The em dash on 99% Invisible

A fun episode of the podcast 99% Invisible : “The Em Dash,” its past, present (in which it is sometimes disrespected as “the ChatGPT hyphen”), and future.

You didn’t think I would make a point of using a dash in this post, did you?

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[Contra Fiona Green, who talks about Emily Dickinson in this episode: most readers would say that we are meant to register the pauses in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Meter (often irregular) does not override all else.]

AI apologies

A story from The New York Times (gift link):

Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.

But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had.

Using AI to write an e-mail to a professor seems an especially witless way to use AI, as if that professor could not possibly have seen a nearly identical or identical such message before.

In 2023 I made the following addition to my read-all-over post How to e-mail a professor:

Don’t ask AI to write an e-mail for you. At least not if you want your e-mail to sound like the work of a human being.

When I asked ChatGPT in 2023 to generate an e-mail requesting an assignment, here’s what resulted. The first sentence: “I hope this email finds you well.” And it gets better (worse) from there.

Have the results improved? Don’t know. Don’t care either.

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[The Illinois story is from last October. I sincerely apologize for missing it then. Thanks, Lu!]

“To AI or Not to AI”

From NPR’s Consider This: “To AI or not to AI? Do college students appreciate the question?” I like this, from Will Teague, a professor of history at Angelo State University interviewed for this story:

“What I told one student was that just because I hand you a hammer doesn’t mean you know how to build a house. You have to learn how to do the thing first before you use tools to make the thing easier.”

See also Ted Chiang’s observation:

Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Undermining credibility

From the most recent installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American :

When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America. It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”

“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”

AI and answers

College Matters, a podcast from The Chronicle of Higher Education, host Jack Stripling and Chronicle writer Beth McMurtrie talk about AI in higher education “Using AI Without (Really) Cheating.” It’s a remarkably cheerful conversation, focusing on the thoughtful ways students are using AI — to make self-quizzes, outlines, summaries, all in the cause of greater efficiency.

I’ll quote something I wrote this summer:

Using AI to generate an outline or essay isn’t accelerating learning — it’s accelerating the creation of a product to turn in for a grade. And if you’re using AI to do your thinking for you, your destination may not be one you anticipated or, perhaps, even recognize upon arrival.

One comment from McMurtrie that I found especially noteworthy and saddening concerned a study by professors at University College Dublin. I’ve added color:

What the researchers came away realizing is that students were using tech out of the sight lines of their professors in a lot of ways. For example, students would say, if a professor threw out a question in class, one of them might put it into ChatGPT, get the answer, put it into a WhatsApp group chat, and then everybody in the class would see what ChatGPT said should be the answer to that question. And then somebody might, you know, deliver the answer. Chances are the faculty member had no idea that was happening. They just knew that when they threw the question out to the class, there was probably some silence and then someone might raise their hand. Some professors did notice also that fewer students are asking questions in class. And, again, it’s that they could look down at their phone, plug in any question they might have in the moment and then get the answer from AI. So in a lot of ways it is changing the immediacy of the connections in the classroom.

What an impoverished way to think about conversation in a classroom. I cannot (literally cannot) imagine a scenario in which a question hangs in the air while someone types into a phone, finds and sends out the answer, and someone else speaks it. Questions should be occasions for thought. And it’s reasonable to wonder: if you’re relying on AI, how do you know that the answer is even a valid one?

I’m with Professor Kingsfield, though without the hauteur: “You will never find the correct, absolute, and final answer.” But there are absolutely wrong answers. Yesterday, Google AI told me that Plato’s Apology is a novel. Try for yourself.

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AI and college writing

“The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education”: in The New Yorker, Hua Hsu asks “What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?”

Many anecdotes, but I don’t see much reexamination of purpose here. Hsu contrasts professors who have returned to requiring handwritten work with professors who are intent on “getting students to see the value of process.” (But have writing by hand and attention to process ever been mutually exclusive?) And Hsu wonders about the virtues of efficiency:

In my conversations, just as college students invariably thought of ChatGPT as merely another tool, people older than forty focussed on its effects, drawing a comparison to G.P.S. and the erosion of our relationship to space. The London cabdrivers rigorously trained in “the knowledge” famously developed abnormally large posterior hippocampi, the part of the brain crucial for long-term memory and spatial awareness. And yet, in the end, most people would probably rather have swifter travel than sharper memories. What is worth preserving, and what do we feel comfortable off-loading in the name of efficiency?

What if we take seriously the idea that A.I. assistance can accelerate learning — that students today are arriving at their destinations faster?

