Alarmed by A.I. chatbots, universities revamp classes

The humans stay home hooked up to some sort of addictive video games
and let the robots that look like them to do their jobs. Detectives, nurses, etc.

So students could let the robots go to class for them.

The people are so zonked out on the video games and drugs it takes awhile for them to wake up.

It was actually a pretty good movie. It starred Bruce Willis, I am not a fan of his, but he did a good job.

The prof was not pleased.

class notes were a commodity offered for sale by the university itself!

all that farfetched anymore. Some of the advances I've seen are a bit unsettling and not really "advances".

Scary.

It didn't get great ratings but I like science fiction so watched it anyway.
It is also a detective/mystery story, which I love.

I was pleasantly surprised that is was interesting and entertaining.

Bruce Willis did a good job. The roles were dual ones in this move.
Actors played themselves and the look-a-like robots.

The robots looked like humans, but artificial looking.
Just that aspect alone in the movie was interesting.

I'll keep a lookout for it, thanks!

I think Bruce Willis in a Sci Fi role didn't sit well with the public.

But I just looked it up on Amazon and it got good reviews there.
I think low reviews on other sites, maybe rotten tomatoes.

and The Fifth Element, so I would have thought I would have seen Surrogates, but nothing about it sounds familiar. Maybe because it came out after my son moved out.

I didn't see 12 Monkeys but people talk about. I should watch it.

I don't think Surrogates was as good as Fifth Element.
Of course BW was also in Sixth Sense and that was so good.

So yes I guess he did his share of Sci-Fi.

Yes once the kids move out, life changes. Living pop culture walks out the door.

that I am more likely to watch with someone else than by myself.

Fun to watch with family or friends.

I watched MILK, the story of Harvey Milk, with my daughter when she was a teen.
It was good to educate her about what life used to be like.
And show her a good role model for bravery and leadership.

So I was more likely to watch some movies and programs with him. When my daughter was young, we watched Masterpiece Theater programs and nighttime soaps like Dallas and Falcon Crest.

So I watched all of that with her. She also goes off on tangents like the show about glass blowing contests.

I love sci fi and Masterpiece Theater, and TV dramas like you mention, so watch most of that stuff as well.

I got a little of everything. They bonded together more on standup comedy and sitcoms, most of which I don't particularly care for. I never liked Seinfeld or Friends, but both of them did and as much as I appreciate some really good standup comedy, I find most of them rather tedious and predictable.

And watched Seinfeld.

Peele and Key are hilarious, they are a duo and genius.

But I am more heavy furniture and like serious topics, or things that transport me to other places or time.

Really good comedy is priceless, but most of it is rather mindless and unoriginal.

Really my sense of humor is strange.
I can be quite ironic and humorous w/ some of my comments.

But half the time here on DU I do not get the jokes.

so I put it in my watchlist. It is bound to show up eventually.

It is one of my all time favorite TV series.

I rarely watch anything twice, but I have watched this a couple of times.

It is sci fi and a police detective story, one of my favorite combinations.

It is set in the UK, goes back in time to the 1970's.
So it is irreverent and not evolved socially, but it is funny as heck.
And very well acted and written.

I watched that show not all that long ago and I really liked it. I watched some of the spinoff Ashes to Ashes with Keeley Hawes. I didn't finish it though. By then the whole premise had been overdone even though I enjoyed it and I really like Keeley Hawes.

I have both Britbox and Acorn!

But I like KW and watched her on some other shows as well.

I have both Britbox and Acorn as well. I love British productions.

at the right time. It is the kind of premise that eventually gets old.

Yes, British TV is usually my favorite. I'm watching Agatha Christie's Marple right now. Almost done.

Yes watched AC Marple some time ago.

I have watched Masterpiece Theater for decades.
And watched much of BritBox and Acorn.

There were so many well known actors in them, it has been a real treat.

I think it's set in 2049. While it's somewhat amusing and kind of funny it's also terrifying.

Looks really good.

It's a funnier take on the Terminator scenario.

Both worth watching in my opinion.

