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hidden_variableA couple of years ago I wrote about how I’ve started creating exam problems by feeding my old test questions to ChatGPT and asking for a critique of the results. Since then I’ve included a problem like this on every exam. I have to admit it’s been getting a bit more difficult to produce them, as ChatGPT has gotten better at responding to typical physics problems. I got into a discussion about this with a student recently: they said they used ChatGPT to check their answers, and expressed surprise when I cautioned them not to trust it. They also had a hard time believing that the chatbot nonsense I’d included on their last exam had been generated just a couple of weeks previously.
Well. ChatGPT now offers image capabilities–even in the free model, with a limited number per day. This opens up a whole new class of questions I can ask it. Today it created the diagram below, which made me laugh until literal tears came to my eyes, so I couldn’t resist sharing it:
You will be assimilated by the Skateboarg! Resistance is negligibble! The uphill “Gravity” arrow is a nice subtle touch.
Anyway, I’ll be keeping this in mind later this week as I attend all the fall semester opening day talks about what a useful tool AI is.
Well. ChatGPT now offers image capabilities–even in the free model, with a limited number per day. This opens up a whole new class of questions I can ask it. Today it created the diagram below, which made me laugh until literal tears came to my eyes, so I couldn’t resist sharing it:
You will be assimilated by the Skateboarg! Resistance is negligibble! The uphill “Gravity” arrow is a nice subtle touch.
Anyway, I’ll be keeping this in mind later this week as I attend all the fall semester opening day talks about what a useful tool AI is.
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Date: 2025-08-28 01:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-30 02:02 am (UTC)Opening day was definitely less amusing, although not as bad as I’d feared it might be. One talk did bring up how extremely helpful AI is for graphics and diagrams, and I thought about showing off this one, but I didn’t have a good way to display it to the whole room. (I did later share it with some colleagues from my department.)
Sure, just make the individual faculty find a way to shove that in there alongside the rest of the content and first-year stuff. This will definitely solve the issue of our students trusting ChatGPT.
Yes, that’s a great plan! Just include a line about it in the syllabus; I’m sure everyone will read it. :P
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Date: 2025-08-28 02:43 am (UTC)Also that one letter in the top left pic where it seems like ChatGPT couldn't quite decide if it was going for Latin or Greek alphabet and changed its mind halfway through.
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Date: 2025-08-30 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-28 01:36 pm (UTC)And it _can_ be useful. For text-related things. And only if you already know what you are doing so you can check its work. It's much faster than me at making the first stage of a discussion guide for a user research study, and gets past the blank page problem. It's also decent at giving a general idea of what's in unmoderated study results when I have - perhaps obviously - not been the person to run the sessions. But I make it give me quotes and citations so I can check its work. It's just not a good thing to use for people who don't already have the expertise to check it, and can seriously circumvent the learning process for those who need to develop the expertise.
It's also decent at giving me the broad strokes of a new concept, as long as I make it give me citations so I can get those broad strokes and then go deeper on my own using the citations and references within them. But again, I have expertise in research, both academic and UX.
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Date: 2025-08-30 03:59 am (UTC)Yes, exactly. It’s in that sort of uncanny valley where it almost looks like it makes sense…
It’s good to know that you’ve found some useful applications. Getting the citations is definitely key!
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Date: 2025-08-28 01:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-08-30 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-02 04:46 pm (UTC)I almost feel like someone should write a fic about the strange alternate universe where surcages sprdowns a ramp in his hill -- it seems like some sort of surrealist magical-but-horror-adjacent genre, where the car is about to start floating off the ramp...
Even though there is so much here to laugh at, for some reason I am also laughing at the skateboarg that is more like... a stool?? (Though I suppose in this AU, actual skateboards are "Stateaoers.")
(I do often find AI a useful tool, but mostly in the sense of "it can do a worse crap first draft than I would do, which tends to unblock me because I'm like 'wait, I can write it better than this and I certainly wouldn't do that'" which is probably not the kind of usefulness those talks were envisioning...)
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Date: 2025-09-03 05:03 am (UTC)I really want to write this now. It would be like one of those Lovecraft stories where eldritch horrors seep into the universe from an alternate plane, but only via AI comments...
Even though there is so much here to laugh at, for some reason I am also laughing at the skateboarg that is more like... a stool??
Weirdly, the prompt for part d was about someone pulling a friend on a sled. So the picture is... kind of almost correct, aside from being confused about pulling vs. pushing. But it seemed to really want to write about skateboargs again.