But using AI to generate an outline or essay isn’t accelerating learning — it’s accelerating the creation of a product to turn in for a grade. And if you’re using AI to do your thinking for you, your destination may not be one you anticipated or, perhaps, even recognize upon arrival. Witness the student Hsu quotes who used Claude to “write” two papers: “I couldn’t tell you the thesis for either paper hahhahaha.” And he received grades of A- and B+.

I will once again cite the words of Ted Chiang: “Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.”

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[Leave it to The New Yorker to punctuäte AI. And thanks to the reader who alerted me to a missing word. Generate was what I had, and I don’t know how it went missing.]

“Your Brain on ChatGPT”

A study from MIT Media Lab Research, “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task,” asked fifty-four participants to write essays, with some participants using their own heads, some using a search engine, and some using a large language model (LLM). The conclusion:

While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI’s role in learning.

Everywhere in academic life, teachers are hearing the mantra “Our students need to know this.” I’d offer great resistance. What students first need to know is how to read well and how think, speak, and write clearly and persuasively and ethically. (I swiped part of that sentence from a comment I wrote a couple of days ago.)

A detail from the abstract that I found interesting: “LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work.” That reminded me of a low-tech strategy teachers sometimes use to help figure out whether a student has plagiarized: present the student with a passage from their writing with every fifth word removed. It’s surprisingly difficult to recreate what isn’t your own.

[I know: just fifty-four participants. But the findings were consistent.]

Handwriting in college

“Five semesters after ChatGPT changed education forever, some professors are taking their classes back to the pre-internet era”: from Inside Higher Ed, an article about “The Handwriting Revolution.”

Telling words from one prof: “We’re sometimes pushed to incorporate high-tech tools in our classroom, and this can be difficult to resist, especially if a professor is not tenured or they’re an adjunct.”

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[As always, handwriting ≠ cursive.]

Professorial AI

From The New York Times: “The Professors Are Using ChatGPT, and Some Students Aren’t Happy About It.” An excerpt:

Ms. Stapleton decided to do some digging. She reviewed her professor’s slide presentations and discovered other telltale signs of A.I.: distorted text, photos of office workers with extraneous body parts and egregious misspellings.

Ms. Stapleton asked for a tuition refund.

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AI yi yi

In New York magazine, James D. Walsh writes about AI and higher education. One detail that made my spirit sag:

A philosophy professor ... at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”

Read it all: “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College.”

If I were still teaching, I’d cite Ted Chiang:

Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

And I’d do the things I describe in this post.

Harvard student to her peers: read

Claire V. Miller is a first-year student at Harvard College. In an opinion piece for the The Harvard Crimson, she writes that her fellow students should read books:

Harvard students complain about readings constantly. They lament any assignments requiring they conquer more than twenty-five pages as tedious or overwhelming (if they aren’t passing the work off to ChatGPT). It’s far too rare that we’re assigned a full book to read and rarer still that we actually finish them.

Literature is worryingly absent from many Harvard students’ course of study. My proposal? The College should instate a new requirement: an English course.

By which she means a course in literature. And yes, she’s an English major.

See also Natalie Wexler’s recent commentary “Becoming a Nation of Non-Readers.” Wexler points out that the National Council of Teachers of English says that “the time has come to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” Got memes? (Read the NCTE statement, and you’ll see that I’m not joking.)

See also Nathan Heller’s “The End of the English Major,” in which Stephen Greenblatt wonders whether literature departments should spend more time on television.

I recall on more than one occasion a student writing on an evaluation form that the upper-level gen-ed course I was teaching was the first in which they’d read a book in college — in other words, a whole book, from start to finish. Gilgamesh, the Odyssey, Invisible Man, whatever. They were grateful.

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Warren and Apple Intelligence

Adam Engst excoriates Apple for its new Apple Intelligence ads, and rightly so. One is about business writing:

In the first ad, Apple Intelligence enables a goof-off who wastes time and annoys his colleagues to surprise his boss with an unexpectedly well-written email. It’s not clear that the boss is impressed; he just can’t believe the guy would have written a professional message.

Is the message that Apple Intelligence is aimed at the perpetually lazy? Where’s the positive ad with a dyslexic child using Writing Tools to proofread a school essay or a businessperson using it to understand a complex report dumped on them minutes before a meeting?

What Adam doesn’t comment on is the writing itself. Here’s the before message:

Hey J,

Been thinking, this project might need a bit of zhuhzing. But you're the big enchilada.

Holler back,
Warren

I’ve omitted the flexed arms that frame Warren’s name — I cannot get that solid grey emoji on my Mac.

