Today, I delivered a quick seminar about ChatGPT, education, and the AI industry!
It was the first of three speaking events that I’m doing this week that lead up to something that’s a bit bigger.
We talked about a few things related to ChatGPT and the education system – mostly thoughts that have to do with the way Singapore’s been responding to these things, which has been pretty materially different compared to the way that pretty much any other country in the world has.
You’ll be able to watch the video here:
If you don’t have the time to watch it, we had a chat about writing, learning, personalized education, and a number of other things that I think you’ll enjoy when you get the chance to watch it – go and have a look if you’d like to hear some thoughts on that!
Speaking of students, one thing I’m looking forward to but didn’t actually imagine would happen will probably happen tomorrow; we’re not there, but soon!
I’ll have lots more to write in the day ahead, but I’d like to first start by getting a little bit more sleep, being better to myself, and preparing myself a little better by resting up for the day ahead đ Till then!
The other day, I used OpenAIâs new Whisper algorithm for the first timeâŠ
âŠOnly to realize something very, very strange.
If youâve not heard about Whisper, itâs OpenAIâs automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, and itâs significantly more accurate compared to something like Siri, which I usually use, or other kinds of technologies.
Anyway, for an upcoming Medium piece, I chose to narrate everything into the voice memo app on my iPhone, in preparation to have it transcribed by Whisper, while I was on a drive from my home to my cello lesson about 15 minutes away.
Whisper did it *almost* perfectly!
Whisper did it (almost!) perfectly, by the way.
Then, I uploaded this into ChatGPT just to format it but didnât change any of the text.
This was perfect! It was well transcribed, everything looked good, and all that remained was for me to just post the thing, right?
âŠNo.
Because you see, at this point, I started to wonder about a strange question that was starting to brew in my mind:
Was this text AI generated or was it human generated?
I asked several people this question, and almost all of them, said the same thing – it was AI assisted, but the text itself was primarily generated by a human.
To me, that makes a lot of sense because I recited it from my voice, and it wouldn’t make sense if it were considered to be AI generated unless what’s inside my head is not in fact a human brain, but rather some sort of super computer.
So I decided to just check with GPTZero just to be sure.
Hereâs what GPTZero had to say, as it casually marked the parts of the my essay that it thought were AI-generated in a bright yellow.
I was a little shook.
Essentially, the majority of the text was determined to have been generated by AI.
At first, I thought about a couple of different possibilities. I wonder to myself â was it because I had put the text through ChatGPT? Could it have been that the text had been watermarked or modified in some way that allowed GPTZero to determine that it had been generated by AI?
That didnât seem to make sense, particularly since OpenAI has not yet implemented watermarks in text . Still, the text definitely wasnât modified in any way apart from the paragraphing or anything else of that nature.
Therefore, what was the only logical possibility here?
The only possibility is that according to GPTZero, I sounded like an AI.
This made me think quite a fair bit and it just so happened that in the gym I ran into my friend Sandy Clarke, with whom I ended up discussing the matter, (Sandy is wonderful and incredibly humble relative to what heâs achieved – check him out here!) and who suggested that perhaps artificial intelligence speech is just speech of a formal nature and to consider the speeches of JFK and Obama, so I decided to go right ahead and input JFKâs inaugural speech into GPTZero:
⊠So did this mean that John F Kennedy and Obama were both advanced forms of artificial intelligence sent to planet earth to rule over the most advanced societies in the world, over which no normal human could have presided?
It would be funny if that were true.
At this point, I started to realize that the way that I spoke was just similar to the way that these people speak, which was similar to what GPTZero was identifying as AI-generated.
Thatâs not all that surprising, since my job is to help students learn how to write effectively, to assist them with their grammar, and also with the way that they use the English language.
But it made me start to wonder â when we interact with artificial intelligence, it’s a new type of interaction where we’re essentially just conversing with and reading from a tool that we are constantly interacting with all the time. Is it all that surprising that that could lead to language change on our parts, and therefore a shift in the way that we think and communicate?
It’s not necessarily going to be the case that humans end up fusing with machine parts, as some movies seem to suggest that we will, but certainly there are going to be changes in our culture as a result of the way that we interact with technology that perhaps aren’t immediately apparent at the outset; what are those changes going to be? It’s not immediately clear what the answer to those questions are.
It was definitely funny to think about this, though, because it leads them into all sorts of interesting questions about sentience, and also about the people that we communicate with â what if the people around us end up adopting artificial intelligence language patterns to the point that we are unable to distinguish the language that is used by artificial intelligence from the language that is used by human beings?
That might be one of the ways in which we become more machinelike as a species, or perhaps not â either way, it was pretty interesting to watch this happen and to ask myself about the ways in which I am being influenced by AI, because we often think of humans and AI as being distinct and different from one another, and that there are clear boundary lines that separate usâŠ
But how are those boundary lines changing over time? The answer to that question is unclear to me.
Yep.
As we interact with AI, I suppose that we will start to talk a little bit more like AI.
As we move forward in this world, I expect that AI detectors will not really be a meaningful way in which we detect human beings â that our natural instincts of judgment and distinction may become just a little bit finer as we go through life.
On my part, I find it kind of funny that maybe the people reading this piece might think rightfully that I am an AI â a sentient AI, maybe â but an AI for all intents and purposes.
To that I say⊠Who knows if that could happen to you too?
Today, it exploded and hit 1k, and it shows no sign of stopping; the hype is real!!
Why?
A mixture of Manglish, an anonymous dude who prompted OpenAI’s ChatGPT with the legendary Manglish prompt, the combined efforts of Kenneth Yu Kern San and Jornes Sim, and, I guess, a huge, huge dose of the wonders of ChatGPT x)
My own small contribution (lol!)
I guess I’ve evolved into the comments guy – take a look here if you want đ
Ah, what can I say?
It’s truly fascinating to be at the beginning stage of a revolution.
First off, congrats and creds to Pang for being infinitely better than I am at managing communities at the moment – something I’m definitely looking forward to learning more in the days ahead!!
Second off, I care a lot about the deeper significance of things – and I’m incredibly glad that this is one of the many things that’s starting off AI on the right foot in Malaysia, my home country – where this will go and what will happen I have no idea, but really look forward to watching what the world’s going to bring đ
Amongst other things, I guess it’s brought a ChatGPT Plus subscription for which now, in order to sign up, you’ve got to join a waitlist.
Can’t wait to see what’s next, and thank you based Sam Altman and OpenAI for creating this gift to humanity đ
âUpload your essay into Turnitin by 11:59pm on Thursday night? You meant start the essay at 11:57 then submit it at 11:58, am I right?â â Gigachad ChatGPT student.
We begin our discussion by discussing the sweet smell of plagiarism.
It wafts in the air as educators run around like headless chickens, looking here, looking there as they flip through oddly good essays with panicked expressions.
âWas this AI-generated, Bobby?!â says a hapless teacher, staring at a piece of paper that seems curiously bereft of grammatical errors, suspecting that Bobby could never have created something of this caliber.
âNo teacher, I just became smart!â Bobby cries, running off into the sunset because he is sad, he is going to become a member of an emo boyband, and he doesn’t want to admit that he generated his homework with ChatGPT.
generated by Midjourney, if that wasnât obvious
This smell casts fear and trepidation over every single part of our education system, for it threatens to break it; after all, education is special and it is meant to be sacrosanct â after all, is it not the very same system that is designed to teach humans facts and knowledge and above all, to communicate and collaborate to solve the problems of our era with intelligence, initiative, and drive?
Itâs unsurprising that the world of education has flipped out over ChatGPT, because artificial intelligence opens up the very real possibility that schools may be unable to detect it.
Fun and games, right? Itâs just a bunch of kids cheating on assignments with artificial intelligence? Itâs not going to affect the older generation?
As it turns out, no â thatâs not the case. Iâll explain why later.
But before that, letâs talk a bit about the part of our education system that AI is threatening: Essay-writing.
If students simply choose to let their work be completed by artificial intelligence and forget all else, that just means that theyâve forgone the education that theyâre supposed to have received, thereby crippling them by an act of personal choice, rightâŠ?
But each of us has been a student, and if we have children, our children either will be or have been students too; there is a deep emotional connection that stretches across the entire world when it comes to this.
Therefore, when Princeton University CS student Edward Tian swooped in to offer a solution,itâs not all that surprising that the world flipped.
Enter GPTZero.
Humans deserve the truth. A noble statement and a very bold one for a plagiarism detector, but something thatâs a little deeper than most of us would probably imagine.
But consider this.
Not everyone who uses AI text is cheating in the sense of doing something that they are not supposed to and thereby violating rules, therefore the word âplagiarism detectorâ doesnât quite or always apply here.
This algorithm, as with other algorithms that attempt to detect AI-generated text, is not just a plagiarism detector that merely serves to catch students in petty acts of cheating âit is an AI detector.
An AI Detector At Work.
So how does it work?
GPTZero assigns a likelihood that a particular text is generated by AI by using two measures:
Perplexity, and Burstiness.
Essentially, in more human language than that which was presented on GPTZeroâs website, GPTZero says thatâŠ
The less random the text (its âperplexityâ), the more likely it was generated by an AI.
The less that randomness changes throughout time (its âburstinessâ), the more likely that the text was generated by AI.
Anyway, GPTZero gives each text a score for perplexity and burstiness, and from there, outputs a probability that given sentences of a text were generated by AI, highlighting the relevant sentences, and easily displays the result to the user.
Alright, sounds great!
Does GPTZero deserve the hype, though?
âŠDoes this actually work?
Letâs try it with this pleasant and AI-generated text that is exactly about the importance of hype (lol).
Thatâs 100% AI-generated and we know that as fact.
âŠWould we know if we didnât see it in the ChatGPT terminal window, though?
âŠOkay, letâs not think about that.
Down the hatchâŠ
âŠAnd boom.
As we can see, GPTZero, humanityâs champion, managed to identify that the text that we had generated was written by AI.
So nope, GPTZero canât detect rewritten texts that were generated with AI â which it should be able to if it truly is an *AI* detector in the best sense â and which in turn suggests that the way that itâs been operationalized has yet to allow it to be the bastion protecting humanity from the incursion of robots into our lives.
Itâs not that GPTZero â or even OpenAIâs own AI Text Reviewer, amongst a whole panoply of different AI detectors â are bad or poorly operationalized, by any means. Rather, itâs that the operationalization is supremely difficult because the task is punishingly hard, and that we are unlikely to have a tool that can detect AI-generated text 100% unless we perform watermarking (MIT Technology Review) and we would have to use multiple algorithms to be able to detect text, or come up with alternate measures to do so.
An Arms Race between AI Large Language Models (LLMS) and AI Detectors â and why you should care (even if youâre not a student).
As Iâve mentioned, there is an arms race at hand between AI Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, and AI detectors like GPTZero, the consequence of which is likely that the two will compete with one another and each will make progress in its own way, progressing the direction of both technologies forward.
Personally, I think that AI detectors are fighting a losing battle against LLMs for many reasons, but let me not put the cart before the horse â it is a battle to watch, not to predict the outcome of before itâs even begun.
Implications of this strange war:
But why should you care about any of this if youâre not a student? Itâs not like youâre going to be looking at essays constantly, right?
Letâs take aside the fact that youâre reading a blog post right now, and letâs also move away purely from the plagiarized essay bit that weâve been thinking about, as we gravitate towards thinking about how ChatGPT is alanguage model.
Itâs a good bet that you use language everywhere in your life, business, and relationships with other people in order to communicate, coordinate, and everything else.
When we go around on the Internet, itâs not always immediately evident what was AI generated, what was generated by a human or, for that matter, what was inspired by an AI and later followed through by a human.
The whole reason we need something like a plagiarism detector is that we may not even be sure that a particular piece of language (which we most often experience in the form of text) is AI-generated with our own eyes and minds, to the point that we need to literally rely upon statistical patterns in order to evaluate some thing that we are looking at directly in front of us, thereby recruiting our brains as we evaluate the entirety of an output.
The problem isâŠ
Language doesnât just exist as text.
Language exists as text, yes, but also as speech. Moreover, speech and text are easily convertible to one another â and we know very well what ChatGPT is doing: Generating text.
We now know that there are Text To Speech (TTS) models that generate speech from text. Theyâre not necessarily all great, but thatâs besides the point â it presages the translation from text into voice.
Think about it.
If the voices that are generated by AI become sufficiently realistic-sounding and their intonations (VALL-E, is that you?), how might you know that these voices arenât real unless there are severe model safeguards that impede the models from functioning as they are supposed to?
Now combine that indistinguishable voice with sophisticated ChatGPT output that can evade any AI detector and in turn may, depending on the features that end up developing, evade your own capacity to tell whether you are even interacting with a human or not.
How would that play out in the metaverse?
How would that play out in the real world, over the phone?
How would you ever know whether anyone that youâre interacting with is real or not? Whether they are sentient?
The battle between AI and AI Detectors is not just a battle over the difference between an A grade and a C grade.
Itâs a battle over a future where whatâs at stake is identifying what even qualifies as human.
Could you potentially write a Masters thesis with ChatGPT?
It so happened that someone on the ChatGPT Malaysia Facebook group had asked about the same thing, so I thought ok, let’s make it happen.
Anyway, I was curious about whether it was actually possible, so I decided to give it a go.
Hereâs what I asked:
Okay, so at the very least the software proposed a bunch of topics that seemed kind of plausible and interesting.
Anyway, since I’m involved in the education industry and AI â based learning is very interesting to me, I decided to ask ChatGPT to follow up on #7, as follows:
Okay, wow! I had sources too! This was getting interesting! But thenâŠ
I looked at this, and I was captivated: Was I on my way to get a Masterâs degree for this man?
No, wait. Wasnât this even better? Wasnât this thing essentially describing the process of creating a personalized new education technology company for me???
I set out in earnest, yearning to go where no man had ever gone before!
Okay, seemed great so far! I ran out of words, though, so I asked ChatGPT to continue:
Okay, uhâŠ
Do you see what I’m seeing here?
Rather than actually writing the thesis, ChatGPT was malingering â it was casually not doing what it was told to do, and presenting me with some nonsense summary!
That wonât do! You think just because you’re an AI assistant you get to be lazy?!
I asked it to continue, and provide results in detail.
For about five, this seemed really really plausible, so I was happy againâŠ
For about five minutes, before my skepticism began again.
âŠSo I checked the references, only to realize that they mostly couldnât be found anywhere.
Okay, I was thinking to myself.
This is a wonderful software, I declared, trying to beat back the cognitive dissonance.
Surely the third page will be a little bit better? So I thought.
At this point, I realized â ChatGPT had failed.
The two methodology sections contradicted themselves, and there wasn’t a possibility of reconciliation unless I proceeded to prompt chatGPT with the specific information that it actually needed, which I decided not to because the rewarded yielded by that effort would actually be better spent writing the thesis if I actually had a clear idea of how to do so.
So, how do we answer our research question?
With a solid no.
As you can see, thereâs a word limit for responses, which means that you will have to re-prompt ChatGPT, which is likely going to lead it to drift from the original prompt.
ChatGPTâs memory for prior responses is about 4000 tokens (words) and it will not completely remember everything that you told it before unless say, you intelligently summarize.
There is no guarantee that the logic or factuality of your piece will be valid or that even any of the sources that you cite will be accessible or even relevant to what you are writing about, as you see from the questionable sources.
Sorry to those of you out there hoping that ChatGPT was going to help you get your Masterâs degree, but it’s not gonna happen right now.
Even if you can though, should you? I guess thatâs up to each person to decide, but what I would say is that submitting something AI generated for a degree means that you didnât get the degree â the AI did and got certified and you did not.
Let me not moralize this or romanticize education, but approach the matter in a logical way â when this starts to happen on a large scale, if it does happen, I can imagine that companies or other institutions that used to take these degrees seriously will simply no longer take them seriously, thereby causing degrees as a whole to become about as worthless as MOOCS among prominent companies (i.e. companies that actually generate large amounts of business and have a vested interest in hiring actually talented people) and leading to what we already see, to a degree, in institutions such as tech companies and start-ups⊠Whereby many of these companies donât pay the most attention to the particular degree that you received, but rather whether you are capable of demonstrating the specific skills that they are looking for and communicating your perspective in the course of an interview in which there is no opportunity to make use of AI software.
How will artificial intelligence change not just education, but also the job market at large?
Weâll be finding out, and weâre going to be in for a wild, wild ride!
I’ll have lots more to say about this in the days ahead, so if you would like to read about the intersections between AI, writing, and education, do consider dropping me a follow and Iâll see you in my next pieces!
Do you ever feel like you might have gotten yourself in something a little bigger than you’d imagined was possible?
