yea
What could possibly go wrong after it absorbs alt-right thought leadership titles with Mein Kampf? What a time to be alive.
All of those kids in college who plagiarized their papers by changing the sentence structure, paragraph rhythm, beats, and tone of someone else's paper but kept the core points and essentially submitted the same paper are.....vindicated?
i found out recently they’re bringing back blue books, which i dind’t realize they’d gotten rid of
I get that those ppl weren't studying to be writers, but they sure as hell weren't studying to be editors, either
and i was like…i read the material, idk what to tell you
but also, i’ve been learning lately, people just don’t know how to/have the patience to research anymore? and i mean, just, basic googling.
I have been reading story after story about how search engines don't work anymore and, yeah, search results are worse, but I can still usually find what I'm looking for. Perhaps that explains things.
mm, maybe. most of my interactions have been with 19-25 yos who just weren’t taught how to research OR want instant gratification and expect me to just tell them things.
if it’s not on tiktok does it even matter? is it real?
My wife is a college professor at Penn State and had to assist with expelling half a dozen students this past semester for using AI to rewrite papers to the point of plagiarism. It’s a real problem. And as an author, this makes me queasy.
what is the thought process you have to go through to think someone won’t be able to tell this AI paper isn’t plagiarized?
like. what??
It depends. Penn State basically requires the students to show their work. If it’s not plagiarized, they’ll have research and drafts and browser histories, etc. It’s all still stuff that can be faked. But at that point why not just do the work yourself, ya know?
i have an essay going about how a disturbing percentage of USAmericans are functionally illiterate
but also my kids and I talk at least once a week about how you can't outsource learning to next-word generator. you just can't.
unfortunately most essay learning in school around here just teaches you the hamburger template anyways and the AI is just exacerbating an already terrible problem
I mean, to be fair, the hamburger template is great to build on
yes, i think most of us probably learned that in elementary school
Once you really get it, you can do a lot with it. Same with all the rules of writing and grammar -- once you know them, you can bend them to your will
but i learned to write academic papers for multiple audiences in college. that was the point of my major.
same
i had a professor tell me once most college students write like school teachers and i was like…wtf does that mean, and he elaborated that school teachers are taught to write in basically the hamburger method and never move on from that bc that’s what they’ll teach. and students who don’t major in a subject that requires academic writing won’t ever really learn to write another way.
I was actually just thinking about how an integrative thesis was required for graduation and how it thoroughly broke down every stage of writing and research, including the minutiae of like, how to properly quote things. how to properly rephrase. how to cite. how to look for valid / trustworthy sources, etc etc
yuh, i went to an IB high school, i had to write an actual thesis, and an academic bibliography on my topic to get my IB diploma.
I'm likely in the minority, but I truly believe there's nothing wrong with using the 5-paragraph essay or the hamburger method if you really truly get it. A lot of people will never go on to do the in-depth writing some of us here do, and that's okay. But the issue is that I don't think most people ever really understand the whys behind those methods, and so they get stuck.
my greek professor never gave word/page requirements bc you’re more likely to fill it with fluff if you don’t know wtf you’re doing. you were graded on your ability to write a coherent essay on the topic you chose.
I studied journalism at Oregon, to get into the J school you had to take 4 classes and apply to school. One of core classes made you write a 20 page paper with 80 pages of supporting material. That taught me how to research 100%
yah, that should absolutely be a requirement for j school.
most majors don’t have more than a 101 english and history requirement which doesn’t require rigorous research
I appreciate the fact that my university required a semester long research thesis and paper as part of graduation and multiple writing courses. Didn't matter if you were studying English or electrical engineering. But even back then soooooo many people struggled with what I thought was a relatively straight forward useful requirement
But heck I was in 8th freaking grade before I was taught the hamburger method. Schools can really really suck with what they cover. Writing just full on was not a focus in an entire state's school system so it wasn't til I moved to another state that I was taught it
Thankfully a had a parent who was a philosophy professor and writer so I was reading and writing at college level by 4th grade. But I was lucky.
i worry about kids, but also people our age are actively opting out of thinking and losing their ability to think critically, which makes engaging with them exhausting. MIT already did a study showing that just using gen ai to help you write something, not just fully write something, reduces your ability to understand what you’re even writing about, even if you rewrite it, bc you didn’t do the rigorous research and critical thought to pull the ideas together.
I think the backlash on this will be minimal from a public/social perspective where art is concerned, at least for a while. But, eventually, I do think the cracks will show with things like engineering and more critical disciplines because folks will eventually, and swiftly, find out that you still have to know how language/code/physics/electricity work to be able to evaluate the quality of the AI's output. The hallucination on the part of the AI is one thing, but I've already seen multiple people in multiple spaces "hallucinate" on their end and assume that the AI is correct just because it gave them an answer without having any context or real rubric to understand whether or not that answer/content is correct/quality.
I can only hope that, someday, somehow, folks will remember what "good" (whatever that means) literature, art and journalism looks and sounds like and the cracks will show there, too.
(spoiler: I think that what "good" looks like, at least in part, is recognizable effort in achievement of a thing)
i would love to talk to my classics profs about this and see how it’s affecting their classes. when i was in school, the lower level classes were 80% non majors who took these courses bc they thought it was greek mythology or an easier history course, and would be easy, then were frustrated that they had to engage on an academic level and were graded on their ability to have a conversation about the subject matter in class.
