A very late set of weekly links! This time it’s heavy on AI and it’s impact on research and teaching. Plus cyborg cicadas.
First up: A NYMag article on LLM use at Universities went viral (at least in my education and AI heavy feeds!) last week. So that’s not the link as you’ve probably already read it. Instead, here’s Benjamin Breen on how AI makes the Humanities more important and also wierder and Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? from the New Yorker.
There’s a lot in here that resonanted with me
Staggering transformations are in full swing. And yet, on campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude: everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: “We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.” This is, simply, madness. And it won’t hold for long. It’s time to talk about what all this means for university life, and for the humanities in particular.
This stuff will change Universities forever, even if there was no more progress in AI at all.
There’s a lot of talk about AI “cheating”, and LLMs can be used very easily to avoid learning, but they are wonderful tools for the self-motivated leaner e.g. here’s Adam Tooze using ChatGPT to help learn Mandarin.
Without grounding self-directed learning (or ‘dyor’) can lead people down rabbit holes of conspiracy: People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies, but surely this has to affect the design of our courses as well as the design of our assessments?
Or take research: When ChatGPT Broke an Entire Field: An Oral History tells the history of the impact of LLMs on natural language processing. Back in about 2018/19 I went to an event to celebrate the launch of the University of York’s new HPC facility. The keynote talk was on natural langague processing and didn’t mention LLMs at all. Now the whole field has changed.
And of course they are super useful for generating slop science papers at pace, which breaks peer review.
And finally, following on from using dead spiders as robot grippers we have the even more ethically challenged Cyborg Cicadas. There is something deeply icky to me about these.