Headline, December 27 2022/ ''' '' LITERACY -STUDENTS- OBSOLETE '' '''

''' '' LITERACY -STUDENTS-

 OBSOLETE '' '''

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WORKS MAGIC but at a price : our pride of ownership and sense of purpose.

I often and unabashedly ask for help. Friends give me ideas. Colleagues give me phrases. Editors suggest what to keep, what to cut and where a key detail belongs. My field vision is only so wide, my brain only so big. I'd be fool not to supplement.

But there's a limit to how much advice I solicit, and it's determined less by the rapid approach of a deadline or bedlam of too many chefs than by something else, something emotional and maybe even moral, an admixture of vanity and integrity.

Past a certain point of collaboration, I lose the belief that a piece of work is truly and fully mine. I lose the satisfaction of that I can't shake the notion that my role in the process was incidental, verging on irrelevant.

I say all this in the context of intensifying chatter about what artificial intelligence can do -and about what, specifically, the new chatbot Chat GPT, from the company OpenAI, is already doing.

It's a surprisingly competent writer and sometimes even a clever one, to the point where early users regard it as ''some mix of software and sorcery,'' as Kevin Roose explained in a recent article in The Times. [The articles headline : ''The Brilliance and Weirdness of ChatGPT.'']

Under the right circumstances, with the right prompt, the cyber Cyrano produces relatively seamless prose of considerable ingenuity.

WELL - GLOBAL FOUNDER FRAMERS OF THE WORLD STUDENTS SOCIETY  : You are what you do, and by that I don't mean the labels affixed to our professions.

I mean the stamps of our idiosyncratic contributions, no matter their nature or context. That's how we bend the universe -our butterfly effect- and how we register that we were here. If we outsource it to A.I. don't we erase ourselves?

Maybe not. Maybe this is the cusp of a new utopia, in which machines not only assemble our appliances and perform our surgeries but also plot our novels, draft our legislation and write our op-eds while we pop our soma or chew our lotus leaves and congratulate ourselves on the programming and the prompts behind it all.

And Lest you all forget : publish Sam Daily Times, ''The Voice of the Voiceless''

EDUCATORS ARE SPOOKED - RECOGNIZING a specter on the horizon - no, right in front of us-  that makes plagiarism look quaint. Last week, The Atlantic published an article, by Stephen Marche, titled ''The College Essay is Dead.''

That was followed just three days later by another article, by Daniel Herman, titled ''The End of High School English.'' I figure ''Curtains for the Seventh Grade'' will be out next week and, fast on its heels, ''Is Literacy Obsolete?''

And I can tell you that here in the lofty precincts of elite academia, conversations about whether a significant fraction of students would be turning in papers generated by A.I. segued quickly into conjecture about whether professors would respond by grading those papers with A.I.

Let's take human endeavor out of the equation entirely. It's such an inefficient, unnecessary thing.

But it's also, well, everything - not by the dictates of productivity, but by measures much more meaningful, It's the font and province of originality. It's the cornerstone of identity.

But I suspect that we'd miss the same feeling - the same fulfillment - that I forfeit when I receive and incorporate more assistance than I went looking for. Pride of ownership would cease to exist. Sense of purpose would vanish with it.

Is ChatGPT a sorcerer or an assassin? It and its kin promise to save us time, sweat and error, but potentially at a price. It's called pointlessness.

The Honour and serving of the Latest Global Operational Research on Artificial Intelligence, Students, the World, and the Future, continues. The World Students Society thanks author Frank Bruni. He is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University.

With respectful dedication to Mankind, Leaders, The Global Founder Framers of !WOW!, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all prepare and register for Great Global Elections on The World Students Society : wssciw.blogspot.com and Twitter - !E-WOW! - The Ecosystem 2011:

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless