Artificial intelligence still has some way to go

i make my students write a lot. i take many precautions to avoid chat gpt use but sometimes i wonder if some slips through.

this honestly sounds like something i would have read in my college newspaper.

it hurts me to think that today's college kids will not feel that it is worth it to opine on their favorite records in this sort of amateurish way, with gushing exuberance and tired metaphors.

i'm serious. the job loss thing is scary. but there is another issue, which is the decline in writing being seen as an important humanistic endeavor. if ai can do it, what's the point. reviewing books and albums for student publications is a big part of how i developed my perspective on the world.

Lukas, there are whole anti-homework movements out there. Most of which is good not bad! I hated homework and almost never did it.

But the amount of both reading and writing expected of current students appears to be different these days. Is all.

The trouble with the anti-homework movement when it gets to ELA classes is that reading and writing are both considered homework, so there's no more "Take this book home, read the first three chapters by tomorrow," and then you come in and talk about it, and then at some point you get assigned an essay and stay up late writing it, and maybe you peer review and edit it in class. Now all the reading and all the writing happen in class, and a lot of the students don't like reading so teachers just put on the audiobook, which forces everyone to at least hear it. And that takes forever so you don't do it more than once a semester, maybe once a year. And of course you also have to make time for the students to sit in class and write their essays. So you barely read, you barely write, and you barely have any time to talk about what you're reading - except during Socratic Seminars, when your discussion is graded on a rubric.

I don't play the audiobook for my students; they have the option to listen if they'd rather, but I figure this may be the only practice they get in decoding words on a page. And I ask them to do some amount of reading at home, though I know I lose a few students this way. But I can't do much more than that, because I can't magically give students with Internet Brain the attention span to sit down and read steadily at home. And the work itself is a lot harder than it would have been twenty years ago, because high schoolers just don't have the basic ease with reading they used to. They're literate, more or less, but it's like a second language to them, not their native tongue.

of course it can write a convincing review of Funeral - that's got to be one of the most written about albums in internet history. I bet it could nail Kid A, Geogaddi, and Illinois as well. if you ask it to write about something obscure though, it's prone to fuck up in real obvious ways. so I'm not sure how this is gonna work with new albums exactly.

I guess critics could plug in bullet points and gpt could mold it together

i make my students write a lot. i take many precautions to avoid chat gpt use but sometimes i wonder if some slips through.

I guess critics could plug in bullet points and gpt could mold it together

― treeship., Sunday, November 26, 2023 9:48 PM (nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah but see I think doing things like that is where people can easily tell it's AI

Lily Dale and Treeship, thank you for these perspectives. And thank you for teaching.

I really don't wish to be all "old man yells at cloud" or "get off my lawn," but it is just simply true that in 1985 I started working on a student newspaper. In 1989 I arrived at college with a typewriter. Literally, a typewriter. In 1993, as I was leaving, incoming students were just starting to arrive with computers.

Now that my children are getting to the same age, I look at what they are doing and I don't quite understand it, but I am trying to roll with it because it's where people are right now.

Part of being a parent is understanding the world your child will have to live in and what help or encouragement you're capable of providing to help them 'succeed' in that world. It's early days for generative AI, though some of the shape of things to come is emerging. That will have a place in the world they will soon enter. Even more important are the 'timeless' skills every human should master, such as kindness and self-awareness.

Aimless: yes, plus how to change a flat tire.

yea I think a lot about how my kids are growing up in a world where you can literally ask your wristwatch any question you want and it has nearly the entire sum of human knowledge to draw from. that alone feels like a pretty massive shift in how people learn/retain things

But I can't do much more than that, because I can't magically give students with Internet Brain the attention span to sit down and read steadily at home. And the work itself is a lot harder than it would have been twenty years ago, because high schoolers just don't have the basic ease with reading they used to. They're literate, more or less, but it's like a second language to them, not their native tongue.

Does this make you worry for them, or do you think once they run into a situation where they really need to do this stuff they'll figure it out?

My 21yo daughter is (a) angry at being robbed of an attention span and (b) taking steps to unplug. If only she could help me.

