Experiment, AI or HI: What Writes the Best Paper?

Steve Dembo is a teacher. As a pioneer in Web 2.0, he's been teaching Artificial Intelligence to his Computer Science students for years. It is no surprise, he's already speaking about Generative AI. I couldn't attend his recent keynote in Chicago so, for today's 80 Days of AI and Hi Feature, here's Steve Dembo talking about Generative AI.

I think my favorite thing about this conversation is where he discusses an experiment that he did with 2 classes of same-grade level students where he had four groups who wrote papers:

1. Totally Written by Human (Human Intelligence or HI)
2. Pre-drafted or pre-outlined by ChatGPT and then totally edited and written by human using the pre-work
3. Drafted by a human and then post-edited and improved only by ChatGPT
4. Totally written by ChatGPT

He then had classes swap and had them vote on the best papers, and the results were consistent. I'll let you listen and learn what Steve said.

I've worked to fix the subtitles on the stream. Of course, subtitles and transcripts are now drafted first by AI, but interestingly, it never seems to properly recognize the word “Chat GPT” so editing the subtitles and transcripts can be tedious.

For now, I'll just have the subtitles help us out and I may go back and add chapters in this for you as well, and paste them here. If enough of you want a formal transcript, just leave a comment or contact me via Twitter and I can go back and do the heavy lifting to make the transcript.

Some Patterns I'm Seeing

But this shows exactly the issues with AI:

• It takes HI (Human Intelligence) to create excellent prompts
• AI can do fascinating things with great prompts and multiple human intelligence
• After receiving output from AI, it again takes your HI to make it meaningful and useful to humans.

Steve shares a lot of wisdom in this conversation. And here we are with Day 2. I hope you enjoy this journey! Just check back here each day (except Sunday) and I'll be sharing the apps, tools, and thought leaders on this learning journey. Have a great day!