Stephen Downes

In retrospect, it wasn't worth watching the hockey game. But the question of what it is worth doing as a writer or an academic is an interesting and complex debate. Should I, for example, have chosen to write my article by hand instead of AI? What more would I have achieved? This is an old question. For example, some of the most prolific authors use speech instead of a typewriter and then automated transcription to create the article. I've tried this with my talks, but never really made it work. What does it mean to be a scholar in the age of AI? I saw an article on LinkedIn (since lost because the algorithm bounced it out of view before I could capture the link) saying humans should always form the research question, do the literature review, analyze the evidence and draw conclusions. I wanted to ask: why these things? I don't think we have a good answer yet. We poretend it's because AI is flawed, but then we get arguments like "I typo [often] therefore I am [human]." I use spell-check in OLDaily because I used to get complaints about my spelling. Cory Doctorow reports using Ollama, an open-source LLM, as a typo-catcher. This led to a denoument from Jürgen Geuter on the ethics of using AI saying Doctorow "tries to make it (the criticism) look unreasonable by making it just a conversation about tech without regarding how that technology affects the world and the people in it."