Can you read his or should your computer read it for you?
Educators are worried that many students can no longer write essays without A.I.
Educators are worried that many students can no longer write essays without A.I. And it’s costing more than just grammar skills. The New York Times, no paywall: “After years of studying how human beings write, the cognitive psychologist Ronald T. Kellogg concluded that drafting a basic persuasive essay was as mentally taxing as digging a ditch was physically exhausting. Writing well requires a command of vocabulary, spelling and grammar. It forces writers to comprehend a subject, to sift through their working memory of that topic, to organize and plan. Writing an essay is so difficult that a person in the throes of it can do hardly anything else — as anyone who has shushed a spouse or child while trying to compose a decent sentence can attest. Very few people would volunteer to dig a ditch. Likewise, it is hard — almost impossible, many English teachers will admit — to turn a reluctant writer into an enthusiastic one. Yet the American education system expects nearly all students to learn how to write an essay. It’s little wonder, then, that as soon as a tool arrived promising to lessen the pain people grabbed it. Like it or not, artificial intelligence is now firmly embedded in how students produce text. Somewhere between two-thirds and 90 percent of high school and college students are already using A.I. for schoolwork, according to recent surveys, often requesting help with writing assignments. A growing number of educators are alarmed, and insist that students should write without A.I. These teachers are returning to handwriting, blue books and proctored, in-class essay tests — all attempts to prevent students from outsourcing their writing to chatbots. This is baffling to tech industry leaders, who see A.I. rejection as a form of educational malpractice. They point out that writing is already the leading use of A.I. in the workplace, and argue there is no need to continue suffering through the task without help. After all, they say, chatbots now exceed the ability of most human beings to produce fluent prose. All this points to some questions about writing itself: Why work so hard to learn it? And what do students stand to lose when they stop facing down a blank page, alone with their thoughts? The scholars who study writing and cognition are rarely reflexively opposed to A.I. Many have spent decades anticipating a leap in computer-assisted writing, just like the one we are living through. They tend to be excited by the technology’s potential…”
Another indication that your data is an asset.
Google Aims to Boost AI With Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data
Google LLC won a bankruptcy auction for a trove of deindentified business data, software code, and operations records from collapsed low-cost carrier Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc., saying it plans to use the assets to improve its artificial intelligence.
The tech giant’s $10 million bid includes a vast repository of the defunct airline’s data, including 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats and collaboration records, plus information related to revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity, and audits and fraud, according to an Aug. 14 notice in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.
