thinking

robot writing

Should We Be Worried about Chat GPT?

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Last winter the chattering classes were all chattering about this: the online language model that can churn out coherent essays in a matter of seconds. In November Chat GPT was made available for free on the Open AI website, so anyone could try it out for themselves. I did so, and wrote about the experience for WORLD magazine (PDF here). The results were impressive, but since then some flaws of this brainy tool have come to light—more about that below.

Like it or not, artificially-intelligent writing will be part of our future, and will undoubtedly replace entire swaths of the writing profession, such as journalism. Why pay for a reporter when you can feed the facts into a machine and watch it churn out a readable story for free? Especially when few reporters these days seem to wear out any shoe leather tracking down a story, but depend on stringers in the field to get it for them. Opinion writers, likewise, echo each other so frequently and tiresomely, why not just program a progressive language bot and let it stir up words to fit the issue?

Especially since ChatGPT is programmed progressive already. A reporter for WORLD asked it to write an essay in praise of President Biden and it obliged at once. An essay in praise of President Trump was beyond its pay grade, however. That, I would say from a neutral stance, is hogwash. And a flaw. The model has all the information on the web at its disposal and could easily find more rightwing opinions to draw from. Could ChatGPT be just another tool of the left to shut down alternate views?

But its handling of obvious facts isn’t completely reliable either. After my column appeared in WORLD, a reader wrote in with a correction. The first assignment I gave the machine was,  “Explain the controversy Athanasius and Pelagius.” ChatGPT dived into early church history with aplomb and spun out a grammatical and historically accurate reply—except for one thing. The debate was between Augustine and Pelagius. Athanasius is best known for an earlier controversy with Arius over the divinity of Christ. I was chagrined by the reader’s comment; I knew that. I was just being sloppy. But so was the machine. I looked it the original interaction and yes, ChatGPT had assumed my mistake and run with it. It gets “smarter” in time as factual errors are corrected, but I’m puzzled how it could explain the controversy accurately without gently reminding me that Augustine, not Athanasius,  was one half of it.

The program is entirely imitative; it learned to “talk” the way any child learns, by listening and responding. In time, little as I’d like to admit it, it will probably be able to imitate human genius. Its current attempts at poetry and drama are lame, but who’s to say it can’t learn from the best? Will enough Emily Dickinson input produce Dickinsonian output? Or a musical comparable to The Phantom of the Opera that won’t require royalties paid to Andrew Lloyd Webber? (The bottom line is the bottom line.)

Some doomsayers see all the professions taken over by machines, including the trades and crafts. Could happen, but only if we let it. My main problem with ChatGPT is that it short-circuits thinking skills. Though many high schools and colleges have already outlawed it, clever nerds will continue to find their way around such restrictions. And why not? Why not outsource hours of brain work (if one follows the essay-writing protocols in Wordsmith Craftsman) to a machine that can churn out a B+ essay in minutes? That’s efficiency!

But it isn’t thinking, and there are no shortcuts to thinking. A machine “thinks” in linear fashion; a human in ever-widening circles that lead to surprising juxtapositions and unforeseen conclusions. Besides straightforward academic questions, I asked ChatGPT to compose a college entrance essay, a marriage-proposal letter, an approach to my parents about my transitioning from female to male, and advice on how to talk to a spouse with dementia. All the answers were acceptable and reasonable—and spooky.

Literate societies create; nonliterate ones sustain; trivial ones fritter away hard-won gains until they’re sitting on the packed-earth floor. Let’s not outsource thinking. Let’s just not.

perspective

Point of View, Part Two: Perspective

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In our previous post, we talked about empathy and “feeling with” another person’s point of view. But POV is not just an individual’s emotional response to a given situation, but the angle from which they see it. We call this perspective. Think about point of view from these two perspectives:

It goes deeper: perspective involves the age, life experiences, and thoughts an individual brings to every circumstance in life. Parents and children who have lived together in the same household for a number of years already know some of each other’s thoughts and experiences. But how well do your children or students know you?

Here’s one way to find out, and stretch their young perspectives at the same time.

 

EXERCISE

Imagine how the significant grownups in your life would respond to the following statements. Try to think beyond “No” or “Yes,” “Good idea” or “Are you nuts?!?!” What reasons might they give for their answer?

