My class required AI

https://oneusefulthing.substack.com/p/my-class-required-ai-heres-what-ive

by alvis • 3 years ago

185 173 3 years ago

oneusefulthing.substack.com

tedajax• 3 years ago

I can't properly formulate why but something about this seems like it'd be my most hated class ever.

elil17• 3 years ago

He teaches at a business school - probably loved by the people who take the classes but not something that would appeal to anyone else

ihatepython• 3 years ago

It does sound like a horrible class.

I think the issue with AI is that the average person doesn't understand how it works, and the problem is when somebody in a position of power becomes infatuated with it. I don't fear AI, but I fear bad-AI, or misused-AI.

Those who understand how it works know that its mostly Garbage In-Garbage Out

lambdaba8• 3 years ago

Indeed but it's also gold-in gold-out, something like that...

But on a more subtle note because conversational AI has this short feedback loop, much shorter than even regular search, I feel that it's something where people can level up quickly. I think there's going to be great value there.

jmount• 3 years ago

My guess is, it sounds like a lot of unpleasant empirical tinkering exercises.

samvher• 3 years ago

Interesting - if you do manage to formulate it I'd be curious to read that.

I like how they're taking a proactive approach in trying out what role ChatGPT and the like can play in generation and exploration of knowledge. I like the breakdown of the different ways of interacting with the tool, and the callout of how collaborative editing seems like the best out of the approaches they've witnessed. I also feel somewhat comforted by the remarks about how students engage with the output of the tools critically and fact checking can actually be a valuable way to interact with the material.

Personally I think I would enjoy this class - I like the openness to experimentation. I can imagine that _getting graded for it_ could be a frustrating experience though, I think with experimental classes that's a kind of thing for which there tends to be little standardization and it can be unpredictable how you'll be judged.

dandellion• 3 years ago

You could try chatgpt to help you formulate it properly. I'm not native so I've used it a few times to come up with a first draft. More often than not the result is pretty bad, but it's much easier to work with than a blank page. I remove 2/3 of what was generated and I write the rest myself, then ask the AI to point out spelling or grammatical mistakes. It's a bit tedious, but less so than having to translate or writing in a foreign language by myself.

simonw2• 3 years ago

Something I've been exploring for a while is that tools like ChatGPT are actually deceptively hard to use - or at least hard to use well.

This piece explores that idea in quite some depth when it talks about the different approaches to working with ChatGPT to generate an essay.

I see a lot of people try ChatGPT once, get disappointing results (maybe they gave it a logic puzzle or asked it to do some math!) and write it off as useless hype. I think that's a mistake.

kenjackson• 3 years ago

There was a time when people used to come to me create search queries. This was during the Alta Vista era. Constructing queries to find what you’re looking for was a skill. I feel like we’re in that era with AI. I suspect soon this will all feel like a distant memory.

warner25• 3 years ago

I was just thinking that we're about to have people going around claiming to be "experts in AI" because they know how to use ChatGPT, despite the fact that they can't even produce "hello world" in Python (without asking ChatGPT to do it for them, I guess?). Like some people seem to think that kids these days are all like Steve Wozniak because they grew up with access to an iPad.

Anyway, yeah, maybe there is actually some valuable skill required for this? But I agree that skill in operating new technology probably doesn't hold its value for very long.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 3 years ago

Yes, but it does not stop various hype sellers on LinkedIn selling 100 websites to do X, where X is just a custom prompt. I will admit it is tempting to ride the same wave ( I actually have a useful common issue for my industry ).

lambdaba8• 3 years ago

What's the upper bound for this particular skill though? I don't see any - there's no limit to how good you can get with designing search vectors for information in latent space...

simonw2• 3 years ago

Skill in operating a new technology sounds like a career to me!

BlueTemplar2• 3 years ago

Sounds a great way to filter out fake "experts in AI", since real "experts in AI" are not particularly comfortable with the "AI" term to start with !

https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/comment...

yamtaddle2• 3 years ago

I was an ace searcher until Google went to hell around '08 or '09.

