Sure, instead of schools checking for plagiarism from other students' papers using turnitin.com, they'll check for plagiarism using ChatGPT tools that scan for known output from their industrial-scale amalgamation of plagiarized materials. Big whoop.

In the small institution I am currently working with, the English courses, in one week, integrated chatgpt as a tool for students to work with. It's part of the collaborative idea building and development process now for every student enrolled in creative writing and writing analysis classes, and that happened in one week. I cannot stress enough how unbelievably fast that is for higher ed. That's faster than light speed.

And we're not even that well resourced. I have to imagine there are other examples where it's more than just running through a bot to scan for known outputs.

It's integrated into existing assignments, modifying processes that are super well established already. It was like integrating a new person into the class. Also, it was before semester, so the students literally saw nothing weird; that was another strange assumption for you to make.

Just a tip, and don't read tone in this statement, but don't assume things. 9/10 times you're going to be incorrect. It's much better to ask questions, instead of making statements with question marks at the end of them.

Isn't that... an assumption?

>It's part of the collaborative idea building and development process now for every student enrolled in creative writing and writing analysis classes

>It's integrated into existing assignments, modifying processes that are super well established already. It was like integrating a new person into the class.

I don't honestly know how else to say that. I legitimately do not know how to help you understand what I'm saying.

In the past, the class would be centered around ideas and themes the class came up with together during the first week of the semester. They would then read and discuss short stories from various authors centered around that theme, preferably from different eras and/or cultures. From there, they would work in pairs/small groups to flush out original ideas they came up with for their own stories based on the themes and styles from the first month of reading. Then they would work individually to write the stories. Finally, they would come back together to edit and work through that process as a group, with a reading and discussion in the last week or two.

Now, the class works alone the first day or two to discuss themes with chatgpt, to identify relevant and appropriate literature (if possible), and to flush out initial ideas for the readings and discussion topics. Then we come back together for group work to figure out themes for the semester and possible readings, like it used to be, but primed with whatever information they had already discussed with Chatgpt. From there they work through the readings, using chatgpt to bounce ideas for discussion off of before coming to class. Then they work in teams, like before, to flush out their own stories, but again, using chatgpt as if it were another member of the group. They also have to track their question/comment and response, to evaluate their own thought processes and look for weak links in their reasoning and logic. Students are then free to use the software to edit their writing before coming together with their creative assignments.

We haven't made it past the step of reading, as it's still the first month of the semester. But,the discussion for the first section has been much more in-depth and (to use a word that is impossible to quantify) vibrant. The students had already aired the ideas they thought may be dumb, and would therefore be less willing to voice in a public setting; this allows them to really dive further into whatever is in each story, and connect dots between stories that generally took a week or two. Because they have another 'person' to talk to whenever they want, and however much they want, they tend to really get into the work. Further, and unexpectedly (and anecdotally sadly) it has allowed a couple of students I know personally who would not have been willing to participate in public discussion (anxiety disorder and TBI) a stronger voice, because they know their ideas are flushed out already, and it provides them with a 'script' of ideas they know are novel and valuable for the class. In other words, if they were able to get the idea from Chatgpt, they knew they had more work to do to build that thought, because that is really just a baseline.

I'm interested to see how the actual writing process goes. Chatgpt is okay at creative writing, but not at the level that we expect to see. Some faculty expressed concerns that students would just have the software do the work for them, but I'm not really bothered by that. First off, if someone can figure out how to make a career out of publishing chatgpt prompts, well, good for them. Second, if the software is able to write better than the students are, they don't really belong in this class in particular (graduate level writing class).

Anyway, like I said earlier in the thread - we're really just treating this as another 'person' in the class, but who is available to everyone, all the time. It's beneficial for the brainstorming sections, but not for the hard skills, from what I can tell. I am most excited to watch them evaluate their own thought processes when working with chatgpt to flush out their ideas. In the past, this has been a barrier, because every single person I’ve ever met never gives a partner 100% of their thoughts all the time. They always hold back. My theory is that, because it’s a dead-end conversation, they will be more willing to push into new topics, and really think hard about what they’re trying to say. We’ll see if that stands.

Why pay for the college?

More Big Data!

- attributed to Socrates by Plato. c.399-347 BCE. “Phaedrus.”

https://marshallbrain.com/manna1

People are very attached to school being just like it was when they went.

If you don’t do it that way, you’ll always be fooled by whatever the screen tells you.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/innovation/chatgpt-can-help-foo...

seems like a no-brainer in the long term.

Actual good information will always be useful, most of this "big data" seems to be the equivalent of recording background static.

At that point, does it keep scaling or is there an S curve where 100x more data and compute only leads to a 2x improvement?

Careful with the scales. 2x improvement could be interpreted from 80% human performance to 160% human performance. Or going from 10% error rate to 5% (which again crosses into superhuman territory on some tasks). Those last few bits are the critical ones.

Here's a novel idea: test students using pen and paper?

I am hopeful that a change happens in academia to prepare students for jobs, which is why they are going to school in the first place. Yes, students need to learn how to "think", but really they are wanting to get the technical skills to perform their duties more than anything.

We have bestowed too much credence in traditional academia not useful to the average person or average job. College is a "game" for most students, and they put up going through the motions of testing, etc. for the sake of the diploma at the end.

I hope we're going to enter a new era of what college means for those looking to get something different out of it.

That's pretty much exactly what the author says in the article.

ChatGPT and the like are not going to get much use from that kind of data and instead are looking at a giant corpus of text and images scraped from a variety of public sources to infer what humans might think sounds smart. It's possible the two worlds will meet, but that's probably not what's going to be announced this week.

I guess the take away however is still that regular businesses really just can't play in this game and should not be assuming they have big data until that fact asserts itself out of necessity rather than the other way around.