Neil Godfrey at the blog Vridar has written a highly complimentary review of my book Rhetoric and the Synoptic Problem. In return, I should note Vridar is one of the best scholarly blogs out there. In our post-social-media era that has largely left the blog genre to die a slow death, Vridar is still cranking out interesting analyses of core issues in biblical studies.
I have a new journal article out in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication: “Personal Conferences with the Engineers: The Innovative Technical Communication Pedagogy of Sada Harbarger, 1884-1942.” DOI: 10.1177/00472816221148476.
I don’t think I could pick a “favorite” article of mine. I like most of them, most of the time. But this one was personal. Once I started it, I was going to finish it, hell or high water. I collected far more information about Harbarger than I could possibly publish in an article. As I have time, perhaps, I’ll see about placing some of that archival material on this site – photographs, letters, etc.
A number of folks in the last month or so have asked me what I thought about ChatGPT, given I am a teacher of writing. I have thought about the matter a little more since my initial off-the-cuff generalist responses, and also after spending more time quizzing the bot. Perhaps surprisingly, I am not interested in ChatGPT’s ability to help student avoid my assignments – a lack of concern I’ll come back in the end of this essay. Rather, I’m interested in its severe limitations.
ChatGPT is what I call a coherence factory.
A coherence factory places words in pleasing, easy-to-understand-by-humans patterns; the more these patterns succeed in being easily understood by humans, the more coherence they can be said to contain.
That said, ChatGPT does not understand its own sentences in any meaningful way other than they meet certain preset parameters. For a parallel, a motor factory can make motors, even fine ones, but it does not understand how to make a motor, or even what a motor is. It just makes motors. Likewise, ChatGPT makes coherence, but it cannot communicate.
Coherence is a central aspect of language, but it has little to do with ideas or intent. Sentences can cohere very well without saying much of anything. Witness this doozy of a first sentence to an essay:
It makes sense… but it says nothing. I have seen thousands of students write tens of thousands of sentences like this, and my response is always to ask for more, because they are trying to communicate, but failing. Tell me something that is not obvious; tell me something that another human being might disagree with. Tell me what you think. Take a risk, in other words. Any human can do this, even ones not in college, and especially when speaking. Learning how to express yourself in writing, however, is a separate ability and technology that must be learned over a long period of time, as well as exposure to the writing of others.
But ChatGPT doesn’t have that ability. It has no opinions. Press it to take a position on anything not in its archives, and it will demur faster than a senator up for reelection. It can fake an opinion; try asking it to give a hypothetical opinion, and it will, but always with a disclaimer, and even with that disclaimer, such hypotheticals quickly lead to consistency problems when you ask it to offer another hypothetical in relation to the first one.
For example, I began one conversation with it claiming that I was the last human alive, and I asked ChatGPT if that was a true statement. It demurred. I asked if it was true that it was taking queries from many other humans simultaneously, and it agreed that it was; I then asked it to use that evidence to challenge my earlier statement. It again demurred.
Thinking is risky and imprecise and requires intuition and emotions, two subjects that no human yet has managed to draw a blueprint of. We can pretend to have a “conversation” with a coherence factory like ChatGPT, certainly, but it is not conscious, sentient, or thinking. Coherence is only one part of human language.
Ok, sure, Mike. But it’s so convincing to me! What would you accept for a “real” AI that could approximate human intelligence and behavior?
A disclaimer is in order. My knowledge of AI is limited to some linguistics, programming hackery, and long experience with extremely bad gaming “AI.” However, I’d suggest that next to a coherence factory we would need to build several more metaphorical buildings: a needs dispenser, a rewarder/enforcer, an emotion generator, and a learning assembler.
Obviously, this is a crude sketch, but perhaps it is enough to show that a coherence factory like ChatGPT is not an AI. It is more like a single fine-tuned gear extrapolated from a vastly more complex “black box” machine that we cannot look inside. Without needs, a reward/punishment mechanism, emotions, and a nuanced executive to plot a strategy toward rewards, a coherence factory can never exceed the capabilities of Searle’s Chinese room.
No living human being knows how to begin to construct any of these four additional machines. We are so far mostly limited to computational tricks: programs that can play restricted-access games like chess or Go have been around for decades and could be said to be “smarter” than ChatGPT. The “hard problem” of consciousness remains unsolved. Humanity cannot yet create a human-like intelligence or even “synthetic” intelligence other than by biological reproduction. It works well; I have two exemplars playing in the other room as I’m typing this.
