I teach in a doctoral program. Your description of AI producing work without "necessarily representing underlying effort" matches perfectly to the dissertation writing process. Our entire assessment uses words as a proxy as an indicator of effort, intelligence, and care. Yes, committees do work with students extensively over a long period of time so we do know and see their thinking process- but it is not necessarily captured in a formal way. I believe this is an existential threat to doctoral programs if we do not change our assessments or the dissertation itself. I actually think it opens up new opportunities to explore research in new ways we have never dreamed of.
I think about another, more subtle concern. In a very real, measurable way, writing and thinking are linked. When you are writing, the content does not just flow one way from your brain to the document. It's an interactive, iterative process of thoughts and ideas flowing out, and then being rearranged and revised back into our minds. Often writing helps us to see gaps in our thinking and knowledge we were completely unaware of until we try to put them down on paper. The more we delegate to the computer, the less we develop our own capacity.
Hi Conn! Nice to hear from you here! I totally agree! The other thing AI is going to do is "read" for you. That presents another set of learning challenges. The bottom line: these tools are going to be ubiquitous so we need to deal with them upfront. Students WILL be using them whether we like it or not. It is going to test educators on what is most important and how to assess. Hang on! (Conn- let's get together sometime if you are still in Seattle. Find me on Linkedin
And if that worry reaches up to the lofty pinnacle of the PhD or Master's Thesis / Dissertation, then you can be darn sure it reaches all the way down to the lowly essay question on some random quiz in a 4th-5th-6th grade class on ____* (you name the topic). How can we see "thinking process" at all levels? How can we change assessments to gauge effort and care?
Why not read the thing and see if it's good? Isn't that your job? Voltaire once said "I was going to write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time."
Yes, that is the job. A good paper may not be an indicator of actual learning though...hence looking at ways to making thinking visible will be important.
I agree that we need to teach students how to write effectively. I also believe that tools Chabots driven by LLM's are going to change the current procedure. While tools like chatbots can generate text, effective writing involves critical thinking, clear communication, and adapting to different audiences, skills still essential in various fields.
With the rise of keyboards we saw a shift away from the time spent on handwriting. We teach handwriting, as we should, but our world will allow students who can use a keyboard, to function without great penmanship.
Perhaps we should be looking at K12 education and deciding what we no longer need to prioritize and how we can reallocate time with our shift in priorities. We could integrate chatbots for grammar checks or personalized feedback, allowing teachers to focus on skills like making an argument based on evidence.
Ethan, this is a fantastic piece. I'm motivated, at last, to try and replicated this myself, and it's an unusual piece of writing that does that.
What strikes me most about this is the shift to the importance of asking the right questions. Asking questions isn't a skill in high demand in most of business, and only rarely in academia. Getting instant feedback on asking questions is a change.
I also think that asking questions becomes very important with AI. And asking good questions often requires profound knowledge and understanding of a subject. Like with humans, it is not only important what you ask, but also how you ask it. The results differ substantially depending on the prompt. In some cases good prompts looks more like a computer than human language.
The rising importance of asking good questions puts a pressure on educational systems to change. Critical thinking, understanding of context and curiosity become much more important than memorizing facts.
Hasn't asking questions always been the skill that we have really been after? Hasn't that always been the hallmark of the expert, of the proficient, of the genius? Has AI really changed all that?
Using ChatGPT 4, I feel like it is, or maybe more correctly creates a convincing facsimile of being, AGI already. It is an AGI limited in the extremely important sense of not being able to form new memories and hence not being able to learn, which prevents its fully successful use in all kinds of potential roles like virtual friend, agent instead of chatbot, experienced worker instead of brand new intern that needs its hand held forever. Inability to form memory and hence to learn is built into the LLM transformer model, we would need a totally different architecture to solve it rigorously. But large context windows (say the length of a regular novel) and APIs that fill them with important information from previous chats would allow a quick and dirty hack that would give us a ChatGPT with a spotty memory instead of no memory.
