so great to be reading your thoughts on this. I've been leading "writing with AI" workshops for teachers through IWT at Bard College, and the wide range of responses to and implications of Gen. AI is . . . rapidly evolving. Thanks, Ann!
Your comments on generative AI are insightful, especially because you take a broad view.
I've worked with and tried to use various technologies described as AI since I wrote my first code in the late 1960s. I agree with the general feeling that genAI is significant, but I've lived by the tech hype-cycle long enough to question anything captured by the tech marketing machine.
GenAI has been accepted and taken up with astounding speed. Perhaps the post-pandemic stagnation and layoffs in tech have something to do with GenAI's rapid incorporation in products like Microsoft Office, but I suspect it's more than that. Folks seem to realize that genAI potentially eases a lot of the inane drudgery that precedes creative products and therefore fear that jobs will be eliminated.
I've been trying to eliminate jobs with software for the past three decades. At first, I worked on these projects because I loved the potential of software to do things better. When I was young, I simply did not think about the jobs I might eliminate.
With experience, I realized that I consistently failed to eliminate jobs with every new feature or product. Why? In business, when a department becomes more efficient, more business is generated and more people are hired. Word processing eliminated typing pools, but typists long ago moved on to other jobs. Office staffs got larger, not smaller. Typists became analysts, managers, and executives and the economy became more productive.
Roles change, but jobs are not eliminated. How will genAI change writing and authorship? I will state, counter intuitively, that writing quality will improve on the five year horizon. The inane chatter and hallucinations of genAI will quickly repel audiences. (In another place, I will argue that eliminating genAI hallucinations is impossible.) Writing will become more firmly based in facts requiring more research. Human insight and imagination will become much more important than it is today. Will dullards be out of jobs? No. They will either take on new challenges and cease their dullest habits, or they will find places supporting the new rush of creativity from those who do step up.
Thank you so much for sharing with us this thoughtful and informed comment! You are making me more optimistic. In my under-informed use, AI (or free ChatGPT) has been so unreliable that I am reluctant to trust it with even routine tasks. What I see in creative fields is that technology has created ways to chip away at the jobs that were meaningful avenues of entry for younger people and sources of income for for others. Younger and mid-level people have less security, less support, and less meaningful participation. I'm not yet seeing how this depletion of work life leads to fuller forms of existence but. maybe I lack imagination!
I don't see enhancement of work life either. Yet. But that is always the way it goes. First the typists disappeared, but the need for report writers increased and were assigned to entry level folks who would have been relegated to the typing pool a few years before. So I am patient. Typically, no one notices that life improves, they only quit being concerned about the detrimental effects that don't materialize.
For what it's worth, I approach genAI as an enthusiastic and extraordinarily diligent assistant who is not too bright. You can rely on them to find everything relevant, but not their discrimination. In their enthusiasm, they might conjure hallucinations, which are the closest they come to creativity. I doubt that genAI hallucinations will ever be eliminated because the possibility of hallucination is exactly what makes them such diligent compilers.
This is such an appealing description! I think part of the genius of ChatGPT was that they gave it that little flavor of personality, like, I'm trying here! Sorry when I mess up!
I am hampered in my ability to think about AI by my relative lack of interest in it--it does not seem to do anything for me that I want done. My own experience with it is in the academic context, mainly wondering about whether students are using it to cheat on assignments. It presents special challenges, because unlike traditional plagiarism, which can often be detected, it's all but impossible to prove that a student has used AI to write something, even when one knows that to be the case.
Though pretty reluctant to see them use it, I think AI probably has potential uses for some students. In some ways I suppose it is like a spell-checker. I don't care about spell-checkers either--I actually turn them off!--but there are perfectly bright, talented people who for various reasons just don't spell very well, and a spell-checker helps them avoid making an unnecessarily and unfairly bad first impression in written communications. Similarly, there are plenty of bright, talented people whose writing will always be a little clunky, and if AI can smooth that out for them, that's probably a good thing.
I worry, however, that its availability offers my students a dangerous temptation, namely, the temptation to remain too uninterested in things to bother learning about them (because if one doesn't have to write the paper, one can skip the preparatory learning). Over the years I find myself thinking more and more that about the most valuable thing I can help my students acquire is the capacity to be interested in things. (Which is not simply inborn but is also learned.) AI makes it easier for them not to bother with that--in the long run, a loss for them. I worry less about whether they will learn to write than about whether they will want to learn.
so great to be reading your thoughts on this. I've been leading "writing with AI" workshops for teachers through IWT at Bard College, and the wide range of responses to and implications of Gen. AI is . . . rapidly evolving. Thanks, Ann!
