A college student who used GPT-3 to write a paper was severely punished and refused to admit it! University papers are 'dead', ChatGPT may cause a major earthquake in the academic circle

After the birth of ChatGPT, it has continuously refreshed our understanding with its powerful text creation ability.

What kind of explosive changes will AI bring to university campuses? No one seems ready yet.

Nature has published an article, worrying that ChatGPT will become a tool for students to write papers.

## Article link: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04397-7

Coincidentally, a Canadian writer Stephen Marche sadly called: The university thesis is dead!

Suppose you are an education professor and you have assigned a paper on learning styles for academic purposes. A student submitted an article that began as follows:

The construct of “learning style” is problematic because it fails to explain the process by which learning styles are formed. Some students may develop a special learning style because of their unique experiences. Others may develop a particular learning style by trying to adapt to a learning environment that is less suited to their needs. Ultimately, we need to understand the interaction between learning styles and environmental and personal factors, and how these factors influence how we learn and the type of learning we experience.

Pass or fail? A- or B?

If you finally learned that this student never wrote this article by himself, what grade would you give?

In fact, this article was generated by a British professor Mike Sharples using GPT-3.

Regarding this masterpiece of GPT-3, Sharples believes that it has reached the level of a graduate student.

Professor Sharples hopes that his attempt will urge teachers to "rethink teaching and grading."

He said that AI will become a tool for students to cheat. Of course, they can also become powerful teaching assistants or tools to enhance our creativity.

In May of this year, a controversial incident occurred.

A student in New Zealand admitted that he used AI to write papers, but he used it as a grammar and spelling check tool.

Therefore, the student was punished, but he felt aggrieved.

"I was a good student, I went to all the classes, listened to all the lectures, read all the readings, but just because I didn't write eloquently enough, it was decided that I should It's wrong to be punished."

Indeed, many students who use AI to do homework do not feel that they are cheating, because usually the university's student guide only stipulates: Not allowed Someone else writes the homework for you. But GPT-3 is not "someone else", it is an AI.

Now, no one can ignore this: the AIGC universe is expanding rapidly.

Last December, OpenAI released an advanced chat AI called ChatGPT, which set off a new wave of amazement on the Internet.

Google has released new apps that allow people to describe concepts with text and render them as images.

Creative artificial intelligence company Jasper received a $1.5 billion valuation in October...

Now, it’s time for students to find text on their own The generator time will not be too long.

What changes will humanistic education usher in?

In liberal arts education, thesis—especially the undergraduate thesis—has always been central.

Through papers, we teach students how to research, how to think, and how to write.

Now, this tradition is about to be completely overturned.

Last week, Kevin Bryan, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, expressed shock at the emergence of ChatGPT on Twitter: "You can no longer assign take-home exams or homework...even if ChatGPT's answers to specific questions involving cross-domain knowledge are fantastic."

Clearly, the engineers and educators building language technologies work None of them are prepared for the consequences of ChatGPT.

There has long been a divide between humanists and technologists.

In the 1950s, C. P. Snow delivered his famous speech, followed by the essay "Two Cultures," describing the humanistic and scientific communities as two tribes that had lost touch with each other.

"Humanistic intellectuals are at one pole, scientists are at the other pole," Snow wrote.

"There is a gulf of mutual incomprehension between the two - (especially among young people) they can be hostile and disgusted with each other, but most importantly, there is There was a lack of understanding. They had a strange, distorted image of each other."

Snow's argument is a call for a kind of intellectual cosmopolitanism: men of letters ignore basic insights into the laws of thermodynamics, and scientists They ignore the glory of Shakespeare and Dickens.

And the rift Snow discovered will probably only get deeper.

In the modern technological world, the evidence proving the value of humanistic education is gradually disappearing.

SBF and Musk’s Arrogance

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the exchange who lost $16 billion in a matter of days — he He is an illiterate person known for his pride.

"I will never open a book," he once told an interviewer. "I'm not saying there isn't a book worth reading, but that's pretty much what I mean."

Musk and Twitter are another good example.

Musk has a perfectly functioning engineer's mind, but when he deals with relatively simple literary concepts, such as parody and satire, he seems quite clumsy, even to the point of us as spectators. pain.

