John, I've been interested to hear your take on this and it doesn't disappoint. It reminded me of two great (not-five-paragraph) essays worth sharing. Your thoughts about what needs to change in college writing pedagogy made me think of this provocative piece by John Michael Colón about what needs to change in college reading pedagogy (t…
John, I've been interested to hear your take on this and it doesn't disappoint. It reminded me of two great (not-five-paragraph) essays worth sharing. Your thoughts about what needs to change in college writing pedagogy made me think of this provocative piece by John Michael Colón about what needs to change in college reading pedagogy (to save the humanities in the same way you'd like to save college writing): https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-the-end-of-the-canon-wars/?mc_cid=0f46429ec7&mc_eid=21b801de99. Colón says: "The value of the humanities is, upon exposure to real humanistic practice, self-evident"--that when students read and engage with great books, when they wrestle with them, debate and discuss them, they learn from them. Then they value them without needing to be told "why." Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. We can't have one without the other, and both need to be valued if either is to be saved.
The second essay is my all-time favorite piece on NLP-generated writing by one my favorite essayists (and writing teacher) Meghan O'Gieblyn, cleverly titled "Babel": https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/essays/babel-4/#fn27-13678). The essay was published in 2021 (a lifetime ago in AI years), but it feels uncannily prescient given the current buzz around ChatGPT. O'Gieblyn questions the nature of machine writing and human writing, and subtly challenges their differences. Of GPT-3, she says: "There was something prismatic in its voice, an uncanny chorus of intertextuality, the haunting of writing by other writing. The internet was driven from its earliest days by the promise of universal authorship. Hypertext and collaborative software were going to revive the myth and the folktale, narratives created not by a single creative genius but by the collective effort of any oral storytelling culture. It is tempting at times to see this technology as the realization of that dream, a repository of the collective wisdom and knowledge we’ve accumulated as a species. All of humanity speaking in a single voice."
I'm no O'Gieblyn, but I've done some writing and research in this area. (I did an independent study called "Can a Bot Read? What Happens When the Digital Becomes Literate" with two wonderful, well-respected Information Science professors.) And I'd gently push back on the claim that ChatGPT is a "bullshitter" who doesn't "read" or "write." I think that's true only in the most literal sense. As O'Gieblyn points out, algorithms like GPT-3 and its cousin ChatGPT, are trained on massive data sets of human language. So while it's not explicitly programmed with grammar, it absorbs our speech patterns, which contain grammatical structures. We humans have effectively taught it to "speak," and we've done so by giving up our data to corporations who then use that data to train these machines. The machines learn by trawling or "reading" that data and looking for patterns, a process that I can't help but compare to close reading (only the machines are infinitely better close readers than humans are. They see things our brains can't even register). So, while these systems don't "read" and "write" using the exact same processes as humans, there are some similarities and the effect is often the same. I worry that when we dismiss ChatGPT and its ilk as "bullshitters" or "toys," we ignore their real power over us. I'm no futurist either but I suspect these technologies are going to have a much bigger impact on society than most people realize. (Remember when the iPhone first came out and everyone thought it was just a Walkman you could call your friends on?) Anyway, I'm happy people in reading and writing communities are talking about these technologies, even if it's just the start of the conversation. Thanks for writing about it!
These points are well-taken. I don't want anyone to think that I'm minimizing the potential threat of this technology, or, as you say "the power the hold over us," but that's one of the reasons I'll still insist it can't read or write. The bots can hoover up and spit out syntax, but they have no independent understanding or appreciation. Unlike humans they have no emotional response to something they read or write.
One of the things I try to do with students is to encourage them to trust their immediate emotional (and physical) reactions to texts as meaningful data perhaps the the most meaningful data. I give them experiences to practice a method I call ROAS (I wish I had a better acronym) which stands for:
React
Observe
Analyze
Synthesize
This, for me, is a human response to text and by starting with the human response before we attempt to analyze the text and then synthesize that analysis into meaning, we're doing something no algorithm can duplicate. The really bad turn that school took was codifying a set of answers (for both reading and writing) that students were expected to figure out. That is the student acting like an algorithm. It's sort of incredible how far away we've gotten from letting students be human.
The AI can definitely create "text," and there's an interesting argument in the epistemological realm about whether or not its remixing of stuff that humans generated makes it "writing" but for me, writing is more than arranging syntax. Reading is more than taking in information. They are embodied experiences, and without the bodies, the meaning isn't the same.
I love that approach! Beginning with a reader's emotional connection to a text seems both human and humane :). As a lit student, I learned with traditional Socratic-style discussions and loose essay assignments. For six years it was basically the same thing: read a text, talk about it, write about it (however you like as long as it's within word count). I had a tremendous amount of freedom. I've only recently realized how lucky I was. If the assignments had been more prescriptive or not reading- and writing-centered, I'm not sure I would have finished college. It will be interesting what effect language-model technologies like ChatGPT have on humanities programs that are built around the essay.