The Peripheral was already there.

Sometimes I go off on WWII watching jags and skip Sci Fi.
WWII movies are very calming and relaxing for me when stressed.

Yes should be listed in this conversation!

If students have to start producing handwritten work, they'll soon learn that cursive is a more efficient method.

Just when cursive was on the brink of extinction, AI gives an assist. Well done--because there's a link between cursive writing and cognitive processes.

with beautiful, flowing handwriting (my cursive is much nicer than my printing). It was like creating a little piece of art, as well as completing an assignment.

It doesn't flow the same way as cursive and the ideas often don't flow either.

I asked my mid-20s kids if they could read cursive and they said "sort of." They can usually figure out most words to make sense of it. It's so bizarre to me. But, they probably find it bizarre that I don't know how to do many things (mainly with technology) that are second-nature to them.

our family tree years ago, I realized how important reading cursive was. Otherwise you needed to have someone translate old letters and documents. When younger people stopped learning to write cursive, it didn't dawn on me at the time that they also would stop being able to read it as well.

I have a tech savvy son, so I was able to keep up with new technology in most respects. However, I never learned to type with my thumbs and have no desire to learn.

The granddaughter brought it to grandma to translate.

I was floored to hear this story.

When educators decided to stop teaching cursive, they had no idea how many doors they were closing.

Right educators didn't realize what it meant to stop teaching cursive.

But as the experts tell us, language is a fluid concept, always evolving.
We have to go with the flow. Many of the rules of grammar I was taught
have gone by the wayside.

let go of some of the strict grammar rules I learned in school, but certainly not all. I avoid many acronyms and the excessive use of filler words such as like - "She was like so happy". I think the point is communication and being understood. Still I have English teachers in my head who rarely stay quiet.

And the English teachers who taught us how to use pronouns and object of the proposition correctly?

My daughter is a grammar snob, but has thrown in the towel with her cohort group.

Awfully excessive.

I was a military brat and in overseas DOD (Dept of Defense) schools, which by the way, are excellent.

We were Air Force kids, the boys made little airplanes with messages and secretively flew them around
the classroom when the teacher wasn't looking and going over these extensive and ridiculous diagrams.

This particular teacher was superb and wonderful, so she appeared to have some mercy on our souls.
And pretended not to see the airplanes. We were basically good kids but had our limits and hated to be bored.

and I am happy to see cursive make a comeback, though some young adults missed out as it was not required or encouraged when they were in school. If you don't learn it young, you probably won't be able to rewire your brain as an adult.

Custom font and a good ink printer.

The second that becomes standard practice there will be easy solutions to evade.

Cursive is an antiquated waste of time. We shouldn't be adding pointless complexity to education, when there are better options.

What I favor is requiring the student to do their writing in a web based application that records their keystroke and typing patterns. Even if the student was using AI to generate it and then retyping it as would have vastly different input and behaviors than a genuine creative process - all differences that an AI model could be built to detect.

There are many advantages to learning to write in cursive.



https://www.columbiamissourian.com/opinion/guest_commentaries/teaching-cursive-writing-helps-improve-brain-development-should-be-required-in-schools/article_f7f99778-8dba-11eb-a293-33c101879bdd.html#:~:text=Not%20only%20is%20cursive%20good,absent%20from%20printing%20and%20typing.



https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/great-cursive-writing-debate



I've found that when writing in cursive, I am more creative and my thoughts and ideas are more inclined to flow. Also as mentioned above, people are more likely to remember things that they write in cursive.


"Cursive handwriting stimulates brain synapses and synchronicity between the left and right hemispheres, something absent from printing and typing." Kaylee Harp

There are many skills that help with brain development as they are mastered. I suspect there are other equally beneficial ways to spend kids time that will result in a more useful skill later in life.

I learned it in school and haven't used it in 20 years.

Certainly, we all aren't the same.

that more and more 'members' of various message boards I visit are just the new and updated operating systems out of St Petersburg and the Internet Research Agency (known as the Trolls from Olgino) quietly replacing the human trolls (more bang for the ruble).