You: I don’t want to go to church today.

They: _____________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

You: I flunked the algebra test.

They: _____________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

You: I’ve started saving up my yard-mowing (or baby-sitting) money for a motorcycle.

They: ____________________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________

You: I’d like to get a summer job.

They: _____________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

You: I find a lot to admire in our President.

They: _____________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

You: I think going to college after I graduate high school would be a waste of time.

They: ____________________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________________

Now, choose two of the scenarios above and imagine a disagreement ensuing (it might not take much imagination!). In your notebook, write an entire page of dialogue for each, showing how the discussion would develop.

Before you start, try to be fair to the other party’s point of view. What would their perspective be? Assuming they’re at least 30 years older than you, would age give them wisdom, or simply show how out of date they are? In your notebook, list at least three reasons they might give for their point of view.

Next, evaluate your own reasons: are you trying to understand where they’re coming from, or do you simply want what you want? List three legitimate reasons for your point of view, then write the dialogue.

Is it possible you could change someone’s mind? Or might it just be that you find your own mind being changed, just a little?

 

 

 

 

 

empathy babies

Point of View, Part One: Empathy

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Your point of view (or POV, for those in the writing game) is simply how you see things. It’s not about right or wrong; it’s about information combined with experience. People judge a situation based on what they know about it and how their upbringing, prior assumptions, and personality have taught them to process that knowledge. The conclusions people come to may indeed be wrong if they don’t fit the facts or a proper moral standard, but it’s very difficult to persuade them otherwise if we don’t understand their point of view.

Empathy–even babies can do it!

Emotions are a good place to start, since we share similar emotions with just about everyone else on the planet. To “feel with” another person is to empathize.*

Ask your students to stretch their empathy muscles with this simple exercise.

The three paragraphs below describe a scene or circumstance from one person’s POV. In your notebook, write a paragraph describing the same scene from the other participant’s POV. Use your imagination to get into the other character’s frame of mind, even it you don’t have much sympathy for their actions.

  1. At 10:50 I was getting ready to close up for the night. The convenience store was empty except for one customer, a young, scruffy-looking guy who didn’t seem to be in a hurry. I turned off the lights in the back half of the store to give him a hint, and heard a cough and a sniffle in reply. Returning to the counter, I was relieved to see him shuffle forward with a six-pack of beer and a box of diapers, size 2. He plunked a twenty on the counter as I rang him up, and when the cash register opened, I noticed the barrel of a handgun pointed at me. Was my vision blurring, or was it trembling? “Give me all you’ve got,” the man demanded hoarsely.
  2. The snow had stopped but temps were well below freezing when Dad put a snow shovel in my hand and pointed to the driveway. Sighing, I wrapped up in coat, scarf, and mittens. As I stepped out the front door, my boots sank six inches into snow. I hadn’t even reached the driveway when a ball of fur charged and nearly knocked me over. “Down, Ranger!” I commanded. But my sheepdog was as “up” as I’d ever seen him. Barely out of puppyhood, he’d never seen snow and it drove him mad with joy. Worse, he seemed to think snow shoveling was a game of keep-away. He jumped at the shovel with every dig and it’s a wonder he didn’t get his nose whacked.
  3. I was on my way out the door when Suzanne stopped me. “You’re leaving already?” she squealed. “We haven’t half finished decorating yet.” “I have plans,” I told her. “You only said we’d be needed for an hour after school.” “I miscalculated, all right?” She was actually red in the face, and I could feel the pressure building up in her like steam in a teakettle. “Three people I was counting on didn’t show up at all, and Arthur has a dentist appointment he can’t get out of, and Amber had to rush out to get the streamers that were missing from the supplies we ordered. I’m really shorthanded here, and the dance is starting in less than two hours. I really need your help!”

In each of these scenarios, verbal and visual clues should let you in on what the other character might be feeling (even if it’s a dog!). You might even be able to guess where those feelings are coming from.

Emotions are often easy to detect, and sometimes even easy to feel. But what about another person’s thoughts? That’s a subject for my next post.