I love the clumsiness

For those who don't know, DALL-E3 attempts to combat the racial bias in its training data by occasionally randomly inserting race words that aren't white into a prompt, but this leads to bizarre overspill like this https://t.co/qm9GuUL4GS

— Asshole, freckled cheeks and a Bookchin (@fireh9lly) November 27, 2023

How does 'Chat GPT automates 3rd rate record reviews' stop people that really want to write. Surely it's a challenge to people that actually want to do it (not just lazily opine) on a record to look at these outputs and come up with something better.

If bad, lazy writers are being discouraged this is a benefit.

The twist of the 6th sense is not that Bruce Willis sees dead people all along lol

Xy it doesn't _stop_ us, it just makes us more expensive. And our employers know that.

It makes life harder for every writer, not just the bad and lazy ones.

The twist of the 6th sense is that Rosebud the sledge wasn't kidnapped but was working with the islanders to lure Sgt Howie to a 1920s party at the Overlook hotel

Also Darth was his father

It makes life harder for every writer, not just the bad and lazy ones.

― Iris Demented (Ye Mad Puffin), Monday, 27 November 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I was not talking about commercial writing. I intended to zone in specifically on DIY music writing.

this is what an old classmate of mine has said: the challenge for fiction writers and poets is to now push the limits beyond AI’s capabilities, not throw up our hands and submit to it. i agree. (he has tweeted a lot about this).

reminds me of the legend of john henry racing the steam powered rock drill

How does 'Chat GPT automates 3rd rate record reviews' stop people that really want to write. Surely it's a challenge to people that actually want to do it (not just lazily opine) on a record to look at these outputs and come up with something better.

If bad, lazy writers are being discouraged this is a benefit.

― xyzzzz__, Monday, November 27, 2023 7:55 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was thinking more about people who will never be a great writer, but still felt the urge to organize their thoughts in writing and share their perspective with an audience. i think it is a nice skill to cultivate. maybe no nicer than painting or playing piano, but it is the one that i have the most experience with.

There are community settings where you can learn to paint and play music. Don't see that disappearing either.

Could even in future be community settings where ppl learn how to get the ai prompts just so in order to produce a bad fantasy novel/heavy rock album cover

"Community settings," yes, that has always been true.

My first painting class at the community center was in 1982. My family runs a ballet school, and I play in three bands. I edited a literary magazine.

However, there are people out there whose main concern is not whether they get to DO a creative thing, but rather whether they can pay the rent with it, feed their family, buy a shirt, go to a dentist. That's a different challenge.

Doesn't basically every "how to write good" advice start "write bad for a long time then write okay"? If that disappears as a professional option, then that will tilt the demographics towards people who can afford not to worry about making a living in the trenches - which I don't imagine xyzzzz intends as an outcome.

How does 'Chat GPT automates 3rd rate record reviews' stop people that really want to write. Surely it's a challenge to people that actually want to do it (not just lazily opine) on a record to look at these outputs and come up with something better.

If bad, lazy writers are being discouraged this is a benefit.

― xyzzzz__

writing badly doesn't make you a bad writer. writing badly is how you become a good writer.

this is maybe a sensitive subject to this group but when i was younger i was... very judgemental of music criticism. my perception of music writing was that it tended towards the sort of stuff GPT can spit out on Funeral. nowadays... i don't think that sort of stuff is a condemnation of P4K-style writing.

i write because it's a learning process. i learn things about myself as a person and as a writer when i put effort into challenging myself in my writing. what does ai learn from writing? does it get any insight from putting out that review, or is it blindly regurgitating?

when i look at ai writing i see something that's really great at form, but not so great in the way of content. even if a human looks at that and learns to write in that style, they're inevitably going to express some amount of meaning, to reveal things they have that the machines won't. even if a viewer can't _tell_ if something is machine generated or human generated... i think even the worst writing has an effect, good, bad, both, on the person doing the writing, expresses something about them.

humans are _creative_. that's an essential part of our nature. all of the sophistication of ai just helps us to understand what human creativity looks like.

i was thinking more about people who will never be a great writer, but still felt the urge to organize their thoughts in writing and share their perspective with an audience. i think it is a nice skill to cultivate. maybe no nicer than painting or playing piano, but it is the one that i have the most experience with.

