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C. O. Davidson Is Haunted's avatar

I try to make the case in all my English classes that I teach that “writing is thinking,” but because thinking is hard work, many of my students don’t want to do it. And now after reading your essay, I see even more clearly with your comment about students having for example, Chat GPT, offload the writing and thinking needed to create an essay on an issue. They put the prompt into the LLM, it spits out an essay, they read it and they think “yeah I think that” but as you say, “in reality they had never thought about any such arguments at all. This is confabulation: falsely believing they had done the mental work themselves, convincing themselves that ChatGPT’s reasoning was their own all along.³”

I plan on sharing this essay with my students. I hope it makes a difference.

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Andrew Norman's avatar

Hilarious- This is a superb essay. Connecting dots is what LLMs do, and "confabulate" is the perfect word for what happens when they do this in a way that goes haywire and misleads...

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