Elissa Rodkey

"Dear, dear, you and me belong so much together!!” My dissertation as chick flick. gesellequalsgazelle.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/the… #Valentines

Let's look under the hood of the new 'AI identifies Anne Boleyn' story. The claim (in a new Nature article, link in 🧵) is that the drawing on the left is wrongly labelled as Anne, and the drawing on the right is more likely her, based on AI and facial recognition. 1/

we don't want one hour shipping, we want the workers to have one hour for lunch instead

@aestheticpriest For what it's worth, though American, I teach in Canada so my students are NOT going into crippling debt/there is free medicare/a social safety net. And yet AI remains a threat to their actual learning. If that helps separate the issues out a bit for you.

@aestheticpriest b/c that's the direction we're heading in, which I promise you is not going to be better than the current admittedly mixed status quo. Ironically the sort of tests that are easier to AI-proof are the sort of rote memorization that contributes to the lack of ethics you note here

profs can't deal with AI because their assignments are and have always been one of those metrics that loses meaning when targeted. AI only provides a scapegoat to believe shallow student engagement happened suddenly instead of it already occurring already

@aestheticpriest Final thought: if it were only bad/credentialing/teaching-to-the-test type assignments that were falling victim to AI that would be one thing. But in fact it has a bigger impact on the very sort of skills/thinking/question-asking that good teachers teach. Thus a new threat!

@aestheticpriest And for the record, I don't find it's the students that are most economically and time pressed that resort to AI. Also, it's SUCH a recent development, it's hardly the unavoidable labor-saving device people some people act like it is. It's barely three years old!

@aestheticpriest True, if public schools/primary schools taught these skills then we wouldn't need so many college graduates. But kids are often not reading whole books in hs, let alone learning to recognize propaganda, so college it is! This passage by D. Sayers (written 1947) still rings true:

@ElissaRodkey how many more graduates do we need to maintain democracy? a lot of the rise of trump has to do with the underestimation of uneducated ppl, jacobin covers this fairly well and were one of the few not to dismiss trump's candidacy. same thing happened with GWB

@aestheticpriest And I suggest you question your dismissal of "intelligentsia"--many profs are like me...I grew up in a trailer park in poverty but loved ideas and was liberated by education from the unquestioned racism and sexism that I was raised with. And I try to do the same for my students.

@ElissaRodkey behaviorist manipulation of the students is also the problem here. this is like a cotton gin of writing. again, not a unique or new problem, just a problem the intelligensia foolishly hoped they were insulated from

@aestheticpriest higher ed, but don't say that it is a scam because it puts people in debt w/out getting them jobs. Because this really concedes the argument to capitalist interests that education is nothing more than job training. We NEED the humanities, history, etc. to fight/unbuild capitalism

@aestheticpriest I think you've really got to ask yourself "Is higher education a good for its own sake?" (I believe it is) and "Can a person self-educate themselves into the sort of person we need to maintain a democracy?" (I believe this ability is q. rare). If so, critique the cost, etc. of...

@aestheticpriest IMO this is very different from the days of cheating/paper buying which mostly tempted the weakest students and was thus seen as something pitiable/not something good students wanted admit doing. AI changes the whole class social structure to reward/de-stigmatize cheating.

@aestheticpriest Part of what makes it a unique/new problem is that the ease/ubiquity of AI writing makes it very hard for even good/motivated students not to give into temptation. Students struggle with cynicism, the hold-outs feeling like they're the only dumb one not using AI. Demoralizing!