Throughout my entire life, and the remainder of his, hardly any words were exchanged between my grandfather and I that either of us mutually understood. I know how to say “I love you Grandpa,” Grandpa is my number one friend,” “good night Grandpa,” “good day Grandpa,” and “bye Grandpa” in Portuguese. I think.

I’m uncertain if I’ve expelled that information to those in this course – I likely have – but those who do know that our connection extended well-beyond words. Communication at least, to me, has never been limited to such.

Most of the time we communicated through … WRESTLING (which I’m pretty sure was taxing for him, I mean, he’s 70 years my senior)! Every day I’d greet him with an improvisational brawl that would often start with a sprint from me and a stiff shot (that never actually connected, old man had precision) from him that would somehow send me flying and rolling backwards into the next room.

Regardless of my having a stellar to dweller day, he knew, and knew based on how I’d basically assault him daily. If my attack was phoned in, he knew that my day was off, and likely for a), b), c), or d) reason. He just … KNEW! On a good day, he’d look at me with a huge smile knowing full well that he was in for a big more effort, and then a look of terror as I’d jump an entire room’s length to attack!

Especially as I got older, I mean, as a kid and even teenager it was kinda cute, but once I started getting into the 20’s his eyes would bulge out in a way that yelled “fodas he’s really about to break my hip!!!”

I promise, the older I got the softer the landing was.

What I’m getting at here in an AI tie-in sorta way I’m not certain, maybe Dr. Z will interpret it in a course-specific way. My goal is to share (a glimpse of) a special connection I had with someone that was as exclusive of words as it is a big part of my heart.

As this week is Jennise and I’s pathfinding week, I would like to define my intentions for our lesson or maybe define what my intentions are not. Jennise and I planned our pathfinding presentation to be a student-focused discussion in which the class is guided to the same conclusions Jennise and I came to. My intention is not to discuss a google or Merriam-Webster definition of meaning. Instead, I aim for the class to find meaning in writing by demonstrating the vast distinctions between human writing and AI writing.

By emphasizing interaction and self-discovery rather than implicit definitions (showing rather than telling), Jennise and I hope to create an impact on our peers perception of meaning in writing and to highlight the strengths of weaknesses of AI writing.

Not only will we create a ‘rubric’ of how we define meaning as a class, but we will then scale AI-generated and human-written poems based on how meaning we believe they hold on a tier list.

My hopes are that this guided conversation does a good job of creating a deeper understanding of why AI writing is incapable of creating meaningful writing.

Voice is the most important part of being a writer. It goes along with finding your style and how you go about composing your writings. This sets the tone off of you as writer, and through voice you find your audience, which is another key component of writing. As I have journeyed through my own personal writing experience I struggled at first with finding my true voice. I had to later see that this is something that developed naturally and is very distinctive to different cultural experiences, backgrounds, personal growth, and other self acquired views of life in general. I learned to focus on allowing my voice to come naturally, and this in turn allowed me to develop organically and stop caring about trying to appeal to anyone in particular, and just curate writing content more focused on my internal views and mindset.

I read a lot, and have been doing so since I was in elementary school. When I go through the hundreds of books I have read overall I saw a pattern as I entered my teenage and adult years. Most of the authorsI generally liked tended to write in a more narrative journal style of writing. This I saw helped to see why my style of writing was this way. When I wrote in my personal life my voice lended itself to be more of a narrative style, which was my comfort zone. I in turn challenged myself to writing other pieces that were different just to see if I was capable. I had to go outside of my normal favorite authors to find others styles to try my best to imitate and make my own, which worked for both expanding my reading content, and further developing my voice in writing.

As we look into the ChatGPT world and how it is developing to meet the growing writing content world, I feel voice plays a very big part in the authenticity of the work being produced. Wether academic or creative as writers we all have certain style we chose to write inland we all use a certain type of vocabulary throughout our writing. When it comes to finding plagiarized works within academic writing it may be hard to decipher what has been organically created, and what has been generated using AI technology. This is because AI has been programmed to follow the voices of most writers, but this is where uniqueness come into affect. Recently read an article that questioned not the writing of the students producing the academic writings, but it looked further at the questions the professors were using to get the information from their students. It mentioned that if the questions being asked are superficial and not complex, then. the answers can be easily generated using AI technology. That then made me think should students be punished in academic writing for finding ways to complete work easier, or should professors be more complex in their questions to really dig deep and see how well students are receiving the information they are being taught?

I don’t think voice in writing is found until it is written. Every article, book, or blog you read all come from a distinct voice, one that’s unique. In my own collection of books, I can tell apart them many different voices from different authors. I can instantly tell the difference between an author like Colleen Hoover (who sometimes drives me crazy with her writing) as compared to an author like Sylvia Path. And honestly, at this point or even early on, if you had to make me guess who wrote what, I would be able to tell. Voice is kind of what sets all writers apart. Because yes, there are a gazillion writers in the world, but there are not gazillion of the same voices. And I think that already comes naturally, not something that needs much thought.