Commanding the Trend: Social Media as Information Warfare by Jarred Prier is a great, eye-opening open-access article, forecasting the replacement of trolls with bots. The last year or so has really validated his thesis.

More and more humans appear to becoming obsolete. The science fiction prospect of a takeover by machines is not so farfetched anymore. Is AI here to make our lives better or to just takeover our lives?

I love my job as a university professor but stories like this make me look forward to retirement in 9 years.

I feel like we are losing something really vital to humanity and I think it could touch many areas of thought and creativity - music, art, philosophy, literature, and science. If people don't have to think or create, is it possible that they will just stop? Sounds like a real life "Walking Dead".

ChatGPT.

I will admit I asked the system two questions about a topic I had an interest in and it answered giving a full assessment and discussion of feasibility that as far as I can tell was flawless.

Quite impressive.

Will people eventually just stop thinking on their own if a computer can do it for them?

Is this an evolution or de-evolution?

The questions I asked the system were literally items I had been thinking about and working on for my entire professional career. My asking was more or less a confirmation of information I already knew.

First of all, to use AI to advance, humans need to have the knowledge and experience to even be able to ask a system relevant questions. They then need to be able to discern if the product generated by the system is correct.

that looks like evolution initially. And if people stop thinking and creating, how will they even know what is reason or art? They will just begin to assume that whatever the computer says must be true. I can picture people's minds atrophying at a rapid pace. Of course, if there is some apocalyptic event in the future, people will not have the skills to survive.

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All this does is teach people how to be good essay writers and plug-n-play information with summary. It becomes monotonous and does not offer any real conceptual skills that could be translated to a career.

When speaking to to other students, they were all uncertain how they would get a job as they had no real work experience.

I approached professors asking why the heavy reliance on essays and they replied that was the best way to judge if a person knows the information.



This was the case I made.

If you are an English Student and have to do an essay on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, have the student rewrite the ending instead.

If you are a Poli-Sci student, revise the a political theorist's arguments.

If you are in Journalism, interview business leaders and college academia and write papers on that. I actually had to write a paper for undergrad where I had to interview a business leader for a business class I took.

Colleges need to restructure the way their courses are taught to include career-building skills, so when the student leaves school, they have something tangible to offer besides the sheepskin.



There were some good things that were done too. They had students create websites to post creative works. They had job studies to create a resume. (First time I revised my resume in 20 years.) Symposiums and business luncheons to introduce people to the student body.

I digress by saying that the Number #1 way to get a job is by networking. Everyone is just a name or number to Human Resources when they submit online. HR's job is to weed out people, to find the best candidate, so the slightest deviance from what is asked for and what is on the resume could impact chances. Instead, people need to join user or community groups to network with others in the field. This way, if a position comes up in one company, your name will be thought of first.

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It is important that students learn critical thinking and a good instructor knows ways to do that effectively. I had a teacher who made us debate both sides of an issue. That was a real eye-opener for me and I never forgot the lesson it taught me. Surprisingly, I was actually convincing on both sides. To this day, I frequently stop and appraise contradictory points of view to be sure I'm not missing something.

"Plug-n-play information" - perfect description. Plug-n-play learning will undoubtedly create more mindless cogs in the machine. Who will innovate and create? I feel like we are living in the prelude to a futuristic dystopian movie.

He was thinking that universities will create tools to detect ChatGPT created documents. At this point that makes sense but at some point the AI is going to be nearly perfect and undetectable.

What does that say about humans?

ChatGPT "learned" some of what it does through training, but it also digested hundreds of GB of data from books and Wikipedia. It sees to me that those kinds of information suppliers deserve to be paid if a computer program uses their work product for input to produce its output. Suppose I buy an e-Book by Cormac McCarthy. Can I just use a program to rewrite the book for me, maybe change the protagonist names and personalities, convert the style to Ernest Hemingway? For free?

They already have AI that produces paintings in the style of the masters. At what point is all of this infringing on the rights of the originators?

It is all making my head hurt.