On ChatGPT and Our Resistance to Change
Moses Ebe Ochonu
On ChatGPT and Our Resistance to Change
By Moses E. Ochonu
The older one gets, the less receptive one becomes to innovation and change.
It's the natural conservatism associated with aging. You're jaded, having seen fads come and go and being comfortable in the familiar.
But another factor is at play. Change is disruptive and it takes work and effort to adopt it or to adapt to it.
When you're getting older, your priority is to simplify your life, not to complicate it any more than it already is. Change complicates one's life.
When you're getting older and you're a busy professional with a full plate of commitments, it seems as though you need more than 24 hours in a day. You're constantly swimming against the current of overload and deadlines.
In such a circumstance, any change to how things are done, no matter how positive such a change may be, threatens your routine and places new burdens on you.
Any innovation or new technology needs adjusting to. You need to learn how it works and how to use it to enhance what you do.
As a person already overwhelmed by work and multiple, competing demands on your time, such new technologies, which often revolutionize work efficiency and ease processes, come across to you as complications to your already stressed life, as additional work on your full schedule.
This is the reason my attitude to ChatGPT has ranged from hostility to indifference. It's not that I don't know the AI's positive potentials even for academia, for what I do for a living. I do.
It's just that, for me, it's one more new tech to learn and master. Where the heck is the time to do that? Where's the mental energy? I am still struggling to master the functionality of the existing tools and now I have to contend with this new one?
That's why I'm largely passing on adopting and adapting ChatGPT and other AI to my pedagogical and scholarly work. Let the young Millennial and Get Z academics do the adaptation and let them show us the way.
I remember how, several years ago, our unit administrator retired when a new, complex accounting procedure was introduced for processing faculty expenses.
As confused faculty overwhelmed her with inquiries and as many workshops were being scheduled to teach administrators how to switch to and master the new system, she announced that she didn't have the energy to learn the new system and that the switch had made her retirement decision easier and had moved it forward.
At the time, I didn't understand her decision to retire rather than have to learn a new accounting system, but now I do.
When we gathered recently to discuss a proposed new core curriculum template, which would require several adjustments to the way we structure and teach many undergrad courses, one senior colleague's only question was: when will the implementation start? He said he wanted to know so he would schedule his retirement before the new system begins. He wants to escape it!
These are things Millennials and Gen Z folks will not understand in their restless energy and excitement for novelty, innovation, and change.
But we already overburdened middle age people know the toll change and innovation take on us. Change, however constant it is in life, upends our routine and the cultivated rhythms of our lives.
It took a lot for us to adjust to the last change and find a comfortable pace and manageable routine, and now we're expected to yet again change our lives and methods to accommodate another disruptive innovative change.
You can understand why many older academics are giving ChatGPT a cold reception.
Chambi Chachage
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Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to give ChatGPT a cold reception – it is literally transforming higher education and testing (ChatGPT recently passed the US Medical Licensing Exam/USMLE, see https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/102705).
I teach a master’s level introduction to biomedical informatics every fall and the one thing that will be in my syllabus for this year is an explicit ban on using ChatGPT or other generative AI models (from Meta, Google, etc.) for essay writing. I’m no Luddite - I use machine learning extensively in my research and find the growing capabilities of generative models to be quite exciting.
However, they can be problematic when it comes to test taking and essay writing, since a generative model is a language model that basically predicts the most probable next word that should occur in a sentence and writes it out, based on the prompt it is given. It has no notion of truth and so along with some good, accurate summary text, it can also produce authoritative-sounding false statements/“facts” and seemingly plausible reference articles (sometimes the name of an actual journal with fake authors and fake title) based on the corpus from which it learns. There’s also the potential problem of plagiarism. We’ll be sorting this out for quite a while.
Cornelius Hamelberg
In an idle moment, this is just another aside from a non-professing, at least not for a living, so it can be brushed aside
AI - latest developments
The very latest: State-of-the-art AI female humanoid robot.
Whatever next ? Transgender? LGBTQ - WXYZ?
