There have been discussions about AI writing programs like ChatGPT in the academy. The past few months have seen a flurry of activity with college administrators calling emergency meetings, professors changing their assignments, and educators writing essays (some perhaps written by AI?) that range in reaction from the nonchalant to the apocalyptic about the fate of college writings, the future of the humanities, and the outlook of higher education.
For those not familiar with AI programs like ChatGPT, they are chatbots—computer programs to simulate conversations with humans—that predict what words and phrases should come next. As an AI, they continually learn as they gather more data, from human interaction and from texts like articles, books, and websites. The GPT-3 model, for example, was “trained” on a text set that included 8 million documents and over 10 billion words.
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