ChatGPT: Perhaps My Lifetime's Most Consequential -- And Not for the Better -- Technological Innovation, Part II

Luis Martínez-Fernández
Fri, 03 Feb 2023 21:00:00 -0800
Opinion

The uses, and abuses, of ChatGPT and similar platforms coming through the AI pipeline are infinite. As discussed in Part I of this column, if prompted, it can produce "poetry": choose the genre — sonnet or haiku? In seconds, it can spit out essays, plots of novels, news reports, screenplays, titles, scientific abstracts, business plans, college papers, speeches and even drafts of legislation (which as a Florida resident, I see as a potential improvement over human-crafted laws).

ChatGPT, however, seems to be programmed to reject what it deems inappropriate requests. In a Psychology Today article Glenn Geher shares a coherent and very optimistic 200-word essay in response to the prompt "How AI technologies will affect writing education in the future." It took 20 seconds. But when he requested an essay on "How AI relates to plagiarism," the result (on three different occasions), he says, "was total garbage — advertisements typed up by the robot." It may not be human, but ChatGPT has the instinct of self-preservation.

Yes, I coined the slogan "Stop STEM bullying," and carry a cellphone that is at least two generations behind, but I welcome technological innovations that may improve efficiency, make us safer and make life more enjoyable.
Updated: Sat Feb 04, 2023

The uses, and abuses, of ChatGPT and similar platforms coming through the AI pipeline are infinite. As discussed in Part I of this column, if prompted, it can produce "poetry": choose the genre — sonnet or haiku? In seconds, it can spit out essays, plots of novels, news reports, screenplays, titles, scientific abstracts, business plans, college papers, speeches and even drafts of legislation (which as a Florida resident, I see as a potential improvement over human-crafted laws).

ChatGPT, however, seems to be programmed to reject what it deems inappropriate requests. In a Psychology Today article Glenn Geher shares a coherent and very optimistic 200-word essay in response to the prompt "How AI technologies will affect writing education in the future." It took 20 seconds. But when he requested an essay on "How AI relates to plagiarism," the result (on three different occasions), he says, "was total garbage — advertisements typed up by the robot." It may not be human, but ChatGPT has the instinct of self-preservation.

Yes, I coined the slogan "Stop STEM bullying," and carry a cellphone that is at least two generations behind, but I welcome technological innovations that may improve efficiency, make us safer and make life more enjoyable.

If used wisely, ChatGPT can offer beneficial tools. For example, it can summarize texts, which can shorten research time. Some of its defenders argue that it allows writers to relinquish the entire research process. That's where I draw the line. It's one thing to outsource the lower-level skill of summarizing; it's another to yield the various higher-level skills necessary for intelligent and creative research. We cannot afford to lose those skills, much less allow new generations to be educated without learning them. That can be very dangerous.

THE END OF THE COLLEGE PAPER?

At the start of the semester, my department chair sent out an email with the subject "AI & Student Papers," alerting us that such papers are original and won't be caught by the plagiarism detection platform Turnitin. Days later, the administration sent us a litany of suggestions that included hypercustomizing writing assignments — sounds like AI-generated language — "collect at least one diagnostic of in-person writing to compare to submitted essays," "preview your writing prompt on the AI platform yourself." No word on which of our scholarly activities we must forgo to spend all that time policing students who are already bound by an honor code that forbids unauthorized assistance and plagiarism.

ChatGPT-generated college papers have their analog antecedents in the 1960s when "essay mills" began peddling papers to college students. In the 1990s, papers for sale became available online for download, sometimes with differential fees: premier "A" papers and more affordable "B" and "C" options.

The incidence of various types of college plagiarism is staggering. Surveys reflect that over two-thirds of college students admit cheating on tests and assignments. A 2018 study concluded that approximately 1 in 7 students (worldwide) had purchased paper mill essays. Turnitin has the capacity to detect plagiarism of written works already on the internet but not AI-produced so-called original papers.

The release of ChatGPT has spurred a torrent of condemnation among educators resulting in the ban of its use in school districts and colleges, nationwide.

In January, Princeton computer science student Edward Tian created an app that reportedly can differentiate between human-crafted texts and those written by AI. And just this week, the same people at OpenAI who created this monster have just released AI Text Classifier, which is purported to detect AI-generated texts. They are selling the poison and its antidote.

LOST SKILLS AND THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION OF OUR LIVES

Technological innovations have been relieving humans of physical and mental tasks since the dawn of time. Writing, for example, reduced dependence on memorization. Clocks allowed us to tell time accurately but, in the process, we lost — no major loss — the ability to calculate time on our own. There's usually a tradeoff: handheld calculators, spell-check features and GPS have relieved us from mental tasks, but we are no longer able to make simple math equations by hand, we are poorer spellers and without a navigation system, we get lost driving a car.

From the perspective of the long view of history we can look back at the most transformative technological innovations: the domestication of animals and plants, the printing press, the steam engine, steel, electric light, the telegraph, antibiotics, computers, space travel and the internet. But ChatGPT and its soon-to-be-unveiled competitors bring us into another dimension of change. It is a turning point (one of no return) in what Nicholas Carr called in 2010 the "cybernetic blurring of mind and machine"; we are witnessing the displacement of the mind by machines, which he warned in 2010 "poses a threat to our integrity as human beings."