― treeship.

this i think... i'm more skeptical of this. the thing is that we _are_ influenced by ai work. i don't think this is an ai thing, but the way we think and express ourselves is influenced by the norms around us. i have a friend who... she's very self-conscious about her writing. she envies my writing skill, wishes she could write better. i don't think ai would make her better at expressing the things she wants to express. it would just produce writing that better conforms to a certain norm.

The delicious irony of ChatGPT and the other text-transform engines is that the detached, depersonalised aggregation/synthesis of other sources is their forte, whereas as academics we have been using it as evidence of intelligent comprehension. Now we can't back away from it fast enough and are scratching around to imagine what else might actually constitute evidence of learning.

― assert (matttkkkk)

i mean to me this isn't just irony... academia actively frustrates me in a lot of ways. academic writing, academic publishing. one of my biggest role models, maybe even one of my heroes, is a lady named susan stryker. her work has done a lot to help me understand myself, understand who i am, what it means to be trans. she's hugely influential to me and also, i mean, a pretty marginal figure. most people don't know about her. probably her greatest professional accomplishment has been her role in establishing trans studies as a discipline. she writes, teaches, mentors... and she does it well. trans studies work, though, is academic. it's shot through with academic jargon. to my mind, this doesn't make it superior writing. a lot of academia just strikes me as so much... gatekeeping. learning words, learning concepts, learning to say things in a certain way.

working in academia makes a person's work inaccessible. not just in an intellectual sense - in a very literal sense. people are doing this work and if you want to read stuff published in TSQ, either you're in academia and have access to it, or, like me, you scour libgen for this dribs and drabs that leak out. i think the work of stryker and trans studies has had an effect, a profound effect. when i see abigail thorn in a latex dress explaining philosophical concepts, to me that approach is a descendent of susan stryker's work. and lots of other people's work as well, including, interestingly enough, brian de palma... but of all her influences, the philosophical ones are among the least known.

to my mind someone like thorn isn't a "popularizer", someone like jared diamond who distorts history to make it accessible. changing the form changes the content, changes the message, but thorn's message is, i think... an evolution of academia, rather than just a dumbing down. and it's way, way, way more accessible than academia - not just for the general public to see, but for people to _create_. they're two different approaches, and i think they're both important - making space for trans people within the academy, and finding a path forward outside of the academy.

-

in terms of the way it educates, so much. i don't mind that educators are being challenged to find new ways to connect with their students. in particular the way the novel is valorized as an art form is... i think excessive. the novel is only one kind of writing, yet for a long time one's worth as a fiction writer has been judged by one's ability to write novels. i've seen lots of writers i respect complain about these norms. ambrose bierce, in his "devil's dictionary", defined the novel as "a short story padded". kurt vonnegut jr lamented the loss of short story publishing as a detriment to writing. bierce, his forte was journalism. i feel like if i was ever going to make a living in writing it would have been in journalism. i grew up reading books written by newspaper columnists. it's ephemeral writing, just like my writing here is ephemeral writing, but it's got advantages that my writing just doesn't. i never thought i'd say that i miss erma bombeck and lewis grizzard... well, i don't, i guess. their writing was ephemeral. what makes me sad is that my generation didn't produce any bombecks or grizzards.

at the same time i mean... there are advantages. i see memes pointing out stuff in early 20th century newspapers that's clearly recognizable as shitposting. it's not like the ideas they expressed are dead... younger generations have just found new ways of expressing them, new ways of communicating. writing is no longer the be-all and end-all. this is one of the things that frustrates me about my compulsion to write... it's good writing, but it's kind of the definition of tl;dr. there are other, better ways to communicate the sorts of things i want to communicate.

it's been a long time since people have gotten paid by the word the way l. ron hubbard did. i don't miss those times.

all of this word vomit is to say that, to me, ai isn't undermining healthy institutions. it's attacking the weaknesses in creative work, rather than its strengths. the styles of communication we've become attached to, the crutches we lean on, it kicks them out from under us. it's cruel to kick the crutches out from under a cripple. it's crueler to break a person's legs.

