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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

#121

Post by piltdownman »

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…

Mieville is a wonderfully challenging prompt for ChatGPT. In the same vein, I would imagine 'The City and The City' would end up with a bunch of half-hallucinated forum-posting and reviews regarding Disco Elysium.

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

#122

Post by KineticLensman »

Tycho wrote: post #118
KineticLensman wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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.

I didn't upload the text; I was trying to see what happened if one asked a question about a specific book, as if I was someone trying to do an essay in a hurry. I know the text quite well so could easily spot the hallucinated answers but someone with less knowledge might have been fooled. The experience reconvinced me not to rely on this specific LLM for help with my essays.

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

#123

Post by piltdownman »

j33zusjuice wrote: post #120
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 analy…

//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.

QFT. It's like the Sparknotes scenario I outlined in my post above - what you get from this level of engagement isn't insight, least of all a debatable position, it's just a loosely cohesive bunch of table-quiz facts.

//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.

Because most of what is being examined is passive/active voicings, brain-dead symbolism, and ham-fisted and dated metaphors as literary vehicles.

Even at University level there should be an emphasis on a 101 level course hammering home the importance of Critical Theory in Literary Criticism as a framework and approach for disseminating texts. Without a basic understanding of the cultural, historical, and ideological dimensions under which a text was conceived and published, you haven't a hope of climbing the foothills of Beckett, Camus, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Shaw...

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

#124

Post by IggleSniggle »

UncleMeat wrote: post #47
quanto wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. If we don't learn from history, why do we do history? Is it a form of pure entertainment, i.e. of arts? If so, does that give more credence to White's argument? I have had a PhD colleague who genuinely believed that history ought to be (in the philosophical normative sense) contributing to national propaganda, thus of national interest…

> If we don't learn from history, why do we do history? Historians uncover and communicate the story of humanity in as rich and diverse of a way as possible. This is, in my mind, somewhat comparable to the process of doing pure math research or fundamental physics research. While there may be practical outcomes for today (either unexpected or intended as a goal of a particular research direction), we also understand…

One of the primary advantages of having a software engineer (or lawyer, for that matter) on staff isn't that they produce software, not exactly. It's that they guide the flow of process, and can adapt the river as needed to keep the business running smoothly.

Historians, imho, serve a similar purpose for society at large. They digest the information of the past to make sense of it for today, and sometimes they build dams that redirect the informational flow of future history.

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

#125

Post by jhanschoo »

sdoering wrote: post #28
UncleMeat wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. This is not what academic historians generally do. The study of history tells us about the story of humanity and exists for wider reasons than direct application to decision making today. This is even true for military history, which is among the slowest subfields at adopting new methods and practices.

Thanks. Came here to say that. Having studied history - esp. in a time where Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction" was strongly (and sometimes emotionally) discussed in between students and professors alike, taught me, that - while we might learn from history - that that is not the reason to "do" history. I also learned to appreciate history on a fundamentally different level than I did, when I loved his…

> Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction"

Your comment made me dig up "Historical text as literary artifact".

I have several thoughts on that, but one very important analogy stood out to me and is succinct enough to comment here. In statistics, one talks about the population, collecting data (sampling from the popluation), and building a model from the collected data. You may have guessed that the collected data alone does not typically make much sense, but for the patterns encapsulated by the model, which then has explanatory power; yet among the three classes I mentioned, it is the most fictitious and constructed for a particular goal, the most inauthentic.

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

#126

Post by pixl97 »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #32
Animats wrote: post #18

The author is talking mostly about teaching history. But what he describes as teaching history is more like history appreciation. It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. It's more about studying the "classics", from Cicero onwards. Military officers study much history, but in a different way. They look for mistakes. Why did someone lose a battle or a war? Why did they even get into that particular…

> It's not about how to use history as an aid to prediction. Because this isnt the goal of history. You cant use history to predict the future. > If you want to understand Cicero's era, for example, read [1]. This is a study of Cicero by an experienced and cynical newspaper political reporter. The author writes that too many historians take Cicero's speeches at face value. The author knows better, having heard many p…

>You cant use history to predict the future.

I mean this statement is somewhat false.

If I show you a picture of a cup from 100 ms ago and it's in midair probability favors that the cup will be on it's way to the ground to its demise. Statistically this will be true.

History is filled with analogous times where by watching the present you can make predictions far better than flipping a coin.

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

#127

Post by sdenton4 »

sampl3username wrote: post #97
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 am a zoomer. Is it really that hard for everyone to NOT use AI? Using AI very clearly atrophies your cognitive skills.

I'm a millennial who has watched the complete failure of my generation to realize the promise of those Obama 'Hope' posters.

"Everyone don't do X" runs into problems when there are clear incentives to do X. Like, say, grades which eventually will be used to determine who gets to graduate, who gets into which schools, who ultimately gets easier access to higher paying jobs. And simple convenience is an incentive in itself - if doing X saves time, it will be the default.

This same dynamic is why we still have a climate crisis, even though everyone has known about the problem for thirty years.

"Everyone just do Y" is what we call a collective action problem. When there are clear incentives to defect, it is also a free rider problem.

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

#128

Post by r2_pilot »

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”.

I mean, before you get to military bases, there are Pearson's testing centers that have lockers for your phone/gear and proctored exams.

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

#129

Post by KineticLensman »

piltdownman wrote: post #121
KineticLensman wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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…

Mieville is a wonderfully challenging prompt for ChatGPT. In the same vein, I would imagine 'The City and The City' would end up with a bunch of half-hallucinated forum-posting and reviews regarding Disco Elysium.

> Mieville is a wonderfully challenging prompt for ChatGPT.

Indeed. I'm doing a close reading of Kraken and have been amazed at the number of 'weird' entities and plot events that Miéville introduces [0]. It would be very easy to hallucinate a few more.

There are more than 100 passages in Kraken where Miéville names people, places and events that occur in other media or culture. For example, in a list of people associated with submarine technology, he throws in the name of the underwater stuntman [1] who played the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Again, it would be easy to hallucinate additional content.

[0] For example, a secondary character who was originally an ancient Egyptian burial slave-statue who went on strike in the afterlife, and in modern London is now the trade-union convenor for the Union of Magicked Assistants.

[1] Ricou Browning, if anyone is interested.

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

#130

Post by math_dandy »

lynx97 wrote: post #21
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…

> where all you got was the outline of the island As a blind person I can't help but notice that this "innovative" question design is inherently inaccessible to people like me. Yes, I know I'm not the norm. However, I can't help but notice that this avoidance of text based assignments is making accessible teaching even more impossible. Say welcome to a new generation of Digital Divide.

As a university professor, I admit with some shame that accessibility issues for specific problem types is not on my radar. “Innovation” isn’t the main culprit here.

Fortunately, my university has a good accessibility center that takes care of accommodation issues (large print versions of tests, etc.). I just send them my tests and they take care of it. It’s a great service, and absolutely crucial because I simply don’t have the time to customize assessments. I assume they would get in touch if they were unable to retrofit accessibility onto an assessment, but that hasn’t happened in my fifteen years of employment.

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