It's not that they got so good the skill became irrelevant, but that they changed so none of that works anymore. All the other major search engines followed suit. Now when there's something I could have found that way, that's not coming up with a naïve search, I just... can't. :-/

version_five• 3 years ago

Ironically the switch to using "AI" for search instead of some version of pattern matching is a big part of what has made it useless. Now you get what it thinks an average person wanted (or what will make them click ads) rather than what matches your query

gfd• 3 years ago

Does anyone feel like the style of searching they learned from that era are actively being punished nowadays? I used to get pretty good results just by just listing out keywords with quotes where needed. Nowadays I feel like google gives better results if I use natural language, which is a lot more verbose to type out.

lambdaba8• 3 years ago

On the other hand, I'm finding the opposite with ChatGPT, that I'm learning that it responds just as well with some compression, or rather that verbosity doesn't matter as long as the information is there.

nickpeterson• 3 years ago

I used to rely on the file type:pdf argument to find ebooks. It used to be trivial to find most ebooks this way. Now it doesn’t work at all, I’m completely sure Google broke this functionality to keep publishers happy. A similar example is googling a phone number, which never works.

elicash• 3 years ago

I feel like this is especially the case right now for image generation. I can craft queries for chatGPT pretty reliably for the precise thing that I need. But Midjourney seemed to require real skill that I don't possess.

pixl972• 3 years ago

AI prompts remind me if making a wish to a genie. The thought going into the input wish drastically effects the output, and we quite often don't get what we expect.

lambdaba8• 3 years ago

I call it "searching for things that don't exist".

VeninVidiaVicii• 3 years ago

Fascinating. My dad is a professor and over Christmas break I showed him ChatGPT and he became obsessed. So much so, in fact, that he used it to generate a syllabus that prohibits the use of AI-assisted writing!

The cognitive dissonance is wild to me, and I think approaching AI as a tool to be embraced is much healthier.

jrockway2• 3 years ago

The cognitive dissonance is wild to me

I guess writing for class has always been about the process and not the result. Nobody has ever wanted to read an essay written by a student. But, the process of writing the essay is useful; collect sources, read them, distill down the important points, join the points with sentences. ChatGPT is all about the end result. Assignments are about the process.

waynesonfire• 3 years ago

sure, then why would chatGPT hinder that process? ChatGPT, will just assemble the words. You can still create a better document working along side chatGPT by critically thinking about the output it's spewing and correcting it. There is probably nuance there but I that chatGPT creating a generation of zombies is over stated. chatGPT is like a calculator used in mathematics.

asow923• 3 years ago

In my school we had a motto: "No excuses, just results." I guess we have no excuse to not produce results anymore.

wyldfire• 3 years ago

The cognitive dissonance is wild to me, and I think approaching AI as a tool to be embraced is much healthier.

It's both healthy and realistic. Let's be real - it's not going away. It seems like it's mostly/somewhat useful now. It's only going to get better. People undoubtedly will find a way to leverage the tool to make themselves more productive. If that's the case, we should (1) continue to teach the skills exhibited by the machine learning models and (2) help students gain mastery over the tools so they can be productive when they start to work in a world where their peers are already using them.

js8• 3 years ago

The cognitive dissonance is wild to me

Maybe he found beauty in that irony.

I have no doubt progress will march on. I was telling a coworker that I think humans will have symbiotic relations with AIs in the future, and he noted, we will be the heart and AI will be the brains. I think that sums it up beautifully.

lm284695• 3 years ago

Which cognitive dissonance ?

Some people are here to learn basic skills they'll use all their lives, the other is here to do his job

isaacfrond2• 3 years ago

Excellent article.

