What’s of interest? UCLA’s new AI-designed literature course has the worst-looking textbook cover I’ve ever seen. ‹ Literary Hub
Tell me more!
UCLA announced the other day that “Comp Lit 2BW will be the first course in the UCLA College Division of Humanities to be built around the Kudu artificial intelligence platform. The textbook: AI-generated. Class assignments: AI-generated. Teaching assistants’ resources: AI-generated.”
The professor’s explanation of why any of this is good doesn’t make any sense to me — she seems to be describing standard teaching practices like discussing texts and putting together a syllabus, but now AI is involved. Which to me always feels like a looming labor issue — I wouldn’t be shocked to see this software cited as justification to fire professors or TAs, or reduce their pay.
This is one among many items I will regularly tag in Pinboard as oegconnect, and automatically post tagged as #OEGConnect to Mastodon. Do you know of something else we should share like this? Just reply below and we will check it out.
Surely someone here has some thoughts on this? Dare I poke @poritzj ?
Who will be the first university to announce a full major created with GenAI?
By the way, this was the WFMU podcast I heard about this, where Ken Freedman and Mark Hurst also get into AI generated music and do the obligatory experiment with Google Notebook LLM AI synthetic podcast.
Sorry I missed this post, @cogdog , I was busy getting some really excellent care from the socialized medicine here where I live (… and, no, I am not a free-rider: I pay a lot of local taxes!).
I just can’t right now on the glories of AI in education…
The big question I think our community needs to confront at the moment is whether open education can continue at all under fascism.
I would argue that it can … but that it needs to step up its game. Education in general, and maybe open education, have to do a better job at teaching and, FFS, practicing critical thinking. Our failure to do so is part of why the world is in the state it is – I mean, people want to go back to a world where we have to fear our children will end up in iron lungs because they didn’t get the polio vaccine? That’s a failure to teach history and science and logic and critical thinking.
And, sorry, treating genAInt like the coming of the messiah for education is such a failure of critical thinking and of old traditional methods like getting real information from (disinterested!!! they have to be disinterested, see thinkers from Cicero to Upton Sinclair for apposite pithy quotes!)) experts. Maybe chatbots/plagiarism-as-a-service adds a fun wrinkle to a first-year writing or language course (some of the few positive (?) uses I’ve seen in education), but is that a benefit that outweighs the idea of giving comfort (and support and more power and more money) to the fascist tech-broligarchs?
I will continue to argue as vehemently as I can against all of these horrors (despite some friends telling me I need to tune it down a bit…). Although while I do it, I will also try to support as much as I can all well-intentioned educators, since we need to build supportive human chains as we stand on this greasy slope to dystopia.
Sorry for the rant … but that’s why you poked me, isn’t it, @cogdog ?
While I see so many people reaching for those GenAI cartoonish images (c.f. that book cover) that lack sourcing and are un-attributable, I have no trouble at all quickly finding openly licensed images taken by real people who have shared them under real open licenses.
Worse, I even attribute my own images although technically I do not have to. Ask me why.
