ChatGPT, Home Buying, Social Media, and Other Horrors

Hi all, I have no fresh take for this week! It’s getting to that busy time of the semester where my weekends are spent recovering rather than doing even more generative work.

I do have something for you to read, though: my new white paper on ChatGPT in college classrooms! In Spring 2023, at the height of the interest in ChatGPT, I started an interdisciplinary collaboration with other members of the UMass’ Center for Teaching & Learning’s SoTL Working Group. We realized that much of the discourse around the use of generative AI in classrooms was being driven by teachers (both skeptical and not), but that few people were asking students about their thoughts. So, we surveyed a bunch of students from different departments about why/how they’re using it (and if not, why not). This is the result of that study! It’s out now as a white paper, and we’re targeting some educational research journals to get this “properly” published very soon.

Our philosophy going into this work was very much in line with my previous writings on AI: student-centered and mindful of ethical implications that go beyond the question of “are students cheating?” This research has also won our group the UMass ADVANCE Award for Equitable Practices in Collaboration - Research Collaboration (EPiC-RC), as we completed this work using feminist, equitable research practices.

Check out our white paper, “Student Perspectives on ChatGPT”! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eMUlaESFpinLHbeXZaX-ViI_lvF250XLRnqzeUczfog/edit?usp=sharing

I truly hope you enjoy this work since we’ve worked really hard on this! If you’re sick of hearing about AI, don’t worry, I have some other reading material for you…

Currently Reading

• I’m currently confronting the horrors of the rental market in a college town. As my partner and I plan to move in together, we’re being met with 2-bedroom apartments starting at $2,500/month and houses breaching half a million dollars. So, it was validating to hear that Girlboss Supreme, aka Katie Gatti Tassin from Money with Katie, is dealing with the same issues as us (and is also choosing to keep renting for a bit longer).
• If you know an academic, send this to them immediately: a new preprint about running a queer and trans-inclusive faculty hiring process!
• There’s this notion among a certain crowd of leftists that “when Democrats are in office, liberals get complacent and stop organizing, but when Republicans are in office, it causes them to ‘wake up’ and ‘actually organize’”. This is used to justify the accelerationist idea that we need to let everything go to shit so we can rebuild society from the ground up. I’ve always been skeptical of this claim, because a) Donald Trump being in office last time did not cause the entire working class to mobilize (it only left us burnt out, traumatized, or pushed further to the right) and b) what data is there to support this? Can we quantify political organizing by looking at, say, union membership and correlating the stats with whoever’s in charge of the country? Well, now we have one piece of data to: under Biden’s term, petitions to form unions doubled. It turns out that when the working class isn’t having their rights stripped away by conservatives, it lends well to organizing. Interesting!
• There is something to be said, however, for breaking down institutions. This new opinion piece by Aziz Yafi argues that universities can never truly decolonize themselves, using the censorship of Palestinian scholars as a case study. (Related: a huge collection of Palestinian films for your viewing pleasure!)
• Speaking of censorship, some damning new investigations into Meta from the Washington Post and AJ+ show how your feed is being curated for you, and not in a good way. I’ve long contended that the Internet is an inherently bad organizing tool; this only supports my point.