What Is Generative AI, Anyway? In my last post, I went on at some length about what Generative AI is and its limitations. Rather than rehash it all here, I’ll refer you back to that section, but here’s what I think is the most salient point: It’s a prediction machine. And its predictions are often…
What Is Generative AI, Anyway? I won’t recap all of last year’s Detox, which dealt with artificial intelligence technologies in education more broadly. In my talks about AI over the last year, this is how I’ve been distinguishing between AI and Generative AI: “Artificial intelligence” is a catch-all term that encompasses a wide range of…
It’s been a wild year to be writing a Digital Detox about artificial intelligence; it has felt like the landscape was always shifting under my feet, and while I always read a lot to prepare for the annual Digital Detox, this year it has been like trying to catch an avalanche in a snow shovel….
Over the course of the last seven weeks, what I have hoped to show is the way that all the choices we have made in higher ed have led up to this place where a tool like ChatGPT causes utter panic. A system that demands teaching be done by a precarious work force at scale…
Hello Detox readers, and greetings from deep within my plague house. As most parents of young children will confirm, everything is a virus and the children are always unwell; my little germ factory came home early from school on Tuesday and hasn’t been back since. My thoughts are with anyone who is also living in…
This week’s post shares a bunch of intellectual air with John Warner’s thinking about AI writing and undergraduate assessment. There’s often a lot of alignment between my thinking and John’s when it comes to talking about writing assessment, but he published first, so let me point you to his excellent piece, ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything…
A question I have been thinking a lot about this week is whether there is any equitable use of artificial intelligence, given all we talked about in last week’s post about algorithmic bias. Is there any way to imagine ourselves into a future where artificial intelligences really can do the work of decision making more…
The first time I used ChatGPT, I was fascinated. You stick in a prompt and it spits out something. The prose is grammatically correct. It’s coherent. It knows basic paragraph structure and it connects ideas together. It obeys the prompts and offers a kind of clarity, if we define clarity in terms of accurate prose….