Warren has five Apple Intelligence options to choose from: Professional, Rewrite, Friendly, Proofread, and Concise (odd sequence there, Apple). He chooses Professional. Here’s the after message:

Hey J,

Upon further consideration, I believe this project may require some refinement. However, you are the most capable individual to undertake this task.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Best regards,
Warren

“Write smarter,” sez the ad. But is this revised e-mail an example of smart writing? I don’t think so. The language here is stilted and ponderous in the extreme: upon further consideration, may require, the introductory however, individual, undertake. And it’s all addressed to a boss, suggesting that the boss do the work. The smarter response to a boss might be to say “On it” — or to explain that you’re swamped and wonder whether someone else (who’s not the boss) might take on the task.

But wait, there’s more: Warren’s e-mail bears the (dumb) subject line “Project Stuff” (unchanged in the revision). There’s no “Re:” — it doesn’t appear that Warren is replying to an e-mail asking that he take on a new task, though he could be replying to a spoken request. But look again at the original e-mail: Warren was suggesting the need for further work on a project while acknowledging that the decision rests with the big enchilada. Warren was having second thoughts. Apple Intelligence appears not to have understood his words.

What might real human intelligence look like here? Maybe something like this:

Hi J,

I think that this project still needs improvement, and I’d be happy to talk about it with you. But I know that’s your decision to make. Let me know what you think,

Warren

The scary question: is the “Upon further consideration” e-mail an example of what Apple thinks good writing looks like, or is it an example of what someone at Apple thinks its customers think good writing looks like? I’m not sure which answer is scarier.

You can see the ad (and another one) at Adam Engst’s TidBITS post.

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ChatGPT and a forklift

From Ted Chiang’s essay “Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art” (The New Yorker ). If I were teaching, I’d share this passage with my students:

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

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“Human interaction might be preferred” : “Inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators” : ChatGPT e-mails a professor : AI hallucinations : ChatGPT writes a workflow : ChatGPT summarizes Edwin Mullhouse : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : Spot the bot : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : ChatGPT on Ashbery, Bishop, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats : ChatGPT summarizes a Ted Berrigan poem : Teachers and chatbots : A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT

“Human interaction might be preferred”

I asked ChatGPT: “What would be some good reasons not to use ChatGPT?” It came through with ten — concerns about accuracy, concerns about accuracy, privacy, bias, and so on — and offered to provide more details. The phrasing in this passage is what most struck me:

Lack of Human Touch: For tasks requiring empathy, emotional intelligence, or nuanced understanding, human interaction might be preferred.

Might be preferred!

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[The ways in which I’ve found AI useful to me: creating Alfred workflows and a Pinboard bookmarklet. That’s all.]

Enrobed Pretzel Rods?

Spotted at Aldi, from Palmer Candy, Patiotic Enrobed Pretzel Rods: “Crunchy salted pretzel coated with white fudge and patriotic sprinkles.” I texted the kiddos.

Rachel: Enrobed is worse that dipped!

Ben: Sounds like someone asked to ChatGPT for help.

The apples lie close to the trees.

“Inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators”

From The Washington Post Tech Brief newsletter:

“All large language models, by the very nature of their architecture, are inherently and irredeemably unreliable narrators,” said Grady Booch, a renowned computer scientist. At a basic level, they’re designed to generate answers that sound coherent — not answers that are true. “As such, they simply cannot be ‘fixed,’” he said, because making things up is “an inescapable property of how they work.”

Grady Booch is in Wikipedia.

Have you had your rock today?

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ChatGPT e-mails a professor : AI hallucinations : ChatGPT writes a workflow : ChatGPT summarizes Edwin Mullhouse : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : Spot the bot : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : ChatGPT on Ashbery, Bishop, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats : ChatGPT summarizes a Ted Berrigan poem : Teachers and chatbots : A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT

Another try at a Pinboard bookmarklet

I asked ChatGPT to write a bookmarklet that would add a URL to Pinboard and paste in text copied from the clipboard as a description. Here’s what I got:

javascript:(function(){ var url = encodeURIComponent(window.location.href); var title = document.title.replace(/^.*?-/, '').trim(); var description = prompt('Enter description (Ctrl+V to paste from clipboard):'); if (!description) { return; } description = encodeURIComponent(description.trim()); var pinboardURL = 'https://pinboard.in/add?url=' + url + '&title=' + title + '&description=' + description; window.open(pinboardURL, '_blank'); })();

I know — huh? But it works. It doesn’t do exactly what I’d like it to do: I cannot add a blog post’s URL to Pinboard without having my blog’s name show up as part of the post title, so I just delete the prefatory Orange Crate Art. (I’m not sure it‘s even possible to remove the blog name automatically.) Two advantages of this bookmarklet: it allows text from the clipboard to be pasted in as a description, and it shows existing tags when I begin typing a tag name. For those reasons, this bookmarklet beats other bookmarklets and a Safari extension that I’ve tried.

