Unsplash
Recently, I had this dream I was back in the classroom again after 21 years in retirement. It turned nightmare.
Replaced by AI, I no longer felt necessary. Students could simply evade reading an assigned book, relying instead on AI to do it for them. No more student essays, research papers, or take-home exams, as AI could do this for my students in mega seconds.
You may have seen Daniel Herman’s piece in The Atlantic, “The End of High-School English,” in which a Berkeley high school teacher wondered whether ChatGPT meant the end of writing assignments altogether.
My German niece teaches Latin as part of the once rigorous Hochschule curriculum. She finds herself beleaguered by student access to immediate translation.
In September, OpenAI announced that thousands of AI agents had solved the Navier-Stokes problem, which mathematicians had pursued for generations. Three days later, UCLA’s Terence Tao and 24 other Fields Medalists posted a declaration on Tao’s blog, “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics,” warning that AI companies’ use of famous problems as benchmarks harms the discipline and its community.
Several weeks ago, the story broke of a recently published novel, Thélyson Orélien’s C’était ça ou mourir, initially proclaimed by literary critics but then dropped from the Goncourt competition amid accusations of AI authorship. In fairness, the author denies using AI, while admitting to plagiarism in his earlier work. The detection evidence is itself contested: other detectors AFP tried gave results ranging from very likely human to 100 percent AI.
Moments ago, I read a moving story on Facebook of a 16-year-old breaking into an animal shelter in the early morning hours to free three senior dogs, scheduled, the post said, for euthanasia at 6 a.m. The wrap-up: nabbed by police as the alarm went off, he was released and the dogs adopted by two police officers and a 911 dispatcher. Several of my Facebook friends put likes on the story. The truth is, the episode is unverifiable and devoid of specifics. The only source I could trace is an anonymous X post, with no outlet, shelter, department, or name attached.
Earlier this morning, scrolling through Facebook, several AI ads popped up, offering to do your writing for you. Independent of Facebook, I found one brazen AI source promising to do your book for you.
When posts like this occur, and they’re replete, it can impugn the integrity of genuinely human-created texts.
As some of you know, I do most of my writing in Brimmings, now approaching 100,000 readers. Everything I write is from me: the ideas, the organizing, the sentences, the metaphors. I don’t want to forfeit my capacity to create, once forfeited, difficult to get back.
I verify each post I write is 100% my own via the AI checker Pangram. While no AI checker can assure complete accuracy, Pangram is regarded as highly reliable. It’s the AI detector mandated by Substack, where I also publish.
We need to be guardians of the authentic, able to separate the wheat from the tares.
Discover more from Brimmings: up from the well
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
