YoThe start of the semester is approaching. Parents are starting to worry about lunch packs, school uniforms and school books. Students leaving school and with places at university are wondering what freshers’ week will be like. And some university lecturers, especially in the humanities, will be thinking apprehensively about how to deal with students who are already more skilled users of the major language models (LLMs) than they are.
They are right to be worried, as Ian Bogost, a professor of film and media, said. and Computer Science at Washington University in St Louis, puts it“If the first year of AI college ended with a sense of dismay, the situation has now degenerated into absurdity. Professors struggle to continue teaching while wondering whether they are grading the students or the computers; meanwhile, an endless arms race of AI detection and deception plays out in the background.”
Unsurprisingly, that arms race is already heating up. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that: “OpenAI has a method to reliably detect when someone uses ChatGPT to write an essay or research paper. The company has not published it despite widespread concerns about students using artificial intelligence to cheat.” This denial infuriates those quarters of academia who poignantly imagine that there must be a technical solution to the “cheating” problem. They clearly have not read the Association for Computing Machinery report. Statement on Principles for the Development of Generative AI Content Detection Systemswhich says: “reliably detecting the output of generative AI systems without an embedded watermark is beyond the current state of the art, which is unlikely to change in a projected time frame.” And Digital watermarks, while useful, can also be problematic.
LLMs are a hot topic for the humanities in particular because the essay is a key pedagogical tool for teaching students how to research, think, and write. More importantly, perhaps, the essay also plays a central role in how students are graded and assessed. The bad news is that LLMs threaten to make that venerable pedagogy unsustainable, and there is no technical solution in sight.
The good news is that the problem is not insoluble, provided that educators in these disciplines are willing to rethink and adapt their teaching to the new reality. Other pedagogies are available, but they require, if not a change of attitude, at least two changes of mentality.
The first is the acceptance that LLMs, as the distinguished Berkeley psychologist put it, Alison Gopnik puts it this way: – are “cultural technologies,” like writing, printing, libraries, and Internet searches. In other words, they are tools for human beings. increaseno replacement.
Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it is necessary to reinforce in the minds of students the importance of writing as processI think it was E.M. Forster who once said that there are two kinds of writers: those who know what they think and write it down; and those who discover what they think by trying to write it down. The vast majority of humanity belongs to the latter group, which is why the process of writing is so good for the intellect. It forces one to come up with lines of argument that are coherent, choose evidence that is relevant, find sources of information and inspiration that are useful, and most importantly, learn the art of expressing oneself in sentences that are readable and clear. For many people it is not easy and does not come naturally, which is why students turn to ChatGPT even when asked to write 500 words to introduce themselves to their classmates.
Josh Brake, an American academic who Write wisely about how to interact with AI Rather than trying to “integrate” it into the classroom, she believes it is worth making very clear to students the value of writing as an intellectual activity. “If your students did not already see the value of writing as a process by which you If you think about it, then of course you’ll be curious about outsourcing the work to an LLM. And if writing (or any other task) is really just about the product, then why not? If the means to the end aren’t important, then why not outsource it?
In the end, the problem that LLMs pose for academia can be solved, but this will require new ideas and a different approach to teaching and learning in some disciplines. The biggest problem is the slow pace at which universities tend to move. I know this from experience. In October 1995, the American academic Eli Noam published a very insightful article: “Electronics and the bleak future of the university” – in ScienceBetween 1998 and 2001, I asked every vice-chancellor and senior university administrator I met in the UK what they thought about this. They all looked at me with a sour look.
Still, things have improved since then: at least everyone has heard of ChatGPT now.
What I’ve been reading
Online Crimes
Ed West has written an interesting blog post about Sentenced for online posts during riots following Southport stabbingshighlighting the inconsistency of the British justice system.
Bannon on the loose
There is a fascinating interview in the Boston Review with the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris on Steve Bannon’s dangerous ‘dharma’ – their sense of being part of an inevitable development of history.
Online Forgetting
There is an enlightening article by Niall Firth in the MIT Technology Review in Efforts to preserve digital history for posterity in an ever-growing universe of data.