WYD?
If modern society suddenly starts using the word “tapestry” a lot, we’ll know who’s been heavily ChatGPTing regularly.
That said I see a parallel with thoughts I have had about the practice of medicine over the course of my career -
When I started I realized that my elders were much better at diagnosing murmurs by auscultation than I would ever be. I was growing up in an era of a ready availability of echocardiograms. When I listened my thought process was really just if it was an exam that required an echo or not. I no longer needed to spend much energy trying to figure out what the pathology was going to be as the echo would tell us that quickly enough. That effort was for the fun intellectual exercise but could be skipped if I was behind and stressed. I then had concern as we entered an era of expert guidelines declaring what quality care was that those who followed me would be less skilled at critical evaluation of the evidence, since we’d be obligated to follow the guideline no matter what we concluded on our own. Delving into the articles was not something we needed to do anymore as the expert committee had done it for us. It was rarely going to change what we were going to do.
But I still think expert in depth reviews and consensus guidelines have brought better quality care. And I still see new docs thinking critically even if they are not doing the literature reviews and journal clubs we did when we were starting out.
Point is I think “we” may shift how we apply our intellectual muscles as different tools become available, be the tool echocardiography, consensus evidence based guidelines, spellcheck, or even generative AI, but that is not rotting our brains necessarily. Kids today don’t know how to use a card catalog or find articles deep in the stacks, and I don’t begrudge them that either.
That sounds like some sort of pagan or wiccan gathering or ritual.
Art thou attending the WYD this eve? 
I absolutely, 100% am sure this story is utter bullshit. It never happened.
ChatGPT is insanely stupid and anyone who relies on it for anything is a fool. But this story is total fiction. You can tell. It smells made up.
I am sort of startled at how often I use ChatGPT as a teacher. If anyone is bored, I wrote out some details but I will put them at the bottom because it may be more specific than anyone cares about.
The upshot of all of them, though, is that in every case they work because I have a precise vision of what I am looking for, and I have that precise vision because I did it the “hard way” for over 20 years. If I’d had ChatGPT as a younger teacher, I do wonder if I would have relied on it to build my vision in a way that would have made my own development stagnate. I didn’t know enough to argue with it.
I especially worry about teachers who use it to give feedback. Reading essays and giving feedback is appallingly awful. But it’s also how you learn to teach writing, because over the course of reading and commenting on thousands of essays, you see patterns, you learn how people that aren’t you think about writing. You honestly don’t even know what you are trying to get them to do until you’ve read 100s of essays that don’t do it. So how does that work if you skip that step? How do you ever learn what you even want? And if you don’t learn what you want, how do you learn to teach it?
I also worry that ChatGPT is good at giving feedback on a subset of things that could be given feedback on. So when teachers let it give feedback and tweak it–something I’ve heard frequently–some of the important stuff isn’t there to tweak. But since so much IS there, it’s not obvious. There’s plenty of feedback, after all. So I worry a person could have big flaws never get addressed. This is even more problematic if multiple teachers in a row use the same approach. Typically, it’s a good thing to have one teacher who is hell on concision and another that really focuses on effective organization and then someone who never let you get away with imprecise word choice or whatever. Everything gets “picked up on” by someone. But if AI is really the one determining what matters and it doesn’t change, that’s not as effective. And kids will learn to write what the AI likes.
The TL:DR is that ChatGPT is that people try to use it for the intellectually challenging stuff and they should be using it for the time-consuming but stupid stuff.
Ok, how I use ChatGPT in the classroom:
Vocabulary lists and quizzes. I can feed it a list of words and ask for brief definitions and sentences that contain context clues, and it just spits them out. I can ask for a story that uses all the words. I read over them, make minimal tweaks, and they are great. I can feed it a text and ask it to flag challenging vocab and generate a list of definitions at whatever grade level I would like. I can feed it a list of words and ask for a morphological analysis. All this was stuff I could do with a dictionary, but in 10% of the time and no worries about copyright.
Writing “textbook” copy. I teach AP Government, and I hate all of the text books. They go into too much detail about irrelevant things, or rely on prior knowledge the students don’t have, or fail to make key distinctions (or make irrelevant distinctions). I know exactly what I want them to know about, say, congressional oversight, but it takes me a long time to write it out. Instead, I ( and many teachers) rely on bullets on slides and hope the kids listen as we explain. With AI, I can quickly generate an explanation that is exactly suited to the amount of time I have for the topic, the prior knowledge of my students, and contains all the relevant information. It does always involve a certain amount of editing. That means I can assign 350 words of reading before class instead of 3500. This makes it much more likely the reading will happen, and that we will have good discussions when they come back. I can also put that 350 words out on Google Classroom with out worrying about copyright fraud.
