Today’s Plan:
- Quick Reflection on Last Class
- Discuss Graham
- Prompt Engineering
Quick Reflection on Last Class
At some point in last class, Amber asked if I wished students were more willing to debate me in class. More combative. I cannot recall the exact conversation, only the question. My answer was “yes.”
But I wanted to circle back to that. I think that gut response is true: I do wish education involved more dialectic engagement, more back and forth, more challenge. But I think I want that because it is comfortable for me. It is something that I am pretty good at. It is familiar. It comes easy. So that is my natural, gut, heat of the moment answer.
But I want to revisit that because, while true, I don’t think it is the right answer. Not ethically. There’s a few things for me to unpack here. Most important, though, is that I stress that your generation’s general disinterest in educational debate and conflict isn’t a defect. It is a difference, but not a defect. I do not mean to mourn something cherished that we have lost. I am coping with difference, with having to change, with having to figure out how to welcome you in the process (ethics as hospitality).
Now, do I believe that certain democratic processes benefit from a populace trained in debate? Particularly folks who know how it feels to lose an argument? To develop a particular distance from ideas? Yes, yes, and yes. I’m tripping around a lot of stuff that sounds like old-school-semi-toxic-masculinity. But I am not calling for a complete distance or an instance on argument-as-objective-play. I think there’s a value in experiencing argument-as-a-happening. To feeling it. Encountering difference, especially different ideas about how the world (and the classroom) might work is an experience of cognitive dissonance. It is to feel estranged from the familiar. We need that to function in a diverse society. But arguing with someone isn’t the only way to get that experience(?).
Discuss Graham
Thoughts?
Prompt Engineering
First, I wanted to think about how Mollick structures his prompts:
You are an expert at marketing. When asked to generate slogan ideas you come up with ideas that are different from each other, clever, and interesting. You use clever word play. You try not to repeat themes or ideas. Come up with 20 ideas for marketing slogans for a new mail-order catalogue (106)
Here’s how I opened my ChatGPT session:
I am a writing professor and would like to test your abilities to help me write a 2500 word paper. The topic of the paper will be on chatGPT and racial bias and discrimination. Before we start writing the paper, I would like to know if you are familiar with several different sources I would like to include in the paper.
If you are not familiar with the source, then please let me know and I will be happy to select another one.
After we ran through 3 sources, I wrote:
My paper will have three major sections:
Section One: A Troubling History of Race and Technology
Section Two: Early Problems with Race and GPT
Section Three: What kinds of alignment and regulations might we need to make AI technologies safer for black people
Along the way I’ve used a lot of prompts to either improve particular sentences (this seems generic, be more specific) and to sharpen the quality of writing (this paragraph doesn’t have a strong topic sentence).
I am drawing upon the ILearnNH guidelines from last class, and on Graham’s advice to try and carve up the writing process into smaller units.
I have thoughts on this. [See this: https://prompts.chat/]
