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Nearly two years ago, I wrote that AI would kill the undergraduate essay. That reaction came in the immediate aftermath of ChatGPT, when the sudden appearance of its shocking capabilities seemed to present endless vistas of possibility—some liberating, some catastrophic.
近两年前,我写道人工智能将终结本科生论文。这种反应出现在 ChatGPT 的直接后果中,当时其惊人能力的突然出现似乎展现了无尽的可能性视野——有些是解放性的,有些是灾难性的。

Since then, the potential of generative AI has felt clear, although its practical applications in everyday life have remained somewhat nebulous. Academia remains at the forefront of this question: Everybody knows students are using AI. But how? Why? And to what effect? The answer to those questions will, at least to some extent, reveal the place that AI will find for itself in society at large.
从那时起,生成式人工智能的潜力似乎很明确,尽管其在日常生活中的实际应用仍然有些模糊。学术界仍然处于这个问题的前沿:每个人都知道学生在使用人工智能。但如何使用?为什么使用?以及产生了什么效果?这些问题的答案至少在某种程度上将揭示人工智能在整个社会中将找到的位置。

[Read: The college essay is dead]
[阅读:大学论文已死]

There have been several rough approaches to investigate student use of ChatGPT, but they have been partial: polls, online surveys, and so on. There are inherent methodological limits to any study of students using ChatGPT: The technology is so flexible and subject to different cultural contexts that drawing any broadly applicable conclusions about it is challenging. But this past June, a group of Bangladeshi researchers published a paper exploring why students use ChatGPT, and it’s at least explicit about its limitations—and broader in its implications about the nature of AI usage in the world.
已经有几种粗略的方法来调查学生使用 ChatGPT 的情况,但它们都是部分的:民意调查、在线调查等。任何关于学生使用 ChatGPT 的研究都有固有的方法学限制:该技术非常灵活,并受不同文化背景的影响,因此很难得出任何广泛适用的结论。但在今年六月,一组孟加拉国研究人员发表了一篇论文,探讨学生使用 ChatGPT 的原因,并且至少明确指出了其局限性——以及关于世界上人工智能使用性质的更广泛的影响。

Of the many factors that the paper says drive students to use ChatGPT, three are especially compelling to me. Students use AI because it saves time; because ChatGPT produces content that is, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable from the content they might produce themselves; and because of what the researchers call the “Cognitive Miserliness of the User.” (This is my new favorite phrase: It refers to people who just don’t want to take the time to think. I know many.)
论文中提到的许多因素中,有三个对我来说特别有吸引力。学生使用人工智能是因为它节省时间;因为 ChatGPT 生成的内容在所有意图和目的上都与他们自己可能生成的内容无法区分;以及研究人员所称的“用户的认知吝啬”。(这是我新的最喜欢的短语:它指的是那些不愿花时间思考的人。我认识很多这样的人。)

These three reasons for using AI could be lumped into the same general lousiness: “I’m just lazy, and ChatGPT saves my time,” one user in the study admitted. But the second factor—“Inseparability of Content,” as the researchers call it—is a window to a more complex reality. If you tell ChatGPT to “investigate the themes of blood and guilt in the minor characters of Macbeth at a first-year college level for 1,000 words,” or ask it to produce an introduction to such an essay, or ask it to take your draft and perfect it, or any of the many innumerable fudges the technology permits, it will provide something that is more or less indistinguishable from what the student would have done if they had worked hard on the assignment. Students have always been lazy. Students have always cheated. But now, students know that a machine can do the assignment for them—and any essay that an honest, hardworking student produces is written under the shadow of that reality. Nagging at the back of their mind will be the inevitable thought: Why am I doing this when I could just push a button?
使用人工智能的这三个原因可以归结为同样的一般懒惰:“我只是懒惰,ChatGPT 节省了我的时间,”研究中的一位用户承认。但第二个因素——研究人员称之为“内容不可分割性”——是通向更复杂现实的窗口。如果你让 ChatGPT“以大一水平写 1000 字探讨麦克白中次要角色的血液和罪恶主题”,或者让它为这样的文章写一个引言,或者让它完善你的草稿,或者任何技术允许的无数小改动,它将提供一些与学生努力完成作业时所做的东西几乎无法区分的内容。学生一直以来都很懒。学生一直以来都在作弊。但现在,学生知道机器可以为他们完成作业——任何诚实、勤奋的学生所写的文章都在这种现实的阴影下完成。他们心中会不断萦绕着一个不可避免的想法:为什么我要做这个,而我只需按一个按钮就可以完成?

The future, for professors, is starting to clarify: Do not give your students assignments that can be duplicated by AI. They will use a machine to perform the tasks that machines can perform. Why wouldn’t they? And it will be incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, to determine whether the resulting work has been done by ChatGPT, certainly to the standard of a disciplinary committee. There is no reliable technology for establishing definitively whether a text is AI-generated.
对于教授来说,未来开始变得清晰:不要给学生布置可以被 AI 复制的作业。他们会用机器来执行机器可以执行的任务。他们为什么不呢?而且,要确定结果是否由 ChatGPT 完成的将极其困难,甚至几乎不可能,尤其是达到纪律委员会的标准。没有可靠的技术可以明确确定文本是否是 AI 生成的。

But I don’t think that new reality means, at all, that the tasks of writing and teaching people how to write have come to an end. To explain my hope, which is less a hope for writing than an emerging sense of the limits of artificial intelligence, I’d like to borrow an analogy that the Canadian poet Jason Guriel recently shared with me over whiskey: AI is the microwave of language.
但我并不认为这种新现实意味着写作和教人们如何写作的任务已经结束。为了解释我的希望,这不仅仅是对写作的希望,而是对人工智能局限性的新认识,我想借用加拿大诗人 Jason Guriel 最近与我在喝威士忌时分享的一个比喻:AI 是语言的微波炉。

It’s a spot-on description. Just like AI, the microwave began as a weird curiosity—an engineer in the 1940s noticed that a chocolate bar had melted while he stood next to a cavity magnetron tube. Then, after an extended period of development, it was turned into a reliable cooking tool and promoted as the solution to all domestic drudgery. “Make the greatest cooking discovery since fire,” ads for the Radarange boasted in the 1970s. “A potato that might take an hour to bake in a conventional range takes four minutes under microwaves,” The New York Times reported in 1976. As microwaves entered American households, a series of unfounded microwave scares followed: claims that it removed the nutrition from food, that it caused cancer in users. Then the microwave entered ordinary life, just part of the background. If a home doesn’t have one now, it’s a choice.
这是一个恰如其分的描述。就像 AI 一样,微波炉最初是一个奇怪的好奇心——20 世纪 40 年代的一位工程师注意到,当他站在一个空腔磁控管旁边时,一块巧克力棒融化了。然后,经过一段时间的发展,它被转变为一种可靠的烹饪工具,并被宣传为解决所有家庭琐事的方案。“自火以来最伟大的烹饪发现,”1970 年代 Radarange 的广告吹嘘道。“在传统炉子中需要一个小时烤熟的土豆,在微波炉下只需四分钟,”纽约时报在 1976 年报道。随着微波炉进入美国家庭,一系列毫无根据的微波炉恐慌随之而来:声称它会去除食物中的营养,导致用户患癌症。然后微波炉进入了普通生活,成为背景的一部分。如果一个家庭现在没有,那是一个选择。

[Read: The future of writing is a lot like hip-hop]
[阅读:写作的未来很像嘻哈]

The microwave survived because it did something useful. It performed functions that no other technology performed. And it gave people things they loved: popcorn without dishes, hot dinners in minutes, the food in fast-food restaurants.
微波炉之所以能够存活下来,是因为它做了一些有用的事情。它执行了其他技术无法完成的功能。它给人们带来了他们喜爱的东西:无需餐具的爆米花、几分钟内的热晚餐、快餐店的食物。

But the microwave did not end traditional cooking, obviously. Indeed, it became clear soon enough that the microwave could do only certain things. The technologists adapted, by combining the microwave with other heat sources so that the food didn’t feel microwaved. And the public adapted. They used microwaves for certain limited kitchen tasks, not every kitchen task.
但显然,微波炉并没有终结传统烹饪。很快就清楚的是,微波炉只能做某些事情。技术人员进行了适应,通过将微波炉与其他热源结合,使食物不显得像是微波炉加热的。公众也进行了适应。他们将微波炉用于某些有限的厨房任务,而不是所有的厨房任务。

