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ChatGPT and Deception

photograph of exams stacked on desk at front of class

For many, writing can be a challenging, even painful, experience. What seems like it should be a simple job – taking the thoughts in your head, turning them into words, and then typing them out – can be a task of almost insurmountable odds for some. Heck, I do it for a living, and I still find the blank page to be an ungodly sight, one that I sometimes flee from and promise to tackle later on.

As such, it should be no surprise that the advent of an AI system that can write for us has caused quite a stir. That system is ChatGPT, and while I could explain what it is, it’s more effective (not to mention easier) to let the tool do that for itself:

ChatGPT is a state-of-the-art language generation model developed by OpenAI. It is based on a transformer architecture and pre-trained on a large dataset of text, allowing it to generate human-like text.

ChatGPT can be fine-tuned for various natural language processing tasks such as language translation, text summarization, question answering, and text completion. It can also be used to generate creative writing, poetry, and even code.

One of the key features of ChatGPT is its ability to generate text that is coherent and coherent with the context it was given, making it able to generate text that flows well and makes sense. ChatGPT can be used to generate text on a wide range of topics and can be fine-tuned to suit specific use cases.

It is important to note that ChatGPT is a machine learning model, it is not capable of independent thinking or decision making, it is only able to generate text based on patterns it has learned from the data it was trained on.

I didn’t write any of that. Instead, I gave ChatGPT the prompt “explain what ChatGPT is” and let it fly. As it just noted, however, ChatGPT is not limited to dry, explanatory statements. The system has demonstrated an apparent aptitude for creative, even funny, writing, from explaining quantum theory to a child in the style of Snoop Dogg to creating an analogy for what it’s like to eat the keto diet, from giving an account of Attack on Titan in the manner of Donald Trump to writing a biblical verse explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR. The tool really does seem adaptable.

Yet, despite the hilarity, ChatGPT’s emergence has brought some pressing issues regarding ownership and authenticity of work to the fore. If an AI generates text for you, can you claim it as your own? For example, Ammaar Reshi is facing considerable backlash for using ChatGPT to write a children’s book (which he then illustrated using Midjorney, an AI art generator). Reshi did not directly write or illustrate the book he is claiming as his product; he gave ChatGPT the required prompts and then used its output.

But, it has been in the educational sector where such concerns have really taken hold. So much so that some, such as New York City’s Department of Education, have blocked access to ChatGPT on school devices for fear of its misuse. The problems are relatively easy to grasp:

What is stopping students from passing off ChatPGT-produced essays and other forms of assessed work as their own? How should educators respond if a student uses ChatGPT to write an essay? And are students actually doing anything wrong if they use ChatGPT like this?

The answer to this last question is vastly complex and intertwined with the very purpose of assessment and learning monitoring. The point of assigning assessments, such as essays, is not so students produce a piece of text. The production of the essay is merely a step towards another goal. These forms of assessment act as a representation of the students’ learning. When a teacher asks you to write a 3,000-word paper on Frederick Douglas, for example, it is not the paper with which they are concerned; it is with your ability to recall, appraise, and communicate what you know about Douglas’ life, work, and impact. The essay is a medium through which such appraisal is conducted.

As philosopher Rebecca Mace remarked in an episode of BBC’s Inside Science:

A lot of people, including the newspapers, seem to have misunderstood the point of homework. So the purpose of homework is not to produce an essay, but to assess student understanding in order that the teachers can assist them with the gaps, or work out what they’ve not taught very well, or what they maybe need to go over again, or what that individual student really needs help with. Then the essay itself is irrelevant in many ways because that’s all the essay’s doings; it’s a means to an end.

Thus, according to such a way of thinking, the danger of ChatGPT comes from its potential to misrepresent student learning, giving the impression that a student knows more about a subject than they actually do. The issue is not one of principle but of outcome, and the use of ChatGPT brings with it the risk that learning is negatively impacted.

This stance, however, seems to overlook something important in using ChatGPT in educational settings. If accurate – if the threat of ChatGPT comes from its capacity to hide academic failings (both on the student’s and teacher’s behalf) – then we shouldn’t have any qualms about it being used in situations where this isn’t a factor. But, academically gifted students who know their subjects inside and out still seem to commit some wrong when they pass the algorithmically-generated text off as their own. This wrong emerges not from the impact such usage might have on their academic performance, nor on their teacher’s ability to assess their grasp of a subject accurately, but from the fact that they are attempting to deceive their assessor. It is wrong not because of an outcome but because of an adherence to principles – the virtue of honesty and the vice of deception.

That is not to say that this is the only reason why ChatGPT presents a potential harm to education and educational practices. The use of AI to game the academic-assessment system by hiding one’s failure to meet the standards are most certainly a concern (perhaps the central one). But, such an acknowledgement should not lead us to overlook the fact that, much like plagiarism, academic wrongs don’t simply emerge from their deleterious impact. They also come from deception and attempting to pass something off as one’s work when, in fact, they had minimal input in its creation.

In Michigan, A Prisoner Forced to Pay for His Own Incarceration

An image of a prison window

In the state of Michigan, Curtis Dawkins, prisoner and recent book author, could be forced to pay his dues of incarceration from the money received from his literary work.

Dawkins has been incarcerated for almost 12 years for murdering a man and has been writing a collection of short stories to pass the time. Before Dawkins was incarcerated, he was a writer earning his Master of Fine Arts degree. Most of the short stories in Dawkins’ The Graybar Hotel tell the life story of a prisoner, narrated in first person. The Graybar Hotel caught the attention of one of the top literary publishers in the United States, and offered Dawkins $150,000 to publish the collection of short stories.

But the offer has raised some serious questions. Some wonder if it is acceptable to support a person who was once involved in such an evil crime. Should inmates be allowed to receive money from stories about their prison life, which is a place intended for punishment?

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Diversity in Children’s Books: A White Author’s Quandary (Part II)

This post originally appeared September 29, 2015.

In Part One of this two-part post on the moral importance of providing children with diverse books, I concluded that white authors need to write about non-white characters, or else they gravely falsify the “reality” presented in their stories. We don’t live in an all-white world. We don’t have all-white readers. Our non-white readers need to see themselves in our stories; our white readers need not to see themselves, exclusively, in every single story.

But how do we do this? As so often happens, the “how” can be even more ethically challenging than the “what” or the “why.”

Assume I’m creating a classroom scene (my specialty as an author is school stories). How do I let readers know the racial or ethnic identity of my characters? For starters, I need to give my characters names that suggest a wide range of national origins, even as sometimes this feels self-conscious, evidence that I’m trying too hard for cheerful “Sesame Street” multiculturalism. But how else can I convey to readers the racial or ethnic identity of the kids in the class?

Two approaches here seem equally problematic. One is to come right out and label characters by race or ethnicity: “Jenny, an African-American girl in the front row, raised her hand to answer Ms. Singh’s question.” This would work, in my view, only if we called attention to the race and ethnicity of every character in the same way: “Sam, a Caucasian boy of Swedish ancestry, raised his hand. . .” That this falls in such a startling way on our ears makes clear the extent to which authors treat “white” as the default setting, where characters are understood to be white unless otherwise specified.

To avoid this, authors often use other markers for race, such as describing a character’s skin tones as “creamy café au lait” or “rich chocolate mousse.” But this is clearly as racially heavy-handed as the first option. We don’t describe white characters by comparing their complexions to food, remarking that her skin was “like pink lemonade” or “like vanilla pudding.” Sometimes diversity can be suggested in other ways: by mentioning a character’s long blond curls, or tight black braids, or by a cultural reference to a favorite food or family holiday celebrated. Oh, but it can feel so blatantly earnest!

Because my books are often illustrated, I have an easy – or cowardly? – way of avoiding this dilemma: rely on the pictures to do deftly what words can do only clumsily. Illustrators can’t escape depicting characters as having skin tones, facial features, or hair that indicate ethnicity, unless (which many do!) they draw anthropomorphized animals instead. But this means that sometimes I am surprised to find that I have created diverse characters without consciously setting out to do so.

My Franklin School Friends chapter book series presents a trio of best friends. Kelsey stars in Kelsey Green, Reading Queen; Annika stars in Annika Riz, Math Whiz; and Izzy stars in Izzy Barr, Running Star, the third book in the series. The illustrations show Izzy as Black, perhaps triggered by my description of her short tight braids. I’m pleased about this. I like the idea of best-friendship across racial lines that is celebrated in these books. But . . . I’m nervous that my star reader is white, my star math student is white, and my star athlete is Black. Doesn’t this perpetuate stereotypes that whites excel academically while African Americans excel in sports?

Perhaps. But in my Gus and Grandpa easy reader series, while Gus and Grandpa are white, the other child character who appears in almost every book is Ryan Mason: the perfect, high-achieving neighbor boy, the kid who has the fanciest bike and the scientifically dazzling show-and-tell projects. The illustrations show Ryan as Black. So this works against the cultural expectations arguably reinforced by Izzy.

This leads me to conclude that, while we certainly don’t want our stories to perpetuate stereotypes, we also don’t want to be so paralyzed by fear (is my character too stereotypically Asian? or too carefully constructed to refute stereotype?) that white authors give up on including diverse characters at all. What we need is not fewer characters of color in our stories, but more. I have now created a Black kid who loves to run and one who is an enviably perfect next-door neighbor. In other books I have an Asian American girl who knits sweaters for homeless shelter dogs and a Latino kid who is doing a science fair experiment that involves trying to explode a pickle.

No one character in any one book can bear the weight of representing all people of color any more than any character in any one book can bear the weight of representing all white people. We need lots of books about lots of kids, with different skin colors and various cultural backgrounds, doing a whole bunch of cool things and wrestling with a wide range of kidlike problems. We need, desperately, to foster and promote work by authors of color, but white authors can’t just write safely in an all-white bubble. We need to write out of our comfort zones. Or else, fifty years hence, the all-white world of children’s books will continue to be as all white as it is today.

TheSkimm: Is “Reading the News” Overrated These Days?

“I really should read the news, but I _______”. Insert excuse here. This might be a direct quote from myself this morning at breakfast.

We’ll admit it. We’ll even take pride in it: We’re busy, we’re caught up, and we’re stressed. Yes, Iraqi citizens are getting bombed and victims of the Ukraine conflict are losing family members daily, buuuuut I have 3 papers due this week, I have to find a summer internship, and my roommate’s gonna kill me if I don’t do my laundry soon.

Continue reading “TheSkimm: Is “Reading the News” Overrated These Days?”