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AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

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Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#111

Post by thijson »

Leo-thorne wrote: post #80

AI hasn’t destroyed the humanities, but it definitely made things more complicated and harder to teach. I’ve seen students rely entirely on chatbots to write essays, and it really does make teaching harder. As the article says, we need to find ways to make AI and the humanities work together, not just hold on to the old way of doing things.

A lot of my engineering exams didn't allow certain calculators, so I guess that's what will happen for humanities, supervised and timed essay writing.

I remember going to museums and seeing all the modern art, and wondering why art went to such weird places compared to the realism of the 1600's, and my conclusion was that invention of photography made realism obsolete. I wonder if something similar will happen to the humanities.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#112

Post by KineticLensman »

Tycho wrote: post #107

I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in…

(source: am a literature student - UK open university)

I just asked get ChatGPT a question about use of language in a specific book (China Miéville's Kraken). It gave a plausible answer but used a common English word ('knackering') instead of the word 'knacking' that is actually used (the word 'knackering' isn't in the text). I then asked it to give me a quote using 'knackering' and it gave me a quote with the word 'knacking'. I asked it to put the quote into Harvard reference style which it did, but didn't provide a page number, which it said I'd have to look up myself.

I think relying on ChatGPT for an essay would be fairly frustrating, and if you used ChatGPT to develop your thesis, you could very quickly get a generic plagiaristic answer (based on the quotes everyone else used) rather than one than that captured your own response to the text, and which contained factual errors.

[Edit] It also said that "gods inhabiting USB sticks are presented matter-of-factly" in Kraken which is false (there are no mentions of USB). When I asked it for a quote to support its assertion, it replied "While the novel doesn't explicitly depict gods inhabiting USB sticks..."

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#113

Post by thijson »

seydor wrote: post #71

Humans are mimetic creatures. The biggest damage (some call it influence) that LLMs will do is that next generation will be talking like an LLM. They might even normalize hallucination

That reminds me of a professor that would play various forms of music compressed in different ways. The class actually preferred the distortion produced by mp3 over uncompressed.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#114

Post by pixl97 »

ivape wrote: post #88
simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

“Cannot be done with chat gpt” Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something? How deep is this addiction? I’m scared to ask what the academic version of fizz-buzz would be at the end of a 4 year degree, “hey write one paragraph describing a simple paradox, an example of irony, or an example of a metaphor”.

>Is a military base the only place “no devices” can be enforced or something?

I mean with the force of law, yea. Businesses get away with a little bit more in places because they pay you to show up.

But if you think anyone is going to university/college to have all their devices taken away all the time and pay for the privilege then you might be confused.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#115

Post by simonw »

UncleMeat wrote: post #45
simonw wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My suggestion here isn't to have the professors do this: it's for the professors to challenge their students to do this.

I am friends with an unusually large number of professors, many of which are at very top institutions. The "make your own pedagogy" approach for students leaves huge portions of the classroom doing zero work whatsoever.

Thats useful, thanks. Sounds like this approach won't help most students.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#116

Post by homarp »

dleeftink wrote: post #91
simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

Among others, Howard Rheingold has been active in this space. For those interested, check out the Peeragogy Handbook and the post that sparked the idea[0]. > The more I give my teacher-power to students and encourage them to take more responsibility for their own learning, the more they show me how to redesign my ways of teaching [0]: https://clalliance.org/blog/toward-peeragogy/

https://bsky.app/profile/hrheingold.bsky.social/post/3lprsqu... points to a compiled syllabus and links to recordings of lectures and video chats in a free pdf, about an "intro to cooperation studies": https://rheingold.com/texts/IntroToCooperationStudies.pdf

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#117

Post by pixl97 »

coldcache wrote: post #14
simonw wrote: post #3

The first comment on that article caught my attention: > I am a grad student in the philosophy department at SFSU and teach critical thinking. This semester I pivoted my entire class toward a course design that feels more like running an obstacle course with AI than engaging with Plato. And my students are into it. It would be interesting to take a class of students and set them an assignment to come up with assignme…

I find it difficult to think of examples that aren't just based on niche information (what did we talk about on this day? what analogy does the teacher make repeatedly?). Maybe multimodal stuff?

