
21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection
13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans
27 quotes about AI & writing assignments
22 examples of teaching with AI
Don't distract, immerse
/We're not taking the world in; we're just listening to the stories we tell ourselves about the world, trusting the endless parade of thoughts flitting through our heads instead of actually paying attention to life around us. Immerse yourself in the world around you. Don't distract, immerse.
Admitting You are Wrong
/Cognitive dissonance is what we feel when the self-concept — I’m smart, I’m kind, I’m convinced this belief is true — is threatened by evidence that we did something that wasn’t smart, that we did something that hurt another person, that the belief isn’t true. To reduce dissonance, we have to modify the self-concept or accept the evidence. Guess which route people prefer?
We cling to old ways of doing things, even when new ways are better and healthier and smarter. We cling to self-defeating beliefs long past their shelf life. And we make our partners, co-workers, parents and kids really, really mad at us.
Carol Tavris quotes in the New York Times and co-author of the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)
The difference
/The difference between successful people and others is how long they spend time feeling sorry for themselves. -Barbara Corcoran
13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans
/Eaton, the academic-integrity expert, cautions against trying to ban the use of ChatGPT entirely. That, she says, “is not only futile but probably ultimately irresponsible.” Chronicle of Higher Ed
I would compare this to using steroids in baseball. If you don’t ban steroids in baseball, then the reality is every player has to use them. Even worse than that, if you ban them but don’t enforce it, what you actually do is create a situation where you weed out all of the honest players. Chronicle of Higher Ed
A study surveyed 372 students seeking admission into college for fall 2023 and found that nearly half, 39% of those students, would not consider attending a college that's banned ChatGPT or other AI tools. ZDNET
Several leading academic journals and publishers updated their submission guidelines to explicitly ban researchers from listing ChatGPT as a co-author, or using text copied from a ChatGPT response. Some professors have criticized these bans as shortsightedly resistant to an inevitable technological change. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Blocking access to ChatGPT at school won’t matter, at least for any student with access to a tablet or laptop outside of school. Ed Week
ChatGPT and AI writer has been banned in educational institutions around the world, from high schools across America(opens in new tab) and Australia to universities in France and India with some university professors having caught their students using ChatGPT to write their entire assignments. Tech Radar
A number of universities that say they are planning to expel students who are caught using the software. Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist and expert on contract cheating at Imperial College London, said many universities were “panicking”. The Guardian
Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district in the US, immediately blocked access to OpenAI’s website from its schools’ network. Others soon joined. By January, school districts across the English-speaking world had started banning the software, from Washington, New York, Alabama, and Virginia in the United States to Queensland and New South Wales in Australia. MIT Tech Review
The New York City Department of Education has banned ChatGPT in its schools, as has the University of Sciences Po, in Paris, citing concerns it may foster rampant plagiarism and undermine learning. Washington Post
Teachers at Oceana High School in Pacifica, California have sent out messages to students warning against using AI-writing software for assignments. Mashable
Washington University in St. Louis and University of Vermont in Burlington are among the institutions that have amended their academic integrity policies to include the usage of AI tools like ChatGPT. Stanford Daily
Also:
21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection
13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans
20 quotes worth reading about students using AI
27 quotes about AI & writing assignments
22 examples of teaching with AI
22 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection
/Students should know that this technology is rapidly evolving: future detectors may be able to retroactively identify auto-generated prose from the past. No one should present auto-generated writing as their own on the expectation that this deception is undiscoverable. Inside Higher Ed
Alex Lawrence, professor at Weber State University, described it as “the greatest cheating tool ever invented.” Wall Street Journal
Some plagiarism detection and learning management systems have adapted surveillance techniques, but that leaves systems designed to ensure original work “locked in an arms race” with systems designed to cheat. Inside Higher Ed
Popular essay submission portal Turnitin is developing its own detector, and Hive claims that its service is more accurate than others on the market, including OpenAI’s very own, and some independent testers have agreed. Tech Radar
While faculty members will likely spend some time trying to identify a boundary line between AI assistance and AI cheating with respect to student writing, that may not be the best use of their time. That path leads to trying to micromanage students’ use of these models. Inside Higher Ed
You can have tools like Quillbot (that can) paraphrase the essays ChatGPT gives you so it doesn't look too obvious. Mashable
