Modern-Day Oracles or Bullshit Machines?
Jevin West and I have spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take.
https://thebullshitmachines.com
This is not a computer science course.
It’s a humanities course about how to learn and work and thrive in an AI world.
Neither instructor nor students need a technical background. Our instructor guide provides a choice of activities for each lesson that will easily fill an hour-long class.
The entire course is available freely online. Our 18 online lessons each take 5-10 minutes; each illuminates one core principle. They are suitable for self-study, but have been tailored for teaching in a flipped classroom.
The course is a sequel of sorts to our course (and book) Calling Bullshit. We hope that like its predecessor, it will be widely adopted worldwide.
Large language models are both powerful tools, and mindless—even dangerous—bullshit machines. We want students to explore how to resolve this dialectic.
@ct_bergstrom Thanks for this! Really useful resource. Could you please clarify the licensing terms?
What's your view on someone reusing this with modification? Incorporating part of the course in other resources etc? If I want to use this at university level should I point the students to the website or can I simply copy the content (with attribution of course) in my own slides/website?
Have you considered formalise this into a CC licence perhaps?
@nicolaromano Thank you for asking. Right now I have deliberately avoided a standard CC license because the website is *very much* a work in progress. Unlike a book, this format gives us the opportunity to update continually as this rapid changing field evolves.
It's a shame that this precludes reuse with modification, but for now it does.