In this case, no, the student was misremembering the name of a poet he read last semester. But, unable to identify a poem on that topic by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Google just made one up.

I've had problems all month trying to put the publication dates of texts next to the titles on the syllabus--quickly searching for a bunch of dates in a row, a lot of them are off by a few decades--just small enough that if you're not really thinking hard about it, might seem plausible.

@carrideen

I really hate it when people tell me that they got information from Google and cannot tell me the actual site Google sent them to that the information came from.

I try to imagine someone reading information in a book and telling everyone they got it from the card catalogue in the library.

This was happening before the the AI bullshit that only magnifies the problem by orders of magnitude.

@carrideen

I've pretty much come to the point that I want a printed book with a publication date of 2000 or earlier. Of course the libraries have either dumped books wholesale or made them inaccessible by moving them off-site and making them request-only, because "everything is on-line now".

Ooops.

@carrideen Everytime I read something like this I feel bad for teachers. Even as an undergrad student I’m seeing my peers over rely on AI models and immediately trust the data it spits out with no fact-checking or verification - then being baffled when they get a poor grade because it was wrong or incomplete.

I forget how to trigger it (I don’t daily drive Google anymore) but there’s a -ai tag or something of that sort to disable Gemini results. Might be beneficial to make a mention of that and point out errors like this to the class. People won’t realize that GenAI won’t be helpful to them like they think until it is explicitly mentioned and displayed.

@carrideen We’ve just spent a few decades teaching students that you should trust backed up information (= stuff you verify with internet search) above a single person’s opinion, as your classmate or neighbor can be wrong.

And now when teachers say ”that’s completely false” about something a kid read from a sentence generator, it can rightfully seem like the teachers are the ones mistaken. There is the valid-seeming search result, after all.

@carrideen
Use offline Lists like Copy and Paste with Computers and Libraries. Still easy known Math, databases and copied shared knowledge. A. I. can help too but need secured and watched results. Back to wrote Information loop...

Important is the consent about value of information.

@carrideen When students say their teachers ban Wikipedia as a source of information because it's edited by mere humans, not scholars...

Well...at least it has humans.

@carrideen slop, it is overwhelming with slop.

And worst of all, this is not by accident.