Process
Status Items Highlights Done See section below Claims None Questions None Output None
Document Notes
In the comments, someone says: ”… too much emphasis on the end result: the paper. Students believe the purpose of a writing assignment is for them to generate a document, which is graded, when in fact all along the purpose was to get them to reflect and think critically about a subject. Learning to write makes us smarter. It makes us better thinkers. It makes us more interesting in conversation.” And that’s at the core of things.. we’re often trained to focus on the end results, not the journey. This is the crux of the matter; the heart of the AI debate and the idea of things being “good enough” followup
Highlights
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The study’s authors recruited 293 amateur writers and asked each of them to write a short story on a given topic. Some writers got story outlines created by ChatGPT, while others were left to fend for themselves. The study authors then recruited 600 “regular” readers, who were unaffiliated with the publishing industry, to give numerical rankings for each story’s “stylistic characteristics, novelty, and usefulness” (i.e. “publishability”) as a workable, if incomplete, quantification of creativity. The study’s results indicated that stories using AI assistance were more creative than human-only stories: AI-assisted stories ranked 8% higher for novelty, and 9% higher for publishability, with extra benefits for “the worst writers,” as NPR’s Geoff Brumfiel puts it. “Those that were the least inherently creative,” one of the researchers says, a little more gently, “experienced the largest improvement.”
✏️ Seems to imply that human-machine collaboration is beneficial.. But, later you see that, at least with AI, this comes at a massive cost: sameness across the board. 🔗 View Highlight
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the more “creative,” AI-assisted stories turned out very similar to one another. When the writer Annalee Newitz tried to reproduce the study’s results, for example, they found that many AI ideas for an “adventure on the open seas” (one of the study’s test cases) revolved around the trope of finding treasure, with a high recurrence of the phrase “the real treasure was….”
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Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud: Navigating the Digital Age: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives, Learning, and Well-Being Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal Reflection on Technology Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal and Peer Perspective on Technology’s Role in Our Lives Navigating Connection: An Exploration of Personal Relationships with Technology From Connection to Disconnection: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives From Connection to Distraction: How Technology Shapes Our Social and Academic Lives From Connection to Distraction: Navigating a Love-Hate Relationship with Technology Between Connection and Distraction: Navigating the Role of Technology in Our Lives
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I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.
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identical results in a writing context are boring at best. At worst, these identical results amount to an insidious reproduction of the tropes and stereotypes present in the source text,
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Far from being a comprehensive, value-neutral pool of all human writing, large language models like GPT have been trained on disproportionate quantities of Adventure, Fantasy, and Romance novels, as well as male-dominated internet spaces like Wikipedia and Reddit
✏️ It must always be remembered what the source is.. AI isn’t trained on the whole of human writing. It’s trained on a skewed/narrow angle, and this can’t be understated. 🔗 View Highlight
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Perhaps we were so deeply programmed by the rom-coms we’d watched that we’d mistaken a rom-com for reality.
✏️ They fell for an AI paragraph that was much better written than the real person.. but only because it had some solid tropes to short circuit our skeptical brains and trigger our massively trained pop-culture brain. 🔗 View Highlight
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Perhaps ChatGPT has simply democratized this venerable tradition of cheating, thereby reducing the moral trespass we indicate when we use the word “cheating.” As I told my students, when spell-check software first became available, a Washington Post op-ed predicted bitterly that “The careless, the inept, the spelling disabled will be able to survive in a world of words by relying on computers to conceal their own weaknesses.” This is easy to dismiss as elitist and mean—“But how many of you,” I asked my students, “can confidently spell the word embarrassed?” My question produced a murmur of embarrassment, as I expected it would, but my point wasn’t that they should feel ashamed. My point was that most people don’t mourn this loss, because spell check wasn’t a hill anyone had wished to die on, because it’s exhausting to give a shit. My point wasn’t that they should give a shit, only that they could. The choice was theirs, as always.
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requiring a writing course for all students “is similar to insisting someone to master starting a fire with flint in an era of propane lighters.”
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“The analogy is flawed,” Dishi argued, “for unlike fires, all writing is not created equal. Fires, regardless of their size or method of ignition, serve similar primary purposes—providing heat or light. Functionally, the end results are always the same,” unlike writing.