I’d love to hear what that’s like!
Your comments on generative AI are insightful, especially because you take a broad view.
I've worked with and tried to use various technologies described as AI since I wrote my first code in the late 1960s. I agree with the general feeling that genAI is significant, but I've lived by the tech hype-cycle long enough to question anything captured by the tech marketing machine.
GenAI has been accepted and taken up with astounding speed. Perhaps the post-pandemic stagnation and layoffs in tech have something to do with GenAI's rapid incorporation in products like Microsoft Office, but I suspect it's more than that. Folks seem to realize that genAI potentially eases a lot of the inane drudgery that precedes creative products and therefore fear that jobs will be eliminated.
I've been trying to eliminate jobs with software for the past three decades. At first, I worked on these projects because I loved the potential of software to do things better. When I was young, I simply did not think about the jobs I might eliminate.
With experience, I realized that I consistently failed to eliminate jobs with every new feature or product. Why? In business, when a department becomes more efficient, more business is generated and more people are hired. Word processing eliminated typing pools, but typists long ago moved on to other jobs. Office staffs got larger, not smaller. Typists became analysts, managers, and executives and the economy became more productive.
Roles change, but jobs are not eliminated. How will genAI change writing and authorship? I will state, counter intuitively, that writing quality will improve on the five year horizon. The inane chatter and hallucinations of genAI will quickly repel audiences. (In another place, I will argue that eliminating genAI hallucinations is impossible.) Writing will become more firmly based in facts requiring more research. Human insight and imagination will become much more important than it is today. Will dullards be out of jobs? No. They will either take on new challenges and cease their dullest habits, or they will find places supporting the new rush of creativity from those who do step up.
Watch the five year horizon.
Thank you so much for sharing with us this thoughtful and informed comment! You are making me more optimistic. In my under-informed use, AI (or free ChatGPT) has been so unreliable that I am reluctant to trust it with even routine tasks. What I see in creative fields is that technology has created ways to chip away at the jobs that were meaningful avenues of entry for younger people and sources of income for for others. Younger and mid-level people have less security, less support, and less meaningful participation. I'm not yet seeing how this depletion of work life leads to fuller forms of existence but. maybe I lack imagination!
I don't see enhancement of work life either. Yet. But that is always the way it goes. First the typists disappeared, but the need for report writers increased and were assigned to entry level folks who would have been relegated to the typing pool a few years before. So I am patient. Typically, no one notices that life improves, they only quit being concerned about the detrimental effects that don't materialize.
For what it's worth, I approach genAI as an enthusiastic and extraordinarily diligent assistant who is not too bright. You can rely on them to find everything relevant, but not their discrimination. In their enthusiasm, they might conjure hallucinations, which are the closest they come to creativity. I doubt that genAI hallucinations will ever be eliminated because the possibility of hallucination is exactly what makes them such diligent compilers.
This is such an appealing description! I think part of the genius of ChatGPT was that they gave it that little flavor of personality, like, I'm trying here! Sorry when I mess up!
Brilliant and disturbing. Please keep up the good work, although it must be exhausting tracking some of this stuff down.
Jean, humble bows and deep gratitude for the encouragement!
Thanks, Ann, for this informative second part!
I am hampered in my ability to think about AI by my relative lack of interest in it--it does not seem to do anything for me that I want done. My own experience with it is in the academic context, mainly wondering about whether students are using it to cheat on assignments. It presents special challenges, because unlike traditional plagiarism, which can often be detected, it's all but impossible to prove that a student has used AI to write something, even when one knows that to be the case.
Though pretty reluctant to see them use it, I think AI probably has potential uses for some students. In some ways I suppose it is like a spell-checker. I don't care about spell-checkers either--I actually turn them off!--but there are perfectly bright, talented people who for various reasons just don't spell very well, and a spell-checker helps them avoid making an unnecessarily and unfairly bad first impression in written communications. Similarly, there are plenty of bright, talented people whose writing will always be a little clunky, and if AI can smooth that out for them, that's probably a good thing.
I worry, however, that its availability offers my students a dangerous temptation, namely, the temptation to remain too uninterested in things to bother learning about them (because if one doesn't have to write the paper, one can skip the preparatory learning). Over the years I find myself thinking more and more that about the most valuable thing I can help my students acquire is the capacity to be interested in things. (Which is not simply inborn but is also learned.) AI makes it easier for them not to bother with that--in the long run, a loss for them. I worry less about whether they will learn to write than about whether they will want to learn.