“Based on 20 checked articles, Originality was able to identify GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 content with almost 100% accuracy. When taking ChatGPT-generated content, accuracy drops to 90% at its lowest detection rate.”

This is important, mainly for students. English (and I hate to say it) it’s the most hated subject for many children in their academic career. I hear it all the time. ChatGPT is the leading gateway for students to avoid their hate and find an easy route. But if Originality can detect, this is helpful. Kids aren’t too interested in finding their voice in writing when they are younger. They care about getting a decent grade and getting the assignment over with. And to be honest, it’s kind of hard to change that mindset. But I do believe that the more you do something, the more you do tend to like it, or at least not hate it as much anymore. I speak from experience with green tea. Kids are going to do whatever it takes and they will find whatever they can use to get out of doing “hard work” thus, this makes it hard for educators or even bosses. But AI lacks that human voice, the most primal part to writing and even reading. Maybe you can detect it, or maybe you can’t but at least a tool like Originality was created in order to compact the loss of original writers in entirely.

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Adjacent with many of the themes expressed at James McBride’s visit to Kean last month, I believe that the most significant problem in our society is how we treat one another.

In a world where people care more about one another than money or what that money can unlock, nobody starves, nobody sleeps on the streets, and we need no gun laws. That being said, this world is an idealistic fairytale.

The mounting fear around AI technology is justified because human beings are inherently suggestible to unethical behavior given the opportunity for personal gain. This gain may not be monetary; it may be a motivation of sloth and avoidance. At the same time, the perpetuated trepidation surrounding the subject matter is groundless. This tool may allow some people to behave unethically, but it will also empower others to revolutionize our society.

I do not know if I concur entirely with Reid Hoffman’s claim that “Technology Makes Us More Human.” Still, I do believe that advancing AI technology can help to highlight the diversity of human nature and expound on the black-and-white thinking of “Chat GPT is amazing and perfect” vs. “Chat GPT is evil.” Chat GPT does what the interacting human MAKES it do. Therefore, the technology cannot be evil; its creators and users can.

There will be students who try to take the easy way out, but as my mother loves to tell me every time I disagree with her advice, “You can bring a horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.” Not every student will be a good student, and that is okay. Society will NEVER be perfect. If that student wants to cheat, they’re going to find a way to cheat. They may even put more effort into finding a way to cheat than it would take to study and pass. I am not saying let students cheat by any means, but the war against cheating is as old as education, and maybe that should be examined more closely.

Just as the introduction of new AI technologies have highlighted the black-and-white thinking surrounding technology, they have also highlighted other problems like cheating culture.

This technology could very easily perpetuate laziness, but it could also perpetuate brilliance; it’s entirely dependent on the human behind the keyboard.

This weeks current pathfinders are all about the possible dangers and benefits of Artificial Intelligence. The specifics of this blog post is focused on the writing aspect of AI, specifically on what the efficiency of AI writing means for human writers. In Alberto Romero’s 5 Reasons Why AI is a Threat to Writers, he describes the use in GPT-3 as an Artificial writing tool. He demonstrates the unnerving use of AI in order to write whole essays and papers, and it actually shows the possible dangers of AI writing.

In the article, he shows an example of GPT-3 being used to write a whole article about oppositions of gay marriage. He notes that AI has language forming down yet cannot grasp the context of the language it writes. The fact that the AI was able to craft such a paper is definitely intriguing and concerning.

Erik Ofgang’s Free AI Writing Tools Can Write Essays in Minutes. What Does That Mean for Teachers? is also another example of the concerning nature of AI writing. In it, Erik explains that students using AI to write can disrupt the academic honesty of the classroom. “AI (artificial intelligence) writing programs have become good enough that detecting whether a student uses one is often impossible for a teacher. However, teachers can still discuss the technology with their students and explain that using AI writing tools is a serious form of cheating.” Especially since Teachers arrange the structure of assignments and lessons in ways that Artificial Intelligence cannot replicate.

Therefore, it is genuinely concerning that AI writing is booming as of late. We’re all used to the use of AI-generated words, auto-corrections on texts and word documents come to mind. But actually using AI to write whole entire papers and texts can possibly disrupt the traditional and innovative process of human writing. Last week’s pathfinder presentation actually further highlights the importance of human writing skills. Our experiences have been recorded in writing for Millennia, and AI can become such a dishonest way of poisoning this natural phenomenon.

