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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

#131

Post by Tycho »

piltdownman wrote: post #119
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 s…

I’m not being satirical. And nowhere did I suggest that you don’t still read the actual text you’re studying. There are more ways to “engage” with literature than just going to seminars.

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

#132

Post by empath75 »

carbonguy wrote: post #9

I spent some years as a teacher and so have some first-hand experience here; my take, for what it's worth, is that LLMs have indeed blown a gaping hole in the structure of education as actually practiced in the USA. That hole is: much of education is based on the assumption that the unsupervised production of written artifacts is proof of progress in learning. LLMs can produce those artifacts now, incidentally disrup…

A shockingly large percentage of education in the US is teaching kids to produce bullshit essays, so it's no surprise that AI is blowing a hole in it.

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

#133

Post by gm678 »

bazoom42 wrote: post #106
dotancohen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies. Education will adapt.

What record is that? Just out of curiosity.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-rhetoric/#Pha

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

#134

Post by empath75 »

bazoom42 wrote: post #106
dotancohen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of learning has not changed. One of our first written records is a man complaining that this newfangled writing thing will make the students lazy, they will no longer have to remember their studies. Education will adapt.

What record is that? Just out of curiosity.

https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/

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

#135

Post by dgb23 »

rwmj wrote: post #78

I'm pretty sceptical about the entire use of computers in education. For myself, I seem to be incapable of learning anything unless I read it from paper and write down notes in the margin or in my (paper) notebook. Obviously I use screens every day (being a programmer ...) but for actual recall of new material, I need to use paper. Also if I'm in a physical meeting or conference, I never have a laptop open, and I tak…

Gamified learning apps, in a broad sense, seem to be very effective for _practice_.

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

#136

Post by pixl97 »

Timwi wrote: post #69
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always an incentive to cheat: economic, reputational… people cheat in single-player video games . People cheat in sudoku puzzles . By removing all incentives, all you do is destroy the concept of "cheating", not prevent the behaviour.

I think you've listed several disparate incentives that should be looked at separately. Economic incentives are what this thread is about. If those are removed, some instances of cheating will subside. Reputational incentives are similar and harder to address, but they are also less strong because the cheating has a much higher chance to backfire. If you are found out, your economic benefits might continue, but your…

>Economic incentives are what this thread is about.

You cannot remove economic incentives for the most part, 'economy' is attached to all facets of peoples lives, especially where rival goods exist.

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

#137

Post by Tycho »

KineticLensman wrote: post #122
Tycho wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, you have to give the tool a chance. If it can’t even see the text you’re asking about, it’s going to rely on whatever quotes and references it can crib together from reviews and blogs and comments.

Try it for a text that is in the training data, or the public internet, or can be put into the context window - then it might help.

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

#138

Post by cmrdporcupine »

wisty wrote: post #50

A lazy physics teacher can make every question a math question in disguise. If a physics teacher is worried that a better calculator will make their test trivial, maybe they need to teach physics instead of testing math. A lazy humanities teacher can make every question a writing question in disguise. If a better spell checker will make a humanities assessment trivial, then maybe they need to teach humanities instead…

What needs to happen is a return to a more Socratic method of teaching the humanities.

Instead of being about the consumption and production of texts -- texts which only the TA and maybe the prof will read ... ever -- the class should be more about the dialectical process of discussing the ideas in the texts and lectures the students consume.

An LLM will be able to easily rattle off an undergrad level paper. But it can't sit in the classroom and have an intelligent conversation with peers.

Of course none of this will happen because it doesn't scale economically nearly as well. It is far more labour intensive.

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

#139

Post by contravariant »

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.

The good news is that avoiding text-based assignments isn't likely to last. Multimodal agents should be more than capable of identifying islands by shape, or will be soon.

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

#140

Post by KineticLensman »

Tycho wrote: post #137
KineticLensman wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, you have to give the tool a chance. If it can’t even see the text you’re asking about, it’s going to rely on whatever quotes and references it can crib together from reviews and blogs and comments. Try it for a text that is in the training data, or the public internet, or can be put into the context window - then it might help.

Well, yes, I'm sure if I uploaded a full text and spent time on the prompts I could get better results, although these might be similar to other students doing the same thing, which might get me a plagiarism fail.

My point was that I would be very hesitant to rely on ChatGPT as an assistant in a real literature task. Many of the texts on my Eng Lit course are in copyright, as is all of the module material (the OU's course-specific textbooks). The hallucinations are a real show-stopper.

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