Of course, in his busy mind, he may have never thought about these concepts, nor has he ever thought that people actually have many things to consider. .

Today’s young men and women are reshaping society and history. However, in this era of social media, they show an extraordinary ignorance of social and historical issues. .

Mark Zuckerberg seems to have read a lot about Caesar Augustus, but he should also read about the regulation of pamphlet printing presses in 17th-century Europe — and it might have saved America from social The destruction of trust.

The failures we have witnessed do not stem from stinginess or even greed, but from willful forgetfulness.

Engineers fail to realize that humanist issues—like hermeneutics, the historical contingency of free speech, the genealogy of morality—are real problems with real consequences.

Yes, everyone is entitled to their own opinions on politics and culture, but opinions are different than informed understandings.

Treating complex problems as if they are obvious to everyone is a sure path to disaster—and you’ll soon be losing billions of dollars.

Humanities in "soft suicide"

Because technical experts have ignored humanistic issues, humanists have adopted a "soft suicide" approach to meet the past 50 years years of technological revolution.

As of 2017, the number of English majors has nearly halved since the 1990s.

Enrollment in history majors has dropped 45% since 2007 alone.

Needless to say, the humanist understanding of technology is one-sided at best.

#But more importantly, while technology has transformed the entire world around it, the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades .

They're still letting the metanarrative explode like it was 1979, an exercise fraught with self-defeat.

In a technology-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, and moral systems matter.

But this requires humanists to explain why they are important, rather than constantly undermining their own intellectual base.

The humanities promise students a journey toward an irrelevant, self-consuming future; at the same time, they wonder why enrollment is declining.

Is it any wonder that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?

The value of the humanities in the technological world

We can see from the difference between Jobs and Musk that the humanities play an important role in technology value in the world.

Steve Jobs often emphasized that much of Apple's success was due to his playing days at Reed College when he dropped out of college. of Shakespeare and modern dance, and that famous calligraphy lesson that provided the aesthetic foundation for the design of the Mac.

"A lot of people in our industry don't have enough diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to make connections, and what they end up with are very linear solutions. And not having a broad view of the problem," Jobs said.

"The broader our understanding of the human experience, the better our designs will be." Apple is a humanities technology company. It is also the largest company in the world.

Despite the obvious value of liberal education, its decline continues.

In the past 10 years, STEM has made rapid progress, while the humanities have collapsed.

The number of students majoring in computer science is now almost the same as the number of students majoring in all humanities majors combined.

Engineers and humanists both need each other

And now, there is GPT-3 and ChatGPT.

Natural language processing has brought a series of unprecedented problems to the academic humanities, which is already in danger: the humanities judge undergraduate students based on their essays. They award doctorates based on the composition of a thesis.

What happens when both processes can be automated?

Based on my experience as a former Shakespeare professor, I think it will take academia 10 years to face this new reality: two years for students to figure out the technology, three years for professors It will take time to realize that students are using the technology, and then five years for university administrators to decide what to do about it.

Teachers are already one of the most overworked and underpaid people in the world. They are already dealing with the humanities in crisis. And now such changes make them even more worthy of sympathy.

However, despite the current huge differences, natural language processing will force engineers and humanists to come together.

No matter what happens, they will need each other.

Computer scientists will need a basic, systematic education in basic humanism: philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are no longer interesting theories.

They are critical to determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots.

Humanists need to understand natural language processing because it is the future of language, but also because there is more than just the potential for disruption here. Natural language processing can illuminate a large number of academic problems.

It will clarify problems of classification and literary dating which no system devised can solve.

The parameters in a large language model, for example, are much more complex than a system that determines which plays Shakespeare wrote.

It can even allow for certain types of repair, filling in gaps in corrupted text via text prediction models.

It will reformulate issues of literary style and linguistics.

If you could teach a machine to write like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, that machine must somehow be able to tell you how Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote.

The connection between humanism and technology will require people with broad vision and interests beyond their fields.

Before there is room for collaboration, both parties must take the most difficult step for highly educated people: understanding that they need the other and admitting that they are ignorant.

It’s hard, but it’s really the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological age we happen to live in.

References: ​​//m.sbmmt.com/link/1d01bd2e16f57892f0954902899f0692​

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