10 Comments
User's avatar
Mike Kidwell's avatar

For anyone who is intrigued by the David Foster Wallace commencement speech, his writing is absolutely magisterial. It's often dense and can be difficult to engage with it first, but the man truly was a master of prose.

Expand full comment
Tomb of the Unknown Poster's avatar

Interesting bluesky thread about a statistic from that NY Mag article:

https://bsky.app/profile/aedwardslevy.bsky.social/post/3lolmc2v2hk2c

I’ve certainly seen an uptick in people I know personally utilizing ChatGPT but it does not seem to be nearly as widespread as the media might have you believe. Not sure what’s going on here - the allure of a juicy story?

Expand full comment
Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

Good find

Expand full comment
Prince(ss)O'Wales's avatar

It used to be an that people complained they didn't learn enough at school and now people are saying they don't care about learning anything from school.

Expand full comment
Matt's avatar

What exactly are the brands hoping to accomplish by spinning up Substacks? Are people actually using the social features of this place? It's hard for me to imagine how American Eagle is going to create value for their shareholders by running a blog.

Expand full comment
Bob Joe's avatar

It's probably similar to how brands frequently had/have blogs in the past, except now it's on substack and can maybe be shared around a bit on the twitter clone that substack has.

Expand full comment
Shreeharsh Kelkar's avatar

Completely agree that students who use Chatgpt are shooting themselves in the foot! And the DFW quotes are great. Will definitely read.

I think exams are one solution but there is value to writing papers. I think the solution is to use watermarking for enforcement which I wrote about here (https://computingandsociety.substack.com/p/how-do-you-solve-a-problem-like-chatgpt) but sadly professors are too busy fighting another internecine war about the symbolic politics of AI to think of pragmatic solutions that can work for all without everyone having to agree on everything. Would be curious to hear your take.

Expand full comment
Rob M's avatar

Message from boomer world - AI doesn't keep one from thinking and learning. It teaches one how to ask better and better questions. In an overload of information managing to valuable signal is an art.

Expand full comment
Jeremiah Johnson's avatar

"It teaches one how to ask better and better questions."

This is possible but very clearly not the case for most students.

Expand full comment
Matthew S.'s avatar

*can

Expand full comment