John, I've been interested to hear your take on this and it doesn't disappoint. It reminded me of two great (not-five-paragraph) essays worth sharing. Your thoughts about what needs to change in college writing pedagogy made me think of this provocative piece by John Michael Colón about what needs to change in college reading pedagogy (to save the humanities in the same way you'd like to save college writing): https://thepointmag.com/letter/on-the-end-of-the-canon-wars/?mc_cid=0f46429ec7&mc_eid=21b801de99. Colón says: "The value of the humanities is, upon exposure to real humanistic practice, self-evident"--that when students read and engage with great books, when they wrestle with them, debate and discuss them, they learn from them. Then they value them without needing to be told "why." Reading and writing are two sides of the same coin. We can't have one without the other, and both need to be valued if either is to be saved.
The second essay is my all-time favorite piece on NLP-generated writing by one my favorite essayists (and writing teacher) Meghan O'Gieblyn, cleverly titled "Babel": https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-40/essays/babel-4/#fn27-13678). The essay was published in 2021 (a lifetime ago in AI years), but it feels uncannily prescient given the current buzz around ChatGPT. O'Gieblyn questions the nature of machine writing and human writing, and subtly challenges their differences. Of GPT-3, she says: "There was something prismatic in its voice, an uncanny chorus of intertextuality, the haunting of writing by other writing. The internet was driven from its earliest days by the promise of universal authorship. Hypertext and collaborative software were going to revive the myth and the folktale, narratives created not by a single creative genius but by the collective effort of any oral storytelling culture. It is tempting at times to see this technology as the realization of that dream, a repository of the collective wisdom and knowledge we’ve accumulated as a species. All of humanity speaking in a single voice."
I'm no O'Gieblyn, but I've done some writing and research in this area. (I did an independent study called "Can a Bot Read? What Happens When the Digital Becomes Literate" with two wonderful, well-respected Information Science professors.) And I'd gently push back on the claim that ChatGPT is a "bullshitter" who doesn't "read" or "write." I think that's true only in the most literal sense. As O'Gieblyn points out, algorithms like GPT-3 and its cousin ChatGPT, are trained on massive data sets of human language. So while it's not explicitly programmed with grammar, it absorbs our speech patterns, which contain grammatical structures. We humans have effectively taught it to "speak," and we've done so by giving up our data to corporations who then use that data to train these machines. The machines learn by trawling or "reading" that data and looking for patterns, a process that I can't help but compare to close reading (only the machines are infinitely better close readers than humans are. They see things our brains can't even register). So, while these systems don't "read" and "write" using the exact same processes as humans, there are some similarities and the effect is often the same. I worry that when we dismiss ChatGPT and its ilk as "bullshitters" or "toys," we ignore their real power over us. I'm no futurist either but I suspect these technologies are going to have a much bigger impact on society than most people realize. (Remember when the iPhone first came out and everyone thought it was just a Walkman you could call your friends on?) Anyway, I'm happy people in reading and writing communities are talking about these technologies, even if it's just the start of the conversation. Thanks for writing about it!
These points are well-taken. I don't want anyone to think that I'm minimizing the potential threat of this technology, or, as you say "the power the hold over us," but that's one of the reasons I'll still insist it can't read or write. The bots can hoover up and spit out syntax, but they have no independent understanding or appreciation. Unlike humans they have no emotional response to something they read or write.
One of the things I try to do with students is to encourage them to trust their immediate emotional (and physical) reactions to texts as meaningful data perhaps the the most meaningful data. I give them experiences to practice a method I call ROAS (I wish I had a better acronym) which stands for:
React
Observe
Analyze
Synthesize
This, for me, is a human response to text and by starting with the human response before we attempt to analyze the text and then synthesize that analysis into meaning, we're doing something no algorithm can duplicate. The really bad turn that school took was codifying a set of answers (for both reading and writing) that students were expected to figure out. That is the student acting like an algorithm. It's sort of incredible how far away we've gotten from letting students be human.
The AI can definitely create "text," and there's an interesting argument in the epistemological realm about whether or not its remixing of stuff that humans generated makes it "writing" but for me, writing is more than arranging syntax. Reading is more than taking in information. They are embodied experiences, and without the bodies, the meaning isn't the same.
I love that approach! Beginning with a reader's emotional connection to a text seems both human and humane :). As a lit student, I learned with traditional Socratic-style discussions and loose essay assignments. For six years it was basically the same thing: read a text, talk about it, write about it (however you like as long as it's within word count). I had a tremendous amount of freedom. I've only recently realized how lucky I was. If the assignments had been more prescriptive or not reading- and writing-centered, I'm not sure I would have finished college. It will be interesting what effect language-model technologies like ChatGPT have on humanities programs that are built around the essay.