My teaching space is veering into pro-AI spaces, and I do find some of the applications and conversation modestly compelling. Not enough to change what I'm doing - I still don't like it but I can see its application to an educational space, especially when it can barf out a structure or a sketch and then I can say 'okay, student, now you need to follow that shit up.'
Similarly, it's a way to diminish bullshit busywork. I would diminish the busywork in other ways, but I don't have the authority there. Giving people structure to work from, giving people sketch art to work from, in a literally educational setting, sure, okay, I don't hate it. All the students I know who have been able to freely use ChatGPT have hated the results and had to pull out the roots to get what they want, so I'm okay with that. That's a learning process. I don't encourage it (environmental impact of LLMs concerns me) but like I can't ban it as a tutor, so I try to be clear and honest with my students about good practice.
Still, it does have a use application for things like today where we need to introduce people real quick to something as an example of what they're working from. What we were doing today was a class meant to get high schoolers interested in university-level work. So in an hour, we bring them in, teach them to play a game, then step through a rapid fire process of making a game idea they source from within the group.
Thing is, these are high schoolers, and they're coming from spaces that don't have access to board games, and they're not used to being asked to do creative work, so sometimes we get game ideas like 'purple shirt' and sometimes we get game ideas like 'horror torture house.' Then they vote on the best one. Long story short, today, we had this class nominate the game idea 'Barrel Full Of Racists.' We reasoned it out and the idea seemed to cook out to some kind of game about stuffing racists in a barrel and throwing it over a cliff. And there was the edge of some ideas but this is also a bunch of edgy teens trying to sass the teachers, and I honestly thought they had some cool ideas to build off. The best version of their idea was a card game where you got to show how racism worked in chains, how the 'not a racist, but,' people were still linked back to actual and overt racists.
Anyway, so the super punched into chatgpt this idea for 'racists in a barrel,' and what ChatGPT responded with was:
hey, it sounds like you're trying to design a racism game. I can't do that.
And okay, I thought that was it, error message, fail state, great, we move on to discuss what we CAN do, but then it went on
so here's a different game, about 'harmony haven' which is instead about how both sides have disagreements and actually, it's just misunderstandings
and like god damn, what a fucking little narc. Just fail! Just have an error message!