I was helping my son with his homework. He had to write an essay about why the gender of the protagonist might be female (although this is never mentioned in the short story). Fortunately for him, ChatGPT knew the story and was happy to write an essay with arguments. [Btw, according to him pretty much everyone in class routinely has the AI do their essays]

He was about to send this essay in. But as we were admiring the prose of the computer (which is much better than either of can), we found out that some of the arguments actually didn't make much sense. So we went to through a rewrite exercise like in the article, improving the essay and our understanding of the issues.

Next time I see her, I'll urge the teacher to adopt a similar approach as in the article.

kzrdude4• 3 years ago

Is this a situation where it's not cheating to use a chatbot for the output? I understand it becomes nuanced if you edit the output, but still.

realharo2• 3 years ago

What about simply helping your child with their homework at all? That could also count as cheating if you go with a strict interpretation.

eertami• 3 years ago

This is cheating and while it might not be picked up in a high school essay, it will certainly be flagged for plagiarism at almost all Universities. It's very dangerous to do this unless your course specifically asks you to answer using AI tools, like the course in the OP.

isaacfrond2• 3 years ago

1. I'm not going to take the moral highroad here. He's clearly going for an IT education. I think it's great that he is exploring these options.

2. He involved me, and we're making this a great learning experience.

3. Face the facts. This goes really fast. If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.

kulahan• 3 years ago

The article talks about it being required, so I assumed this was a similar scenario, personally.

ecf• 3 years ago

A whole generation is going to start relying on AI and never do any actual writing or critical thinking for themselves. This is a problem when the average reading level for half of American adults is already below that of an 8th grader.

cjbgkagh• 3 years ago

I figure learning the utility of AI might be more important than critical thinking about why some stories character might be female. Don’t we have more interesting questions for these children to ponder? Plus editing requires critical thinking in a way that is less mechanical than essay writing.

pixl972• 3 years ago

What is the long term historical trend of the average 8th grade reading level when taking in all currently measured groups and taking in considerations in measurement changes?

lambdaba8• 3 years ago

I know this is a bit of a shortcut but have pocket calculators rendered mental math extinct? I see language models as calculators for text. True, the analogy isn't perfect, as you don't need to double-check your calculator's output.

65• 3 years ago

School curriculums need to adjust how they are creating assignments.

I had a great assignment in college where the professor gave you all the materials required. You could only use the various articles/essays/news clippings he gave you, and you wrote an essay based on that.

Assignments that don't rely on the internet for research would do a much better job teaching the material and forcing students to read the material. Students wouldn't be able to SparkNote or ChatGPT an essay.

adamsmith1435• 3 years ago

Fortunately for him, ChatGPT knew the story and was happy to write an essay with arguments. [Btw, according to him pretty much everyone in class routinely has the AI do their essays]
He was about to send this essay in.

Why would you encourage your child to use ChatGPT like this? "Everyone else is doing it" seems like a great argument for NOT doing it yourself as those kids are going to seriously lack critical thinking skills in a few years as they offload that work to AIs.

b112• 3 years ago

No defending, merely pondering.

It may be, and this part horrifies me, like using a calculator. I remember when they first became affordable, and at that time, the same horror. And from what I've seen, that horror came to fruition, as I see younger(20s to 40s) adults sometimes struggling with simple math.

EG, if the power is out, and manually handling change at a cash register.

Yes, there is intelligence, but also the honing and application of the same. And calculators reduced some of that.

Now enter chatgpt. Here goes the ability to hone arguments, forge essays, etc, etc. Gone!

Imagine when everyone gets a brain link, I bet all long term menory will fall into ruin, too.

HDThoreaun2• 3 years ago

First, I'd say that using chatGPT actually lead to more critical thinking here since the essay had to be proofread for mistakes. More importantly though using ai to assist in writing is the future, there's no point in ignoring that. And as the OP points out, getting good output isn't that simple, it is a skill that needs to be trained.

xeyownt2• 3 years ago

For me this is the wrong attitude.

