The Public Professor

A little over a year ago I published an essay that implored my fellow educators not to panic amid the dawning of Artificial Intelligence. Since then I’ve had two and a half semesters to consider what it all means. That first semester, many of my students had not even heard of AI. By the very next semester, a shocking number of them were tempted to have it research and write for them. Many of my earlier observations about how to avoid AI plagiarism still hold: an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; good policies and clear communication from the jump are vital; assignments such as in-class writing and oral exams are foolproof inoculators… However, other, more abstract questions with profound pedagogical implications are emerging. These can be put under the larger canopy of: What am I teaching them and why? Us Historians specifically, and Liberal Artists more generally, help students develop certain skill sets. We train them in the Humanities and Social Sciences, teaching them to find or develop data and use it effectively through critical and creative thinking. Obviously a political scientist and a continental philosopher go about this differently. However, the venn diagram of their techniques and goals probably overlaps a fair bit more than a lay person might realize. For starters, we all have the same broad subject matter. Everyone in the Liberal Arts, from art historians and literature profs to psychologists and economists, studies some aspect of the human condition. And while we each have our own angles of observation and methodologies, there are also substantial similarities among them. We all find or generate data (even if forms of data are different), analyze them, draw conclusions, and present our findings. And those presentations of findings, even when centered around quantitative data, include a narrative. In other words, words. All of us, in one way or another and to varying degrees, teach students to write. And that’s what Large Language Model Artificial Intelligence has me thinking about. If last year I was concerned about stopping plagiarism, today I’m contemplating what “cheating” even means and how its definitions are likely to change in the next few years. And that in turn has led me to reconsider the common calculator. Today, calculators are so readily accessible that you hardly think about where to find one should you need it. Your phone has one. Even my phone, which flips open and shut and has mechanical buttons, boasts a calculator. All your other computer devices have at least one as well, which is a nice reminder that “computer” literally means “computational device,” ie. “calculator.” And of course there are thousands of different calculators available online. But if you’re my age or older, you remember when calculators were dedicated pieces of technology. Large by today’s standards, they had physical buttons, ran on batteries, and appeared alongside another innovation, the digital clock, both of which used new technology to produce the digital display of numbers. Two hands circling a round clock

I am sitting on the couch of our discontent.  The Robot Overlords™ are circling.

Be the first to join my cult!

Nowadays satire is caught in the middle, between the craziness and the sanctimony, the outrageous and the outraged.