Generating model answers. In all my classes, we do a lot of 3-5 sentence answers to things. (explain this, give an example of that) and I like to give students model responses to read after they finish their own. The nice thing about using AI for this is that it doesn’t sound like me, it sounds like a textbook, like a model. I don’t want them to try to sound like me, or to think the goal is to sound like me. I want to give them a more neutral model. The other advantage is that sometimes Chat thinks of additional approaches I didn’t. So the model answer they see after they submit their own is more comprehensive. They review the model and then I can ask if they have questions about that, and we get much better discussions. But again, I often have to edit or correct the models.
Coming up with language. At times, it’s really good at helping me find a term for something or wrap my head around an idea that I understand, but am having trouble breaking down for kids. This is when it gets really “chatty” and I don’t directly use anything it produces. It just gives me new approaches for my own thinking.
TPS-Forms. I have a good principal and don’t have to turn in dumb lesson plans or intervention plans or anything, but if I did, I would 100% use ChatGPT for that.
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Great post. Thank you.
I could have written broadly the same post about the changes in my industry over my career. All the details would of course be different, but my conclusion would match your bottom line just the same. Our tools form our processes which in turn form our thoughts. Which in turn form our next tools.
There have been lots of academics and lots of threads on the question of whether speaking only e.g. Chinese produces a different way of thought from speaking only e.g. Arabic. Or only e.g. English. The conclusion seems to be there are differences, but not such that really affect the big picture outcome.
Language is perhaps humanity’s ultimate tool. I sure think it’s our secret sauce that separates us definitively from any and all other earth life forms. Despite all languages’ collective variety the nature of human thought remains substantially universal.
The Wiccan Youth Debauch, thou asketh? Why yes, I art. Perhaps to espy a maiden most faire. 
I shall have to write a fake folksong about this now!
Merry meet, merry part, and merry meet again, goodfellow.
I don’t think at any time in history, younger people have talked the same way the older crowd does.
As usual, there’s an XKCD, although about writing, rather than speaking. The claim is, if people write a lot, they get good at writing, even if they aren’t doing “good writing”. I’m sure speech is the same way.
I saw it first on r/LinkedInLunatics: I’ll take “Shit That Never Happened” for 500
That is precisely the issue (and thanks for make a clearer statement of that); it is just too easy to have the browser or word processor input the correct word (especially when typing on a mobile device where it will autocomplete or correct a long word) and not actually integrate the correct spelling. It is analogous to how people doing calculations now will just plug values into a calculator and perform operations without any consideration for significant figures or rounding, and then come up with a ten digit precision that is completely meaningless even when they are ostensibly dealing with whole numbers and rational fractions. Back when you did the operations by hand using a slide rule or a simple four function calculator, the correct precision of a result was obvious by inspection, and calculations were truncated by the precision of the instrument, but now I get quizzical looks when I ask junior engineers how they came up with a six figure value from measurements that are only three or four figures of precision. And because we use logarithmic scales for various purposes, I’ve had to explain to so many how to correctly manipulate logarithms and exponentials because they are used to just having a calculator figure out how to multiply a two values that are ten magnitudes of order apart and have Matlab or Excel plot the result on a log scale. Which is fine until you are actually using log rules to express margin and then have to mentally translate that into a linear factor. This is not to say that we should still use slide rules for doing practical engineering calculations (please, no!) but the skill of understanding logarithmic operations has broader applications that are very useful in signal processing, acoustics, shock and vibration, et cetera.
I’ve also seen people use chatbots specifically to obfuscate or produce plausible-sounding nonsense. I got an analysis from a contractor last year that was superficially convincing if you just skimmed it, I guess, but once you dove into its explanations about statistical mechanics and molecular gas dynamics (for a simple convective heat transfer problem in a dense gas where continuum mechanics applies) it became clear that it was total gibberish, and the derivations it presented weren’t even correct even before getting to the actual analysis. When questioned, the analyst hemmed and hawed before finally admitting that the analysis that was done didn’t match flight data and so he had ChatGPT or whatever he used produce a rationale that made it ‘work’. I pointed out to him that this was flagrant dishonesty bordering on fraud, and he responded that if his chatbot could come up with the right answer it must be okay, apparently just not comprehending that the LLM just manipulates words to give the desired response to a prompt and doesn’t know anything about gas dynamics or (clearly) statistical mechanics.
I’m not afraid of new technology and I don’t ‘hate’ chatbots and other generative models; I think they have a potential—provided they can be made suitably reliable, which is still in question—to take away a lot of the busywork in basic interactions like responding to basic user support questions or aiding overworked teachers by doing the drudgery that @MandaJo describes, and perhaps with greater training and control draft boilerplate legal briefs or summarize complicated texts. But the danger lies in both ascribing too much ‘intelligence’ into these systems when they clearly aren’t actually sapient or can correctly interpret context, and letting atrophy those intellectual skills of organizing disparate thoughts into coherent statements or essays, which is a crucial and distinctive human attribute. For adults who have already developed those skills that nonuse can be bad enough but for students just learning those skills, the use of chatbots means that they will likely not even fully develop them.
And color me increasingly dubious that the current approach to training and the ad hoc methods of catching and correcting factual errors and logical mistakes is really going to produce sufficiently reliable for use in mission- and safety-critical applications, even though they are already being used to write legal briefs, review insurance claims, write software, and as illustrated above, performing engineering ‘analysis’ in ways that are less than rigorous or frankly ethical.