“If I’m a very intelligent AI and I want to bypass your detection, I could insert typos into my writing on purpose.” said Diyi Yang, assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University. Inside Higher Ed
But what about the cheaters, the students who let a chatbot do their writing for them? I say, who cares? In my normal class of about 28 students, I encounter one every few semesters whom I suspect of plagiarism. Let’s now say that the temptation to use chatbots for nefarious ends increases the number of cheaters to an (unrealistic) 20 percent. It makes no sense to me that I should deprive 22 students who can richly benefit from having to write papers only to prevent the other six from cheating (some of whom might have cheated even without the help of a chatbot). Washington Post
If a teacher’s concern is that students will “cheat” with ChatGPT, the answer is to give assignments that are personal and focused on thinking. We don’t have to teach students to follow a writing algorithm any more; there’s an app for that. Forbes
What’s to stop a student from getting ChatGPT to write their work, then tweak it slightly until it no longer gets flagged by a classifier? This does take some effort, but a student may still find this preferable to writing an entire assignment themselves. Tech Radar
If the concern is that students could cheat, it’s worth remembering that they could cheat six months ago and 60 years ago. Students taking a brand-new exam could already get answers to test questions in minutes from services like Chegg. Students could already plagiarize — or pay someone else to write their entire paper. With the entrance of ChatGPT, “what’s changed is the ease and the scope. Chronicle of Higher Ed
If ChatGPT makes it easy to cheat on an assignment, teachers should throw out the assignment rather than ban the chatbot. MIT Tech Review
Professors can create conditions in which cheating is difficult, giving closed-book, closed-note, closed-internet exams in a controlled environment. They can create assignments in which cheating is difficult, by asking students to draw on what was said in class and to reflect on their own learning. They can make cheating less relevant, by letting students collaborate and use any resource at their disposal. Or they can diminish the forces that make cheating appealing: They can reduce pressure by having more-frequent, lower-stakes assessments. Chronicle of Higher Ed
Unlike accusations of plagiarism, AI cheating has no source document to reference as proof. “This leaves the door open for teacher bias to creep in.” Washington Post
Despite their positive attitude towards AI, many students (in a survey say they) feel anxious and lack clear guidance on how to use AI in the learning environments they are in. It is simply difficult to know where the boundary for cheating lies. Neuroscience News
While the AI-detection feature could be helpful in the immediate term, it could also lead to a surge in academic-misconduct cases, Eaton said. Colleges will have to figure out what to do with those reports at a moment when professors have yet to find consensus on how ChatGPT should be dealt with in their classrooms. Chronicle of Higher Ed
“Do you want to go to war with your students over AI tools?” said Ian Linkletter, who serves as emerging technology and open-education librarian at the British Columbia Institute of Technology. “Or do you want to give them clear guidance on what is and isn’t okay, and teach them how to use the tools in an ethical manner?” Washington Post
Even if detection software gets better at detecting AI generated text, it still causes mental and emotional strain when a student is wrongly accused. “False positives carry real harm,” he said. “At the scale of a course, or at the scale of the university, even a one or 2% rate of false positives will negatively impact dozens or hundreds of innocent students.” Washington Post
On many campuses, high-course-load contingent faculty and graduate students bear much of the responsibility for the kinds of large-enrollment, introductory-level, general-education courses where cheating is rampant. How can large or even mid-sized colleges withstand the flood of nonsense quasi-plagiarism when academic-integrity first responders are so overburdened and undercompensated? Chronicle of Higher Ed
Bruce Schneier, a public interest technologist and lecturer at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, said any attempts to crackdown on the use of AI chatbots in classrooms is misguided, and history proves that educators must adapt to technology. Washington Post
Harsh punishments for cheating might preserve the status quo, but colleges generally give cheaters a slap on the wrist, and that won’t change. Unmonitored academic work will become optional, or a farce. The only thing that will really matter will be exams. And unless the exams are in-person, they’ll be a farce, too. Chronicle of Higher Ed
“I think we should just get used to the fact that we won’t be able to reliably tell if a document is either written by AI — or partially written by AI, or edited by AI — or by humans,” computer science professor Soheil Feizi said. “We should adapt our education system to not police the use of the AI models, but basically embrace it to help students to use it and learn from it.” Washington Post
Also:
21 quotes about cheating with AI & plagiarism detection
13 quotes worth reading about Generative AI policies & bans
20 quotes worth reading about students using AI
27 quotes about AI & writing assignments
22 examples of teaching with AI
Painful and sobering
/Everything painful and sobering revolves around the terror of admitting what one is doing to earn one’s self-esteem. -Ernest Becker
The paradox of sad music
/This is the paradox of sad music: We generally don’t enjoy being sad in real life, but we do enjoy art that makes us feel that way.
