Defending Academic Integrity Against ChatGPT

[ciao_yall]

Bring the student to your office hours. "Who is Lacan?"

Boom.

[apl68]

I'm in philosophy...and I teach mainly 100-level gen ed classes.

The mind reels at the possibilities.

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour: A Lacanian Spectacle

Taylor Swift's Eras Tour is a Lacanian spectacle in the truest sense of the word. It is a tour de force of pop culture kitsch, a celebration of the feminine sublime, and a meditation on the nature of desire.

At the heart of the tour is the figure of Swift herself. She is the object of desire for her fans, both male and female. She is the embodiment of the feminine ideal, the perfect woman. But she is also something more. She is the Real, the thing that is beyond desire, the thing that cannot be possessed.

But Swift is also detached from the spectacle that she is creating. She is aware of her own image, but she is not controlled by it. She is in control of her own destiny. She is the mistress of her own desire.

This is what makes the Eras Tour so subversive. It is a celebration of the feminine, but it is also a challenge to the male gaze. It is a spectacle of desire, but it is also a meditation on the nature of desire itself.

In the Lacanian sense, the Eras Tour is a mirror stage. It is a moment when Swift's fans confront their own desire. They see themselves reflected in Swift's image, and they recognize their own desires. But they also recognize that Swift is something more than a reflection of themselves. She is the Real, the thing that is beyond desire, the thing that cannot be possessed.

This confrontation with the Real can be both exhilarating and terrifying. It is exhilarating because it allows us to see ourselves for who we really are. It is terrifying because it forces us to confront our own limitations.

...

Could he have said it better himself?

I would think that ChatGPT's ability to generate word salad would work quite well when discussing Lacan....

[Hibush]

How feasible this is can vary by discipline, but the easiest thing to do is to create writing assignments that ask students to do something very specific. That doesn't mean it has to be prescriptive or leave no room for creativity. Pick a primary source from this particular database-write a paper analyzing the primary source using at least one secondary source. At least in history, CHATGPT can't do that kind of stuff because it doesn't have access to the diary a woman kept in 1862 or whatever and nobody has written some piece about this particular source. At best, if they find some source that has something written about it in their database, they might manage something vague that doesn't really fulfill the terms of the assignment.

The AI engines do have access to the primary material if the students give it to them. One of the nice legit uses is to have these tools summarize a piece of your own writing. Or if you are looking at a bunch of long, tedious primary materials you can feed it to the ai engine and ask it to look for particular concepts or subjets.

[Caracal]

I've tried feeding it a quote and asking it to talk about it and it doesn't know what to do with it.

[Hibush]

I've tried feeding it a quote and asking it to talk about it and it doesn't know what to do with it.

See whether bard.google.com is more ambitious.

[Kron3007]

I've tried feeding it a quote and asking it to talk about it and it doesn't know what to do with it.

It probably needs more direction.

A lot of people try it out, get garbage answers, and then assume that means it produces word salad and such.  This is a dangerous assumption, and the quality of the output is 100% dependent on the input.

Students are smart.  Perhaps it is hard to tell in your class, but they will get good at using this in no time.  Many are likely already using it well, and many of us have likely graded chatGPT without even knowing it. 

[onthefringe]

I've tried feeding it a quote and asking it to talk about it and it doesn't know what to do with it.

It probably needs more direction.

A lot of people try it out, get garbage answers, and then assume that means it produces word salad and such.  This is a dangerous assumption, and the quality of the output is 100% dependent on the input.

Students are smart.  Perhaps it is hard to tell in your class, but they will get good at using this in no time.  Many are likely already using it well, and many of us have likely graded chatGPT without even knowing it. 

And for reasons unknown to me, many people are willing to put in double the effort that it would take to just do something in order to avoid doing it. So students may be willing to put a lot of effort into getting something useful out of an AI — possibly more effort that it would take to just do it themselves.

[Kron3007]

I've tried feeding it a quote and asking it to talk about it and it doesn't know what to do with it.

It probably needs more direction.

A lot of people try it out, get garbage answers, and then assume that means it produces word salad and such.  This is a dangerous assumption, and the quality of the output is 100% dependent on the input.

