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ChatGPT Is a Gimmick
AI offers a tempting illusion to students—and evidently to some teachers.
It appears both to save labor and to inflate it, like a fanciful Rube Goldberg device that allows you to sharpen a pencil merely by raising the sash on a window, which only initiates a chain of causation involving strings, pulleys, weights, levers, fire, flora, and fauna, including an opossum. AI progress in cultural production already seems to have slowed because the models have run out of human-generated writing to “learn” from and increasingly feed on AI-produced content, gulping down a vile soup of their own ever-concentrating ordure. “The worst thing educational institutions could do is embrace AI uncritically as an inevitable ‘efficiency upgrade,’” it wrote, “because that would mean compounding the very gimmickry Ngai diagnoses: mistaking ease for value, and output for understanding.” Take that, Scott Latham.
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