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if GPT-3 can do the homework you assign your students then the homework you assign your students is fake notice what you did *not* say: "finally, GPT-3 will save us so much time analyzing international relations" https://t.co/P5EN8bRBAZ
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*
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
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 https://t.co/y9nafUCJTL
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
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 https://t.co/dsq7g0VWVl https://t.co/hZSTEqpfcC
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"
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
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
@sashachapin 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 https://t.co/cUG156Vgac
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* https://t.co/0vayPKyWk7 https://t.co/bsu9wbtrCf
more on GPT-3 as a bullshit engine https://t.co/EAjXhsmo9k
GPT-3 apparently surprisingly good at generating marketing copy. hmmmm https://t.co/cT1RzsLjhx
"The thing to know about the AIĀ language models, OpenAIās GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fundamentally bullshitters. The bullshit has gotten better and better, but at the coreāā¦āwell, thereās nothing at the core." https://t.co/OBSYAFKMmF https://t.co/QbXpNuYXvv
this feels like it goes here: are greentexts bullshit? https://t.co/SWaZDl8cPR
"if ChatGPT can actually produce a good essay for your assignment, it's probably not a very good assignment or demanding much of your students" https://t.co/gt6HKo21RG