2012-01-13 — AI and college

You can’t use ChatGPT in person. College kids will soon be writing term papers using ChatGPT, which raises some interesting challenges for professors. How do they know if the student knows the subject or is simply using artificial intelligence to fulfill a requirement?

How about this? Talk to the students!

Pictures of documents on the carpet. Remember how the FBI released photos of the classified documents seized from Mar-a-Lago? I wonder why they haven’t done that with the Biden documents? (Actually, I don’t.)

As I discussed in the post about bossy women, the problem with saying “if ___ had done this it would be different” is that no two situations are identical. If you compare the Clinton, Trump, and Biden stories about the mishandling of classified documents, each case has its own peculiarities, so it’s not quite fair to say “they did this with A, they should do it with B.” It doesn’t work that way.

On the other hand, when you have steady, persistent examples of bias, and they all seem to go in one direction, it’s hard not to make conclusions.

On the benefit of discussing literature. With at least two books that we’ve read for “shortcut to the classics” (on the “Beer and Conversation Podcast”), I changed my initial judgment of the book after discussing it with Pigweed and Longinus. The two that come to mind are Metamorphosis and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

I was underwhelmed with both of them, but after reviewing them I realized there was more to the stories than I had perceived at first.