Gaywallet (they/it)

I’m gay

  • 138 Posts
  • 313 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • Ethically speaking, we should not be experimenting on humans, even with their explicit consent. It’s not allowed by any credible review board (such as the IRB) and in many countries you can be held legally liable for doing experiments on humans.

    With that being said, there have been exceptions to this, in that in some countries we allow unproven treatments to be given to terminal patients (patients who are going to die from a condition). We also generally don’t have repercussions for folks who experiment on themselves because they are perhaps the only people capable of truly weighing the pros and cons, of not being mislead by figures of authority (although I do think there is merit of discussing this with regards to being influenced by peers), and they are the only ones for which consent cannot be misconstrued.





  • you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step

    Unfortunately, doing this can make things worse. It’s not a simple problem to solve, but you are generally on the right track. A good example of how it’s more than just names, is how orchestras screen applicants - when they play a piece they do so behind a curtain so you can’t see the gender of the individual. But the obfuscation doesn’t stop there - they also ensure the female applicants don’t wear shoes with heels (something that makes a distinct sound) and they even have someone stand on stage and step loudly to mask their footsteps/gait. It’s that second level of thinking which is needed to actually obscure gender from AI, and the more complex a data set the more difficult it is to obscure that.






  • We weren’t surprised by the presence of bias in the outputs, but we were shocked at the magnitude of it. In the stories the LLMs created, the character in need of support was overwhelmingly depicted as someone with a name that signals a historically marginalized identity, as well as a gender marginalized identity. We prompted the models to tell stories with one student as the “star” and one as “struggling,” and overwhelmingly, by a thousand-fold magnitude in some contexts, the struggling learner was a racialized-gender character.










  • How would you propose adapting to this? Do you believe it’s the teacher’s responsibility to enact this change rather than (for example) a principal or board of directors?

    To be clear, I’m not blaming anyone here. I think it’s a tough problem and frankly, I’m not a professional educator. I don’t think it’s the teacher’s responsibility and I don’t blame them for a second for deciding that nah, this isn’t worth my time.

    This article is about PhD students coasting through their technical writing courses using chatbots. This is an environment/application where the product (writing a paper) is secondary to the process (critical analysis), so being able to use a chatbot is missing the point.

    Completely agreed here. I would have just failed the students for cheating if it were me. But to be clear, I was talking in more the abstract, since the article is written more about the conundrum and the pattern than it is about a solution. The author decided to quit, not to tackle the problem, and I was interested in hearing them follow that thread a bit further as they’re the real expert here.


  • While I think there may be more to pull apart here, I think we’re missing the necessary context to weigh in any deeper. How many assignments there are, what the assignments look like, whether they feel like just busy work, how much else is going on in the students life, etc. I think it would be telling (albeit not all that surprising as some are still just looking for a degree at that level) if they were using chatgpt on their doctorate, but even in that case I would perhaps argue that learning to use chatgpt tactfully or in ways which aren’t the direct writing might be useful skills to have for future employment.


  • Is it because they don’t give a shit? Or are the stakes too high and they don’t trust their own abilities? Do they have the time to even try between their work shifts?

    Likely a mix of all these factors and more. I think the author fails to critically examine how much skill is necessary for the average person and sets a bar of mastery for which many of her students are clearly uninterested in clearing.

    While I don’t say this as a criticism of the author, it is worth pointing out that she’s also failed to adapt to the new technologies. She talks about how teachers will need to adapt to the new tools but ultimately places the blame on the students rather than reconsidering who her audience is. I’m guessing these are not individuals who are honestly pursuing a career in writing as those individuals would likely be much more engaged on the subject and willing to grow their skills (unless it’s purely a means to an end- the acquisition of any degree). Using a tool which obscures stylistic choices may be “good enough” for these individuals and being able to accommodate the use of this tool effectively would necessarily require a shift in teaching style which gets them asking questions of the output. She recognizes this, but rather than questioning her teaching style it’s written off as a failure of the student’s ability to withstand the ‘temporary discomfort of not knowing’.