This course focuses on the human nature of writing. How we as humans have such a uniqueness, that even if we tried to remove it, finds its way into our artistic creations. It could be the idiosyncrasies in the way we write or the way our hands move on their own when painting, the crack in our voice when we are confessing our love, the rhetoric we use in speeches we create or our experiences that unknowingly slip into our narratives. What a wonderfully human phenomenon. However, one more thing slips past no matter how much we fight it, Bias. Commentary on a social issue, the harsh critique a work of a younger or woman author, or the writings of a political opponent. Biases slip past us unconsciously in writing and most definitely in our AI.

AI is a creation of man, and no matter how much we as humans attempt to detach ourselves from it our Biases they do slip in. Joy Buolamwini’s Ted Talk on bias in algorithm sheds light on the way “Algorithmic bias can also lead to exclusionary experiences and discriminatory practices.” mentioning that AI facial recognition software cannot recognize her face but has no issue recognizing her peers of a lighter complexion and even masks. In spite of this she made a point to stay positive and mention that it is a flaw of our own creation and there are many ways we can combat this.

She makes the mention of police departments using unregulated AI networks, that have not been audited for accuracy. Which is terrifying. If eye witness testimony can’t be trusted, how can we trust software that can’t accurately and without bias recognize a variety of faces. Imagine the amount innocent people who would be accused of crimes they did not commit due to faulty algorithms. One specific phrase stuck out to me “We now have the opportunity to unlock even greater equality if we make social change a priority and not an afterthought.” Even when facing such a unfathomable social issue we can take steps in correcting them. AI is not naturally occurring, we create it, and evolve it. So together we can push it to a version of itself where it can be an inclusive software.

I want to end this portion of this blog post with a few lines from my all time favorite poem. Desiderata by Max Ehrmann .

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

AI in Education

Having no interesting in the field of pedagogy, I agree with the decision of some schools that have already banned ChatGPT from their servers to prevent students from what they would consider “cheating”. However, I commend the intentions of Katherine Schulten article Lesson Plan: Teaching and Learning in the Era of ChatGPT. If you scroll through my blog, you’ll find it more than a few negative comment of the effects of AI on education. Though she gives positive uses of AI the classroom. She has created lesson plans on how to effectively inform students on chatbots. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Students will find methods of using AI and incorporating them into their work. whether using it to “cheat” or augment their work they must be made aware of the potential misuses. This begins in the classrooms.

As a writer and a future English teacher, this topic is important to me. Tonight I’ll be presenting on how teaching is effected by ChatGPT in particular.

Here is a link to a short slideshow

Response to: “How Should Schools Respond to ChatGPT”:

I don’t really know if banning ChatGPT is going to do anything but motivate students to using it in a more determined fashion. Teenage rebellion is a force to be measured with, and to combat it is a seemingly futile challenge. Rather, I think that those who are truly caring of the integrity of self-expression, need to find creative ways to steer classwork elsewhere.

I know that I come from an era where technology wasn’t even present in a classroom. It really wasn’t that long ago, less than ten years easily. Hand written was the way to go before my Junior year of high school, which was 2014-2015. Perhaps it should even be beneficial to create assignments that are more opinionated, which I am all for, the sort of thing that ChatGPT will not engage in because it is so conscious about appeasing PC sensibilities.

Does it really have a place in the classroom? Actually, sure it does. We use it very engagingly in this one. I still think that the tool, in regards to submitting work that any of us, as students, sign our name on, is incredulously lame. Who am I to represent the majority, though? I’ve never been a super big convenience hound, I don’t really sniff the whole “smarter not harder” perspective.

The quote goes, if you can’t beat them, join them. This is us (educators and everyone else against AI systems) with our silent war of this ongoing funny business. But ironically now, we need to get down to business and discuss this arrising issue.

In the article, How Should Schools Respond to ChatGPT by Katherine Schulten, she gives a special shoutout to Kevin Roose. He argues that schools should consider the technology (ChatGPT) as a teaching aid. Obviously, less like the enemy. While it can be hard to find that in-between balance once you already hate something, Roose has a point. AI systems can be a good tool to give feedback and even teaching tools for teachers to use in their classroom. A teacher can demonstrate how a generic and boring essay is suppose too look like. Or better yet, how students should write their essays for state tests. I can see that being a semi positive approach. New York has blocked access for students to be able to use ChatGPT but that won’t stop them from using it when they are home, unfortunately.

