Jared Diamond and GPT-3
I wrote this as an email to my academic department but for various reasons decided to not send it and instead post it here.
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Based on yesterday’s departmental conversation, I went to the educator’s page for the three-part documentary on Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I gave one of their essay prompts to an AI
Write a paragraph disagreeing with Jared Diamond’s theory about geography being the main determining factor in which countries became rich and powerful through the development of technology and conquest and which countries remain impoverished and underdeveloped in relation to the rest of the world. Explain your reasons why using specific reasons, facts, and examples.
And here was the response:
I disagree with Jared Diamond’s theory that geography is the main determining factor in which countries become rich and powerful. The truth is that many other factors, such as economic policies, political stability, and even luck, play a role in the development and prosperity of a nation. For example, Singapore is a small island nation with limited resources, yet it has managed to become one of the wealthiest countries in the world due to its economic policies and its ability to attract investments. In contrast, many African countries have significant mineral wealth, yet they remain impoverished and underdeveloped due to political instability and poor economic policies. Therefore, it is clear that geography is only one factor among many that determine a country’s wealth and power.
All is not lost. In the short-term, you can feed a suspected AI-authored paragraph through GPTZero, which is an AI (yes, it will eventually become an arms race between AIs.) It is not 100% accurate and it can be fooled by manually altering words, clauses, or phrases in the generated-paragraph — but for now it’s better than nothing.
For the Jared Diamond paragraph above, I got this result:
First, I fully expect, for better or for worse, turnitin.com to incorporate this AI-detecting-AI technology into their service.
Second, because our students will be working with AI’s in most knowledge-worker fields, it’s my humble opinion that we should be their capacity in these regards. That is going to involve building students’ understanding of what AI’s actual capabilities and limitations are; and this will necessitate building students’ ability to formulate prompts that generate the desired response.