Andrew, that is often the story for interns and editorial assistants in NYC publishing - $3,000 a month in rent, $0 salary. Hmm. I wonder what people are able to make that work.

Could it be... people with rich parents? As a result, NYC publishing has been a province of rich people for centuries. Do you think that affects what books get published and what voices get heard?

i'm starting to think that some of the people i know who make art for a living might have wealthy parents

The delicious irony of ChatGPT and the other text-transform engines is that the detached, depersonalised aggregation/synthesis of other sources is their forte, whereas as academics we have been using it as evidence of intelligent comprehension. Now we can't back away from it fast enough and are scratching around to imagine what else might actually constitute evidence of learning.
― assert (matttkkkk), Sunday, November 26, 2023 10:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

STEM's final revenge against the humanities. it was a murder-suicide though because this thing also codes and analyzes data.

it's cruel to kick the crutches out from under a cripple.

goddammit that's another shitty part about getting old, i think it was offensive of me to say that last word. my apologies.

i know we have a lot of compsci people here but jfc fuck STEM forever

even my presence on the internet at all makes me feel nothing but scorn and shame

Lol @z_tbd.

John Adams is alleged to have said "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

What might a current version be? "I study investment banking so that my children can study management consulting, so that their children can study immersive virtual gaming and lo-fi trip-hop."

"i study machine learning so my child can become a twitch streamer"

Lol @z_tbd.

John Adams is alleged to have said "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

― Iris Demented (Ye Mad Puffin)

john adams said that? dang i thought that was yang wenli

What might a current version be? "I study investment banking so that my children can study management consulting, so that their children can study immersive virtual gaming and lo-fi trip-hop."

― Iris Demented (Ye Mad Puffin)

"i'm a data analyst because it gives me the opportunity to do the things that are actually important until we get rid of capitalism"

https://futurism.com/sports-illustrated-ai-generated-writers

"But now that it's under the management of The Arena Group, parts of the magazine seem to have devolved into a Potemkin Village in which phony writers are cooked up out of thin air, outfitted with equally bogus biographies and expertise to win readers' trust, and used to pump out AI-generated buying guides that are monetized by affiliate links to products that provide a financial kickback when readers click them."

i know we have a lot of compsci people here but jfc fuck STEM forever

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 November 2023 bookmarkflaglink

even my presence on the internet at all makes me feel nothing but scorn and shame

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table), Monday, 27 November 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Chill out...a little

"humans are _creative_. that's an essential part of our nature."

Yes to that, don't feel chat GPT us breaking that.

So this:

"all of the sophistication of ai just helps us to understand what human creativity looks like."

Is to give ai too much credit, on what I've seen so far.

why aren't they doing more research to investigate how easily AI can eliminate CEO and board of directors positions?

Robots would probably be really good at firing people. "The algorithm would like you to clean out your desk. Please shred your keycard and a Roomba will come by shortly to vacuum it up."

I research ai and labor management, and there is at least one start-up out there that offers "AI-based" termination services

i'm sure chatbot will be happy to recommend resources for dealing with terminated and looking for new employment

ok "ai-based" wasn't quite right, but: https://www.onwardshr.com/severance-package-management

There was a movie about termination services, called Up in the Air. Anna Kendrick, George Clooney, Vera Farmiga.

Sixth Sense-style spoiler alert: Clooney was a robot the whole time.

I don’t think layoffs and firings could be any worse! But there’s always room for innovation

"all of the sophistication of ai just helps us to understand what human creativity looks like."

Is to give ai too much credit, on what I've seen so far.

― xyzzzz__

well in the sense that it allows us to rule out things that get taken for "creativity" but which in actuality can be done by machine

things are creative when human beings create them. the process of creativity is very humane and fulfilling. it allows people to feel proud of themselves. they produced something that is now in the world that others can benefit one.

maybe this is a chair. maybe it is a poem. maybe it is a song.

ai can probably produce reasonable approximations of these things. but they don't mean the same thing.