Hallucinating Bakhtin made me giggle. I feel like he would welcome the LLM as a retroactive voice in his own textual polyphony. Loved reading about your experiments!
Really appreciate your thoughtful experiment! But your thoughtfulness is exactly what may have made this useful to you and concerns me about student use on the whole. Most students don’t use Chat GPT with this level of metacognition. They just use it to complete assignments more quickly, and perhaps most importantly, copy and paste the ChatGPT answers into assignments like reading responses. This makes grading student comprehension challenging because the ChatGPT language has a high vocab level but basic sentence construction and variation and basic analysis. It’s also challenging because learning actually does need to take effort, and when students blow by the easier stuff in intro to English Lit, they tend to be less prepared when they get to classes that they really can’t ChatGPT. It lowers their resilience level when the learning gets more challenging and requires more critical thinking. Anyway, enough teacher complaints! I look forward to reading the rest of this series.
Eshe, thank you so much for this super insightful comment--I didn't get a "teacher complaint" vibe from it at all! Man, I don't envy you educators these days. I can't imagine how challenging it is to grade assignments, especially given how unreliable AI detectors are. So interesting to hear your description of ChatGPT language--high vocab level but basic sentence variation is so on point, and I haven't seen it expressed in that way before. I'd be very curious to hear what you think of LLM tutoring tools that attempt to talk the student through a problem or assignment rather than giving them the answer (I think Khan Academy has one, and Google LearnLM just came out). They seem to have potential, but I'd imagine they're not the education panacea tech companies are pretending they are. Plus, doesn't deal with the main assignment challenges since students still have access to normal ChatGPT/other models at home. I'd love to read anything you write about generative AI and education! I think teachers probably have more insight than any other professionals re: the various practical drawbacks and benefits of these technologies.
Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Hannah! I'm so happy to see you're on Substack too, can't wait to read your pieces! This Middlemarch project is fascinating, I particularly love the heat map visualization.
Hallucinating Bakhtin made me giggle. I feel like he would welcome the LLM as a retroactive voice in his own textual polyphony. Loved reading about your experiments!
LOL this is so true!! Thanks so much for reading, Jade <3
Really appreciate your thoughtful experiment! But your thoughtfulness is exactly what may have made this useful to you and concerns me about student use on the whole. Most students don’t use Chat GPT with this level of metacognition. They just use it to complete assignments more quickly, and perhaps most importantly, copy and paste the ChatGPT answers into assignments like reading responses. This makes grading student comprehension challenging because the ChatGPT language has a high vocab level but basic sentence construction and variation and basic analysis. It’s also challenging because learning actually does need to take effort, and when students blow by the easier stuff in intro to English Lit, they tend to be less prepared when they get to classes that they really can’t ChatGPT. It lowers their resilience level when the learning gets more challenging and requires more critical thinking. Anyway, enough teacher complaints! I look forward to reading the rest of this series.
Eshe, thank you so much for this super insightful comment--I didn't get a "teacher complaint" vibe from it at all! Man, I don't envy you educators these days. I can't imagine how challenging it is to grade assignments, especially given how unreliable AI detectors are. So interesting to hear your description of ChatGPT language--high vocab level but basic sentence variation is so on point, and I haven't seen it expressed in that way before. I'd be very curious to hear what you think of LLM tutoring tools that attempt to talk the student through a problem or assignment rather than giving them the answer (I think Khan Academy has one, and Google LearnLM just came out). They seem to have potential, but I'd imagine they're not the education panacea tech companies are pretending they are. Plus, doesn't deal with the main assignment challenges since students still have access to normal ChatGPT/other models at home. I'd love to read anything you write about generative AI and education! I think teachers probably have more insight than any other professionals re: the various practical drawbacks and benefits of these technologies.
What an interesting experiment! I don't think I've encountered any thinking about chatGPT from this kind of pedagogical perspective before. It reminds me a bit of this DH project I just learned about: https://xpmethod.columbia.edu/lit-mod-viz/2017-02-04-middlemarch-critical-histories.html
Thanks so much for reading and commenting, Hannah! I'm so happy to see you're on Substack too, can't wait to read your pieces! This Middlemarch project is fascinating, I particularly love the heat map visualization.