Time Magazine printed a fairly dramatic evaluation of ChatGPT, as that "Artificial Intelligence" program is related to education. Click here for the entire article, which is pretty brief. The statement I want to highlight is reproduced below:
Virtually all experienced scholars know that writing, as historian Lynn Hunt has argued, is “not the transcription of thoughts already consciously present in [the writer’s] mind.” Rather, writing is a process closely tied to thinking. In graduate school, I spent months trying to fit pieces of my dissertation together in my mind and eventually found I could solve the puzzle only through writing. Writing is hard work. It is sometimes frightening. With the easy temptation of AI, many—possibly most—of my students were no longer willing to push through discomfort (emphasis added).
Victoria Livingstone. who is the author of the article just quoted, holds a doctorate in Hispanic literature, and was a Fulbright scholar in Brazil. She is currently the managing editor of MLN, a peer-reviewed journal of literary scholarship. Most recently, Livingstone was teaching doctoral students at a "technical college" (unnamed). Her students largely refused to do their own writing, relying on ChatGPT instead. As a consequence, Livingstone quit.
I have been writing in this blog since January 1, 2010. One post every day. I write this blog, essentially, as a way to "think" about what is happening in this "Political World" that we inhabit, and it is my belief that the thinking I have done, in the course of writing all those individual blog postings, has paid off in my own self-education. I am writing, in other words, not to tell anyone who reads these postings what they should think, but as a way to figure out what I think.
I recommend this method of writing in order to "learn" - as opposed to the idea that a person should write in order to "teach" others. This idea of daily writing (in order to understand the world) is something like the idea that we might - each one of us - "journal" our daily lives, as a way to come to grips with the significance of our lives, and thus with our own significance.
"Thinking" - all types of "thinking" - is highly recommended. We are seeing a lot of evidence that our politics would be better if more "thinking," by more people, were brought to bear on the politics of the day. That's my view, of course, and views may differ.
Still, I say:
Write On!
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