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OK, trying an experiment with my Programming Languages class!

• Have an AI generate some of your writing assignment.
• Critique its output. Call BS on its BS.

Assignment details in screenshots below. I’ll let you know how it goes.

(Here are the links from the screenshots:)

Raw AI Text:
https://gist.github.com/pcantrell/7b68ce7c5b2e329543e2dadd6853be21

Comments on AI Text:
https://gist.github.com/pcantrell/d51bc2d4257027a6b4c64c9010d42c32

(Better) Human Text
https://gist.github.com/pcantrell/f363734336e6063f61e451e2658b50a6

#ai #chatgpt #education #writing #highered
#swift #proglang

Project check-in 2: Shred the AI Due Friday by 6pm I asked the ChatGPT AI to explain the core concept behind our Swift optionals activity. The AI produced an answer that was very impressive…for an AI. For a human, the answer would be pretty bad writing: fastidiously grammatical but verbose, full of fluff and waste, repeating ideas instead of synthesizing them, and sometimes just flat-out wrong. Here is what the AI wrote Links to an external site.. Here are my comments on its response Links to an external site.. (Don’t worry: I won’t be this detailed or this harsh with your writing. I want to be as critical as I can be, and I know I won’t hurt the AI’s feelings.) Here is my own attempt at a better answer to the same questions Links to an external site.. The fundamental problem with the AI’s answer is that it doesn’t really know what its main point is. It meanders around the relevant concepts, but it never quite manages to get to the heart of the central idea at hand. It is parroting fragments of the words of others, hoping that somehow they will coalesce into a coherent new thought. (They don’t.) It’s uncanny how much it’s like bad student writing. If I didn’t know this was written by an AI, I would probably think it was written by a student (or maybe an employee at a web content farm) trying to fill out their minimum word count at the last minute based on nothing but hasty web searching.
You all can do much better than the AI! Instead of doing a traditional pre-submission project check-in, I have a challenge for you: ask an AI to write a few paragraphs of your paper, and then critique its output. Here’s what to do: Use an AI (ChatGPT or other) to generate a few paragraphs of your final project. You can use the AI to generate English text or code, whichever is appropriate to your project. You can use ChatGPT or a different AI. The OpenAI account you need for ChatGPT is cheap but not free, and maybe a little intrusive. If you don’t want to set up an account and generate text yourself, let me know your topic and I will happily generate some text for you. Just ask. Save the raw text the AI gave you. Write comments about the AI’s output, much like the ones I wrote above. You can write your comments inline like I did, or use the Comments / Suggested Edits features of Google Docs, or use the Review / Track Changes features of MS Word. Consider the following: What is correct, a good point? What is wrong? What is missing? (This is the hardest one.) What is useless, just filler language? You do not have to be as detailed as I was with the AI. Quick notes are fine! Please send me (1) the original AI text and (2) your comments.
You do not have to create the “better human version” like I did. Of course, doing so might help you write your paper. If you choose to do that, however, don’t let the AI decide your paper’s structure for you. It might give you some good ideas for things to talk about! It might point out some ideas and resources you hadn’t considered! But it might also mislead you into a line of argument that is wrong (as the AI did with my response above), or into a structure that doesn’t make sense. Don’t switch off your own good sense — not for a computer, and not for a human either. Not ever. JUST TO BE CLEAR: Using an AI to help write your assignment would be cheating in most circumstances. Don’t let the fact that we are doing this as an exercise confuse you about the ethics of coursework in general! If you think an AI would help you with an assignment, you need to ask your instructor. Hopefully you already know all that, but I do not want to leave any confusion about it.

Raw AI text.md

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#AI #education #writing #swift #chatgpt #highered #proglang
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Paul Cantrell

Paul Cantrell
Paul Cantrell
• •

Early returns are promising. Students got into the activity. Discussion took over half the last day of class.

This is a Programming Languages class, and discussion took an interesting turn: how would •languages• change in a world where we expect AI code generation to be a normal part of the development process, and the problem for humans shifts (even further) away from “How do I generate code?” and toward “Does the code I’ve generated actually do what I think? What I want?”
#proglang #ai

#AI #proglang
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Paul Cantrell

Paul Cantrell
Paul Cantrell
• •

My favorite outcome so far: a student remarked (paraphrasing here) that she didn’t realize how much she had to say in her paper until she saw how wrong the AI was, how much it missed the point.

Observing her own reaction to BS about her topic made her realize she’d underestimated the extent of her own newly-forming knowledge. That…that is the sort of outcome an educator dreams of.

#ai #chatgpt #education #writing #highered

#AI #education #writing #chatgpt #highered
This entry was edited (1 year ago)
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