Even multimodal stuff is something is advancing pretty quickly. And with the more widespread incorporation of things like this, the information will be fed back into AI systems as training data making finding new things more difficult.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#118

Post by Tycho »

KineticLensman wrote: post #112
Tycho wrote: post #107

I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in…

(source: am a literature student - UK open university) I just asked get ChatGPT a question about use of language in a specific book (China Miéville's Kraken ). It gave a plausible answer but used a common English word ('knackering') instead of the word 'knacking' that is actually used (the word 'knackering' isn't in the text). I then asked it to give me a quote using 'knackering' and it gave me a quote with the word…

Did you upload the text of the novel? It’s under copyright so wouldn’t be in the training data or retrievable via search.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#119

Post by piltdownman »

Tycho wrote: post #107

I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in…

What a wonderful bit of satire.

To those that missed the joke - 'consuming' the classics is the antithesis of a liberal arts education. The value lies in the engagement, the debate, the Hegellian dialectic involved in arriving at a true grok level understanding of the text or topic.

It would be akin to reading the Sparknotes of Ulysses and being able to reference how it draws heavily on Homer's Odyssey, or utilises stream-of-consciousness narrative to great effect; and thinking that, as a result, you have the faintest understanding of the text, its conception, or its impact.

The OP almost hit on this with the 'Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford,Yale,MIT etc...'. Unlike coding bootcamps or similar, universities are not VOCATIONAL TRAINING - no matter how skewed towards that end-goal the American Economy is dictating such. As just about any Educator can attest, no amount of listening to youtube lectures will replace the University experience, nevermind the Oxbridge/Ivy League experience.

The pedagogical benefits are simply unrealisable from an AI prompt 'streamlining'- i.e. being forced to read and engage with topics outside of your comfort zone to maintain your GPA, engaging and working with people from a diversity of outlooks and backgrounds, benefitting from the 1:1 and small group sessions with the Academics who often wrote the literal book on the subject in question.

If the intersection of JSTOR and Machine Learning didn't reduce humanities to Cory Doctorow level script-kiddyism, the hoi polloi throwing prompts into a hallucinatory markov chain isn't likely to advance or diminish Academia anymore than the excess of 'MBA IN 5 DAYS!' or '...for Dummies' titles previously available.

Re: AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

#120

Post by j33zusjuice »

Tycho wrote: post #107

I would love to be a literature student today. Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming. Red team every essay with ChatGPT. Become a top tier Genius.com contributor for poetry. Listen to all the online lectures from Oxford, Yale etc. Effortlessly pick up where past critics have left off because the AI can summarise all contributions on any topic. Find every reference to support your thesis in…

OK, that last sentence would be incredible. I think this is tongue in cheek, but I was an English lit major so I feel the need to defend my honor. XD

I don’t think you’d do well in 400-level classes this way. English Lit isn’t as much of a joke as STEM students make it out to be[1]: it gets a lot harder than the bullshit 101/201 courses everyone is required to take. You’re supposed to try to be original in your analysis, and it has to be rigorously proven within the text itself.

Probably as a grad student you’d start arguing against other critics points, but not undergrad. I think that would hold for almost all schools because no one at that level in that field wants to hear from someone who doesn’t know how to analyze a text in the first place. It’d be like a high school student trying to tell you about software (or systems, network, data, etc.) engineering.

For similar reasons, AI summarizations for past contributions wouldn't work, either. If you’re arguing someone else’s analysis is wrong, you’re going to need to read and understand the whole thing. And if you’re just copying from AI, you’ll have a hard time defending your position.

Although, man, if you can understand the subtext of a book from listening to an audiobook *while gaming*, AND you have time to watch all the online lectures about a book!? I need to talk to you about time management, my friend!

1 - I have been involved in so many forums and subreddits where people try to analyze books, comics, TV, or movies. Based on what I have seen come out of people there —- most of you MFers couldn’t pass 300-level classes.

People can’t analyze literature for shit, and I think it’s because everyone gets such a negative perception of literary analysis because high school and required college classes are junk. It’s actually really hard to read five novels in month, keep track of all the characters and plots and themes and so on, and understand all of them well enough to write a coherent argument. I saw so many kids in my major crying about their GPA getting tanked because they weren’t ready for rigorous analysis. FWIW, I was 25 as a Junior (third year of uni, in the US), and had spent the last few years reading exercise physiology papers while bored at work. Seeing real science changed my life, and I wanted to apply their level of rigor to my own analysis of any kind. It’s why I’m good at my job now, tbh.

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