CHARGPT
This morning I was amazed that only 2 million years ago Greenland was a lush forest and that humans have only been here 100,000 years.
But that is science which is a foreign country to me and I can be dislocated, but undisturbed, with this discovery only causing a sense of wonder and delight.
But I just read an article in the Atlantic which came to me through the Apple News that directly affects me in my own country, the high school and college classroom where learning to express yourself clearly and to understand in a way that you can share your understanding with others is all important.
This article is about a computer writing program by a company called OpenAI called CharGPT, which does to writing an essay what the pocket calculator did to teaching long division and multiplication. It makes learning to write an essay unnecessary because it is a computer, after all, and already knows everything, but in addition artificial intelligence gives it the power to answer a specific complicated question or take a few prompts and then to write a graceful, grammatical summarizing essay, all in the blink of an eye.
I’ve never heard of this program. It makes anyone into an accomplished writer. A take home exam takes 30 seconds or no seconds at all. That doesn’t make a student into a good writer, it makes good writing so easy to produce that a student doesn’t have to learn to be a good writer.
What it does for me is turn a great deal of what I think of as education upside down. Wikipedia probably does the same thing with every student having all knowledge in his breast pocket.
Actually, I have no idea what it means or what kind of world we are entering. All I know is that it will likely turn the world upside down for me with the classroom, or maybe even the institution of college, being transformed in ways that I can’t imagine, as disconcerting as having automation transform production in ways that throw factory workers in Swannanoa out of a job.
Instead of writing here and trying to figure things out in an(almost) daily post, I can sit back and drink tea and ask Alexa to explain what automation is going to do us and then read what Alexa tells me. I can write a daily post in five minutes, as long as it takes me to print it out.
Except that I am less interested in what I write and am more touched by the process of figuring things out for myself. I wouldn’t sit and write if the process wasn’t fun.
But it is a little disquieting to think that what my feeling along leads to can be done as well or probably much better by a computer who instantly spits out an essay with no enjoyment or feeling at all. It is more than a little disquieting, it is downright horrifying.
And this took me half an hour to write. Here’s the link to the article.
https://apple.news/AyeBKMkl1SaqctflHqv2-Yw
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 