ChatGPT's Achilles Heel

I just posted a discussion of ChatGPT's major weakness for the Sentient Syllabus Project: sentientsyllabus.substack.com/

It falls prey to its "Schrödinger Facts".

In a nutshell: ask the AI for sources - and then check whether they actually exist. They usually don't. Requests for specific, provable sources turn out to be ChatGPT’s achilles heel.

That's a big deal: (a) we can (and should) always require students to attribute ideas anyway, and chasing down the source of a ChatGPT claim may be more work than working from an actual source; (b) ChatGPTs information is not useless though - and can be very valuable to point to the right direction; (c) while we become masters in attribution, the collaboration benefits in other ways, and the end result is improved.

Find our resources on academia and the new AI at sentientsyllabus.substack.com and on sentientsyllabus.org

... and share this information to whoever might find it useful.

The Sentient Syllabus Project
Charting a course for academia in the era of digital thought.
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I've been really busy over the last days rolling this out: the large-scale availability of literate AI has imploded the academy as we know it. We need to re-orient. How? I founded The Sentient Syllabus Project to share concrete, practicable advice. Check it out at sentientsyllabus.org and at sentientsyllabus.substack.com/

Most importantly: this includes text samples how to start re-thinking and adapting our winter-term syllabi by next week. This is needed _now_. Drop in, have a look, and if you know someone who might benefit please share.

"A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct."

(Frank Herbert, Dune - 1965)
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I was a teenager when I first read Dune, waiting in the queues of the Stubai glacier ski-lifts, in Austria. At the top of the glacier, a short hike would bring you to the saddle and the view from there soars over an untouched snowy plain, beckoning, sparkling, dipping into the Windach Valley high above Sölden, and the view leaps across the slope and continues all the way to the blue peaks of Italy's Dolomites that make the horizon. I stuck my skis in a drift, sat on a heap of scree, chewed on an apple and read.

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So this is a beginning. Hello, Mastodon. Are the balances correct? The thing is, one cannot know that, at the beginning. Such knowing is for the end. Until then, there is a path. Let's see where it leads to.

In lieu of an just tags: and , programming and teaching , , and and ... but also and more recent published work in , and - jointly with @yi_chen .

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