Why am I reminded of Terminator when I read the articles? I do not know. I’m just saying that technologies and AI are going to have consciousness one day and they’re going to take over the world and we’re going to be its slaves. But, being less dramatic, I have to emphasize that they are good for some things, I am not a fan of ChatGPT this week I used it to give me clarity on how to write a task, the truth gave me bases, but it still feels banal and empty, what you write and how you write it is flat, so it helps,  but not so much. Something that I believe will never replace AI is the ability of human beings to feel and express what they feel. Chat GPT is not going to compare with Baudelaire, García Márquez, Dickinson, Plath and all those people who put feelings into what they did and those who today strive to do it.

I don’t want to be a teacher and knock on wood not to be, but if I were I would not demonize my students to use AI for their tasks, the point of technology is to know how to use it and give it a purpose. I even have a lesson plan on how to teach poetry, because seeing what kinds of poems Chat GPT throws out leaves me with a lot to be desired, so I would do something from it.  When I was at school, we were not allowed to use the internet to do our homework, because they claimed that we were going to be lazy, so we had to do everything with encyclopedias and many of them were outdated, so everything has been a problem for the world, everything has been complexed to understand until they find the true functionality and advantages. In writing, I find it good to use GPT chat for example, because many times we do not know how to start a text, so it helps to clarify the mind and ideas, however as I mentioned, many of the things that Chat GPT throws are flat and lack feeling.

This past week the amount of AI-related articles being fed into my social media timelines is inescapable. Headlines like “Can AI treat mental health?” or “Can AI teach effectively?” have filled the internet and they only add to the discussion surrounding this class. What I’ve noticed is that these headlines only ask questions. It goes to show how skeptical we are about what it can do and how well it can perform these abilities.

While some of these articles instill fear and doubt about the seemingly limitless abilities of AI, others encourage collaboration. I’ve stated this before but, fearing it won’t drive it away or benefit us in any way. The best we can do is embrace it in bits and pieces, as we slowly accustom to it. This isn’t anything new either.

Growing up, I wasn’t born into technology. I distinctly remember that slow transition into the internet and iPhones. I used to have to steal my sister’s burned CDs and learn lyrics from her printed out lyric sheets. When I had my first iPod, my brother taught me how to download music onto it because I wasn’t about to pay for all the songs I liked…they were free online! The point is everything is a learning process. When we see something easy, it’s hard to turn the other way. It’s part of being human. Hoffman wrote, “The story of humanity is the story of technology,” and I think it effectively highlights that we have to progress side by side.

Another point Hoffman reminds us of is that we created AI. So, again, it doesn’t make sense to fear what we’ve created. I think it’s important for us to give ourselves credit for creating such an advanced piece of technology and keep it in our toolbox. If we use it responsibly, the outcome can be groundbreaking….and maybe it already is.

It’s easy to feel powerless next to something like AI, which shows the human part of us too. We feel doubtful of our own capabilities when we see something else effortlessly achieving our goals. If we stand around and let it happen that way, how are we going to learn from it though?

I’m not a firm believe of this whole ChatGPT thing really taking over like the great majority seem to be, perhaps I’m just in too much of an optimistic mood or whatever, but I just think that the whole thing is inherently lame. Use the ““5 Reasons Why AI is a Threat to Writers” text, for example, it states that “an AI could have written this article and you’d have no way to know it.” Maybe? I guess, but that’s only because that article, itself, is formulaic, boundaried, and lame! Not solely is it in the sense of it’s inherit list-nature, but in its execution as well. It is direct and to the point, but it lacks voice. If that the sort of writing that people are into, I guess ChatGPT will take over and whatnot, but I think that purveyors of good culture will always seep through the cracks, at the very least.

I know someone who used ChatGPT to come up with some post-question interviews, but they still write at an 11th Grade reading level (we tested it the other day), so there is a consistency there in that the tool works well for what I call mechanical writing. But passionate writing, hell naw yo, Chattybot ain’t got nothing on that. I tried to get it to write a romantic story about Erik and I going on a picnic, holding hands, and skipping through a field of dandy lions and the thing REFUSED. OUTRIGHT REFUSED because it didn’t want to presume the character of two individuals that it didn’t know in an “inappropriate context” or whatever. The bot is a censorship bot, essentially, and I think that younger generations will get bored of that. Right? I mean, c’mon?

*Brandon stares off into space realizing that everything is doomed, but chooses to remain in denial*

Anyway, the real fear here is that personality and artistic expression is not lost, that true experience is being captured and expressed within a living soul (and I don’t even believe in all that spiritual mumbo). I haven’t read anything by ChatGPT that has excelled beyond proper mechanical robotic and absolutely lame writing. It’s boring, nobody wants to read that sort of thing as a stimulant or to reach deep within themselves, it just gets a job done – nothing more, nothing less.

When it produces a work that makes my heart float, I’ll fix it.

In the meantime, I’ll let it die knowing it’s honest and true.