Tornado Alley (PROG)

[janice shell]

Well...

A fifth of US universities already ban AI, and with OpenAI and Google considering releasing to the public tools that can quickly detect if a paper was written by their AI, universities could better enforce these bans. But bans are not the way to go.

https://universitybusiness.com/why-generative-ai-bans-will-not-work-for-colleges/#:~:text=A%20fifth%20of%20US%20universities,not%20the%20way%20to%20go.

That, of course, was written by a bot. What about high schools? We may soon be turning out students who can only read and write with the help of a bot. I've posted here in the past about teachers at elite colleges whose students find it very difficult to read entire books. They can't concentrate, can't keep track of details. Reading a whole 350 pages or more is a scary prospect. That is bad and wrong.

To be fair, it isn't entirely the fault of generative AI. When I taught part time at Boston College back in the mid-70s, as soon as I began, the department chair told me not to bother to assign term papers, because the students couldn't handle writing even short ones, and I'd find the experience frustrating. I thought they could surely manage three to five pages.

She was right; I was wrong.