Students are smart.  Perhaps it is hard to tell in your class, but they will get good at using this in no time.  Many are likely already using it well, and many of us have likely graded chatGPT without even knowing it. 

And for reasons unknown to me, many people are willing to put in double the effort that it would take to just do something in order to avoid doing it. So students may be willing to put a lot of effort into getting something useful out of an AI — possibly more effort that it would take to just do it themselves.

Perhaps, but that effort is a transferrable skill.  A lot of students are forced to take courses they have little interest in, and putting effort into this may seem preferable

Like it or not, being able to efficiently and effectively use chat GPT and such will be very useful moving forward. 

[mbelvadi]

I've tried feeding it a quote and asking it to talk about it and it doesn't know what to do with it.

See whether bard.google.com is more ambitious.

"Bard isn't currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!"

[Hibush]

"Bard isn't currently supported in your country. Stay tuned!"

I guess it is VPN time so you can try Bard out.

Perhaps more productive than generating Lacanian word salad--as fun as that is--here's an event that crossed my feed this morning.
Storytelling in the age of AI: Strategies for a new Era. "...why using ChatGPT is only the first step to becoming a great storyteller. Professor Byrne will help us understand how using AI can help us be better storytellers."

It is from the professor's perspective, with ChatGPT as the ally not the problem. Could be interesting.

[mbelvadi]

A true story this week, which I am sharing for one of our faculty who wishes to remain anonymous:

Assignment: review an article by Adams (1989), the full text of which was posted for the class on our LMS, about the impact of climate change on crop yields.
A student asked chat gpt......
And handed in a review of Ryan Adams' cover of Taylor Swift's 1989.

[Sun_Worshiper]

I've been grading a lot of essays this week, almost all of which I suspect were aided by ChatGPT.* I am noticing that the good students are writing very well, while the poor students are turning in essays with major errors of the sort that ChatGPT is notorious for. In other words, AI is widening the gap between the smart and savvy students and the weak and lazy ones.

* I don't have a no-AI policy in my class, so students' use of AI is not a problem in and of itself.

[apl68]

In other words, AI is widening the gap between the smart and savvy students and the weak and lazy ones.

Just like with pretty much every other technological tool that's ever been invented, huh?

[downer]

As I see more and more AI generated work, it becomes easier to identify. In the past, any student work with good grammar and spelling was automatically suspect. These days I guess we allow students to get that autocorrected.

Now when I see student work broken up into several paragraphs of similar length, all perfectly written, with 3-5 references at the end (sometimes not real references) then I'm sure it is made via AI.

Then there's the passive voice and technical language. AI is not good at discussing particular cases, and applying general discussion to actual incidents. So I'm learning how to create better assignments.

It's an incremental process. It's time consuming. I'm never going to be able to rule out all use of AI, but I can make AI less helpful to students.

The issue of proof and punishment is a pain in the neck. I am not going to spend a lot of time following elaborate college procedures and going to meetings about it. So it's partly about creating grading rubrics that will give major penalties to students whose work looks like it used AI, whether I can proove it or not. I'm still working on that.

As ever, my time is limited. All the time I spend on this stuff means less time on other class prep and student feedback.

[fishbrains]

The issue of proof and punishment is a pain in the neck. I am not going to spend a lot of time following elaborate college procedures and going to meetings about it. So it's partly about creating grading rubrics that will give major penalties to students whose work looks like it used AI, whether I can prove it or not. I'm still working on that.

For next semester, I plan on adding a reflection assignment that students complete after they hand in their essays but before I grade them where I take a paragraph or two from their essay and ask them to explain what a paragraph means, where they found particular sources, and what specific words mean. In-class. Handwritten.

This should be easy for students doing the work, very difficult/impossible for students relying on AI for everything, and non-time-consuming on my part (Turnitin does pretty well with its AI report). We'll see how it goes. This approach might only produce more students lying to my face. The punishment will depend on what my administration will support.

AI is doing a better job at not just making up sources, but it tends to use sources freshizzles would not normally access. I don't think my students are reading that 500-page book they might have eventually found on JSTOR to employ that three-sentence summary using technical terms they really don't know.