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   Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 03:05:31 JST Carrie Shanafelt

   Last night, one of my students thought he had read a specific poem by a poet we're about to read, but I didn't recognize his description of the content of the poem. So he opens up Google and types in the poet's name and the topic, and it just spat out a fabricated poem in her style. This is what's really unnerving--"AI" is not adding value to a search service that works; it's flooding the search results with so much crap that you can't even verify a date or the existence of a text anymore.

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     Carrie Shanafelt (carrideen@c18.masto.host)'s status on Wednesday, 29-Jan-2025 14:55:03 JST Carrie Shanafelt

     in reply to

     In this case, no, the student was misremembering the name of a poet he read last semester. But, unable to identify a poem on that topic by Phillis Wheatley Peters, Google just made one up.

     I've had problems all month trying to put the publication dates of texts next to the titles on the syllabus--quickly searching for a bunch of dates in a row, a lot of them are off by a few decades--just small enough that if you're not really thinking hard about it, might seem plausible.

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