"I had one friend who told a colleague that he was going across campus to an Al workshop, and the other professors said, 'Don't, we're leading a boycott against the workshop.' Okay. I mean, I don't remember that kind of thing happening with Wikipedia or other tools for online learning..." For me at least, it's pretty simple. People are using these tools, and they are using them poorly. We are educators and if we can teach them to use them more effectively we should. If we refuse to do that, where we end up as a society is at least a little bit on us. But I disagree with Bryan a bit. We went through this before in miniature. In 2010 I was trying to convince people in civic education conferences we should teach people to use social media more effectively, including checking things online. The most common response "We shouldn't be teaching social media, we should be telling students to subscribe to physical newspapers instead." Those students we could have taught that year are thirty-five now. We could have had 15 cohorts of college students knowing how to check the truth of what they see online. Our entire history might be different, and maybe we wouldn't be seeing this rampant conspiracism. The thing is those professors who said we should just give students physical papers will never realize their role in getting us here. I wish others would consider that history before they treat boycotts of AI workshops like a noble act. When you engage in politics you are judged by results, not intentions. And the results of this approach are not risk free.

I see some instructors on here joking how they are going to add prompt injections into assignments as a defense against agentive browsers. I get the frustration and maybe it's just jokes? Maybe I need to lighten up? But just in case: prompt injection applied to people to whom you have a duty of care is not funny, it's not resistance, it's deeply messed up behavior that involves using your power to hijack the computer of people you force to consume your compromised materials, and if that seems reasonable to you, you need to touch some grass.

Was talking to @becksup about something similar to this. One of the reasons ChatGPT horrifies many professors is they've come to rely far too much on discursive fluency as an indicator of student understanding, and GPT undoes that in ways that, in fact, may deserve to be undone. https://t.co/aZ1IKKosVT— Mike Caulfield (@holden) March 28, 2023