Is AI the Big Bad Wolf of the Internet?
First there was Wikipedia which literally annoyed everyone. Then came Deep Fakes, giving us the heebie-jeebies. Now there's AI and and 'Aigiarism.' Just don't panic!
You can tell, educators are somewhat tickled by the hoopla around AI. (OK, to be honest, some are aghast. It’s roiling up the interwebs, isn’t it?) It’s a crucial moment we should not dismiss with snarkiness. Things will accelerate from now on in the content and knowledge departments.
Photo: Sandra Petersen, Pixabay
I began this a few weeks back while editing a podcast about AI that I had my colleagues record. It was on the good, the bad and the scary of AI. (TikTok’s apparently rife with AI apps.) Educators quickly found themselves in the front line of all this shake up. One word: Plagiarism. Even Google —yes Google - is recognizing it better do something. Could you guess why?
FRIEND OR FRENEMY?
I have to say I’m ambivalent about the direction AI is taking. On the one hand it’s threatening writers, and I’m ticked off. On the other, it’s nothing more than automation. I may be annoyed by the spell-check feature in Microsoft Word and Google docs but it’s sometimes useful and so I’ll live with it. I’ve never spoken to Siri (I don’t own an Apple device, thank you very much!) but I know a 97 year old lady in a retirement home who does. It’s a blessing.
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Remember when teachers were banning Wikipedia? Remember how students were told it was “more dangerous than crack” or that it was “all made up?” I heard that ten years ago when I had just started teaching; I winced, but said nothing. Since then they have softened. (Read “Truce Be Told” in Harvard magazine, from 2011.) Will it be the same with ChatGPT and the likes? I seriously think educators will take a broader view this time. Those few harboring the “more dangerous than crack” attitude will be mollified by the apps themselves that, as we speak, are rushing to put some guardrails around this thing. Microsoft made a move in this direction nearly three years ago with a plagiarism checker in Word. Turnitin says it can detect plagiarism in ChatGPT ‘articles,’ and OpenAI has said it is working on watermarking or fingerprinting its content generated by ChatGPT.
Microsoft, which has a major stake in ChatGPT will definitely want to wend off legally sticky issues. They would not want to be dragged into court on a whim because someone’s artwork or ‘idea’ was scraped off a website, edited, remixed, and baked in a new oven. But some are optimistic.
Here’s what a teacher had to say about plagiarism on our school podcast, Fully Charged.)
“The opposite argument is that you could use a bot to do a lot of menial things… We could use it appropriately as a teaching tool to teach (students) to free up time to be more creative.” Dr. David Collings
So to give you some background, when we refer to AI, we mean AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. Don’t be fooled by hyperventilating promoters of AGI. To be sure, the game is not over, though the Google folks may have suggested. The nonprofit, OpenAI has been referring to it as that which will ‘outperform humans.’ Its backers were the usual suspects: Google, Elon Musk, Amazon, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, LinkedIn.
OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity.
CHATBOTS, ANYONE?
By the way, ever wonder what the GPT in Chat GPT stand for? It’s a weird acronym for ‘Generative Pre-trained Transformer.’ So subtle!
I have a lot to say about these bots. Instead of going into details, I’ll suggest you read an article I published two weeks ago on Medium. Basically I said, we shouldn’t get too much in a tizzy; we should stop treating this like a cheating tool, and think of it a teaching tool. The wolves are not circling. Chill.
Or, you could listen to my podcast here on which I weigh in on my ongoing experiments with ChatGPT.
Until next time! Thanks for reading this far.