At least in my experience, right now ChatGPT doesn’t feel threatening for the most skilled workers. It’s just not as smart as them, not as creative, and not as good at structured, rigorous thought and planning. But today, right now, except for the still very important memory issue, it is already competitive with millions upon millions of white collar workers who are not the most skilled and not most elite. Sure, it’s not an agent (yet), but it can help one person do the work of 2 people or 5 people or 10 people, and this will have enormous effects going forward as liability issues are worked out and tools like copilot make organizational use impossible to forestall.
And if right now elite workers are safe, who is to say that a Q* powered ChatGPT 5 or 6 in half a year or a few years won’t surpass them or be good enough to start replacing them? Right now we are in the last “normal” time when it comes to organizations and white collar work, the last twilight when it is possible to ignore what is coming. But I have a feeling we will look back from 2030 or 2035 with bemusement to how different things were in 2024
I see a lot of people either using ChatGPT 3.5 and basing opinions off of that, or nitpicking at the trees instead of seeing the forest. I’m not talking about you particularly, but I think there is a lot of suppressed fear in the software engineer community that is taken out through finding any faults no matter how small or cherry-picked in ChatGPT 4, custom GPTs etc
Bing chat, Bing chat entreprise, Copilot, Copilot studio…Microsoft keep changing name and it drives me crazy when I try to explain things to my colleagues
There are so many excellent insights in this post--thanks for your leadership.
I hope you'll address the issue of "quality" in a future post.
Theoretically, as you say here and have said before, AI would "free up" time on less important tasks we are for some reason adamant about preserving (?), so we, humans, can spend more time on the important stuff--even quality. But any behaviorist will tell you that if there aren't immediate and tangible benefits to offering quality products (can we really market quality anymore?), the temptation to turn the time saved by AI into more time to play golf is probably gonna win out.
What AI seems to be revealing is that businesses are like unions in one crucial respect: what's important is time spent, not the quality of the product. The *motivation* for this emphasis on time spent is obviously directly oppositional: the company wants less time put in to increase profit margins, while the union is concerned with the human costs of work speedup (picture the post office, letters and packages flying by). But the quality of the product is really secondary to both. Consumers (both union and management as they go to the same store) will continue to lose.
Will we have to wait until AI actually works better than humans until quality will matter--that is, when an algorithm might suggest that actually, AI might increase quality, too, without any damage to your tee-time or hours on the bass boat?
I'm waiting for AI to get to the point where it says. "Hey John, you look tired, the papers are all graded, the gradebook is updated, the lesson plans are all ready, the assessments are all prepared. Go to bed! Go read your son his bedtime story. Go have some quality pillow-talk with your partner." Or, to your point "you can still make that 2:30 tee time", or "go catch that bass that's been eluding you..."
Interesting perspective! As an instructional designer, I’m spearheading a new generative AI (genAI) project within my department. My theory for our project hinges on the belief that through successive iterations and varying prompt sequences, we can enhance the output’s quality. To achieve this, a proven methodology is essential for every task where genAI is applied, including rigorous quality control of both the input and the output. Repeating this process a few times should elevate the quality of our workflow through AI utilization… this is my hypothesis. However, I’m also aware that humans can exhibit laziness if given the opportunity. That’s precisely why a structured approach with human-led quality control is crucial.
Ethan, I love that you're out there doing this sort of experimentation. These are truly earth-shaking innovations, and this moment we're living through is just plain *faster* than every other time before.
"This time is different" are perhaps the four most dangerous words in the English language, but "this time is faster" seems altogether completely appropriate. Profound societal changes are already (slowly) beginning to happen, and this revolution won't be anything close to uniform. Your students are already far ahead of the curve, and it'll be tough for anyone to close that gap once AI becomes embedded in their (our) way of life.
As an English teacher, I am excited about how AI can/will change the classroom experience. But as a worker, I am concerned about what this will do to my skill-set. My skill has always been communication - verbal, written, et al. -- what happens when a well-organized and delivered presentation can be done by AI in a matter of seconds? What skill do I need to learn to keep myself relevant for the next 30 years?
I have already begun experimenting with AI in the classroom and writing about it, and have taken a course in prompt engineering from Vanderbilt. Should I learn programming - on a basic level? Data science? I fear that so much of my identity is due to be erased from relevance.
