Artificial intelligence has been a topic on this site. This is not surprising to people who know a little about me. I started learning about natural language processing and – a little later – about student modeling in 1995, when I began to work at the Centre for Computational Linguistics at UMIST. All three – natural language processing, student modeling , and computational linguistics – are part of artificial intelligence research in their different ways. Over the last many months, I started learning more about generative AI and how it impacts education and especially language education. I have now completed drafts for two book chapters. I have started splitting them into smaller parts and edited them slightly. I hope you will find them interesting. The first part is up. Let me know you think this academic writing is working on a blog.
Writing gives me a chance to think. It does not happen very often. I need to make it happen. Often. As often as I can. The thinking. The writing helps. Helps me remember. Helps me to slow down. Slow down my thinking. When it’s slow, it gets deeper. Alright. That’s a cliché. No, it’s not. Who said that. I got interrupted. Now my stream of thoughts has been disrupted. How did that happen?
Let me go back to the chance to think. About disruption. Disruptive. Is this good or bad? The question is too simple, too linear. Just one alternative. And there are so many. Alternatives. Alternatives after a disruption. It’s complex. Linear is just one of a zillion alternatives. Is zillion a number? Apparently not. I learnt that at trivia night three weeks ago. Interrupted again. I was thinking about disruption. In recent posts, I was talking about AI. Generative AI. Technology. And now disruption. Disruptive technologies.
No, I am not getting all businessy in this blog. Business folk like to talk about disruptive technologies. And so do I. It happens all the time. The disruption. Film disrupted theater. TV disrupted movie theaters. Video cassettes disrupted movie theaters too. VCR. VCR disrupted BetaMax. BetaMax was of better quality. It was discontinued. VCR prevailed. Until … Until the DVD disruption came. Netflix used to send out VCR cassettes. Streaming services disrupted the DVD. During COVID lockdown new films were streamed. The theaters were closed.
Is this all good or bad? You decide. All of you. Each time you decide. Again. And again. Each of you. Separately. And together. It’s complex. It can’t be linear. There are a zillion alternatives. And sometimes only one seems to prevail. For a short time. A disruption. And another one. In different areas. Not just film and theater and video. A disruption. Disruptive technologies. And we are taken by surprise. At times.
Disruptive technologies. And since 2022 we have been talking about AI. A disruption? AI disruption. Sure. What will it bring? What will we gain? What will we lose? In learning and for teachers, we read about new tools. The lesson plan that writes itself? The text the kids will read that was generated on the teacher’s computer. The feedback the machine gave, the errors corrected. With new errors?
What else can it do? Write. Translate. Chat. We know all that. This new AI is All. Powerful.
For writing we have always used tools. When I write – in English – I use tools. I use a thesaurus. I use dictionaries. More than one. One with more than one language. One with one language. English only. Funny that. But it helps.
When I learned writing … And it was hard. In grade one. When I learned writing, we had to use a fountain pen. My t-shirt and my tongue were blue. I wrote with a cheap fountain pen, doing my best to stay within the lines. Struggling with the tools. I could not write without them. There were so many lines in my exercise book. So, I was the last kid in class who always needed help to find the pale blue base line for the letters, when I started writing. Then I wrote. Letters first. Words later. Then sentences. Then stories. With a fountain pen. The pen did not write. I would never say that. It would never say that. I — wrote. I had to use the pen. I would have preferred another tool. A ballpoint pen would have been nice. It didn’t spit at the page. It didn’t leak on me.
Years later. I had saved some money and wanted a new toy. I said to myself – and others – a new tool. For writing. My writing would look neater. I could correct the words on the screen. And no one would ever know, if I did not say. The computer wouldn’t. I hit a key and it displayed. I sent in a command, and it printed. I had to wait years for this computer. Years before the deutsche mark came to where I lived. When it came, I bought a new tool. I had the computer in the one room that I rented as a student. And I wrote. Pages over pages. Most days. The dot matrix printer put them on pages, going over each line four times. It looked neat. Whatever I said. And the printer was loud. Whatever I wrote. That didn’t bother me. I slept in the same room. Soundly. And my landlady thought I was working during the night. And never. Never ever, did I say that the computer wrote my text, I did not acknowledge that I used the computer. The computer was not cited. It was there to see. Everyone could see on the page, I had not used a ballpoint or fountain pen. Not even pencil and eraser. I had a computer. But it was me. I wrote. And I said so. And no one ever doubted it.
Later I started using a spellcheck on my computer. In English and in German. And occasionally in Russian. And when my phone also became a computer … I love autocomplete. Most of the time. I type so slow. On any keyboard and with any touch. But – I – type. Which means for me: I – write. Only the typos I can blame on autocomplete. But using autocomplete without checking, I can only blame on myself. No one else. And everyone else does that, too. When I write, I am responsible. Typos and words and all.
And then I could have ChatGPT or DeepL or GoogleTranslate write my text. I write. Still, I can write. But then I commandeer a tool. I write in one language, because I find that easier. And then I command the tool to write the same in another language. It spits out the text much faster than I could type the original. Who wrote the translation? And what else can it do? I can prompt it to write the original too. And then I ask it to translate its original. What did I write? But it was my idea … I controlled the machine. And the machine wrote. In one language and then in another. I wrote the prompt and a command. Whose line is it anyway? That was a TV show … What else can it do? Someone writes to me. I wonder did they have the text generated. And I don’t have enough time to write a short letter and so I write … I write a prompt, having the machine read the letter and write a response. This I send. I did not write it. But it feels like I did. I was in control. If I wanted to have my letter – or is it its letter – in another language. So I send its letter, knowing it’s gonna look like I wrote it. Like these might be my ideas. We still read that way. They might wonder, too, whether I generated the letter. The text. But to make sense of it, they will assume that I wrote it because we have not yet learned to make sense of what a machine does.
What else does it do? It can have a conversation. Converse. Correspond. Discuss. It doesn’t need a friend. It needs a text. A text to which it can respond. It does not know where the text is from. It is a text. It does not have to be written. My friend did not write. It can be generated. A generated text gets answered by a generated text. I don’t need a friend. Who generates a text. Machines are talking among themselves. Conversation for conversation’s sake. Correspondence for correspondence’s sake. Generation for generation’s sake. Generation for generation. But then … why would we bother reading? Only reading. Only reading what machines send to each other. What is the meaning of that? What else can we do? Let’s write. Write. Write with pure intention. With a tool. As we always have. Yet, don’t leave it to the tool – write. Write with a tool. Don’t let the tool write for you. It might just accept your abdication … It doesn’t need a friend. You need a friend. Write. Express yourself.
Photo by sudip paul on Pexels.com [I call it: Friends in Conversation]
Panta Rhei Enterprise 