Don’t think ChatGPT is going to turn legal blogging, a form of creative writing, on its head?
Universities were early skeptics of AI, but now see it as possibly transforming how we write.
From Beth McMurtrie in the The Chronicle of Higher Education:
It’s hard to believe that ChatGPT appeared on the scene just three months ago, promising to transform how we write. The chatbot, easy to use and trained on vast amounts of digital text, is now pervasive. Higher education, rarely quick about anything, is still trying to comprehend the scope of its likely impact on teaching — and how it should respond.
ChatGPT, which can produce essays, poems, prompts, contracts, lecture notes, and computer code, among other things, has stunned people with its fluidity, although not always its accuracy or creativity. To do this work it runs on a “large language model,” a word predictor that has been trained on enormous amounts of data. Similar generative artificial-intelligence systems allow users to create music and make art.
While some professors fear change,
Other professors are enthusiastic, or at least intrigued, by the possibility of incorporating generative AI into academic life. Those same tools can help students — and professors — brainstorm, kick-start an essay, explain a confusing idea, and smooth out awkward first drafts. Equally important, these faculty members argue, is their responsibility to prepare students for a world in which these technologies will be incorporated into everyday life, helping to produce everything from a professional email to a legal contract.”
And from Sarah Elaine Eaton, PhD, an associate professor of education at the University of Calgary, who studies academic integrity.
I really think that artificial-intelligence tools present the greatest creative disruption to learning that we’ve seen in my lifetime.
AI is a tool, no different than a PC marking the advance from typewriters, which marked the advance from pen and a paper
Perhaps just a more uncomfortable advance.