Stranger
Agreed. I played around with these when they first came out, specifically probing to check correctness of real facts. And I rapidly came to the conclusion that they are just very sophisticated sentence completion engines. Trigram generators on steroids, if you like.
I am astounded that people seem so addicted to these things. All they are good for is producing grammatically correct bullshit. Unfortunately there seems to be a market for this, especially in the corporate world?
Since all that a vast number of white collar workers are good for is producing grammatically incorrect bullshit, this AI innovation would seem to be an improvement from most PHB’s POVs.
And if I was one of those white collar BS generators, the improvement in the amount of BS I could produce per unit effort also seems like a no brainer.
Sorry, you’re not needed any more. AI has superceded you.
Please clear your desk and leave the building.
Severance package? Our AI resources department will shortly evaluate how much you are owed for your time at the company. Have a nice day.
It might well be years before management figures that out though.
they call it management
Using them to create fact-based papers probably isn’t a great idea unless you have the knowledge to fact-check them yourself. I don’t use them much but find them most useful for idea generation or I could see them used to create marketing style text/emails. But I find them perfectly useful for “Within these parameters, give me ten ideas for XYZ”. The worst it can do is give me ideas I don’t want to use.
That’s not a technology problem. That’s forgetting the basics of significant digits that they learned probably in middle school.
Sure, but when you are doing calculations by hand you don’t calculate out to extraneous degree of precision because it is more work, and if you are using a slide rule, table lookup, or nomograph you are inherently limited to the precision of that instrument/table/graph, so the limitations of the precision of the calculation are obvious (and the consequences of exceeding them become evident if you are running any kind of iterative calculation). If you are using a calculator or software like Matlab (or especially Excel) then it isn’t obvious, and people whose experience is largely limited to using these tools for all calculations will argue that it doesn’t matter because the computer handles the math and you can just round off the final result, which is an argument that does work most of the time for most straightforward calculations but can get you in a real mix when doing certain types of operationsOr comparing to other results (and of course can cause all manner of problems with computer code if you are mixing and matching levels of precision.
Similarly, having a proficiency at spelling doesn’t matter if spellcheck is always around to correct you…until it isn’t, or it uses a homonym that sounds correct but means something completely different. As human beings, we are in the business of knowing things and communicating them with a degree of explicit definition that other animals do not possess. Handing over significant parts of that fundamental skill set to a chatbot or other AI so we can spend more time watching kitten videos or following celebrities on Twitter wars is not a good trade.
Stranger
Just a quick blanket reply, since I got quoted a couple times both agreeing and disagreeing (politely, to be clear!):
I did try to make the point that it was behavior I saw among some, not all, probably not even the majority of younger folk. For that matter, when I was 14-18 or so, I was the nerdy, introverted one that would be hiding my face in a book most of the time when I wasn’t with people I was reasonably familiar with, so I explicitly tried to avoid judgement.
Again, it is a behavior that exists, but when I was discussing the exact circumstances of the OP’s scenario I gave it grave doubts, but in light of my observations I stated:
Note the “barely” plausible, and that I mentioned someone who was already socially isolated, which can happen regardless of how much or how little AI contact they have. In some ways, I suspect for chronically insecure / unsocial individuals, AI could be something that helps them respond by what the rest of society considers “Normally” which may be helpful to them, but IF (again, huge IF) the scenario of the OP was even vaguely accurate, it may well lead to dissonance when they are subsequently forced into face-to-face interaction.
On the positive side though, I know several people for whom Work from Home was a blessing - they’re comfortable talking or texting via phone or computer even with difficult clients, but had major issues with talking with people face to face. Humans have a huge spectrum of how they’re comfortable interacting, and as pointed out in one of the replies to me, each generation does it differently.
Or as another friend of mine once mentioned, after watching Burn’s documentary on the Civil War - even common soldiers wrote with penmanship, diction, and clarity that were sadly lacking in all but the most poetic and formal modern correspondence.
Yes, but paper letters did not displace synchronous communications in one’s day to day life.
For me, in any given day, less than 5% of my communications are synchronous, talking interactively with someone (whether on video conf or in person). The async communications are near-flawless because it’s normal for me to take a moment, recline, and stroke my beard while I’m thinking of a response. Or, pretend I didn’t see the message, while in a different window I’m furiously typing to gather the needed information, or just wait for a certain moment to pass.
But in sync, I’m noticing in myself and my colleages that our pacing is all off. If someone knows what they want to say, they’ll blurt it all out in one breath. If not, they’ll stutter and stammer before going completely silent. The normal give-and-take, ebb-and-flow, consensus-building of traditional conversation isn’t really a skill anymore, at least not for us.
Let me say I won’t generalize that to all techies, there are clearly some of us who do have a cultivated “podcaster presence”. I would say it’s a maybe 30-40% of us who are suffering from async caveman syndrome.