AI apologies
A story from The New York Times (gift link):
Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.
But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had.
Using AI to write an e-mail to a professor seems an especially witless way to use AI, as if that professor could not possibly have seen such a message before.
In 2023 I ma…
AI apologies
A story from The New York Times (gift link):
Confronted with allegations that they had cheated in an introductory data science course and fudged their attendance, dozens of undergraduates at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign recently sent two professors a mea culpa via email.
But there was one problem, a glaring one: They had not written the emails. Artificial intelligence had.
Using AI to write an e-mail to a professor seems an especially witless way to use AI, as if that professor could not possibly have seen such a message before.
In 2023 I made the following addition to my read-all-over post How to e-mail a professor:
Don’t ask AI to write an e-mail for you. At least not if you want your e-mail to sound like the work of a human being.
When I asked ChatGPT in 2023 to generate an e-mail requesting an assignment, here’s what resulted. The first sentence: “I hope this email finds you well.” And it gets better (worse) from there.
Have the results improved? Don’t know. Don’t care either.
Related reading All OCA AI posts (Pinboard)
[The Illinois story is from last October. I sincerely apologize for missing it then. Thanks, Lu!]