Tag Archives: AI

AI

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I know we’re all supposed to hate AI, but this image is not really how it works. For my concept album cover for The Tower, I asked for an image of a crumbling university tower, and I selected the one I liked the most. Possible enhancements it suggested (that I agreed to) included a greater amount of ivy, ravens, and a mysterious figure staring at it from the outside. For my one song, “In the Halls of Academia,” I asked for a song lyric about precarious academic employment in the style of Rush’s Neil Peart. What it came up with almost perfectly matched the music of an earlier, unrelated song that I wanted to re-use anyhow. I’m probably not going to use AI for something like this again, but it is not obvious to me that it can’t or shouldn’t be used at all.

ChatGPT

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https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt

ChatGPT

There’s a meme going around about artifical intelligence (AI) software actually being plagiarism software, but that’s not really what’s going on.

I’ve used ChatGPT to see what it would do. For topics where there’s a lot of info out there, it’s maybe 80% on point, but genericizes the info, has no particular (or at least no strong) “thesis,” shows no evidence of research, provides no references (and can’t if you ask it to), and is poorly written. So, all of that is similar to a high school or early undergrad essay that would probably get a C or D.

If it directly took sentences from somewhere without citing them, that would be plagiarism/fail/F, but I don’t find that’s usually what it does. It’s more insidious than that.

On more obscure topics (even when the facts are out there in at least a few places), it makes up almost everything and is only maybe 20% accurate, in addition to many of the above problems. That’s not plagiarism, but it’s a definite fail/F.

The program is actually really good at coming up with poems and lyrics in the style of certain writers, but that is also not plagiarism.