computers

Writing on Demand vs. Writing on Purpose

computers, teaching, Technology, writing

By Evan Thomas

What does it sound like to sound educated yet know nothing? In a 17th-century comedy by Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (“The Middle-Class Aristocrat”), a rich cloth merchant tries to imitate aristocratic education and speech. He takes philosophy classes and learns that his normal expressions “require a little lengthening” – he must learn how to stretch heartfelt statements (“your lovely eyes make me die of love”) into aristocratic contortions (“Of love to die make me, beautiful marchioness, your beautiful eyes”; “Your lovely eyes, of love make me, beautiful marchioness, die”; “Die, your lovely eyes, beautiful marchioness, of love make me”; “Me make your lovely eyes die, beautiful marchioness, of love”). The joke is on him, as his rhetoric tutor cruelly exploits his easy admiration for excessive, voluminous, amplitudinous, prolix, verbose, copious speech.

The example of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme is echoed in a new development in AI. Recently, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a large-language model (“LLM”) AI that appears to have tremendous facility at composing passable long-form texts. As an educator in higher ed, I don’t think that writing pedagogies are remotely ready yet for the instructional challenges posed by this technology. The main concerns that academics have had about AI and collegiate writing have to do with academic integrity. These are important concerns and addressing them will probably have massive relevance in the years to come.

Headline: Schools Ban ChatGPT Amid Fears of Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Cheating
Headline: Teachers Fear ChatGPT Will Make Cheating Easier Than Ever

However, not all academics are especially concerned by the threat posed by AI language models. First, some academics express confidence that their domain-specific knowledge is too inscrutable for a machine to understand. Second, others suggest that the strength of their bonds with their students would make it impossible for their students to make an unnoticed switch to a different voice. Whether the first or second case is true, whether some content or character is indelible, there are finer, more constructive applications of LLMs to writing in higher ed.

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A laptop with html code and the word Poetry on the screen.

Does Poetry Require Humans?

computers, Poetry, Technology

By Christy Tidwell

To end National Poetry Month and my exploration of the relationships between poetry and science, I want to turn to the process of writing poetry rather than poetry that addresses scientific ideas. More specifically, who – or what – writes poetry? Can an algorithm write poetry? Poetry is usually considered a particularly human thing. It’s an art form that requires linguistic ability, and it is associated with subjective experience, emotion, and interiority. Algorithms have access to language, but they lack individual identity, experiences, and emotions. Algorithms can be programmed to write poetry, so the question is really: does that count as poetry?

Bot or Not (sadly now defunct) takes up this topic by exploring whether we can actually tell the difference between poetry written by a human and poetry written by a bot. Check out some samples and see how you do. Here’s one example to consider:

Red flags the reason for pretty flags.
And ribbons.
Ribbons of flags
And wearing material
Reason for wearing material.
Give pleasure.
Can you give me the regions.
The regions and the land.
The regions and wheels.
All wheels are perfect.
Enthusiasm.

Does this seem like the work of a human poet? If you’re looking for expressions of emotion and interiority – as I primed you to do in the introduction – you might suspect this is the work of the bot. It’s not, though. It was written by Gertrude Stein, who was famous for challenging expectations of language use anyway. Kind of a tricky one. Ultimately, though, Oscar Schwartz, one of the creators of Bot or Not, said that 65% of their human readers failed the test for some of the poems in their database, indicating that it’s not just about Gertrude Stein being Gertrude Stein. There’s some real confusion about what’s human about poetry – and about humans themselves.

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