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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

#91

Post by dleeftink »

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/

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

#92

Post by vintermann »

UncleMeat wrote: post #70
verisimi wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The history we have inevitably passes through bottlenecks. Much is left out, edited away, embellished. We have no idea what happened over 500 years ago, but the idea of a brilliant scholar translating the Greek texts on behalf of the Medicis, shouldn't simply be accepted as stated. If you are running the world (like the Medicis did) history would be a lever of control. It seems inevitable that the stories should be d…

Paleography, transcription, and translation are hellishly difficult to learn and really make it difficult for interested people to explore the archive. LLMs have become pretty darn good at doing this out of the box. Prior to this you needed specially trained ML models and before that there was no automation whatsoever.

I can't find any big AI model which can read historical Kurrent-family handwriting well out of the box. You still need specially trained models (i.e. transkribus) which generalize terribly.

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

#93

Post by simiones »

lr4444lr wrote: post #75
UncleMeat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge. This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked…

How does making podcasts solve anything? Students can just read out what the AI writes into an audio recording. Why is this problem being fretted over? In-class written and oral tests should be fine to assess students. If AI helps them learn or even cram the material, great!

Homework and/or project assignments are often a major component of scoring for many courses.

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

#94

Post by dirkc »

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/

It's fun to see how old that article is and that the ideas still apply! Power dynamics are not considered enough when people talk about education. My believe is that the more you balance the power dynamic, the more learning is prioritized over education.

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

#95

Post by UncleMeat »

lr4444lr wrote: post #75
UncleMeat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge. This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked…

How does making podcasts solve anything? Students can just read out what the AI writes into an audio recording. Why is this problem being fretted over? In-class written and oral tests should be fine to assess students. If AI helps them learn or even cram the material, great!

You can do different podcast structures than a single person reading a script, which can produce some useful social barriers to cheating.

A lot of kids also suck at cheating so the small barrier of "ask ai to generate a script and then read it" appears to stop a bunch of cheaters.

There are limitations to timed evaluations such that oral exams or blue books are not panaceas.

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

#96

Post by throwaway75 »

pasc1878 wrote: post #87
throwaway75 wrote: post #86

What is the general take on the ethics of using AI as a much more powerful search engine? For example, "Find all occurences in the text where Odysseus' will is overridden by the Gods." The question is not something that would be directly set by an instructor, but might be required to substantiate an interpretation that a student is aiming for. Finding something like this is difficult and requires reading the text clo…

Will the AI find ALL the occurrences. Finding hallucinated ones is OK here as the user can check each one.

Perhaps not. But it'll probably find sufficient passages/instances that are useful.

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

#97

Post by sampl3username »

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.

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

#98

Post by UncleMeat »

vintermann wrote: post #92
UncleMeat wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paleography, transcription, and translation are hellishly difficult to learn and really make it difficult for interested people to explore the archive. LLMs have become pretty darn good at doing this out of the box. Prior to this you needed specially trained ML models and before that there was no automation whatsoever.

I can't find any big AI model which can read historical Kurrent-family handwriting well out of the box. You still need specially trained models (i.e. transkribus) which generalize terribly.

Transkribus is definitely still the best option in some cases. But there are a bunch of cases where it was necessary two years ago and isn't necessary anymore, which is pretty remarkable.

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

#99

Post by pasc1878 »

throwaway75 wrote: post #96
pasc1878 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will the AI find ALL the occurrences. Finding hallucinated ones is OK here as the user can check each one.

Perhaps not. But it'll probably find sufficient passages/instances that are useful.

Yes but the question did say ALL.

Finding some yes it might well be quicker than a manual read.

So it depends on what the actual requirement is.

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

#100

Post by thfuran »

UncleMeat wrote: post #26
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…

> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge. This is indeed true. But a challenge is that few professors are being given the time and training to help do this. When you are on a 4/4 and just keeping your head above water you don't tend to have enough time to adopt experimental pedagogies and completely replan your courses. And professors are largely being tasked…

>on a 4/4

That's teaching four distinct courses?

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