And, ultimately, that’s the whole point of the enterprise of higher education: to provide a framework in which students who care about a subject can, with a bit of effort, learn and grow and come to understand a subject in a deeper way.
That's a pretty... naive belief in the purpose of education in general and higher education in particular. In high school, I had to take plenty of classes I did not care for (scientific ones) - and perform - because failure to do so would impact my academic career and professional life thereafter.
Higher education serves as a stamp of approval for validating who, in our societies, "deserves" a shot at upper middle class lifestyle/professional status.
And, while it may be true that, in scientific fields, "the fact that they didn’t learn what they were supposed to learn is going to bite them in the ass", there are plenty of fields where you can bullshit for a long time. A professional job in corporate America does not, in practice, truly require a degree. But companies do rely on a degree to denote raw intelligence and work ethics. And those 2 qualities are pretty relevant to most jobs. So I can see why people would be upset with cheating.
I've written about GPT-3 before and basically there are going to be a lot of the more naive/less attentive faculty freaking out in a year or two when they start to understand what has happened (or more likely, understand only partially). Anybody who is still using writing just as something students do to prove they did the homework should just come out with their hands up, it's game over. But they shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. Because not too long from now the successor to GPT-3 is going to be able to put some form of a real-time API call or something of the sort to Wikipedia etc. and actually get the basic content sort of right as well as the form.
What we need to start doing with writing (and I think other expressive forms) is teaching students how to invest in developing a distinctive voice and style as well as learning content that isn't in a wiki or other knowledge database. Essentially how to be more distinctively human. At the same time we need to start honestly teaching students how to usefully direct AI engines to produce the best outcomes--you've probably see that the art-based AIs produce the best stuff when someone has a really specific image in mind and has a great descriptive vocabulary that the AI can work from.
I'm always a little hesitant about the "distinctive voice" part, because I think that risks introducing a level of subjectivity to grading that can go badly. There are a bunch of writers on blogs and so on who are widely beloved (a lot of the old Gawker multiverse, for example) whose writing I just can't stand because I find their voice grating. Distinctive and human, sure, but Not My Thing to a degree that makes it hard to evaluate the content of whatever they have to say. I'm not sure that I want to deal with that sort of thing in a class setting where I need to assess the author's understanding of the material and the quality of their arguments.
(I have a similar reaction to the idea of having students write reflective personal essays about how they feel about their learning in a course or major, which comes up now and again in curricular discussions. I kind of hate about 80% of the reflective personal essays that turn up in the New Yorker and the like, and those are written by paid professional authors. I suspect I would gnaw off a limb to get out of grading a bunch of papers in that vein from students who haven't figured out the writing thing yet.)
(It is perhaps not surprising that I have really strong reactions to voice in writing, given the sorts of books that I write...)
I live in the subjective but I try to be as clear about it as I can; strong voices in writing even when they aggravate are valuable. (unless they're saying bad shit, and even then occasionally...)
What we need to start doing with writing (and I think other expressive forms) is teaching students how to invest in developing a distinctive voice and style as well as learning content that isn't in a wiki or other knowledge database.
1- if I am not planning on a career where writing is essential/central, writing clearly, concisely without too many grammatical errors ought to be enough.
2- how can there be content that isn't in a universal knowledge database? By definition, it knows everything and, indeed, more than I ever will - except in maybe very narrow slices of specialised knowledge that I've extensively studied.
There is so much content that could not be called by a GPT successor's API. So many books that aren't digitized, so many databases and archives that aren't digitized, so many things that people in fields of specialized knowledge know collectively that isn't clearly set down in writing anywhere, so many things that are embodied knowledge of the world that we don't (yet) put into a form that an AI could call. That last may change fast; the others will change very slowly. GPT-3's successors will be able to look content-capable with everything in the big part of a power-law distribution of knowledge but there will still be a lot in the long tail.
I think there will always be a difference between a distinctively expressive writer and a basically communicative one; the former is a kind of leading indicator of some kind of distinctive perception/understanding/analysis of the situation that the writing pertains to.
It seems to me you're basically arguing that "AI won't ever catch up to the most creative of humans". Which is an argument about capabilities and, like... maybe?
But in so many cases, it seems unlikely? Like, lots of art seems easily replicable. The hard part was thinking up the first original element of a particular work? Hence I am not convinced about "distinctively expressive writer" and I would push back on that level of craftmanship being required to write corporate memos and research notes.
The other element, the digitization of knowledge, is, as you admit, well underway. I don't expect that to stop either.
It may be that true originality is not possible for an AI. But then again, how often, in art or elsewhere, do you get something truly original? Creators get their inspiration from somewhere too.
