Kathleen Belewhello good morning howdy, I am teaching undergrads today for the first time in a long time and I hate that I have to start with the AI speech. Has to happen. I just hate it.
I hate that teaching has become policing and surveilling. I hate that learning has become evasion and shortcuts. I hate how AI papers say nothing at all; they have no capacity for originality, contribution, or social change.
In a world full of problems, I hate that this technology boils our engines of hope down to empty non-interaction. My school recently polled to see how the faculty feels about using AI for GRADING. At what point is it just robots talking to each other? Where is the humanity in these humanities?
We are told to do oral exams; I can't do that in a lecture class of this many students. We are told to use lockdown browsers, but they're only effective if you monitor the students by video. I refuse to take this step.
I can't do blue books because nobody can read anybody else's handwriting (we didn't teach them penmanship). What I really need is a room full of typewriters. This doesn't exist at my very wealthy, full-of-resources university.
Students tell us they use AI because it makes their writing better, cleaner, more likely to get an A. But it also makes it empty. LLMs like ChatGPT generate, by design, the most likely ideas and sentences. It is, by definition, impersonal and unoriginal.
If anybody has ideas, I'm all ears.
If anybody would like to fund a room full of typewriters, HMU
Oh also interesting: students report that they think we use AI to write lectures and books and articles. Some of them already think this is just a dance of meaningless nothing. I find this endlessly heartbreaking.
Also also: this thread is mostly about exams, which are already the least good kind of evaluation tool for historical thinking, research and writing. The problem is even worse with take-home essays and papers, which is where the real work used to happen.
Eric LiknessAs Audrey Watters has described it,... this "cop shi*"
And as an Instructional Tech support person, I will never advocate FOR it, nor will I testify on behalf of it in any honor code cheating cases brought up on my campus. The vendor is welcome to do so, but I will not lend support to the claims THE VENDOR makes for their product.