This is a dynamic I saw firsthand in my own classes (first-year college students rather than high schoolers) after the election. So disorienting and disturbing to witness. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/16/opinion/donald-trump-women-girls.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ak4.kQGv.TL_8mIdozjyk&smid=url-share

Because we can always use more photos of kittens being adorable, right? #CatsOfMastodon

I mentioned getting good news back in August that I wasn’t sure I could share publicly yet. Well, now I can: I am one of this year’s winners of my university’s biggest teaching award! https://www.rochester.edu/college/ourfaculty/goergen/

I did end up writing up all of my thoughts about the ways our (legitimate!) critiques of LLMs and their output can end up dehumanizing actual human writers. I posted it to Medium, so here, have a mostly-coherent 3k word essay instead of a series of Mastodon posts: https://writerethink.medium.com/avoiding-dehumanizing-writers-in-our-critiques-of-large-language-models-5e13d64507db

@dingemansemark and unfortunately, the evidence I’m collecting suggests that this risk of being flagged as “AI” is higher for L2 writers and neurodivergent ones (I’m in the latter category but not the former) even when it’s other humans, not automated tools, doing the “detection”.

@inthehands @amaditalks I have wished for exactly this ever since I was a kid. (My mom says I literally sobbed all day, age 6, when I realized I’d never be able to experience the world through anyone else’s head but mine.)

@timnitGebru it makes me so furious that *hospitals*, of all places, have stopped requiring masks. Like, as a high-risk person myself (still dealing with the aftermath of my first COVID infection back in March), I’m upset about every indoor place that’s stopped requiring them, but a freaking HOSPITAL?? Like, why would masks EVER not make sense in a hospital setting? I’m so, so sorry for your family member, and I hope they come out of this ok.

@vegafjord @RosethornRangerTTV here’s another that I just saw: https://twitter.com/FractalEcho/status/1681632336771796992?s=20&fbclid=IwAR2LHLN6BXxU3fI-0PshJEDKBcW4tygTlf6zQbDfZXz853JRbPd17iyTgIQ_aem_Afry97Kq71CCLylXT9-wdzWsqAaEvUG5dnCJXN02D0Y5OLO5C3HDhVADS5Jj9UXBA90

@inthehands this is like what we had last week in NY (we were up over 300!). It was so bizarre.

@inthehands @seachanger yep. My brother and his wife teach at UW Eau Claire. I really hope WI can somehow teeter back to the other side of that knife’s edge but it’s quite hard to see how (at least from a distance).

@inthehands @seachanger oh, I know. I still follow MN politics pretty closely (and WI, too, since that’s where my family ended up after I left for college…WI politics is YIKES.)

I’m so so proud of MN and wish they could come talk some sense into NY!

@seachanger @inthehands mind-blown NYer here. I’m so proud of my former home state of MN and still (even after 15 years of living here) so baffled by how dysfunctional NY state politics are.

@inthehands Bach’s Sonata 2 for unaccompanied violin! (From the 6 Sonatas & Partitas.)

#100daysofpractice round 7, day 5: Today I tried reading through the opening movement of Sonata 2, the Grave. It’s really gorgeous, and I need to spend some time working out where the beats are, because right now as I read through, I can tell I lose the beat and am just kind of guessing about the 32nd/64th/etc notes actually go. Of course, I probably do need to actually figure out what the notes ARE before I can figure out when to play them.

Tomorrow’s my last day of classes. It’s gonna be a doozy, because on top of the classes I’ve got 3 1x1 meetings with students, the last of which is a likely academic honesty violation (whee!). Here’s hoping I can sustain my energy.

I feel like I’m so boring right now; I spend my time working and being a lump on the couch (sometimes at the same time!). I’ve been skipping a lot of things due to lack of energy, but that’s left me feeling really isolated and lonely :(

Last RT: whenever I read about holding kids back in the name of "equity", I think back to awkward, "highly gifted" kid-me and how *utterly fucking miserable* my childhood would've been if I'd been held back to grade-level in the interest of "equity".

I just...I know way too many well-meaning white liberals who've convinced themselves that "giftedness" is just something that privileged parents buy their kids, and they're not 100% wrong about that, but also: kids like me exist, in all races.

And I know that the students that will be hit hardest are the ones we already police the most: the ones who we think “shouldn’t” be able to produce clear, clean prose. The non-native speakers. The speakers of marginalized dialects. So I’ve been pushing against every suggestion that we should adopt these tools.

As a writing prof, I’ve been making this point as forcefully as I can in as many contexts as I can, because I have seen too many people uncritically accepting the hype - in both directions, about the capabilities of LLMs and about the abilities of automated detectors - and my biggest concern is that schools will decide to use automated detectors and put their students through “reverse Turing Tests”.

My brain wouldn't let go of this, so I now have a nearly 5k-word essayish thing expanding on this thread, and I don't know what to do with it - do I post it to Medium? Do I rework it to submit to a journal, and if so, which one? Make it an OER somehow? I dunno, but if anyone wants to read almost 5k words about why AI-detection is a fool's errand likely to disproportionately harm marginalized students, here you go: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CXgsYD-Sk-FqrbiaK2XeRwgRK56RG7-1rX2DDMV0JAA/edit?usp=sharing

I've been experimenting with GPTZero, which claims to be able to identify whether text was produced by an LLM or a human.

Everything I know about how LLMs work and how humans produce language (I know a non-trivial amount about both, given my background in computational linguistics and psycholinguistics) tells me that you will never, ever be able to build something that can reliably distinguish between the two. And sure enough, GPTZero fails miserably. So many false positives.