This is an excellent distillation of the state-of-the-state-of-AI to date. (At least, it makes sense to me.) AI is a tool that may make some kinds of output easier, but it doesn’t do the *thinking* that leads humans to create progressive, even revolutionary work. Did you write “Kratzenberg” deliberately? Well played, sir.
Agreed. AI has saved me countless hours of time that I used to spend despondently creating and debugging complex regular expressions. I can only imagine the assistance it has provided others completing similarly unpalatable tasks.
That is one of the worries - that people are getting incredibly lazy and use ChatGPT for ***EVERYTHING***.... AI is incredibly western biased, devoid of cultural, regional, generational nuanced interpretations. All this "AI is everywhere" is going to create a sterile, no-innovation type of business world where people will become inflexible dumb workers with no personal confidence to get anything done without an AI directing them.
It would be nice to see a deep dive into the energy cost for this "5 tasks in 59 seconds".... the data centers running OpenAI queries are incredibly energy hungry. That is a dirty side of the business nobody wants to discuss, and be realistic on whether we should really get an AI LLM to do all the "thinking" for us.
Completely agree with the energy cost question. It has to be significant. Very similar to mining crypto coins. No one talks about that, but it is (was?) a real problem in many areas.
Another great piece. Your point on organizations and senior executives thinking about how best to deploy the technology in a responsible way (to employees, clients, regulatory obligations) is a key one. It’s amazing to me how many organizations are not experimenting with this yet. Waiting until the path is clearer means you’ll be too late
I teach in a doctoral program. Your description of AI producing work without "necessarily representing underlying effort" matches perfectly to the dissertation writing process. Our entire assessment uses words as a proxy as an indicator of effort, intelligence, and care. Yes, committees do work with students extensively over a long period of time so we do know and see their thinking process- but it is not necessarily captured in a formal way. I believe this is an existential threat to doctoral programs if we do not change our assessments or the dissertation itself. I actually think it opens up new opportunities to explore research in new ways we have never dreamed of.
(Hi, Jim!)
I think about another, more subtle concern. In a very real, measurable way, writing and thinking are linked. When you are writing, the content does not just flow one way from your brain to the document. It's an interactive, iterative process of thoughts and ideas flowing out, and then being rearranged and revised back into our minds. Often writing helps us to see gaps in our thinking and knowledge we were completely unaware of until we try to put them down on paper. The more we delegate to the computer, the less we develop our own capacity.
Hi Conn! Nice to hear from you here! I totally agree! The other thing AI is going to do is "read" for you. That presents another set of learning challenges. The bottom line: these tools are going to be ubiquitous so we need to deal with them upfront. Students WILL be using them whether we like it or not. It is going to test educators on what is most important and how to assess. Hang on! (Conn- let's get together sometime if you are still in Seattle. Find me on Linkedin
And if that worry reaches up to the lofty pinnacle of the PhD or Master's Thesis / Dissertation, then you can be darn sure it reaches all the way down to the lowly essay question on some random quiz in a 4th-5th-6th grade class on ____* (you name the topic). How can we see "thinking process" at all levels? How can we change assessments to gauge effort and care?
Why not read the thing and see if it's good? Isn't that your job? Voltaire once said "I was going to write you a shorter letter, but I didn't have time."
Yes, that is the job. A good paper may not be an indicator of actual learning though...hence looking at ways to making thinking visible will be important.
Either that or we can actually teach students to write effectively. AI might help.
I agree that we need to teach students how to write effectively. I also believe that tools Chabots driven by LLM's are going to change the current procedure. While tools like chatbots can generate text, effective writing involves critical thinking, clear communication, and adapting to different audiences, skills still essential in various fields.
With the rise of keyboards we saw a shift away from the time spent on handwriting. We teach handwriting, as we should, but our world will allow students who can use a keyboard, to function without great penmanship.
Perhaps we should be looking at K12 education and deciding what we no longer need to prioritize and how we can reallocate time with our shift in priorities. We could integrate chatbots for grammar checks or personalized feedback, allowing teachers to focus on skills like making an argument based on evidence.
