Author Julie Gilbert Discusses the Writing of Her New Book ‘Giant Love’
Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
Image courtesy of UCLA’s website , but since AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted, maybe this acknowledgment doesn’t matter. UCLA announced the other day that “Comp Lit 2BW will be the first course in the UCLA College Division of Humanities to be built around the Kudu artificial intelligence platform. The textbook: AI-generated. Class assignments: AI-generated. Teaching assistants’ resources: AI-generated.” The professor’s explanation of why any of this is good doesn’t make any sense to me — she seems to be describing standard teaching practices like discussing texts and putting together a syllabus, but now AI is involved. Which to me always feels like a looming labor issue — I wouldn’t be shocked to see this software cited as justification to fire professors or TAs, or reduce their pay. Because again, I can’t make sense of how this is supposed to be innovative: “What’s amazing is that this takes a general education course from being about information overload to being much more about helping students find a through line and key themes over the course of 10 weeks,” Landers said. “Now, instead of a professor lecturing about historical facts — because those are all in the textbook — they can instead focus on things like, ‘How do we think about this particular text?’ and ‘How can we think about it differently?’ And that’s how critical thinking starts to happen.” Sounds like teaching? I’m really struggling to see how this as anything more than a stunt-y gimmick, and based on how often the AI software brand is mentioned, I have to imagine some money is exchanging hands here. Why don’t students switch on their own AIs to read and summarize the AI-generated textbook, reply to the teaching AI’s questions, answer any AI-worded writing prompts, and generate a final paper? That way, everyone can just go home and we can check in on what was learned at the end of the semester. But what really got me fuming was the horrible, horrible textbook cover that was extruded for this course. This image is for a book that’s apparently called History & Fiction: Survey […]
Click here to view original page at UCLA’s new AI-designed literature course has the worst-looking textbook cover I’ve ever seen.
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Julie Gilbert Today, we delve into the enduring relevance of the themes explored by Pulitzer Prize -winning author Edna Ferber
The Mallorcan Joana Marcús is a young bestseller in Spain and America, writer of young adult novels with a romantic
