AI news and opinion notes clog my sidebar of potential blogs. Go ahead, try getting an hour free from some AI hype or dire warning.
One I find a bit amusing is the fear of AI LLMs taking over writing.
I’m old enough to remember teachers telling students not to just copy from encyclopedia entries. Then there was copying from web pages.
I wrote a paper for my university freshman composition class (do they still have those?). It cited one major source book. I lived at home and used a book from my local library. Now, what are the odds that two students from a class of 40 would pick the same topic—Henrik Ibsen’s Concept of Truth in Peer Gynt? It happened.
The copy of that source disappeared from the university library. The instructor called me to her office. “Can you bring in the book?” she asked. No problem. Turns out the other student copied their paper from the book. Net result—I received an A and a suggestion that I major in English.
Cheating must be as old as schools.
Back to AI. I have recently guided Claude through a series of questions to research smart manufacturing. Wound up with many notes. I asked it to write an essay in the style of The Manufacturing Connection. It did.
I have now discovered what programming leaders are discovering about using AI to write code—checking the work and (in my case rewriting to suit me). That entails a lot of time and work.
Writing is thinking. If you want to think through something, don’t just copy AI. Write your thoughts and then organize them.
By the way, I’m getting press releases obviously written by AI. I can tell the grammar and phrasing.
Oh, I didn’t major in English. International politics and philosophy. Add that to all the math classes I took, it became an ideal background for working on the technical side of business.
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