AI is my best colleague, my help and friend. It is creepy how I cannot imagine my life without it any more. I love this blog, I learned so much!
Ethan, this is a fantastic piece. I'm motivated, at last, to try and replicated this myself, and it's an unusual piece of writing that does that.
What strikes me most about this is the shift to the importance of asking the right questions. Asking questions isn't a skill in high demand in most of business, and only rarely in academia. Getting instant feedback on asking questions is a change.
I also think that asking questions becomes very important with AI. And asking good questions often requires profound knowledge and understanding of a subject. Like with humans, it is not only important what you ask, but also how you ask it. The results differ substantially depending on the prompt. In some cases good prompts looks more like a computer than human language.
The rising importance of asking good questions puts a pressure on educational systems to change. Critical thinking, understanding of context and curiosity become much more important than memorizing facts.
Hasn't asking questions always been the skill that we have really been after? Hasn't that always been the hallmark of the expert, of the proficient, of the genius? Has AI really changed all that?
Using ChatGPT 4, I feel like it is, or maybe more correctly creates a convincing facsimile of being, AGI already. It is an AGI limited in the extremely important sense of not being able to form new memories and hence not being able to learn, which prevents its fully successful use in all kinds of potential roles like virtual friend, agent instead of chatbot, experienced worker instead of brand new intern that needs its hand held forever. Inability to form memory and hence to learn is built into the LLM transformer model, we would need a totally different architecture to solve it rigorously. But large context windows (say the length of a regular novel) and APIs that fill them with important information from previous chats would allow a quick and dirty hack that would give us a ChatGPT with a spotty memory instead of no memory.
At least in my experience, right now ChatGPT doesn’t feel threatening for the most skilled workers. It’s just not as smart as them, not as creative, and not as good at structured, rigorous thought and planning. But today, right now, except for the still very important memory issue, it is already competitive with millions upon millions of white collar workers who are not the most skilled and not most elite. Sure, it’s not an agent (yet), but it can help one person do the work of 2 people or 5 people or 10 people, and this will have enormous effects going forward as liability issues are worked out and tools like copilot make organizational use impossible to forestall.
And if right now elite workers are safe, who is to say that a Q* powered ChatGPT 5 or 6 in half a year or a few years won’t surpass them or be good enough to start replacing them? Right now we are in the last “normal” time when it comes to organizations and white collar work, the last twilight when it is possible to ignore what is coming. But I have a feeling we will look back from 2030 or 2035 with bemusement to how different things were in 2024
AI is a toy. Garbage in, garbage out with a smattering of bullshit to boot.
the smattering of bullshit is most of people's daily tasks in knowledge work. Or do you not agree with that?
AI might be a toy until it takes your job Henry.
Maybe we should rethink our economy if vast sectors of it are spiritually draining bullshit busy work.
a bit too late for that no? lol
GIGO was a favorite mantra of...uh...those denigrating personal computers. And now look.
I see a lot of people either using ChatGPT 3.5 and basing opinions off of that, or nitpicking at the trees instead of seeing the forest. I’m not talking about you particularly, but I think there is a lot of suppressed fear in the software engineer community that is taken out through finding any faults no matter how small or cherry-picked in ChatGPT 4, custom GPTs etc
Bing chat, Bing chat entreprise, Copilot, Copilot studio…Microsoft keep changing name and it drives me crazy when I try to explain things to my colleagues
There are so many excellent insights in this post--thanks for your leadership.
I hope you'll address the issue of "quality" in a future post.
Theoretically, as you say here and have said before, AI would "free up" time on less important tasks we are for some reason adamant about preserving (?), so we, humans, can spend more time on the important stuff--even quality. But any behaviorist will tell you that if there aren't immediate and tangible benefits to offering quality products (can we really market quality anymore?), the temptation to turn the time saved by AI into more time to play golf is probably gonna win out.
