Doing Stuff with AI: Opinionated Midyear Edition
AI systems have gotten more capable and easier to use
Every six months or so, I write a guide to doing stuff with AI. A lot has changed since the last guide, while a few important things have stayed the same. It is time for an update. This is usually a serious endeavor, but, heeding the advice of Allie Miller
Kevin James O’Brien
•
5d
I appreciate your posts. And look forward to playing with these projects this summer.
This spring I had to pivot as a high school English teacher trying to pitch the value of poetry to students. I was seeing writing with what I suspected had AI help to say the least, so I asked my students to write with integrity as they experimented with ChatGPT and poetry - asking big questions as to role of the poet in an AI world.
They had to credit AI where credit was due - indicating AI writing in bold font - as they wrote poems and reflections on…
Why write poetry?
Does poetry matter?
What’s the point if large language models can generate sonnets and sestinas in seconds?
They read various Ars Poeticas by poets and wrote their own. They researched and presented more than 90 poets and cross checked with ChatGPT. This fact checking is essential as AI churns out words, words, words - some true, yet some false. Discernment is an essential skill. They concluded that writers write with an authentic voice that reflected their lived experience - and context is everything: historical, biographical, political, and social.
Echoing Ross Gay, writing serves as an “evident artifact” to thinking, to struggling,
to investigating, to enduring,
to living - and to inspiring
by sharing with the world.
As educators, we will have to ask big questions as we rethink teaching and learning with this technology.
We must consider our students and their future as they develop their respective relationship with writing and reading.
Right now, more questions than answers.
And as Rilke writes:
“I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
“Writing is the evident artifact of some kind of change.” - Ross Gay
From slow stories podcast.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ross-gay-theres-always-a-gathering-inside-of-us/id1438786443?i=1000590791028
Daniel Nest
•
5d
I especially love some of the "fun" use cases. A great way to dip your toe into working with AI while having fun in the process.