And, ultimately, that’s the whole point of the enterprise of higher education: to provide a framework in which students who care about a subject can, with a bit of effort, learn and grow and come to understand a subject in a deeper way.
That's a pretty... naive belief in the purpose of education in general and higher education in particular. In high school, I had to take plenty of classes I did not care for (scientific ones) - and perform - because failure to do so would impact my academic career and professional life thereafter.
Higher education serves as a stamp of approval for validating who, in our societies, "deserves" a shot at upper middle class lifestyle/professional status.
And, while it may be true that, in scientific fields, "the fact that they didn’t learn what they were supposed to learn is going to bite them in the ass", there are plenty of fields where you can bullshit for a long time. A professional job in corporate America does not, in practice, truly require a degree. But companies do rely on a degree to denote raw intelligence and work ethics. And those 2 qualities are pretty relevant to most jobs. So I can see why people would be upset with cheating.
I've written about GPT-3 before and basically there are going to be a lot of the more naive/less attentive faculty freaking out in a year or two when they start to understand what has happened (or more likely, understand only partially). Anybody who is still using writing just as something students do to prove they did the homework should just come out with their hands up, it's game over. But they shouldn't have been doing that in the first place. Because not too long from now the successor to GPT-3 is going to be able to put some form of a real-time API call or something of the sort to Wikipedia etc. and actually get the basic content sort of right as well as the form.
What we need to start doing with writing (and I think other expressive forms) is teaching students how to invest in developing a distinctive voice and style as well as learning content that isn't in a wiki or other knowledge database. Essentially how to be more distinctively human. At the same time we need to start honestly teaching students how to usefully direct AI engines to produce the best outcomes--you've probably see that the art-based AIs produce the best stuff when someone has a really specific image in mind and has a great descriptive vocabulary that the AI can work from.
I'm always a little hesitant about the "distinctive voice" part, because I think that risks introducing a level of subjectivity to grading that can go badly. There are a bunch of writers on blogs and so on who are widely beloved (a lot of the old Gawker multiverse, for example) whose writing I just can't stand because I find their voice grating. Distinctive and human, sure, but Not My Thing to a degree that makes it hard to evaluate the content of whatever they have to say. I'm not sure that I want to deal with that sort of thing in a class setting where I need to assess the author's understanding of the material and the quality of their arguments.
(I have a similar reaction to the idea of having students write reflective personal essays about how they feel about their learning in a course or major, which comes up now and again in curricular discussions. I kind of hate about 80% of the reflective personal essays that turn up in the New Yorker and the like, and those are written by paid professional authors. I suspect I would gnaw off a limb to get out of grading a bunch of papers in that vein from students who haven't figured out the writing thing yet.)
(It is perhaps not surprising that I have really strong reactions to voice in writing, given the sorts of books that I write...)
I live in the subjective but I try to be as clear about it as I can; strong voices in writing even when they aggravate are valuable. (unless they're saying bad shit, and even then occasionally...)
What we need to start doing with writing (and I think other expressive forms) is teaching students how to invest in developing a distinctive voice and style as well as learning content that isn't in a wiki or other knowledge database.
1- if I am not planning on a career where writing is essential/central, writing clearly, concisely without too many grammatical errors ought to be enough.
2- how can there be content that isn't in a universal knowledge database? By definition, it knows everything and, indeed, more than I ever will - except in maybe very narrow slices of specialised knowledge that I've extensively studied.
There is so much content that could not be called by a GPT successor's API. So many books that aren't digitized, so many databases and archives that aren't digitized, so many things that people in fields of specialized knowledge know collectively that isn't clearly set down in writing anywhere, so many things that are embodied knowledge of the world that we don't (yet) put into a form that an AI could call. That last may change fast; the others will change very slowly. GPT-3's successors will be able to look content-capable with everything in the big part of a power-law distribution of knowledge but there will still be a lot in the long tail.
I think there will always be a difference between a distinctively expressive writer and a basically communicative one; the former is a kind of leading indicator of some kind of distinctive perception/understanding/analysis of the situation that the writing pertains to.
I don't know.
It seems to me you're basically arguing that "AI won't ever catch up to the most creative of humans". Which is an argument about capabilities and, like... maybe?
But in so many cases, it seems unlikely? Like, lots of art seems easily replicable. The hard part was thinking up the first original element of a particular work? Hence I am not convinced about "distinctively expressive writer" and I would push back on that level of craftmanship being required to write corporate memos and research notes.
The other element, the digitization of knowledge, is, as you admit, well underway. I don't expect that to stop either.
It may be that true originality is not possible for an AI. But then again, how often, in art or elsewhere, do you get something truly original? Creators get their inspiration from somewhere too.