* What’s the difference between empathy and sympathy? We can put it very simply this way: To empathize is to “feel with” another person; to sympathize is to “feel for.” In my opinion, empathy is a useful mental exercise (and writing exercise), but not much use when it comes to helping the other person. You can be hindered, or even blindsided, by their emotions. Sympathy is more helpful, because you can understand the feelings but still reason your way to helpful solutions.

So, I have to write this report . . .

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or, How Not to Bore Your Teacher to Death–or Yourself

Report-writing may not be as common as it used to be in the old days (that is, when I was in school), but once in a while your teacher may ask you to unplug the PowerPoint and write a one-to-two-page book report, biographical sketch, or science-fair exposition.  This is not an overwhelming challenge if you take time to organize your material and put it together in clear paragraphs.  If you have trouble with that, check out Wordsmith Craftsman; organization and clarity are big subjects beyond the scope of this one little tip.

But let’s say you understand the basic principles of sentence and paragraph construction, and know how to make an outline and follow it.  There’s still the possibility that your report will be less than stimulating (in a word, boring), both to write and to read.  Frankly, teachers are accustomed to boring reports and are pleased if they just make sense.  But they’ll sit up and take notice if you add a spark of imagination to your reports–as long as the spark isn’t just fireworks to cover the fact that you don’t know what you’re writing about.

Some teachers like to give “creative” report assignments.  Others leave the choice up to you, and still others may not appreciate your flights of fancy at all.  Use your judgment, but a dash of creativity will make your report not only more interesting to read, but also more fun to write (really!).

You could begin a biographical sketch with, “Martin Luther King was born . . .” etc.  Or you could study a portrait or two contrasting news photos and describe the character you see in that face.  Back up your analysis by the three pivotal events of his life that shaped that character, and include the portrait or photos with your report.

You could open a report on the Constitutional Convention of 1787 with this sentence, “The first governing document of the United States was called the Articles of Confederation . . .”  Or you could take the point of view of a delegate summoned to Philadelphia and shut up in a stuffy room with the other sweating delegates to draft a new governing document.  A entire report written that way would amount to a novel, but a longish opening paragraph describing the room, the smells, the sounds, and a few of the famous delegates would set the scene and interest your reader enough to keep reading.

In my seventh-grade Texas history class I wrote a paper titled “Sam Houston and I,” whereby I took a time-machine trip back to 1840 and interviewed the President of Texas.  Is this an approach that might work for your next history project?

Here are some other ideas to keep in mind for those mid-semester papers:

BOOK REPORTS (fiction)

  • Describe the climax of the story from the antagonist’s, or villain’s, point of view.
  • Interview the main character.
  • Imagine a date with one of the main characters–where would you go?  What would you talk about?  How would he/she behave toward you?
  • Insert yourself into the climax of the story as an additional character, and describe how you change the action.

SOCIAL STUDIES REPORTS

  • Write a dialogue or debate between two historical characters who held opposing views.
  • Write the history of an object seen in a museum.
  • Write a newspaper “editorial” presenting one side of an historical issue.
  • Take pictures or buy postcards at an historic site.  Use them to illustrate your own brochure, with captions, quotes, and interesting facts (you can make up the captions and the quotes, but not the facts!)

SCIENCE REPORTS

  • Interview a scientist who is famous but now dead.
  • Write a radio play describing activities of the body, or any other scientific process.
  • Using the brochure example above, make and illustrate a brochure promoting travel on Jupiter, or “Black Hole Theme Park,” or a thrill ride through the circulatory system.

It really doesn’t take much to shake up the average school report. What further ideas do you get from these ideas?

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The Professor and the Madman: A Review

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The Oxford English Dictionary (OED, for those in the know) is a treasure unparalleled. I don’t know if any other language has anything like it: not just a depository of definitions, but also a history (as much as can be determined) of each word. That is, the word’s root, whether Latin, Greek, Germanic. or other; the approximate date of its first appearance, and the earliest examples known, in context. I have a 1971 “Compact Edition,” meaning two volumes of 2000+ pages each, with four 3-column sections of miniscule print per page. The slipcover set came with a magnifying glass.

