Writing & Communication Program Reorienation
August 21, 2024
There is a lot of information here, and we don’t have a lot of time. So some of this we’ll just touch on in order to leave space for your questions.
Here are some of the main takeaways:
- Although ChatGPT seemed to explode into the public consciousness, it is part of a surprisingly long history of technological development.
- Understanding at least some of that history can help us understand the affordances and limitations of LLMs. They kind of seem like magic, but they’re not.
- ChatGPT and other LLMs are also part of the inextricable relationship between writing and technology, which doesn’t mean that they don’t present their own unique problems and challenges.
- Research is showing that the writing produced by LLMs don’t much look like human writing in a number of important ways, which doesn’t mean that students shouldn’t use them. However, they should be aware that they may not always be performing in the way that they think.
- It takes a lot of expertise to prompt-engineer your way to an effective (expert-looking) LLM-generated text. How are students going to develop that expertise if they rely on an LLM consistently? (And what counts as consistently?