Isn’t it time to leave/depart from civilization, retire to a Wordsworthian century somewhere in the depths of pastoral Africa, a nice little village by the river, sipping palm wine in the evenings and watching the sun go down, far away from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot and far, far away from To New York By Leopold Sedar Senghor
Ah, “ The Seven Ages of Man”
To which of the seven ages do Elders Tinubu, Atiku and the “old youth” upstart Obi belong?
BTW, I've heard the term “ Oldies “ - “we oldies' ' so many times that I’m beginning to get sick and tired of hearing it. It's even used in this piece I’m reacting to, and when you’ve heard it enough times you begin to think ( erroneous thinking ) that you are, are becoming or have become one of them “ an oldie “, “middle-aged” ( like a proper citizen of “Middle Earth” or soon to be interred/integrated, dust to dust, and ashes to ashes in the eternal resting place of the body. Until the resurrection. If at all.
( When I tell Baba Kadiri that I’m fasting, he tells me to eat ( well well) and not to worry, that our final mission is to feed the worms.
The fact is that in our lifetime ( lazy buggers) we should all be looking forward to astronomical progress in the field of medicine - maybe we will be able to live as sweet birds of youth, forever !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In the meantime, kudos to the creative techno geniuses who are creating ( some say) a brighter future for the lazy, with a mere 150 watts bulb IQ in their professional heads ( what they call a “brain” / bio-computer) because, now, we ( mankind, those who understand ) will be able to solve problems that would take low-wattage brains several lifetimes to begin to understand, talk less about to begin to solve, especially, mathematics, said to be the language of science ( not holy Hebrew, eloquent Arabic, softly. spoken Russian, big English, big German, big, French, Italian, Spanish, Yoruba, Hausa or excellent Chinese
It would seem that what Prof Ochonu is complaining about are mere inconveniences that cannot be conveniently brushed aside in his line of earning his daily bread, the way he describes it, as some kind of indocility or call it old age imbecility if you will, a poor player, out of sync with modern times // MODERN TIMES, not being willing or able to adapt to the new reality. As in “ Move over and let Jimi take over”
It was first forcefully brought to our attention when Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov
Even scarier, is that AI can write or compose/ do poetry with total self-awareness
Makes you shudder to think what the great composer could have done with all the modern technology that was developed after their time on planet earth
Stephen Hawking warned that we ( mankind, the bright, the low wattage, the dumb, the real stoopid) should be careful, other bright lights are warning that AI could take over completely if we / relatively speaking the dumbasses) are not careful and I guess that it’s the kind of advice that William Shakespeare would have taken seriously, William Shakespeare whose clown Touchstone said, “ The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool “ So could the wise man ( the first in his village to crow about his wisdom, please stand up?
Now, if the current Naija administration were adept at the latest technology then this change of currency affair would have been a fait accompli, with no inconveniences, and no complaints. This means that the opposition would have been out of business as the whole population sent Atikyu & OBi and the others packing with a resounding we want more APC, and more Buhari! We want even more naira: Let Tinubu take over
Not to worry, my travel companion, an Irishman, told me on the plane Port Harcourt - London, that no one has a monopoly on paradise. As we get more sophisticated with the new technology we will soon be entering what was previously science fiction, hopefully, the machines will usher in the age of leisure, not the age of mass unemployment., although then with all that leisure, all that time on our hands, it’s only the creative life that will be worth living, not a care in the world, sweet bird of youth surfing at some of the best places for surfing
Since all of the above is unreflected and if not insane is then bordering on the inane, here’s sober advice for all of us, including the gerontologists among us: I have entitled it “ Growing Up “
Michael Afolayan
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/2109245221.1478642.1675844307261%40mail.yahoo.com.
Cornelius Hamelberg
It's never too late to start learning, it's even more frightening than that: The rabbi says that if your knowledge doesn't increase, then it decreases. It does not remain " constant". Much more frightening than even that is the prospect that it can decrease to the extent that you become a complete ignoramus, like yours truly. The only comsoöation is that it's not over till it's over
It’s all over when someone is no longer curious ( about anything) - therefore, many thanks to Don Ochonu for ever mentioning ChatGPT because I had previously only vaguely heard about any such contraption but I’m now happy to say that I just signed up for one and have added an extension to my chrome.