In Katherine Schulten’s other article with the New York Times, Lesson Plan: Teaching and Learning in the Era of ChatGPT she further dives in just how this tool can be used in the classroom. She shares how to play with the tool, giving it a prompt, then having the students analyze it. Open the discussion in the classroom on the overall prompt, opinions, and thoughts. While like I mentioned before, that can be helpful. I think this can actually be really helpful in a school environment. Within the state and all the state testing, it’s almost feels like their is that pressure to get rid of the students voice in order to generate more essays that are “academically correct.” This tool can be helpful to aid students on writing those essays for their SAT’s and so on and so forth.

In my opinion, if we approach ChatGPT for what it is, which is basic. Maybe students won’t be as intrigued or maybe they will be. But with new systems vast approaching, if you can’t beat them, might as well join them.

Masterpiece Moore’s text and makes me think of Flaubert when he mentioned “Madame Bovary, c’est moi” in a trial for immorality. Why do I think this? Simply because of the power that literature and words have to transform and contain the most intimate aspects of the writer, something that cannot be replaced by any machine. Moore reveals the sensitivity of human beings when she says, “Where does dust come from? Or: Why is there war? Or: If there’s a God, then why is my brother now a cripple?” because they are thoughts that human beings have had at some point in their lives, just like something banal like “Let’s go out and get a big beer.” These are simple acts or words, but they contain a personal, social, and cultural background.

I have mentioned this many times, but a machine or AI cannot take away from human beings the capacity to feel, to express, to tell. When that happens, the world will end. I remember a long time ago, a professor told me that all literature has already been told, already been said, already been written, whether it was in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, or the Odyssey, that all genres were already there, all themes were already addressed. So when I read about Originality and Voice, I think that yes, everything has already been told, but the way it is told is different, the way in which the world is narrated through the eyes of each writer is different, everything has already been told, but there are different ways of reading it. What would the world be like without the poems of Benedetti or Neruda? What would Magical Realism be without Gabo? What would the damned be without Baudelaire? The genres and stories are there, but those who tell them make them unique.

Upon the topic of authorship, before reading any of the articles, I immediately thought of two Bible passages (shocker, I know). The first was Genesis 1, the creation story. Everything was created by God’s Word– the very Word that, as John explains in John 1:1-14, came down as the light that shines in the darkness. And as I’m writing this, another verse came to mind: 2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV)– “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” There’s this divine authorship about the entirety of creation, about the Bible itself (given its 40 authors across 3 continents and about 1500 years and still having a consistent and cohesive storyline)… and we were made to reflect that. Genesis 1:26 says “Let us make man in our image, to be like us…” There’s an interesting Latin term that roots from that verse: imago dei. Here’s the thing with that term though: yes, it can translate to “in His image,” but it can also translate to “doing as He would do.” And this is where authorship comes from for us as people– it’s part of the very core of our identities, whether we recognize that identity or not.

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“The voice in a piece of writing is a defining characteristic that touches the reader instinctively” (Carlow U). Just this quote had me thinking of how pertinent word choice can be. For example, I asked ChatGPT to describe a heavily infected wound in one sentence and regenerated the results six times. These were the AI generated responses:

1. A heavily infected wound may be red, swollen, painful, and exude pus.
2. A heavily infected wound may present with increased pain, redness, swelling, pus, and a foul odor.
3. A heavily infected wound is characterized by increased pain, redness, swelling, and pus or drainage.
4. A heavily infected wound may present with increased pain, redness, swelling, and pus discharge.
5. A heavily infected wound can appear swollen, red, painful, and may discharge pus.
6. A heavily infected wound is characterized by increased pain, redness, swelling, and drainage of pus.

You can see the pattern, and while it may provide a picture, it may not be pungent or repulsive as a heavily infected wound might be. You don’t feel the radiating heat of the wound just before you touch it by these descriptions. You might see a still picture of the puss excretion, but you can’t quite visualize or smell the volcano-like eruption of sticky, yellow, pungent, rancid goo as some small but excruciating degree of pressure is applied near the edges of the now tomato-colored skin.

My point is, AI may give a still picture, but it does not give life to the picture. Sure, the image I used is not the ideal picture of life, but it is a part of life on this side of eternity nonetheless. And while every life is lived and experienced differently, almost every life here on earth comes physically from different parents, there’s still a pattern that shows life does not come from anything else but life.

