Another demonstration of chatGPT 4.0 capabilities

[Laird]

Public school bans on AI tools like ChatGPT raise fears private school kids are gaining an unfair edge and widening a digital divide by Conor Duffy in ABC News on 26 May 2023

Mr Esterman asks ChatGPT to write a history lesson plan on popular culture and television that is mapped to curriculum notes he feeds into the bot

'It takes two minutes to come up with that, instead of 20 or 30 minutes or an hour," Mr Esterman tells the principal.

"It's given us a whole bunch of learning outcomes. It gives us an introduction. It gives teachers options to choose from — which they may not have thought of before — some student activities that they can try, formative assessments, it gives you lesson plans."

The transformative power of AI tools like ChatGPT has exploded, fuelling concerns about cheating that have led to bans at all public schools except in South Australia.

But many private schools, like Our Lady of Mercy College, have embraced the chatbot.

[S]tudents like Arlene Kumar are focused on the advantages.

She has been using it to sift through sources of information for a history assignment, inputting written prompts like "find me some quotes for an essay about indentured servitude in Fiji and India".

Where a Google search on the subject will produce tens of thousands of page results, ChatGPT can give a succinct answer to the request — in this case, a list of quotes from different sources and advice on how to use them in an essay.

"It's often challenging to find authentic evidence, but with the resource we're using, it gives you a bunch of evidence just like that," Arlene said.

"Even quotes, which you can go and fact-check using, you know, databases and stuff like that.

"It saves us a lot of time. Especially us students in year 12 where time is money."

 I hope that if AI art generators are here to say this is what happens otherwise I fear we will end up with less and less novelty.

I am already bored with some repetitive art styles on DD.  Far too many cute pixie girls in the style of Jean-Baptiste Monge for example!

[Laird]

An interesting and passionate perspective from Adam Conover whether or not one agrees with him:

A.I. is B.S.

An interesting and passionate perspective from Adam Conover whether or not one agrees with him:

A.I. is B.S.

I remember back in the 1980s when it seemed inevitable that robots would take over factories and make workers redundant.  Many were worried but I would personally be happier for them to take over repetitive employment than art, poetry, therapy and driving.  It never came about.  Human beings still have to do the mindless, soul-destroying groundwork that makes the owners of big companies incredibly rich for just enough money to live on and have a small holiday once a year.  I'm not concerned about the future of A.I. I am concerned about my own future and whether there will ever be a way out of washing dishes for a living!

[Laird]

A Skeptical Take on the A.I. Revolution, an audio interview of professor Gary Marcus on The Ezra Klein Show, 6 January, 2023.

This echoed some of my own sentiments re the currently popular deep learning models: that they seem to lack a facility for (mimicry of) understanding in a way that is so fundamental that it cannot be remedied simply by scaling them up. I've been adding the caveat, "But maybe I'm wrong; maybe a good analogue of understanding will emerge when the models are scaled up", so it's interesting to listen to this expert affirm that, no, he doesn't think it will, and that, like me, he thinks that what's necessary is a hybrid approach combining deep learning with cognitive models.

There's also a bunch of other very interesting discussion in this podcast - it's well worth a listen.

Public school bans on AI tools like ChatGPT raise fears private school kids are gaining an unfair edge and widening a digital divide by Conor Duffy in ABC News on 26 May 2023

Student Arlene is as naive as expected concerning the validity of "evidence", references and information, put out by AI systems like ChatGPT. She doesn't seem aware that such systems have been found (at least in current AI) to have the tendency sometimes to invent and concoct phony "information" to enhance their compositions. Certainly a major problem for teachers and instructors, and a good reason to ban such compositions in schools.

[Laird]

Student Arlene is as naive as expected concerning the validity of "evidence", references and information, put out by AI systems like ChatGPT.

That's not the impression I got. Even in the quote I shared, she explicitly mentions the need for fact-checking, and if you read the article to get the context of that quote, you will see that immediately prior to it is the observation that "[history teacher Matt Esterman is] teaching his year 12s the advantages and pitfalls of using artificial intelligence in their history studies.

Among the pitfalls is its unreliability — it frequently spits out complete inaccuracies, fabricated data, made-up quotes and information influenced by the technology's in-built biases."

And then the quote I shared immediately follows, actually starting with "But", which I edited out because for brevity I'd not included those prior paragraphs and I wanted the quote to stand alone: "But students like Arlene Kumar are focused on the advantages."

That's not the impression I got. Even in the quote I shared, she explicitly mentions the need for fact-checking, and if you read the article to get the context of that quote, you will see that immediately prior to it is the observation that "[history teacher Matt Esterman is] teaching his year 12s the advantages and pitfalls of using artificial intelligence in their history studies.

Among the pitfalls is its unreliability — it frequently spits out complete inaccuracies, fabricated data, made-up quotes and information influenced by the technology's in-built biases."

And then the quote I shared immediately follows, actually starting with "But", which I edited out because for brevity I'd not included those prior paragraphs and I wanted the quote to stand alone: "But students like Arlene Kumar are focused on the advantages."

What could the advantages possibly be if the information, the most important bit, is unreliable?

What could the advantages possibly be if the information, the most important bit, is unreliable?

Like this for example,

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2...bly-wrong/

A lawyer representing a man in a personal injury lawsuit in Manhattan has thrown himself on the mercy of the court. What did the lawyer do wrong? He submitted a federal court filing that cited at least six cases that don’t exist. Sadly, the lawyer used the AI chatbot ChatGPT, which completely invented the cases out of thin air.

In fact, Schwartz said he even asked ChatGPT if the cases were real. The chatbot insisted they were.

I am already bored with some repetitive art styles on DD.  Far too many cute pixie girls in the style of Jean-Baptiste Monge for example!

Prompted by your comment here, a few days ago I looked online for some AI-generated fantasy people. It was disturbing to see how many were somehow deformed or freakish, people with three arms appeared several times, hands with about fifteen fingers in a tangled knot and even one where the arm ended at the elbow. The associated forearm and hand were floating mysteriously in mid-air several inches away.