Tag Archives: GenAI

Currently reading about “botshit”, and how to avoid it (Hannigan, McCarthy, Spicer; 2024)

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When I recently summarized an article that claimed that Large Language Models (LLM) are “bullshit”, I got a lot of strong reactions offline and online about that term, and a comment recommending the article “Beware of botshit: how to manage the epistemic risks of generative chatbots” (Thanks, Ian!). In that article, Hannigan, McCarthy and Spicer (2024) suggest using the term “botshit” to describe what can happen when users uncritically use the output of LLMs, and I spent the better part of a Baltic Sea crossing today enjoying that article.

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According to Hicks et al. (2004), “ChatGPT is bullshit”. And they make good arguments for it, too!

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I have written about playing with GAI for certain purposes, most recently to “discuss” the development of a workshop when I had no person to discuss it with. But this article has given me new language (not just the “bullshit” word*, just keep reading) to talk about a highly problematic aspect of GAI.

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Planning an academic development workshop with GAI Claude

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“Hi Claude, I want to plan a 45 minute workshop for university teachers with the title “how do I cultivate joy, passion, and purpose in my teaching, and how do I share it with my students?”. The goal is for the participants to leave the workshop feeling a renewed sense of joy, passion, and purpose going into their future teaching, and I also want them to be able to articulate what it is that brings them feelings of joy, passion, and purpose in their teaching. Ideally, they will have strategies for how to cultivate those feelings, and have ideas on how to share that with their students.

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“It feels like having a smart friend which we ask anything and it can answer”: Currently reading: “Exploring Students’ Perceptions of ChatGPT: Thematic Analysis and Follow-Up Survey” (Shoufan, 2023)

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I’m currently thinking a lot, and talking with a lot of students, about what builds trust between students and teachers: Mostly that teachers ask questions, listen, and respond. But then someone pointed out how students appreciate the “human-like” interactions that students have with ChatGPT, and Rachel sent me a study that also shows that.

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Prompt engineering and other stuff I never thought I would have to teach about

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Last week, I thought a very intensive “Introduction to Teaching and Learning” course where we — like all other teachers everywhere — had to address that GAI has made many of the traditional formats of assessment hard to justify. We had to come up both with guidelines for the participants in our course on how to deal with GAI in the assessment for our course, and with some kind of guidance for them as teachers.

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