Twitter’s had a lot of discussion about some interesting issues in the last week. Here’s some thoughts on student use of AI tools, use of automated transcription, and false equivalency bias.
I’m less in the “can’t be tricked!” camp and more in the “probably been tricked using analog methods for years, students who cheat play themselves” camp.
— A.J. Bauer (@ajbauer) January 20, 2023
Yes. There are lots of ways that students can deceive faculty. New technology like the AI writing and art tools can certainly do so. But so can girl/boyfriends, greek system archives, and purchased help. The real solution is to know your student’s writing style (which really only occurs in upper-division classes) so you can tell when it wasn’t written by them.
Journalist's Toolbox: Tools for #transcribing audio of your interviews: https://t.co/mwU2tSUkB1#reporting #reportingtools
— Mike Reilley (@itsmikereilley) January 20, 2023
There are a lot of tools out there to automate interview transcription. But as the author of this list points out, there can also be real privacy concerns about what the transcription services do with their data (your data that’s become theirs). Also, there is a lot to be said for transcribing the recordings yourself – that’s how you really get to know what’s in the interview. But, I understand, there isn’t always time for that.
Journalists are terrified of being accused of being biased. We need to get over it. No matter what we do, we will be accused of being biased. But here’s the truth – both sides are not always (perhaps only rarely) equivalent. In the case of the debt limit – one side wants to have a clean raise of the debt limit. One side wants to threaten to crash through it. (To be fair, if the Democrats had been serious about really wanting to make the problem go away, they could have done so, or at least tried to do so, during the lame duck session.)