Associate deans at the Vanderbilt University office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) sent an email to the whole Peabody College community after a man shot eight people at Michigan State University. The deans made the ill-considered choice to use ChatGPT to write the note. But regardless of that choice, such post-shooting sympathy notes are…
The New York Times published a piece regarding university policies and strategies for students using ChatGPT or similar tools to prepare coursework. For each strategy, I’ll assess how realistic it is and what the consequences might be. Articles like this one, as well as the policies they describe, are shortsighted, because AI text generation is…
ChatGPT is a crisis in the making for professors who teach writing. Their administrations are attempting to cope. Their pathetic efforts will fail. Here’s what Georgetown is telling professors — and why it won’t work Here’s the text of a message from Georgetown University to professors there (posted by a professional friend of mine who…
One of the most creative things I do is to help authors select titles and subtitles for their books. While doing a book titling brainstorm yesterday, I asked the AI writing tool ChatGPT to come up with suggestions; it did a creditable job and generated some subtitle text we may end up using. But is…
ChatGPT undermines the traditional way we teach writing in high school or college. We can try (and fail) to preserve the old ways of teaching. Or we can develop new ways that assume future writers will have access to AI tools and help them to use those tools. Current ways we teach writing already stink…
If you are a writer, your job is now in danger. ChatGPT can do a decent job of doing what you do. Oh sure, it has shortcomings — it doesn’t know the difference between truth and fakery, and it’s got no soul. But if you write generic content, AI can now do your job nearly…
Imagine that you had a friend who was a fairly good conversationalist but whose often got facts wrong. What would you think of such a person? Because that is what ChatGPT is. A bullshitter. This, surprisingly, is not a criticism. As it turns out, the AI required to figure out how to write a convincing…
I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT, an AI writing tool from Open AI. It is amazing. In contrast to previous AI writing tools, which were transparently awful, this one is quite good. I am not an AI expert, so don’t ask me how it works. I am a writing expert, so my question is this:…