AI is there, and more of it will come. The best you can do as a parent is to help your children to use it correctly. I'm pretty sure that using it correctly will help to improve the critical thinking, and will help children to express themselves in a better way (by virtue of example, or correction, etc -- possibilities are countless).

New technology doesn't mean people will regress.

welshwelsh• 3 years ago

Being able to effectively offload work to AI is an extremely valuable skill.

The Washington Post and Associated Press use AI to generate articles. In the real world, only results matter. Using technology isn't cheating.

The solution is not to make students manually do what AI can do perfectly well. Instead, give them assignments that are too complex for AI to solve unassisted. Raise the bar so high that a ChatGPT generated essay will earn them a C and they need to do substantially better than that to get an A.

anon7725• 3 years ago

This comment makes a valid point, so I don’t know why it’s attracting downvotes.

like this

This is the key phrase. There are ways to use LLMs to help with both research and writing that don’t involve surrendering your own part in the process.

Research with LLMs is often much better than search engines for surface level information. You should accept nothing that they say as truth, but they will often turn up names, book titles, etc that you can follow for more information.

Editing with LLMs is great - they were born for it. “What is a more expressive way to say ‘Lincoln’s presidency was a time of great change for the United States’?”, etc.

kerpotgh• 3 years ago

The kids are definitely going to have a lack of critical thinking skills. But the cat is out of the bag. If I think back to my days in university, I would have definitely used chatGPT, especially when deadlines were a few hours away. It takes an inordinate amount of self discipline to not use a tool when it’s right there and the alternative is failing the class. You’re never going to be able to use the honor system effectively here. It’s going to devolve into students submitting chatGPT essays and professors using chatGPT to grade them.

From there the only logical step is to have AI be a generally accepted tool in everyone’s life like we have smartphones now. The extremely long term view on this is the lack of need for education at all as soon as we get the future AGI version of chatGPT directly plugged into our brains.

janeway• 3 years ago

I am delighted to hear that children are already adopting the new tech. Sure there will be kinks for a while where no one bothers with the reading or writing assignments. But shortly that will smooth out as everyone gets on even ground.

Writing those essays will become trivial and irrelevant and be replaced with more interesting tasks with the assistance of AI.

I always think of Star Trek; instead of long-division math questions they will learn skills like “computer, if the trajectory of this rouge planet is reversed and we assume that is was ejected after some massive explosion, calculate the possible causes based on previously observed similar events and report the top candidate cause and confidence interval”.

An example from my academic field: instead of biased, unreproducible research papers we could publish: [1] raw data, [2] hypothesis context, [3] model, [4] seed. The output result can be read based on your own AI chatbot preferences but the conclusion is consistent and reproducible.

bennysonething• 3 years ago

But surely the point of essay writing is to learn how to structure your thoughts into a coherent argument? If students aren't doing this, how will they learn this skill?

swatcoder2• 3 years ago

I know it's easy to get caught up in a few sustained decades of peace and progress (for those that have had it) and imagine that we can always rely on the tools that make our lives easy today, but it's actually quite important that people have foundational skills.

908B64B197• 3 years ago

So we went to through a rewrite exercise like in the article, improving the essay and our understanding of the issues.

The lesson you tought your son is far more valuable than what he could have possibly learned writing the essay as intended. AI is a tool he can use to augmentent his capabilities. But he shouldn't rely on it blindly. That's true for every technology (remember the Graphing Calculator on PowerPC Macs?).

Next time I see her, I'll urge the teacher to adopt a similar approach as in the article.

Don't. This gives your son a competitive advantage over the kids who will simply turn up what the AI wrote (and get a 0) or spend too long writing their own essays.

noobermin5• 3 years ago

Yes, this is a competitive advantage for the next...six months until the other students figure out they can do this.

smolder2• 3 years ago

This gives your son a competitive advantage

In what competition?

bombolo• 3 years ago

Well when I was in school the graded essays were written in class

feoren• 3 years ago

Did I go into a coma and wake up into a world where wholesale cheating is celebrated? What the fuck is going on here? You're causally dropping that you're helping your son cheat? People are talking about your son having a "competitive advantage" over other students? You people sound like fucking psychopaths.