How does such a work come to be? I’ll admit never giving it much thought, except that it must have taken generations of cumulative effort. It never occurred to me that there was a story behind the OED, that impressive but impassive work, staid as a black-robed Oxford don.

But there’s a story behind almost everything. The Professor and the Madman is the movie version of how the Oxford English Dictionary became more than a dictionary—but also how God’s grace can lurk even in the depths of despair.

It begins with a crime: Dr. William Minor, a veteran of the American Civil War now residing in London, is possessed by the notion that a man he wronged during the War is after him. It’s kill or be killed, but the man he tracks down and shoots, on the victim’s own doorstep, is a total stranger. Dr. Minor is sentenced to an asylum and to the dubious benefits of 19th-century psychology.

Meanwhile, in Oxford, the Scottish linguist James Murray applies for the job of directing the languishing dictionary project. Murray is fluent in several languages and can cite any number of roots and terms, but he has no university degree. Nevertheless a few adventurous souls see his unorthodox approach as the recipe for success, and he gets the job. Murray opens the project to the entire English-speaking world, as it were: all are invited to submit their knowledge of the earliest provenance of any English word. Murray’s office is flooded with slips of paper, but the work is maddeningly slow, with even the most commonplace words difficult to trace.

Until Dr. Minor, deep in his asylum, gets wind of the project. Like a proper schizophrenic, he latches onto it and becomes a veritable etymology machine, submitting hundreds of word origins at a time. He and Murray begin a correspondence, which is so erudite and genteel that Murray has no idea Minor is an inmate of the asylum until he pays the man a visit. Murray’s generous heart immediately makes room for the madman, and the two become friends over their shared love of words.

That much is factual, but I’m not sure how the subplots line up with history. Dr. Minor forms a relationship with the widow of the man he killed, who not only forgives him but appears to be falling in love with him. This disturbs him so much (it’s a double betrayal, to steal a man’s wife after stealing his life) that the doctor emasculates himself. This is more suggested than shown, but might be too disturbing for kids. Otherwise, there’s almost no bad language, no nudity, no suggestiveness. Not everyone will love the movie; in fact, to judge by Rotten Tomatoes (not my go-to for sound judgment), few did. But I was fascinated by subject matter and the spiritual underpinnings: language as a gift of God, kindness as everyday grace, forgiveness as an eternal mystery.

 

Slow-Children-Playing

The Unintentional Hilarity of Misplaced Modifiers

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They’re easy to misplace. Not by getting lost, but by ending up where they shouldn’t be in a sentence.

More a punctuation problem than a modifier problem, but you get the idea.

By law, English adjectives are always placed before the nouns they modify (the shy, quiet boy) unless they follow a linking verb (The boy was shy and quiet). That seems simple enough, but be careful with possessives (nouns that show possession):

Did someone lose a silver woman’s ring?

Could it be that a silver woman lost her ring? More likely that a woman’s silver ring is missing from someone’s finger.

I found a camo boy’s hunting jacket on the playground last Saturday.

A camo boy would have a great advantage while hunting but be rather conspicuous elsewhere.

There’s an easy fix for those two examples: simply swap the possessive and the adjective:

a woman’s silver ring

a boy’s camo hunting jacket

Here’s another adjective pitfall. When a noun is paired with an adjective to modify another noun (it happens) the result can be a head-scratcher:

I want you to meet Mr. Jones, our precious metal specialist.

Can’t wait to meet that precious Mr. Jones! Oh wait—you mean he specializes in precious metals. Why didn’t you say so? Why don’t you just hyphenate the adjective/noun combination, making it a single modifier: our precious-metal specialist.

That’s an easy fix, but hyphens are seen and not heard (in fact, this example came from an actual radio ad that had me speculating about precious specialists). Rearranging the sentence will make Mr. Jones less precious, but more special:

I want you to meet Mr. Jones, our specialist in precious metals.

Another example: “Rare earth” is the name given to a class of elements used in electronics. It’s also an adjective/noun combination that can leave the reader thinking, Huh?

The company made a rare earth discovery near Shantung province.

All kinds of rare discoveries could be found in the earth, but again, rare-earth (used as a modifier) could be hyphenated to clarify its status. Or rearrange the sentence:

The company discovered deposits of rare earth near Shantung Province.