What AI seems to be revealing is that businesses are like unions in one crucial respect: what's important is time spent, not the quality of the product. The *motivation* for this emphasis on time spent is obviously directly oppositional: the company wants less time put in to increase profit margins, while the union is concerned with the human costs of work speedup (picture the post office, letters and packages flying by). But the quality of the product is really secondary to both. Consumers (both union and management as they go to the same store) will continue to lose.
Will we have to wait until AI actually works better than humans until quality will matter--that is, when an algorithm might suggest that actually, AI might increase quality, too, without any damage to your tee-time or hours on the bass boat?
I'm waiting for AI to get to the point where it says. "Hey John, you look tired, the papers are all graded, the gradebook is updated, the lesson plans are all ready, the assessments are all prepared. Go to bed! Go read your son his bedtime story. Go have some quality pillow-talk with your partner." Or, to your point "you can still make that 2:30 tee time", or "go catch that bass that's been eluding you..."
Interesting perspective! As an instructional designer, I’m spearheading a new generative AI (genAI) project within my department. My theory for our project hinges on the belief that through successive iterations and varying prompt sequences, we can enhance the output’s quality. To achieve this, a proven methodology is essential for every task where genAI is applied, including rigorous quality control of both the input and the output. Repeating this process a few times should elevate the quality of our workflow through AI utilization… this is my hypothesis. However, I’m also aware that humans can exhibit laziness if given the opportunity. That’s precisely why a structured approach with human-led quality control is crucial.
Ethan, I love that you're out there doing this sort of experimentation. These are truly earth-shaking innovations, and this moment we're living through is just plain *faster* than every other time before.
"This time is different" are perhaps the four most dangerous words in the English language, but "this time is faster" seems altogether completely appropriate. Profound societal changes are already (slowly) beginning to happen, and this revolution won't be anything close to uniform. Your students are already far ahead of the curve, and it'll be tough for anyone to close that gap once AI becomes embedded in their (our) way of life.
As an English teacher, I am excited about how AI can/will change the classroom experience. But as a worker, I am concerned about what this will do to my skill-set. My skill has always been communication - verbal, written, et al. -- what happens when a well-organized and delivered presentation can be done by AI in a matter of seconds? What skill do I need to learn to keep myself relevant for the next 30 years?
I have already begun experimenting with AI in the classroom and writing about it, and have taken a course in prompt engineering from Vanderbilt. Should I learn programming - on a basic level? Data science? I fear that so much of my identity is due to be erased from relevance.
This is an excellent distillation of the state-of-the-state-of-AI to date. (At least, it makes sense to me.) AI is a tool that may make some kinds of output easier, but it doesn’t do the *thinking* that leads humans to create progressive, even revolutionary work. Did you write “Kratzenberg” deliberately? Well played, sir.
Once again, Ethan crushes it. I have already forwarded this to many.
Just amazing!
"The AI does the work they do not want to do."
What's not to like?
Agreed. AI has saved me countless hours of time that I used to spend despondently creating and debugging complex regular expressions. I can only imagine the assistance it has provided others completing similarly unpalatable tasks.
That is one of the worries - that people are getting incredibly lazy and use ChatGPT for ***EVERYTHING***.... AI is incredibly western biased, devoid of cultural, regional, generational nuanced interpretations. All this "AI is everywhere" is going to create a sterile, no-innovation type of business world where people will become inflexible dumb workers with no personal confidence to get anything done without an AI directing them.
It would be nice to see a deep dive into the energy cost for this "5 tasks in 59 seconds".... the data centers running OpenAI queries are incredibly energy hungry. That is a dirty side of the business nobody wants to discuss, and be realistic on whether we should really get an AI LLM to do all the "thinking" for us.
Completely agree with the energy cost question. It has to be significant. Very similar to mining crypto coins. No one talks about that, but it is (was?) a real problem in many areas.
I love your newsletter, thank you so much. Can you recommend others with practical advice on how to use ChatGPT?
Another great piece. Your point on organizations and senior executives thinking about how best to deploy the technology in a responsible way (to employees, clients, regulatory obligations) is a key one. It’s amazing to me how many organizations are not experimenting with this yet. Waiting until the path is clearer means you’ll be too late