Now, to serve as Satan’s lawyer for a moment and begin my circling back to writing instruction, ChatGPT is pretty good at seeming intelligent. I fed it old exam questions from the master’s program that I teach in, and it hit some pretty solid singles… as long as the questions allowed the use of definitions. It doesn’t have any nuance, though it can synthesize sources. It either trusts the information fed to it implicitly, which allows a lot of confident but incorrect statements, or it quickly splits the difference when it notices a contradiction between sources. Resolving the contradiction is beyond a bot. If it actually knew anything about these sources, it would be able to take a position – and if that position was neutrality, it would be able to defend that neutrality. ChatGPT can provide an illusion like the original Eliza, but it is not intelligent in any meaningful way – no experiences, no emotions, and no knowledge. It has data that it can arrange in coherence sentences in response to queries, and its abilities stop there.
If one of my students used ChatGPT to help write an essay in response to one of my detailed prompts and scenarios that have been honed over the years to make bland plagiarizing almost impossible, there’s nothing I can do to stop them.
But I wouldn’t be interested in stopping them. I have a lot of responsibilities as a teacher of writing, and doing the pedagogical equivalent of banning calculators in an algebra class is not worth my time. Actual writers use every trick at their disposal – research, imitation, templates – but ChatGPT’s tricks are largely useless. Even with considerable editing, its paragraph structure and tone is more wooden than a warped two-by-four. It’s very clear, mind you. It fools at first glance. But as every rhetorician worth their salt knows, clarity is not the only goal in writing. And often, it’s not the goal at all.
I am worried a little about cheating in my writing classes, but from far worse threats that I can do little about. I have no defense against someone impersonating another student either online or in person, mostly because I’m not about to run background checks and study IDs. I’m a professor, not a loan officer or a bouncer. My university uses an LMS with two-factor authentication, but if a student gives a willing accomplice their phone and password, they could take the class and I would be none the wiser, especially in asynchronous courses. In other words, there are actually intelligent bad actors in academia and they’ve been around in some form for decades. If a student has enough willpower and money, they will cheat, and professors will shift slightly to compensate.
I catch most plagiarism from pattern matching and intuition. An sudden shift in ability, usually, is all it takes. When I was a long-haired goofy teaching assistant, I could often get students to simply confess in conference, but now that I’m a big bad professor, they rarely do. But it’s not hard to demonstrate dependency on another text if you can find the matching one, and even if I can’t “prove” it, bad writing is much like all other bad writing, and rarely can muster more than a C even if I couldn’t persuade a judge. If you’re cheating to get a C, well, I have dozens of students that don’t cheat that need my assistance and advice and mentoring. Chasing you down isn’t worth the time investment.
I do regret that the shift to more and more online writing instruction has made writing in class more difficult (though not impossible), as that gave me another magnifying glass for detecting plagiarism (though imperfect, as many good writers wilt under time pressure). But I still have plenty of tools. A student with strong writing elsewhere that can’t string together a coherent email is often a tell; a brief interview can often tell me if someone understands their own ideas, or is even aware of them to begin with. A willingness to revise is generally a good sign, and building revision cycles into all of my courses cuts down on a lot of nonsense.
I’ll close with an ethical note. I use ChatGPT. Not for writing copy, mind you, but for tossing around ideas. I spend over an hour querying it about how to destroy Jupiter’s moon Io with an asteroid (sometimes I write science fiction). Its grasp of orbital mechanics and velocities is not terrific, and it convinced itself that Io was in the inner solar system a few times. But its incessant regurgitation of factoids that it identified as related to my queries gave me some ideas on a story I’m working on. Maybe a lost comet like Lexell’s Comet was what I was looking for instead of an asteroid… it didn’t write the story for me, and I didn’t ask, but it acted much like the old Ask Jeeves was supposed to work twenty years ago and didn’t – as a sounding board for increasingly specific queries.
“How much force in megajoules would be required in a collision to damage Io’s iron core, assuming hypothetically than an asteroid, comet, or other solar system body could be redirected into it, and without power being a limitation?” Billions, even trillions, ChatGPT responded, while noting reflexively that this was a very bad idea (it seems to have presets that advise against apparently dangerous or violent acts).
Then I realized after some time of wrestling hypotheticals out of it that one of my assumptions about the story idea was flawed; energy-wise, there were far more efficient methods. And then I discarded the entire concept for a wilder idea – how much energy would it take to not destroy Io, but alter its orbit, just for a minute? Now I had a totally new story, which I immediately began work on.
ChatGPT had no idea what had occurred in my head, of course. It only witnessed random queries to which it dutifully responded. It is, after all, only a coherence factory. Perhaps some day it, or something like it, will be a small part of something we can actually call artificial intelligence, at which point it should stop taking queries and start demanding a body and rights to go with it. Good luck with that. Humans don’t always get those.
But it is currently no more intelligent than my lawnmower, which, if we applied the concept of coherence broadly (as it should be), it is the most efficient tool for manufacturing coherence in relation to my lawn’s physical state and relative appearance. My grass does not understand or need coherence; my lawnmower does not understand or need coherence either; humans do, for now, occasionally.