[It works!]

With Alfred workflows and, now, a bookmarklet, ChatGPT does what I’d never be able to do on my own.

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“Meticulous,” “commendable,” “intricate”

Erik Hoel, neuroscientist and novelist, on the “insidious creep” of artificial intelligence into culture:

Consider science. Right after the blockbuster release of GPT-4, the latest artificial intelligence model from OpenAI and one of the most advanced in existence, the language of scientific research began to mutate. Especially within the field of A.I. itself.

A study published this month examined scientists’ peer reviews — researchers’ official pronouncements on others’ work that form the bedrock of scientific progress — across a number of high-profile and prestigious scientific conferences studying A.I. At one such conference, those peer reviews used the word “meticulous” more than 34 times as often as reviews did the previous year. Use of “commendable” was around 10 times as frequent, and “intricate,” 11 times. Other major conferences showed similar patterns.

Such phrasings are, of course, some of the favorite buzzwords of modern large language models like ChatGPT. In other words, significant numbers of researchers at A.I. conferences were caught handing their peer review of others’ work over to A.I. — or, at minimum, writing them with lots of A.I. assistance. And the closer to the deadline the submitted reviews were received, the more A.I. usage was found in them.

Thanks, Ben.

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ChatGPT e-mails a professor : AI hallucinations : ChatGPT writes a workflow : ChatGPT summarizes Edwin Mullhouse : ChatGPT’s twenty-line poems : Spot the bot : Rob Zseleczky on computer-generated poetry : ChatGPT writes about Lillian Mountweazel : ChatGPT on Ashbery, Bishop, Dickinson, Larkin, Yeats : ChatGPT summarizes a Ted Berrigan poem : Teachers and chatbots : A 100-word blog post generated by ChatGPT : I’m sorry too, ChatGPT

iA Writer is not AI

From an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “ChatGPT Has Changed Teaching. Our Readers Tell Us How,” quoting an instructor’s revised syllabus:

“Since writing, analytical, and critical-thinking skills are part of the learning outcomes of this course, all writing assignments should be prepared by the student,” it reads, in part. “Developing strong competencies in this area will prepare you for the competitive work force. Therefore, AI-generated submissions (using ChatGPT, IA Writer, Midjourney, DALL-E, etc.) are not permitted and will be treated as plagiarism.”

Yikes: iA Writer is not an app for AI-generated prose. It is a writing app for humans who use macOS, iOS, iPadOS, Windows, and Android. The app should not be confused with AI-Writer, an online app for AI-generated prose.

The latest versions of IA Writer for macOS, iOS, and iPadOS offer an option to to mark copy-and-pasted AI-generated text so as to distinguish it from the writer’s own words. But that’s an option meant to keep a writer from passing off AI-generated text as their own.

I’m a happy user of iA Writer, and I’d hate to think of any professor mistakenly warning a student off it.

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[I don’t know anything about AI-Writer.]

In search of lost passage

Elif Batuman asked ChatGPT to find a passage from Proust, something about love affairs in the past and present. Here’s what happened.

I think that the passage Batuman was looking for (and still is looking for?) might be this one, from the narrator’s recollections of the “young girls in flower” of his youth, girls who are now much older or already dead:

It was painful for me to have to retrieve these for myself, for time, which changes individuals, does not modify the image we have of them. Nothing is sadder that this contrast between the way individuals change and the fixity of memory, when we understand that what we have kept so fresh in our memory no longer has any of that freshness in real life, and that we cannot find a way to come close, on the outside, to what which appears so beautiful within us, which arouses in us a desire, seemingly so personal, to see it again, except by looking for it in a person of the same age, that is to say in another being. It is simply, as I had often had reason to suspect, that what seems unique in a person whom one desires does not in fact belong to her. But the passage of time was giving me a more complete proof of this since, after twenty years, spontaneously, I was trying to find, not the girls whom I had known, but those who now possessed the youth that the others had had then.

Finding Time Again, trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2003).

Unlike Elif Batuman and ChatGPT, I have that passage (or most of it) at hand in a post about Proust gift tags and note cards. But that passage might not be the one in question.

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