Excited to announce that I’ll be speaking about AI for the “How AI Tech Will Disrupt Businesses” panel on the 24th of February! Thank you Vulcan Post for the feature and MrMoney TV x Entrepreneurs and Startups Malaysia for the invitation!
You’ll be able to meet me there directly and hear me talk about the ways AI is going to change businesses around the world alongside my fellow panelist, Richard Ker!
If you’ve not heard of Richard, the man is a legend at creating incredible infographics and marketing, and I respect both his trite observations and the value that he’s created for literally thousands of people throughout Malaysia and far beyond; the man is a true blue digital authority, If you’re looking for something specific, feel free to check out this article that he’s written on Facebook, amongst other things; the man is everywhere!
In other words, what does this mean?
It means I need to level up!
This conference is something that I’m truly honored to be a part of, and a wonderful opportunity to learn from many incredible minds that I won’t be missing by any stretch of the imagination.
As we speak, I’m preparing for with all my might at the moment even as I read and learn more about artificial intelligence, building up that reading habit again thoughtfully documented by my dear friend Sandy Clarke and that I’ll make sure to work towards in the days ahead as I build this platform.
Meanwhile, if you haven’t already, please feel free to join Artificial Intelligence Malaysia! I’ve had some pretty wild conversations in the past day or so, and it would be great to add a diversity of voices to the group especially if you’re really interested in AI and everything that it has to offer đ
In preparation for that, know that I’ve been reading extensively and creating lots of other content as well because I know that anything I have to make this worth your time, and will do my very best to do so.
Iâve been doing plenty of writing on different platforms over the past couple of days.
Honestly, when I say a lot of writing, I mean a lot of writing.
Iâve written on LowYat, Reddit, Medium, everywhere. At the pace Iâm going, I guess I seem like an Energizer bunny at times, but also possibly seeming like Iâm crazy because the way that I write is that I talk to Siri and get Siri to transcribe every single thing that I say.
âHey Siri!â
Anyway, that seems to be the reason that a lot of people are coming in from different places here and there – Welcome one, welcome all! So glad that you decided to be here!
Noun I think normally marketing should be a boring thing, but for me itâs actually been quite entertaining, and still with seemingly fit for moments that I am sure I donât appreciate the full scope of just yet.
Probably the most random one of these instances was the way that I met Pang Sern, the admin of ChatGPT Malaysia, a new Facebook group that I started posting in over the past day and in which people have started to ask me to repost my writings from this blog (o.o)
I have been going on that self-promotion grind, shameless author as I am, and found myself at a Star article about ChatGPT featuring some guy who has nothing to do with ChatGPT but whose face was somehow plastered on the articleâŠ
Nice to meet you if you somehow end up seeing this, Yun-Han! LOL)
⊠To which Andrew Boey rejoins with the following epic comment:
To which, appreciating Andrew Boeyâs epic comment, I rejoin with shameless self promotion ala here, only to realize that Pang also writes on Medium.
âŠWhich then leads to even more shameless self promotionâŠ
âŠWhich then leads us here:
Okay, thatâs a bunch of people.
Well, what can I say? Thank you for responding to my shameless self-promotion (and to the moments where I wasnât self-promoting either⊠Were there any?!)⊠and I hope that it wasnât just self-promotion with no benefits to you, the reader, because that would cause the entire house of cards to come falling down!
But now, some self â evaluation!
On my part, I do know on an intuitive level why it is that self-promotion generally isnât appreciated â itâs one of those things that interrupts the flow of community in the name of furthering a specific personâs aim, an attempt to distinguish oneself from a crowd for whatever reason â it is natural for people to look at that with scorn: Who is this person, and why are they creating a ruckus?
Sorry if you found it annoying and rest assured I understand why; on my part though, it was one of those things that I had to do no matter what because I know that I have something valuable to share and that there is a mission that I am on â for which I must do my thing.
I just happened to be lucky enough that people have responded kindly so far and seem to enjoy my work, so Iâll look forward to creating more of it!
Iâm thrilled that youâre here and that you enjoyed my writing (or perhaps you hate it and wish to strangle me? Iâll never know if you donât comment!), and Iâll look forward to creating much more for you in the days to come đ
Till our next chat! (Literally this entire piece was narrated out to Siri while I was sitting in my chair, LOL)