MarbleFangs098• 3 years ago

Will be interesting to see where the needle lands on the Crutch <-> Tool scale for AI.

swlkr• 3 years ago

This article is a great intro to prompt engineering.

It helped me with my own prompts!

modeless• 3 years ago

It seems premature to teach the limitations of ChatGPT in a course. Five years from now its capabilities and limitations may be very different. But I guess if you realistically believe that students are going to use it anyway, you have to do something.

Aunche• 3 years ago

I think that using allowing students to AI to write school essays is like allowing students athletes to use a hoverboard when they're told to run a mile. It's the act of running that's the point, not the end result of running in a circle

Likewise, nobody is going to give a damn about your school essays except your teacher. It's the practice of synthesizing information on your own that important.

javier1234543212• 3 years ago

I agree that students using LLMs to do work for them is akin to your example. However, what is described in the article shows thoughtful exercises on engaging the same critical thinking skills you mention, so I see no problem with this approach. Might not want to do that for every assignment, but it seems the author had a pretty skillful approach to developing well rounded students in the context that students will be dealing with outside the classroom.

93po• 3 years ago

It's engaging critical thinking around the use of AI tools. Which is not a super valuable place to be applying that critical thinking. I feel like this is the equivalent of asking students in the 60s and 70s to learn to use a complicated machine that made punch cards for programming, and to apply critical thinking to the operation of the punch machine. They should be focusing on the the end product itself (writing, or software development in my example) instead of AI tools (punch machines) that will be obsolete very soon.

_nalply• 3 years ago

I see two ways. Either let the students write school essays only in school while being supervised, or explicitly allow the use of ChatGPT and make them reflect the use of ChatGPT. Either way, this requires more effort by the teacher. I am sure that most schools will fail. Writing essays will seem quaint, annoying and superfluous. We as a society will need to find new ways to train.

dncornholio2• 3 years ago

Yikes.. In my professional teaching career I always tried to not teach the tools, but the concepts. Tools are things that develop. Students can find the right tools just fine.

Teaching how to use ChatGPT is exactly what I would advice against. There's no science behind it, except some knowledge that's based on personal experiments. It doesn't provide much educational progress.

I mean, one class for this would be OK. But basing all your classes on a tool?! Not in my class!

JadoJodo• 3 years ago

One of the comments on the article stated, "What a pleasurable read.". I have no idea if this article was generated using the method described, but this gave me pause in the era of ChatGPT/AI.

Can something be pleasurable to read/view/listen to/etc., knowing the author of the work doesn't, for lack of a better term, have a soul? I don't know.

Perhaps this drifts too far into philosophy, but I myself find it adds something... more, knowing that a human being put their thoughts/feeling/heart into a piece of work. This is certainly, in part, informed by my theistic beliefs, but I recognize that others (like Sam Harris) wouldn't delineate at all between human thought processes and something like ChatGPT.

That being said, I would have to imagine some portion of people also feel something "other" about human connection that brings works of art/literature/music/film/etc. an undeniable beauty BECAUSE of their human-origin.

coffeefirst2• 3 years ago

Yes.

I keep going back to Stephen King's definition of writing as telepathy. The machine does not think.

That doesn't make it bad, it just makes it meaningless. I was able to use it to identify an obscure 90s B movie and that's pretty cool.

But in terms of actual meaning, you might as well be talking to a tree.

There's a long and storied history of humans who talk to trees and project deep meaning on their answers, so we're probably doomed to fall for the delusion anyway.

qu4z-22• 3 years ago

I for one am completely uninterested in AI-generated "art" (including writing, music, etc) because of the lack of a human who is communicating something. I'm concerned it will be increasingly difficult to tell what is worth my while.

blep_2• 3 years ago

To me, what matters most about the media I consume is my personal emotional response to it. Whether a sentence is generated by an AI or a human, it has an equivalent impact on my feelings.

