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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

#141

Post by gdubs »

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago.

If college students are using AI to breeze through their work rather than doing the reading themselves, developing grit – I don't see how we can blame them rather than ourselves for the educational and career system we've created. This problem didn't happen overnight, and it's not just AI.

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

#142

Post by Tycho »

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…

You probably wouldn’t be arguing that previous critics are wrong but surely to get top marks you’d be expected to know what relevant literary criticism has already been published and then build on that in some fashion. No doubt just reading that stuff would sharpen your own insights. AI should make it much easier to find the most relevant criticism and put it in context.

AI should also be able to help you gather evidence from the reference texts, because it can exercise reasonable judgement without any constraint on patience or access or time. Consider the recent social media sensation about the lady who got a PhD for analysing how smell factors into the fates of literary characters. AI can quickly find thousands of examples, and then filter them as desired.

You could even have the AI write essays for you - “analyse this novel through the lens of ____ theory” - where no literary criticism already exists to review. You could have it generate any number of such essays, applying theories/frameworks you might not even know, but want to understand better.

I think it’s possible to “read” an audiobook while doing something monotonous like walking, driving, or, yes, gaming. The lectures you probably have to treat like podcasts and just play them in the background and pick up some ideas.

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

#143

Post by nluken »

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…

> Consume the classics in audiobook form while flâneuring or gaming

I can't tell if you're serious or not, but this would be like saying you've "watched" a movie because you had it on your second monitor while you were playing counter strike. There's a fundamental difference in hearing a book read to you and actually listening and engaging with the audio on a meaningful level. The latter requires focus, and you're not going to be able to do that if you're gaming away at the same time.

Put another way, why would someone who presumably loves reading bother studying literature if they don't actually care enough to pay attention to the books they supposedly loved?

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

#144

Post by bluGill »

gdubs wrote: post #141

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago. If college stu…

Nobody ever could say with confidence what jobs will pe available. those who know the basics and flexible can find something.

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

#145

Post by Tycho »

KineticLensman wrote: post #140
Tycho wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Your position seems to be “if you use the tool like a total dumbass, you might get a bad outcome.” Like… maybe use it intelligently?

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

#146

Post by kouru225 »

empath75 wrote: post #132
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.

Bingo. If you want to just write an essay, then ChatGPT is perfect. If you want to write an essay that says something very particular, then ChatGPT starts to give you issues

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

#148

Post by bee_rider »

UncleMeat wrote: post #104
thfuran wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>on a 4/4 That's teaching four distinct courses?

A 4/4 means that you teach four classes each semester. This is a pretty typical schedule for non tenure track or adjunct professors in the humanities or even tenure track faculty at slacs, though I've seen 5/5s before. It is a lot of work to update this many classes to adapt to AI.

That seems like a crazy amount of work. Four classes, or four sections of the same class?

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

#149

Post by yupitsme123 »

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…

If a teacher knows the topic that they're teaching, then a 30 second talk with a student is enough to determine if the student actually knows anything. Maybe "assignments" aren't the best method of building and verifying knowledge.

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

#150

Post by tsunamifury »

gdubs wrote: post #141

There's a deeper educational problem that's been decades in the making which is that students are trained to see school and work as a series of never ending goals to achieve. The ultimate one is to 'get a job'. Well, now nobody can really even say what jobs will be available in 5 to 10 years with high confidence. Except maybe the trades – and we mostly cut those programs out of schools a long time ago. If college stu…

Trades would collapse if even 10% of the population switched to them. What does no one get about this?
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