I guess it’s still confusing if you don’t know what “rare earth” is in this context, but at least you could look it up in Wikipedia.

So, adjectives are usually placed before the nouns they modify. Adverbs may roam more freely:

Sarah limply raised her hand.

Limply, Sarah raised her hand.

Sarah raised her hand limply.

Your choice! (You can put your hand down now, Sarah.)

But that doesn’t mean an adverb can go just anywhere and park itself. Meaning matters. For example,

Teachers who rarely laugh in the classroom have a negative attitude.

Teachers who laugh in the classroom rarely have a negative attitude.

These two sentences come to a similar conclusion (sourpuss teachers make for unhappy classrooms), but one emphasizes the teacher while the other points to attitude. The best fix is to experiment with the adverb “rarely” (not to experiment rarely with the adverb) and settle where you and it are happiest.

Prepositional phrases and relative clauses can modify nouns and verbs. They can also raise havoc when they’re misplaced. What’s confusing about these sentences? How would you fix them?

Mom brought Kool-aid to the kids in paper cups.

(How did those kids get in paper cups? And where is the Kool-aid going to go?)

The waiter brought a steak to our table that was oozing blood.

(Somebody bring a paper towel for that poor table!)

I saw a Fourth of July Day parade on the way to the pool.

(I hope the pool is big enough for all those marching bands.)

Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon in 1969.

(After that, the moon could hardly kept itself swept with all those other men setting foot on it.)

In these examples, all you have to do is move the phrase or clause. For example,

In 1969, Neil Armstrong was the first man to set foot on the moon—

thus restoring his proper place in history.

For the most part, correcting misplaced modifiers is a simple matter of thinking it through. Take time to look at those sentences you’re willy-nillyly writing. You have a logical brain that will tell you if something is off. And with a little practice, you’ll figure out how to fix it.

Cogito

Conditional Clauses – And the Ultimate Condition!

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Conditional and consequential clauses introduce an action that depends on another action.  They are introduced by words like if, since, and because. All of us have personal experience with the consequential type of clause, just by growing up. Such as,

If you get straight A’s on your next report card, I’ll double your allowance.

You can’t go because you didn’t clean your room.

And even after we’re all grown up:

If you don’t pay your water bill within fifteen days, we’ll shut it off.

Beyond the practical affairs of daily living, conditional clauses are an essential tool of thought. If . . . then is the framework for setting conditions and speculating on the results:

If we raise the minimum wage, then millions of Americans will raise their standard of living.

If we raise the minimum wage, then thousands of small businesses will have to close and millions of Americans will lose their jobs and be worse off than before.

Or, to be more philosophical:

If God exists, then humanity has a duty to discover who he (or she) is.

If God exists, then it’s impossible to know anything about him or her or it, so why bother?

In the second proposition, I find a huge gap between the if and the then. More if . . . then statements are needed to reason one’s way to that particular conclusion. But if we couldn’t speak this way, we probably wouldn’t be able to think this way, so conditional clauses are essential to thought.

And speaking of thought . . .

Back in the 1600s, René Descartes was trying to solve the riddle of existence. How do we know what’s real? How do we know anything is real?  Could we trust our senses to show us reality? But how do we know our senses aren’t lying to us, or that we’re seeing, hearing, and smelling the world correctly? And what is “the world,” anyway??

Descartes set himself the task of doubting everything, like trees (they seem solid, but–).  Blueberry pie (what is this digestion thing?). Other people (figments, possibly?). His own ideas (can’t see them, after all).

But when it came to thinking, he realized that thoughts had to originate from a thinker. Doubts required a doubter. That led him to the conclusion he is best known for:

I think,

therefore I am.

What do you think? Is “thinking” the way you prove your own existence? Are you free to think whatever you want? Are your thoughts purely original, arising out of your own head, or do you pick them up from friends, relatives, social media, entertainment, or some other source? Are you self-sustaining, or does your existence depend on sources outside yourself? And how many conditional clauses does it take to figure this stuff out?

(Because you can’t do it without a functioning language. If we could not communicate with each other through complex language, then we would have no way of framing these thoughts, and therefore no way of even thinking them.)

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