Something similar is emerging with AI. If you’re going to use AI, the key is to use it for what it’s good at, or to write with AI so that the writing doesn’t feel like AI. What AI is superb at is formulaic writing and thinking through established problems. These are hugely valuable intellectual powers, but far from the only ones.
类似的情况正在人工智能领域出现。如果你要使用人工智能,关键是要利用它擅长的领域,或者与人工智能一起写作,使写作不显得像是人工智能的产物。人工智能在公式化写作和解决既定问题方面表现出色。这些是极其有价值的智力能力,但远非唯一的能力。

To take the analogy in a direction that might be useful for professors who actually have to deal with the emerging future and real-life students: If you don’t want students to use AI, don’t ask them to reheat old ideas.
将这个类比应用于那些实际上必须应对新兴未来和现实生活中学生的教授:如果你不希望学生使用人工智能,就不要让他们重新加热旧观念。

The advent of AI demands some changes at an administrative level. Set tasks and evaluation methods will both need alteration. Some teachers are starting to have students come in for meetings at various points in the writing process—thesis statement, planning, draft, and so on. Others are using in-class assignments. The take-home exam will be a historical phenomenon. Online writing assignments are prompt-engineering exercises at this point.
人工智能的出现要求在管理层面进行一些改变。设定任务和评估方法都需要改变。一些教师开始让学生在写作过程的各个阶段进行会议——论题陈述、计划、草稿等。其他教师则使用课堂作业。家庭作业考试将成为历史现象。在线写作作业在这一点上是提示工程练习。

There is also an organic process under way that will change the nature of writing and therefore the activity of teaching writing. The existence of AI will change what the world values in language. “The education system’s emphasis on [cumulative grade point average] over actual knowledge and understanding, combined with the lack of live monitoring, increases the likelihood of using ChatGPT,” the study on student use says. Rote linguistic tasks, even at the highest skill level, just won’t be as impressive as they once were. Once upon a time, it might have seemed notable if a student spelled onomatopoeia correctly in a paper; by the 2000s, it just meant they had access to spell-check. The same diminution is currently happening to the composition of an opening paragraph with a clear thesis statement.
写作的性质正在发生有机变化,这将改变写作教学的活动。人工智能的存在将改变世界对语言的重视程度。研究表明,“教育系统对[累计平均绩点]的重视超过了实际知识和理解,加上缺乏实时监控,增加了使用 ChatGPT 的可能性。”即使是最高技能水平的机械语言任务,也不会像以前那样令人印象深刻。曾几何时,如果学生在论文中正确拼写onomatopoeia,这可能显得很突出;到了 2000 年代,这仅仅意味着他们可以使用拼写检查。类似的贬值目前正在发生在撰写具有明确论点的开头段落上。

But some things won’t change. We live in a world where you can put a slice of cheese between two pieces of bread, microwave it, and eat it. But don’t you want a grilled cheese sandwich? With the bread properly buttered and crispy, with the cheese unevenly melted? Maybe with a little bowl of tomato-rice soup on the side?
但有些事情不会改变。我们生活在一个可以把一片奶酪夹在两片面包之间,微波加热,然后吃掉的世界。但你不想要一个烤奶酪三明治吗?面包适当涂上黄油并烤得酥脆,奶酪融化得不均匀?也许旁边还有一小碗番茄米汤?

The writing that matters, the writing that we are going to have to start teaching, is grilled-cheese writing—the kind that only humans can create: writing with less performance and more originality, less technical facility and more insight, less applied control and more individual splurge, less perfection and more care. The transition will be a humongous pain for people who teach students how to make sense with words. But nobody is being replaced; that much is already clear: The ideas that people want are still handmade.
重要的写作,我们将要开始教授的写作,是烤奶酪式的写作——只有人类才能创造的那种:更少表演性而更多原创性,更少技术技巧而更多洞察力,更少应用控制而更多个人挥洒,更少完美而更多关怀。对于教学生如何用文字表达意义的人来说,这种转变将是一个巨大的痛苦。但没有人被取代;这一点已经很清楚:人们想要的想法仍然是手工制作的。