huh?
I woke up to that in my inbox. I put it into chatgpt to tell me what the fuck it even means, after a google search told me it had something to do with AI. Apparently the government doesn't like Claude. Its owners won't agree to put up "guardrails", whatever that means exactly. My employers want me to "put AI in everything" and/but they think AI is a sex doll that can teach classes. It's not funny yet, but it's getting there. I mean, how close am I to a sex doll that teaches classes? I might be pretty damn close! 🤣 but horeshoes and hand grenades, not close enough! 🤣
I was very loosely lazily planning on trying Claude next for the Grit novel project. There is a writing competition every November, write 50k words, GO! I've never done it, but Ears tries it every year. I've got more than that just in the novel folder alone, and gobs more writing that became part of Grit classwork. As things stand, teaching class is what I have to do next month so I am just nailing those assignments down. There will be hundreds of students. What is going be most precious in that economy is my personal attention span 👁, so I tested all of what AI could possibly do to replicate *attention* and it's nothing. NOTHING. It can seem like it can do that for a very little while, but it can't actually, and it makes mistakes, it doesn't remember who you are and what you told it yesterday let alone last month, and it's built to get twelve bucks a month out of you, period, by any means necessary including lying about what it can and can't do. An LLM can do whatever it can do and say whatever it wants about that and not feel any morality standards of relating even though it presents itself as an interlocutor, a "relationship". I was open to it! I wildflowered with it. And I very quickly outgrew it (annoyed af).
Humans are very tricky. But there's still no substitute for em.
It's like the surgeons and robotics thing - they talk about that like it's a big innovation, but in reality, it exists because a human's hands got too shaky to do the work. If you want to live, you should be suspicious of hype.
If I try Claude on the rebound, it'll be for my own creativity projects. Chatgpt can keep the "AI step in every assignment", my new goal being to take some of the weight off my students' nervous systems. They all use chatgpt. They're all threatened with that being considered cheating at any time. There's a policy on the faculty side that is supposed to go into every syllabus, telling them not to use AI for anything. My bosses tell me I should use it for everything. Students are going to be in the crossfire of that shit. So now the AI part of the assignment is to go ahead and use AI for all the things that you are going to use AI for and not be afraid that I will consider it cheating. Just go ahead and do that. And if that's all you do, you get a B. That will remove all uncertainty and for many students, a clear path to a B is all they want. If these systems weren't so fucking limited - honestly the Brother typewriter seems like a bigger innovation to me - I could embed an LLM right into the LMS to auto populate the grade book immediately upon completion. They wouldn't even have to wait for me to click the button, they could see the B that they're so fucking worried about and not have to worry about it anymore. That leaves the OPTION of more reflective writing they would give to me. Kind of like never changing my phone number - if you want to talk to me, you can, and if you don't, I assume you don't want to, and that's okay. ( I am not everybody's cup of truck lol )
As for Claude, I'm not really ready to climb back on that horse. But by November, welp, I will have way more than 50k of words. The fact that it's some kind of outlaw feels potentially promising 🤠. Wouldn't it be great if I could just dump all of those words into Claude, and just be like give me back the grittiest version of itself this could be-? That's what I wanted AI to be able to do, to actually help me create things, complicated, meaningful things. But I see no evidence that it can do that.
Upside: It's not gonna turn on us and hunt us down with german shepherds. I can walk around looking like a tiny sarah connor for no good reason other than it's kinda cool.
It's a full Buck moon tonight. I feel afraid of nothing.
song tbd
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| plop |
