I saw this on the social media and it’s an excellent summary of how I feel about AI generated text. I went to several of our teaching and learning sessions and there was an honest effort to engage with the AI generation features offered now through the Microsoft suite and Blackboard. This is a new tool, there is lots of hype around it, let’s see what we can do.
And I was there to give it a merry go.
Maybe it speeds things up. A lot of setting up of course material etc feels like stuff i would happily hand over to a machine (“figure out when the spring break is and set deadlines on Friday accordingly.”)
The education team that was giving us the workshop “ai as a TA” (hmmm do these folks know what AITA stands for already?) gamely tried to show us what they were using and how. And maybe it could sorta work? You have a built in chatbot TA teaching Socratically (asking follow-up questions). Ehm? Yeah the chat adventure games from the 1980s could mostly do that (“AITA has been eaten by a Gru”).
What isn’t addressed is how stuff like this would be received. The galaxy zoo team could have probably done some foreshadowing. There it’s very difficult to have people engage with simulated I.e. “fake” galaxy images. People hate it. Discover new and interesting real stuff? Everyone is enthusiastic. Fake? Off they go.
So I would have to expend quite a bit of effort to a) check the ai isn’t hallucinating and b) that the students suspect nothing.
Yeah that’s too much stress for me. Pass.
And I don’t blame the students. I would just reply AI:DR to anything I suspected what generated this way. If you can’t be bothered to write it, I can’t be bothered to read it. And what kind of standing does an instructor have if they outsource their teaching of a topic — that they are supposedly an expert in — to a machine, a slop machine to boot!
But I hope this abbreviation catches on. Imagine emailing that back to some long winded email…