For me, at least, the important part of media I consume is how I feel about it. If an AI writes a sentence and a human later writes the same sentence, they have the same effect on me.

To me, what matters most about the media I consume is how it makes me feel. Whether a sentence is written by an AI or a human, it has the same impact on my emotions.

I wrote one of these. The other two are ChatGPT's rewording of the same idea, and a second rewording with "try to sound as human as possible". They are in an arbitrary order. Does one of them make you feel different than the other?

duckmysick• 3 years ago

Can something be pleasurable to read/view/listen to/etc., knowing the author of the work doesn't, for lack of a better term, have a soul? I don't know.

I find pleasure in looking at gorgeous natural landscapes: mountain ranges, forests, waterfalls, creeks, glaciers, the sky at night. I also enjoy eating fresh blackberries.

I enjoy them even though they don't have a soul or a human creator.

garrisonj2• 3 years ago

Switching to a system where students watch lectures at home and do homework in class was overdue anyway. I think that’s the real way to stop AI from writing everything.

yamtaddle2• 3 years ago

I don't think college students will like paying for that kind of arrangement.

Apply that model to high school and you'll just have teachers desperately trying to cram lessons into the beginning of class, to make up for the fact that 80% of the kids didn't watch the lectures.

KineticLensman• 3 years ago

The concept exists already and is known by the term flipped classroom [0]. One well known example is the Khan Academy

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

garrisonj2• 3 years ago

Yeah, there are a lot of positives. It's not just about stopping kids from cheating. It's a better system, in my opinion.

coffeefirst2• 3 years ago

In college I used to help friends fix their essays. We'd go through line by line and examine if the actual words on the page were clear and said what they intended. All of them wound up getting As on the second draft and every essay thereafter. It was just about learning how to look at the problem.

We live in a world of emails and slacks and documents and text messaging. Literacy matters. Writing clearly matters.

What I would actually do with this is not use GPT to write your essay, but have GPT write a flawed essay and ask the students to rewrite it. Fix the logical fallacies, tighten the language, check the facts, etc.

jacobr1• 3 years ago

but have GPT write a flawed essay and ask the students to rewrite it.

There is also benefit in the opposite - automating your editorial role. Have the student write an ok essay, then rerun in through the AI to clarify, or to raise questions about ambiguity, word choices, general background knowledge assumptions, etc ...

In practice I expect both styles will be be used to produce superior human-augmented writing.

linuxftw2• 3 years ago

I started cheating on book reports in the 3rd grade when I realized there's no way the teacher can know about every children's book, and as long as I picked something relatively new and obscure, I'd be safe.

In later years, we had to write reports on books everyone read, this strategy broke down. Cliff notes were a thing back then, but mostly I just skipped around through some chapters, talked with other students, and wrote the reports based off very superficial knowledge of the story with a few examples sprinkled in.

10/10 would use this to not have to suffer reading Shakespear or whatever the book du jour is, or whatever other topic I don't care about.

jaredcwhite2• 3 years ago

I think it's irresponsible and unethical to "require" students to use generative AI tools. These tools are highly controversial and pose severe cultural, moral, and increasingly legal dilemmas. It's like requiring students to take certain types of drugs to participate in a class, or learn how to use certain types of firearms. Unless the class is literally "how to take drugs" or "how to use guns" everyone would understandably flip a lid, yet this certainly wasn't a "how to use ChatGPT" class but another topic entirely (entrepreneurship if I'm not mistaken).