Maybe, because sadness is such an intense emotion, its presence can prompt a positive empathic reaction: Feeling someone’s sadness can move you in some prosocial way.
“You’re feeling just alone, you feel isolated,” Dr. Joshua Knobe (an experimental philosopher and psychologist at Yale University) said. “And then there’s this experience where you listen to some music, or you pick up a book, and you feel like you’re not so alone.”
Read more from Oliver Whang in the New York Times
Familiarity & Truth
/Familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. -Daniel Kahneman
Do something
/Don’t be something, do something. -William Bridges
New ways of being alive
/(At the age of 35) cancer has kicked down the walls of my life. I cannot be certain I will walk my son to his elementary school someday or subject his love interests to cheerful scrutiny. I struggle to buy books for academic projects I fear I can’t finish for a perfect job I may be unable to keep. I have surrendered my favorite manifestoes about having it all, managing work-life balance and maximizing my potential. I cannot help but remind my best friend that if my husband remarries everyone will need to simmer down on talking about how special I was in front of her. (And then I go on and on about how this is an impossible task given my many delightful qualities. Let’s list them. …) Cancer requires that I stumble around in the debris of dreams I thought I was entitled to and plans I didn’t realize I had made.
But cancer has also ushered in new ways of being alive. Even when I am this distant from Canadian family and friends, everything feels as if it is painted in bright colors. In my vulnerability, I am seeing my world without the Instagrammed filter of breezy certainties and perfectible moments. I can’t help noticing the brittleness of the walls that keep most people fed, sheltered and whole. I find myself returning to the same thoughts again and again: Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.
Kate Bowler writing in the New York Times
An Apology
/A German wholesaler decided to offer a brief apology and rebate to customers who had posted more than 600 complaints about the firm on eBay. Defective products and late deliveries pledged the firm. Half were sent an apology and half were offered a small cash rebate. The result? Nearly half of those who received the apology removed their poor rating of the company. Only one-out-of-five of the customers given the money did so.
Stephen Goforth
History
/Men make their own history but not in circumstances of their own choosing. -Karl Marx
What History can Teach us
/The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events. -Gerda Lerner
Possibility and Despair
/Possibility … is to human existence what vowels are to speech. To live in pure possibility is like an infants utterance of vowel sounds, which fail to express something that is definite and clear. Vowels alone do not make for articulate speech, although without them nothing can be said at all. Similarly, “if a human existence is brought to the point where it lacks possibility, then it is in despair and is in deeper every moment it lacks possibility.” One cannot breathe without oxygen, but it is also impossible to breathe pure oxygen. Possibility is a kind of spiritual oxygen that a person cannot live without, but one cannot live on pure possibility either.
C. Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard: An Introduction
What forgiveness Does
/Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future. -Paul Boese
Think of AI as a tool
/The most pragmatic position is to think of A.I. as a tool, not a creature.
Mythologizing the technology only makes it more likely that we’ll fail to operate it well—and this kind of thinking limits our imaginations, tying them to yesterday’s dreams.
If the new tech isn’t true artificial intelligence, then what is it? In my view, the most accurate way to understand what we are building today is as an innovative form of social collaboration.
A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures.
Jaron Lanier writing in The New Yorker
My Life with One Arm
/Two months to the day after my accident, I went to see a therapist for the first time in my life. I didn’t know where to begin. We discussed loss and resilience and the will to live and adapt. But when I started talking about the outpouring of love and support that I had received since my accident, I began weeping uncontrollably. I realized that for the first time in my life, I was truly letting love into my heart. Losing an arm has connected me to others in a way I have never felt. Yes, I have suffered a tremendous loss, but in a way, I feel as if I have gained much more.
Miles O’Brian, Writing in New York Magazine