@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
I wonder if maybe, and I'm just wondering, if maybe you have a goal like "Learn to write a paper well." And then add "manually", I get that. So let's assume that that is the goal.
Then this would clearly make ChatGPT a valuable research tool, even a sample generating tool, but using it to avoid "manually writing the paper" would logically violate the point.
For me, a key goal would be to "avoid anyone needing to learn to write papers." Because to me, that is a skill that exists only to placate incompetent professors to fill time to avoid learning more meaningful material. Being able to write well, something I take great pride in being good at, is essentially worthless. It has very little, if any, academic benefit and basically no function in the workplace. It's an entire human activity that exists only to waste time in the school process.
Being able to research and produce good information on a topic is super important. And if ChatGPT does that better than a human, then learning ChatGPT is the appropriate means to that end. But laying out that information, while potentially valuable forty years ago, isn't valuable today. So the last thing I would want to do is waste students' time on it instead of having them learning things that they can use in the future.
I find the time spent learning how to write, learning how to cite, how to format essays to be directly counter to educational goals. Wasting time, while expending effort, is highly detrimental because your brain works very hard doing things it is bad at (double checking citations is labor intensive and a wholly worthless activity - it's just about coping notes correctly) making it exhausted and not leaving time or energy for learning valuable things.
Scott,
That's a whole lot of words. Again, we seem to be at the point where I've made simple points and backed them up and end up with a dissertation as to why my conclusions are wrong, usually based on some sort of feelings type thing.
I will repeat myself this one last time: The human person produces something from their mind and heart. Some call it art, some call it poetry, some call it literature, and so much more. A dissertation or a thesis would be another set of examples or perhaps an essay on a Dostoyevsky novel.
That creativity comes from that person. Thus, they own what they have done.
There is no way to reconcile what comes from within a person via their own thought processes and creativity and what comes from a machine as far as ownership goes.
They are not the same and never will be.
