The first really tangible example of the burgeoning research into Artificial Intelligence that broke into mainstream culture is the ChatGPT application produced by OpenAI. It’s a large-scale neural net with a natural language “chat” interface. It blew up at the tail end of last year and then was the subject of lots of discussion last semester around how to understand its impact in educational institutions.
Some articles for more information:
- Steven Johnson, “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” NYTimes.
- Stephen Marche, “The Computers are Getting Better at Writing,” New Yorker.
- Ian Bogost, “ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think,” The Atlantic.
- Daniel Herman, “ChatGPT Will End High-School English,” The Atlantic.
- Jeff Schatten, “Will Artificial Intelligence Kill College Writing?” The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Let’s spend some time in class discussing this tool and its implications. In preparation for that conversation, I tried starting a conversation with ChatGPT using two of the assignment prompts from this semester’s work that you’ll be responding to.
Here’s the discussion I had with it about David Small’s Stitches:
