Hey everyone! I hope you had a great break and were able to get some rest and rejuvenation. We don’t have much longer in the semester so I am going to try and provide you with as much applicable content as I can, so that you leave feeling like you’ve gotten something from this course!

Cool, so. ChatGPT, the enemy of English professors and probably all professors everywhere, right? I actually think the premise of ChatGPT is great and if it’s a useful tool for you to get started in the writing process, then I fully support it.

But, if you haven’t already realized, it has the potential to create a sophisticated word salad that doesn’t have much meaning underneath what it writes. I guess all of this is to say that if you are going to use it, make sure you can back up your claims with real research (like what we’ve been doing in arxiv).

https://www.pbs.org/video/can-computers-really-talk-or-are-they-faking-it-xk7etc/

I also love this video from 2021 that explains how ChatGPT works (in case you don’t already know). TL:DR version is that it puts sentences together based on statistical analysis, not word comprehension.

For this week, please watch the video and then I want you to find give me three examples where you find errors in ChatGPT’s response. Let us know what the original prompt was and then show where it veers off course.

Let’s not forget that behind every tech advancement, there’s a human pulling the puppet strings! Oh and if you disagree with me on ChatGPT, put that in the comments too. I would love to hear varying opinions.

Thanks everyone!