If I discovered a class I was planning to attend in academia was going to require the use of AI, I would launch a protest immediately. This is a violation of my human rights. If you're OK with using generative AI tools, that's your prerogative, but forcing me to use them is like forcing me to eat food grown with pesticides if I'm a staunch organic foods consumer…or possibly even worse, forcing a vegetarian to eat meat. Way-ay-ay out of line.

marvel_boy• 3 years ago

Not sure if you are joking.

jcutrell4• 3 years ago

I understand this clearly is something you feel strongly about, but do you think this is somehow drastically different from using other tools for doing secondary research? As in, using an index tool (like the Dewey decimal system, or Google) to surface previously performed work, so you can then summarize it?

There is always a line to draw, why is this the point where you think it is important to draw a line?

jaredcwhite2• 3 years ago

I'd feel the same way about a job that requires the use of generative AI, nothing to do per se with a classroom setting or even education.

blep_2• 3 years ago

That's actually a great example of why I agree with that person.

It is totally reasonable to say "you may use AI tools in this class", or by comparison, "you must do research in this class, here are some ways you can do research, it is not cheating to use Google".

It is a very different thing to require the use of AI tools by someone who can competently write an essay on their own, or to require the use of Google by someone who happens to have a bunch of relevant sources bookmarked. That's moving from "can you do this" to "can you use this specific tool", and away from the actual point of the class.

Another example of this I can remember was requiring specific IDEs for some courses, which invariably led to a quarter of the class time being wasted explaining buttons in a now long-outdated version of Eclipse in excruciating detail, instead of any actual programming concepts or even Java-specific concepts.

lambic2• 3 years ago

how is using generative AI tools immoral?

ignite2• 3 years ago

There is considerable controversy about using artists works as training data for creating an AI that competes with artists.

Just to take a top google hit on the subject: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/lensa-ai-artist-contro...

Laaas• 3 years ago

This feels like something Sydney would say.

PeterWhittaker• 3 years ago

The author teaches entrepreneurism, among other things. Perhaps I am simply jaded, but, if this "becomes a thing" how long before VC investments become mostly robotic, with decks generated by AI, reviewed by AI, recommended by AI, etc?

I understand the importance of knowing how AI is being used in one's field, of being aware of it, knowing its limits, and, where applicable, knowing how to detect and counter it, but I'm not sure that simply considering it a tool in one's chest without first having some level of expertise in its limits is wise.

(I'm fortunate enough to work in a space where artisanal hand crafting is still the norm. The writing may be on the wall, but the wall is distant yet.)

titzer2• 3 years ago

Replace "Using AI" with "Asking your parents" and behold the breathtaking vacuousness and stupidity of this idea and how little students will actually learn from it. The wasteland that is students' utter lack of skills is troubling. "Prompt engineering" and all that. What utter tripe.

jgmedr• 3 years ago

I believe the intent behind implementing such a policy is admirable. By teaching students practical use of A.I. tools, their current limitations and biases, and how to refine the prompts and results will be a necessary skill. However, I also find it problematic.

As a result, the projects this semester are much better than previous pre-AI classes.

The use of the term "better" is concerning. According the blog, the subject of the class is "innovation". He is essentially praising the A.I. ability to innovate and not his students. If the object of school is to learn, what did his students learn about innovation and how was that measured despite ChatGPT? It reads as if his students learned about using and optimizing a tool and not the subject at hand.

The common argument for A.I. is that it will free humans to pursue more interesting and creative activities. The pervasive theme among many of these articles suggests creativity and thought to become a commodity, where the role of the human is to simply intervene and edit. Many architects are beginning to forfeit design to Midjourney, and editing the results. We need to ask ourselves: is authoring or editing more worthwhile?

asow923• 3 years ago

I love that we're already seeing some professors being intellectually honest about the future of AI. Knowing how to use AI, and knowing its limitations will be a needed skill in years ahead.

The analogy I like is that it's sort of like calculators: they were academically shunned at first, and are now an integral part of learning advanced maths. Sorry, Mrs. Kelly, but we did end up having calculators with us always after all.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 3 years ago

A more practical AI skill to teach would be to install face and voice recognition devices in the class and let them spy on one another. Catch those that have uttered disallowed words and punish them.

My class required AI

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