As the semester winds down and the final essays (and incessant queries for lenience) pile up, it's time to check in and check out on this project. I had intended it to be a return to writing and self-publishing focused on a specific topic. I wanted to try to capture the emergence of GAI. After seeing the seismic shifts that the web, the LMS, the smartphone, and social media have all had across so many sectors-- and especially education-- I've wanted to see if there's an arc that this follows.
If there is, then it's at the overwhelming stage where there's such an explosion of ideas that it's a riot of color and sound. I'd rather focus the the paradoxes and questions particular to GAI. I mean...I'll attempt to. It's fascinating to watch a communication technology fold in on itself into a hall of mirrors. Chances are I'll be thinking about these and encountering more as I continue to read and contribute and be involved in discussions. To that end, I am happy to say that one of my brilliant colleagues and I got to write an article for the trade publication Computers in Libraries titled "The Modern Prometheus: How AI Is Pushing the Limits of Human Knowledge." After reading so many articles from the last sever months, it's nice to end with one of my own!
Questions and Paradoxes about GAI writer-bots
Is it a mirror-world of us? If so, is it sinister-- or reflective of truth?
Relationships are built on trust. People seem conflicted on what they can trust from a writer-bot, or how they can 'relate' to it. We talk about it like it's a person, like it's alive, like it's one of us. Then we wonder if it will end our lives (and, by extension, itself).
Are we "conversing" with it? Is it "telling us" whatever we want to know? Is it telling us what we already collectively know?
The hallucinations are rather fun-- its own form of fiction. They are almost like something out of Borges or Calvino or Eco...data-driven magical realism.
Is it a tool that's fired up and controlled by us? Or a living cache of our knowledge-- our collective brain, a la Wikipedia?
Does it open new portals of imagination? Or homogenize ideas and communication?
People say it will make gaining and retaining knowledge obsolete, so students should focus on learning skills. Then they say one skill is accessing knowledge through GAI. Then they say GAI helps us create knowledge and access our own imaginations. It's fractal, inside and out.
This tool can make us smarter and more powerful...as well as dumber and lazier.
I've now watched many people have their first experience using ChatGPT or another writer-bot. They are fascinated and terrified all at the same time. What is it about this that unlocks all these emotions at once, when it's merely data?
Whatever the dataset is, it's a record of where we have been. Where is this taking us?
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