Bonus Blog: Is AI Harmful to Students?

Readers of my blog may be interested in this recent event from Valparaiso University’s Christ College, where students debated the proposition “on balance, the rise of Artificial Intelligence harms students more than it helps them.” (So the “pro” team was arguing against students using AI, and the “con” team was arguing that it’s OK). If you work in education, or are just an interested observer, you might be intrigued by what these bright students thought were the most compelling reasons for and against their own use of emerging artificial intelligence technologies. I should note that both sides were explicitly instructed not to bring up the issue of reliability or AI-generated “hallucinations,” because it was felt that this would distract from the main question. That’s probably fair, as hallucinations have gotten a lot of press yet are also decreasing in frequency and severity with each new iteration of the technology. My daughter Ruth was one of the speakers for the “pro” side, but I won’t spoil this by telling you who won! https://www.youtube.com/live/iZ0FKG_O4LU?si=TZFmf1lnpubwh_Im

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Chatbot Changes and Challenges in 2023

I wrote last summer about artificial intelligence tools that are increasingly able to approximate human speech in free-form conversations. These tools then burst onto the public stage with the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT at the end of November last year. As you probably know by now, the acronym "GPT" stands for "generative pre-trained transformer," which highlights the three most important aspects of this technology: (1) it generates novel responses that aren't based on an a specific algorithm or decision rule, but instead rely on pattern recognition; (2) it has been pre-trained by consuming massive amounts of writing from the Internet -- much more than a human could read in several lifetimes; and (3) it transforms those prior writing samples using a trial-and-error process that predicts the next phrase in a sequence until it has come up with a response that seems intelligible to humans. ChatGPT works much like the auto-complete feature in your email or ...

Our Reactions to Robots Tell Us Something About Ourselves

Robot football players at a Valparaiso University College of Engineering event I have been thinking lately about robots, which creates an interesting asymmetry: They almost certainly have not been thinking about me. Nevertheless, I find that I often respond to robots as though they have thoughts about me, or about their own personal goals, or about the world in which they exist. That tendency suggests an interesting aspect of human psychology, connected to our social minds . We are hard-wired to care what other people think about us, and we very easily extend that concern to robots. Here's a recent article about how the language-learning app Duolingo, which features an owl-shaped avatar (a kind of robot), uses "emotional blackmail" to keep application users engaged: https://uxdesign.cc/20-days-of-emotional-blackmail-from-duolingo-4f566523e3c5 This bird-shaped bit of code tells users things like "you're scaring me!" and "I miss you" if they haven...

Inside the Intuitive Mind: Social Support Can Facilitate or Inhibit Behavior Change

This week I'm looking at another concrete tool in the behavior-change armamentarium, social support . I have written previously about the Narrative mind's strong focus on social cues , and indeed perhaps the Narrative system evolved specifically to help us coordinate our behavior with groups of other humans. As a behavior-change strategy, social support can be used in several different ways. Instrumental Social Support . The most basic form of social support is instrumental, the type of help that a neighbor gives in loaning you a tool or that a friend provides in bringing you a meal. This type of concrete support can be helpful for diet change -- e.g., here are some fresh vegetables from my garden -- or exercise -- e.g., you can borrow my tent for your camping trip. Although instrumental support is particularly powerful because someone is actually doing something for you or giving you resources that you don't have, it is also usually short-term (I probably don't want...

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