Every life also has a trace of its original source. Justin, the author of the Gold Penguin article, starts with this question of what originality really is, which I really appreciated given one of my recent posts that also explored this topic. To sum up the idea of that whole post, here’s just a portion of it:

The key word that make me think of an article we read last Wednesday was original. In this article, Kenneth Goldsmith poses the argument that “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” Goldsmith mentions the ideas of other minds such as Marjorie Perloff and her idea of the unoriginal genius. Essentially, Goldsmith implicitly asks his audience what we should really consider plagiarism, especially given there are authors that have created pieces of other authors’ works– works of unoriginal genius known as patchwriting. So as I skimmed through the articles for this week, I also thought of ChatGPT is basically just an algorithm that does this patchwriting for us.

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So what really is original? I’d argue that there really isn’t anything under the sun that’s truly original. I would have somewhat argued otherwise before reading this article, but there is so much information out and available these days that something truly original is hard to come by. I might even say it’s impossible, even from a faith standpoint.

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The devil isn’t creative– he has no power to create but is only out to steal, kill, and destroy. Rather, he’s crafty. He takes Truth and twists it in such a way that we see our own truths being created. He’s an unoriginal genius, of sorts.

original. Bianca I. Wargo

But regardless of how these stories, words, things, ideas, you name it are twisted or molded, they all reflect the same Creator. All things were created for good, they’ve just been used with ill will– thus these things have been left with traces of creators that we see in the every day life of the physical world: people. And that’s not to say we as people always mean the worst when we create– we typically don’t, I know, and that’s because we still do bear the image of a good God, whether we recognize that God and accept our identity in Him or not.

So with that said, Originality, the program Justin writes about, will likely still detect things as “unoriginal” even if it is truly original to the author and no AI tool and no plagiarism is involved. Sure, language is constantly evolving, but there are only so many letters in the alphabet, and only so many different words we can reasonably create aside from the many (but still limited) catalog of English vocabulary. The same is also true of any other language, including computer code.

And this got me into a deeper question that I think I’ll leave us with for today: where does authorship begin? I know I already have my own (probably pretty predictable by now) answer to this question, but it is nonetheless an interesting topic of conversation that I’m sure we’ll get into for next class.

This was an interesting bunch of articles to read. The first thing I want to talk about is Lorrie Moore’s ‘How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliché?’. This article was amazing to read. It fully shows a story of struggle in personal desires. What leads someone to want to write? Most people probably remember wanting to write since the age of 10 or something. I know I have.

The reason why I am talking about this article specifically is because it’s the one that stood out to me the most. This one tells a engaging story from someone’s life. I feel like I can connect to this article compared to the others. Lorrie’s story strongly resonates with me because I have also been in similar situations regarding my career path changes. Although I have never changed from a different major to creative writing, I have been given random recommendations for other career choices, and I have found myself discouraged in my classes. Just like Lorrie, I have also had to endure the same disappointed criticisms every single time I presented my works in class.

It also says a lot when she explains how her multiple dates at the end all say and do the same thing when she tells them about her writing journey. It’s just like when I tell people that I plan on becoming a writer. It feels like I when get asked the same exact questions and I only have the same exact answers to give.

“Whether it is through a news article, company blog post or creative storytelling, writing expresses a voice.”

When writing anything of any sort, it is important to write with a voice. Many times the voice isn’t found until all the writing is complete. As stated in the article a voice is set by the choice of words and the writing structure. Having a voice in your writing sets you apart from other writers. Every writer has a different style which creates the voice for the reader.

Even as the reader, it is nice while reading to be able to establish the voice of the writer. Over the last few months I read about four different books and in each book the writer had their own voice. I was able to distinguish between the different writers because their choice of words were different and how it was written was different as well.

When ChatGPT comes into play, I feel that will cause a writer not to have their own voice. Of course you are able to go back and make changes as much as possible, but for those who will rely on ChatGPT to be their writer will not have their own voice in their writing. I feel that kind of sucks because having a voice with your writing in my opinion makes the writing more interesting and in most cases leave the reader wanting more. It take away the authenticity of the writing. Like I state during my presentation, I like ChatGPT as a tool to help writers get started if that’s a struggle for them but not as a source to use to completely write for them. AI doesn’t have the human voice, so if writers choose to use it as a tool to help them then writers should edit to display their own voice.