I was one of the last people in my generation to get a computer, greatly preferring books, journals, newspapers etc, and my fountain pen or biro to any computer keyboard. I resisted the temptation to the very last and only surrendered by circa 1995
There are of course problems ahead that one can anticipate, such as instead of someone hearing a voice in his head or committing a crime and telling the puisne judge that “ God” told him to do it, the miscreant can now prove that he got directions from ChatGPT on e.g. how to make a BOMB!
I understand the dilemma, particularly in US schools - it’s bad enough reading (on the www) students’ assessments/ grading of their professors and the first thing that one notices is that some of them can’t spell ( “u”, “ “r” etc) others can’t even put two coherent sentences together and obviously such types would never be in a position to assess whatever ChatGPT may spit out, be it in wordology, philosophy, logic or maths - for the unprepared the difference between billions and trillions could be negligible. God save us all.
I said particularly in US Schools but not only. Check this out 👍
https://www.facebook.com/martin.flodkvist :
"Parents, this is something you need to keep up with because this makes me completely lose my mind. I teach at high school and meet lots of intelligent, sensitive, lovely students who straight up and down can't write! It's all from missing a capital letter (on their own names! I'm not kidding ! ), to not being able to form letters, to not understanding how sentences are divided (I'm talking: to put a period at the end) into a spelling that is non-existent.
The vast majority of young people have in common that they did not write so much by hand in primary and middle school. No one has given them enough time to learn, they have not been allowed (like we got) to sit quietly and shape "Gg" or "Mm", they have not written small stories in small notebooks by hand and got them back corrected with a cute comment from a teacher. They have mostly cut, glued on the computer, pressed their fingers on keys without feeling the imprint letters make, how different letters feel different in the hand, look different on the line, on paper, resemble different figures they see in the outside world. They haven't been given a chance.
And before you ask: no, they can't write on the computer either. Not without the help of digital programs that correct them. Now you think: "well, I ALSO take help from digital programs when I write, that's how the world looks today! "Then you have to remember that yes, digital tools are the top... when you're an adult and can already! Not when you are a child and in the process of learning.
Why does it look like this? Yes, partly because the School Board WANTS it to look like this. In my opinion, they are totally blinded by the digitalization process, even though numbers suggest that Swedish young people are feeling worse and can less since the introduction of the computer in school. Read and laugh DN today. The article is about a Waldorf school, mark well, but it matters less in this context. I believe it highlights the excessive focus on digital work that the school curriculum today contains. And when it's time to put your kids in school or have developmental conversations or parenting meetings, ask for handwriting. Question about analogue teaching materials. Ask for a hand note during class time. Pull your ears when oral exams, one-to-one and digital learning materials come up and explain that you do not want this! School boards listen to parents because you are the representatives. They don't listen to teachers because we represent
(Okay to share. )
Edit: Want to mention that handwriting is still part of Swedish school, it is still in the central content in primary and middle school. However, it is my determined opinion that it is emphasized too little in our curriculum and is therefore used too little in daily work. As I said, students reach high school without being able to form readable letters, etc."
Harrow, Kenneth
kenneth harrow
professor emeritus
dept of english
michigan state university
Sent: Wednesday, February 8, 2023 6:53 AM
To: USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafric...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - On ChatGPT and Our Resistance to Change
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/56fd290b-7ea9-4b92-876a-8bcb31258f06n%40googlegroups.com.
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
i would like to try the system to see what it would produce when asked to generate essays on topics ive already written, and on topics i intend to write which no one has written on yet, in both cases focusing on work unique to myself, such as on the shrine arts of Benin City multi-deity priest David Ebengho.
Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
Prof. of History/African Studies, CCSU
africahistory.net; vimeo.com/ gloriaemeagwali
Recipient of the 2014 Distinguished Research
Excellence Award, Univ. of Texas at Austin;
2019 Distinguished Africanist Award
New York African Studies Association
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Chambi Chachage
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Omolola Ijeoma Ogunyemi
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
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