Monday, January 09, 2023

New York City Public Schools Block AI Chatbot Over Cheating Concerns

The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) has blocked OpenAI’s ChatGPT service access on its networks and devices amid fears that students will use it to cheat on assignments and other school tasks.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot capable of producing content mimicking human speech. Accessible for free, the service can be used to generate essays, technical documents, and poetry, Chalkbeat New York reported. The program uses machine learning to pull and compile historical facts and even make logical arguments that sound convincing, all the while ensuring that the output remains grammatically correct.

“Due to concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content, access to ChatGPT is restricted on New York City Public Schools’ networks and devices,” NYCDOE spokesperson Jenna Lyle told Chalkbeat. “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”

However, if individual schools do need access to the site in case they wish to study the technology powering ChatGPT, they only need to put in a request, Lyle said.

ChatGPT and School Tasks

In an interview with the New York Post, Darren Hick, an assistant philosophy professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, said that academia “did not see this coming,” referring to the capabilities of ChatGPT.

In early December, Hick had asked his class to write a 500-word essay on philosopher David Hume and the paradox of horror. One of the submissions caught his eye as it featured a few hallmarks of having been created by AI.

“It’s a clean style. But it’s recognizable. I would say it writes like a very smart 12th grader,” Hick told the New York Post, adding that the bot uses “peculiar” and “odd wording.”

Dangers of AI

A problem with ChatGPT is that it is not always correct. OpenAI admits that ChatGPT “sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers,” and that fixing the issue is a challenge. As such, the service cannot be used to source critical information, like medical advice.

Many people have been raising alarm bells over the rising development of AI. In June of last year, Google put a senior software engineer in its Responsible AI ethics group on paid administrative leave after he raised concerns about the human-like behavior exhibted by LaMDA, an AI program he tested.

The employee tried to convince Google to take a look at the potentially serious “sentient” behavior of the AI. However, the company did not heed his words, he claimed.

Tech billionaire Elon Musk has also warned about the dangers of AI.

“I have exposure to the very cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it,” Musk told attendees of a National Governors Association meeting in July 2017.

“I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don’t know how to react, because it seems so ethereal.”

****************************************************

Modernity and the death of the Enlightenment

In Looking back on the Spanish Civil War (1943) George Orwell writes, such is the power of totalitarian thought control and how language is manipulated, we now live in a world ‘in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past … If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs’.

Whereas Enlightenment thinking is committed to rationality and reason and the ability to weigh and analyse arguments to more closely approximate the truth of things, Orwell argues: ‘Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science”. There is only “German Science” “Jewish Science”, etc”.

Fast forward to today’s world of Woke ideology and it’s obvious what Orwell feared most about totalitarian regimes is even more pervasive. As noted by Roger Scruton in Culture Counts, ‘the belief that rational inquiry leads to objective proof’ has been replaced by ‘a new cult of darkness’ where knowledge is condemned as a social construct imposed by the dominant elites.

Instead of a liberal education based on the search for wisdom and truth, the academy is now dominated by a rainbow alliance incorporating neo-Marxist critical theory, postmodernism, deconstructionism, and radical feminist, gender, and postcolonial theories all intent on overthrowing rationality and reason.

While the arts and humanities have long since been infected the situation is now so dire even mathematics and science have fallen victim to the long march. Academics at the University of Sheffield condemn UK science as ‘inherently white, since the discipline developed from European scientific enlightenment’.

Students are told ‘science can never be objective and apolitical’ and that European science must be ‘decolonised’. Students at the University College London also argue the way science is taught must be radically reshaped in terms of Critical Race Theory and postcolonial ideology.

Students argue Enlightenment science is the product of imperialist white hegemony and must be rejected as it ‘reproduces power and thought which is racialised as white, psychologically/physically fit, wealth-rich and heteropatriarchally/cisgenderly male’.

A guide to advancing health equity produced by the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Medical Association also illustrates how pervasive Woke ideology now is. The guide argues it is wrong to emphasise ‘biological factors in understanding the treatment of diseases’.

Prospective doctors are told illness is caused by structural classism and racism inherent in capitalist, white society and cannot be dealt with ‘without explicit recognition and reconciliation of our country’s twin, fundamental injustices of genocide and forced labour’.

Australia’s national curriculum also suggests mathematics is a cultural construct. Students are told to study Indigenous algebra and that, ‘Content elaborations in Mathematics have been structured around identified themes in Australian First Nations Peoples’ mathematical thinking, understandings, and processes.’

While not widely known, the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce in The Crisis Of Modernity offers a compelling analysis explaining why the West has undergone such a far-reaching epistemological and cultural change.

Whereas classical Marxism is primarily economic in its focus, Del Noce argues the establishment of the Frankfurt School in Germany in the mid-to-late 1920s led to the rise of cultural Marxism involving the infiltration and takeover of institutions including universities, schools, the media, and the family.

