if the homework you assign students is to build a chair and then they have to bring the chair into class and you sit on it, that is *not fake*. if a machine solved this problem for them it would *actually produce real chairs people could actually use*
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this essay question garbage is fundamentally fake. every student knows the goal is to write some bullshit that sounds good enough that you're willing to assign it a good grade. you are not actually training the students to perform any kind of useful work and you never were
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here's the opening of an essay i wrote as a sophomore in college. i don't remember writing this. i don't know a single thing about fMRI or the patriot act. i bullshitted this whole thing. this is what happens when you force students to write about shit they don't care about
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this whole thing might as well have been generated by GPT-3 for all anyone could tell by reading it; it contains none of my actual writing voice, which i would not get back for another 8 years. there's none of my personality or life experience or soul in here
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i want to clarify here that i'm using "bullshit" in harry frankfurt's technical sense, and specifically as distinct from lying: when you lie you try to hide the truth, when you bullshit you don't care either way what the truth is
www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f1
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GPT-3 is literally a bullshit engine. it does not have a concept of words as referring to things; it plays games with words *only*, pure syntax, no semantics. literally the thing it is optimizing for when it produces text can be condensed to "put words here that sound good"
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if GPT-3 can answer the essay questions you've assigned as homework then you've learned that your essay questions were optimized for producing bullshit, in the specific sense of words that sound good but are indifferent to their own truth or falsehood
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spending a decade training students to orient towards writing as mainly about bullshit is not the profound education in the humanities some people want it to be. any actual writing ability i have now i trained on MSN messenger, livejournal, forums, social media
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only has a job as a writing coach because school has so thoroughly destroyed so many people's relationships to writing. people who have entire books in them live in fear of Doing The Homework Wrong
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Replying to @QiaochuYuan
I’ve worked with at least three people who are Pulitzer level talents just quietly wondering whether they should disturb the universe
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writing in lowercase is magic because it doesn't activate the Uppercase Context. Uppercase is for School and Work; in other words, it's writing someone else is forcing you to do. lowercase writing is *consensual*
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i wrote a thing
it's about how writing in lowercase has done magical, inexplicable things for my creative output
ungated.media/article/lowerc
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in this way i, for one, welcome our machine overlords. if GPT-4 destroys the essay, or the concept of homework entirely, i will cheer and applaud raucously. we do not need them and we never did
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more on GPT-3 as a bullshit engine
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Linguistic context *correlates* with real-world context, so assembling extremely large amounts of it gives a simulacrum of semantics. Except when it doesn’t, revealing that current language models have zero idea what they are talking about: aiweirdness.com/baltimore-orio
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GPT-3 apparently surprisingly good at generating marketing copy. hmmmm
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An interesting thing about working with GPT-3 is that you have to fact check /everything/, because it excels at generating convincing text but makes no promises that the facts in that text will be accurate in any way
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"The thing to know about the AI language models, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fundamentally bullshitters. The bullshit has gotten better and better, but at the core … well, there’s nothing at the core."
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Doh, don't know why I didn't spot this glaring connection between ML generated outputs and Frankfurtian bullshit. robinsloan.com/lab/notes-on-a
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this feels like it goes here: are greentexts bullshit?
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Also what does it imply that, out of anything I've seen it try to do, GPT-3 is easily the best at greentext
Like, it's a competent sophomore at poetry, a vague freshman at essaycraft, but a PhD in greentext twitter.com/sashachapin/st…
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By the logic of this thread, there's no point in teaching children basic maths either. Assignments can be valuable because they help students *practice* skills they are not *yet* able to do in a way that brings new value.
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Yes, you're right. I won't speak for QC, but my complaint about the essay is that it *pretends* to be a venue for authentic intellectual engagement (what do you really think about this literature?) while cynically existing for practice. It's the false pretense I don't like.
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