The academics involved, including Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno, embraced a revolutionary stance, one Del Noce describes as ‘a radical affirmation of the transition from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom’.

An approach drawing on critical theory that presents itself as ‘the end point of progressive thought’ involving ‘a process of liberation from authority, theological or human, transcendent or empirical’.

In addition to critical theory cultural Marxists, drawing on Louis Althusser’s concept of the ideological state apparatus, argue capitalist societies reproduce themselves by controlling what constitutes essential knowledge and the way education is structured.

As a result, Del Noce argues long-held certainties, whether the belief in a higher spiritual and transcendent order or the Enlightenment’s belief with reason and logic it is possible to better understand human nature and the wider world, are all undermined.

One of the examples Del Noce refers to illustrating the influence of the Frankfurt School is Wilhelm Reich’s book The Sexual Revolution and Reich’s belief the traditional, monogamous family must be overthrown as it was capitalist society’s ‘repressive social institution par excellence’.

Whether condemning objectivity and rationality as examples of white, Eurocentric supremacism or arguing knowledge is a social construct to be critiqued in terms of power relations Orwell was right when arguing what he feared most, instead of bombs, is the destructive nature of totalitarian mind control and group think.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/12/del-noce-modernity-and-the-death-of-the-enlightenment/ ?

***********************************************

Wharton's Majoring in Woke Capitalism. Some Are Taking an Elective in Dissent

Wharton is Trump's alma mater

One of America’s storied Ivy League executive training grounds is elevating a view of capitalism that shuns the very enterprises from which its namesake made his fortune: In 2023, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School will offer a new major called Environmental, Social and Governance Factors for Business.

The nation’s first business school was founded in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, an industrialist who made a killing in mining and manufacturing, the sorts of “dirty” industries that ESG proponents disfavor. Now, the school that bears his name will have the distinction of becoming the first prominent institution to offer an ESG degree.

Skeptics, including former faculty and alumni of the school, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of recriminations, fear the MBA program could serve as progressivism in business sheepskin clothing. One recent graduate warned against a one-sided presentation of left-wing politics used “to justify increasing the power of the state in markets and firms while demonizing capitalism.”

Observers suggested the school’s embrace of ESG could not only presage similar curriculum changes at business schools nationwide, but also change the character of the corporate C-suites that the school’s graduates tend to populate. The thinking is that ESG-focused students will matriculate to ESG-focused executive positions in an already socially conscious corporate America, creating a feedback loop that could have an indelible impact not just on U.S.-style capitalism, but on America itself.

“By creating a major [in ESG] at Wharton you are helping to legitimize it,” said another graduate.

Proponents of Wharton’s new direction, such as Penn professor Witold J. Henisz, see it as a way to “enhance” capitalism’s “efficiency.” Henisz, vice dean and faculty director of Wharton’s ESG Initiative, told RealClearInvestigations that by incorporating “pollution, human rights, and other ESG impacts” into financial analyses, market participants can properly price such “externalities” and “mitigate” associated risks.

In a recent opinion piece challenging critics of the “anti-ESG” or “anti-woke investment movement,” Henisz said: “Climate risk is investment risk. There is no credible other side, only an ideological opposition cynically seeking a wedge issue for upcoming political campaigns.”

When RCI asked Henisz to clarify his remarks, he said: “I believe that the science on climate risk as investment risk is settled. I do not see substantive academically grounded debate on this point.”

“There are, by contrast,” he added, “legitimate questions as to how, when and where climate risk poses investment risk and we encourage all such discourse, research and debate.”

One recent graduate, Isaiah Berg, told RCI that Henisz’s comments were “sad to see,” noting that there are “good faith disagreements that exist around ESG topics.” If Henisz’s “intent was not to persuade, but instead to intimidate those who might otherwise speak up and disagree, he likely achieved his goal.”

Others expressed similar concerns. Alex Edmans, a former Wharton professor who earned tenure at the school in part based on his writings on ESG, is a qualified supporter of the school’s push into the space.

But in a recent paper responding to Henisz’s remarks, Edmans said “ESG is not a debate on which you have to take a ‘side’ – it’s a subject. … people’s stance on a subject should evolve with the evidence rather than being anchored on a side. To be closed to the possibility of valid concerns is contrary to a culture of learning, and to assume that counterarguments are politically motivated is itself cynical.”

Nevertheless, Edmans told RCI, he supports Wharton’s introduction of the ESGB major – with two conditions. “First, the courses should be taught by professors with substantial expertise,” he said. “Other schools have launched such courses because they are popular, and faculty have suddenly reinvented themselves as ESG experts; as a result, such courses are based on wishful thinking, not scientific evidence.

“Second, the courses should cover research and evidence on both sides of the issue, rather than only what people would like to hear.”

Although those speaking out lamented that there was a distinct chill over expressing dissenting views, Edmans and recent graduates noted that in their personal experience, Wharton professors strained not to bias their presentations in classes.

***********************************

My other blogs: Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

*******************************

No comments: