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At UCLA, Professors See 'Exciting Opportunities' in AI Writing Tools
Nat Rubio-Licht
Nat Rubio-Licht is a freelance reporter with dot.LA. They previously worked at Protocol writing the Source Code newsletter and at the L.A. Business Journal covering tech and aerospace. They can be reached at nat@dot.la.
Generative AI is tech’s latest buzz word, with developers creating programs that can do anything from writing an academic essay about guitars and elevators to creating photorealistic paintings of majestic cats.
ChatGPT, a platform built by DALL-E 2 and GPT-3 founder OpenAI, is the latest one of these tools to go viral. But this tool can go far beyond writing a version of the Declaration of Independence in the style of Jar Jar Binks. It has the capability to write full essays on almost any subject a college kid could desire — creating another layer of complex technology that humanities professors now have to consider when they teach and dole out assignments.
\u201cSo #ChatGPT can easily write college essays now. Turnitin won't touch this. So are we ready to rethink assessment yet?\u201d— Colin D. Wren (@Colin D. Wren) 1670580381
While ChatGPT does have some limitations (It can only write up to 650 words per prompt), some students have taken to Reddit to talk about the potential uses and workarounds of the word limit to help them pass their classes. Ironically, another student even used the AI to write an apology email to his professor for using AI to write his emails.
One student wrote, “As finals are hitting, I’ve written 6 papers for people and made a great chunk of change. Same day turnaround, any size paper with perfect grammar and in depth writing plagiarism free is a pretty lucrative way to advertise oneself to a bunch of cracked out stressed college students.”
But despite the tool’s internet virality among desperate college students, UCLA professors told dot.LA that they aren’t worried about ChatGPT’s capabilities. Rather than viewing the technology as something they have to shield students from using, they see it as another potential tool in their arsenal and something they can implement in their classrooms.
\u201cI asked ChatGPT to write an essay on mental health. Returned essay immediately. College professors don\u2019t need to worry; the essay contained mostly weak verbs and no advanced grammar.\u201d— Heather Holleman (@Heather Holleman) 1670419435
“My sense of ChatGPT is that it's actually a really exciting opportunity to reconsider what it is that we do when we write things like essays,” said Danny Snelson, assistant professor of English at UCLA. “Rather than raising questions of academic integrity, this should have us asking questions about what kinds of assignments we give our students.”
Snelson tried ChatGPT out for himself, prompting the platform to write an essay about “the literary merit of video games that cites three key scholars in the field.” As it does, ChatGPT instantaneously churned out an essay which answered the prompt accurately and synthesized the arguments of three scholars in a compelling way. But Snelson could spot flaws in its work. The writing style was repetitive and the scholars the AI chose were not diverse.
“I probably will give my students the assignment on the first day of class to write a ChatGPT essay about a topic they know nothing about,” Snelson says. “Then have them discuss the essays that ChatGPT has written for them and what the limits of their arguments are.”
Christine Holten, director of Writing Programs and the UCLA Undergraduate Writing Center, said that she and other instructors are currently having similar talks about how to integrate these tools in a responsible way.
“One way is to allow students to use them,” she said. “Build them into the course, and allow reflection about the bounds of their use, what their limitations are, what are their advantages? How does it change their composing?”
Along with dissecting the platform’s limitations, Snelson also sees using ChatGPT as a tool to propel students’ writing even further. For example, one of the hardest parts about writing an essay is the first line. Having an AI write it for you can be a great starting point to push past the “blank page dilemma,” he said.
And while ChatGPT can write a passable essay on almost any subject, Snelson said students still need to have an understanding of the subjects they’re writing about. “Having a live conversation about Chaucer in the classroom, a student is not going to be helped by an AI,” he said.
“In the real world, you have access to information, you have access to writing tools,” Snelson added. “Why should (academics) disavow or disallow those kinds of tools?”
To that end, Holten said she recognizes that ChatGPT “raises the stakes” by circumventing tools that academics have relied on to detect plagiarism. But students turning in papers that aren’t their own isn’t new: Essay mills have existed for a long time, and Instagram is filled with pages that will sell students an academic paper.
“We have to do our part by trying to craft assignments carefully and making sure that we're not assigning these open-ended prompts of the sort that could be bought from paper mills,” she said.
It helps, too, that ChatGPT may already be working on a solution. Scott Aaronson, who works on the theoretical foundations of AI safety at OpenAI, said in a blog post that he’s working on a tool for “statistically watermarking the outputs of a text model like GPT” that adds in an “otherwise unnoticeable secret signal in its choices of words” to prevent things like academic plagiarism, mass generation of propaganda or impersonating someone’s writing style to incriminate them, though it's unclear how far away this development is.
“We want it to be much harder to take a GPT output and pass it off as if it came from a human,” Aaronson wrote.
All of which explains why even despite claims that high-school English and the student essay are nearing their death knell, Holten thinks, ultimately, “The availability of ChatGPT is not likely to change very much.”From Your Site Articles
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Nat Rubio-Licht
Nat Rubio-Licht is a freelance reporter with dot.LA. They previously worked at Protocol writing the Source Code newsletter and at the L.A. Business Journal covering tech and aerospace. They can be reached at nat@dot.la.
nat@dot.la
Latinx Workers Face Greatest Pay Disparities in LA Tech Scene, Report Finds
06:04 AM | July 28, 2021
While the predominantly young, white Los Angeles tech scene has made strides to improve diversity, deep inequities remain.
Women earn 78 cents for every dollar made by a male tech worker. Black and Latinx investors are underrepresented at venture firms and the majority of venture investments goes toward white and Asian-owned businesses, according to PledgeLA's survey of Los Angeles tech companies and venture firms released Wednesday.
"Tech oftentimes likes to think of itself as a very equal, egalitarian space," said Jasmine Hill, a UCLA sociology professor who analyzed the data for PledgeLA. "But the data shows something different."
The third annual report shows some improvement in representation but persistent pay disparities and lack of inclusion among L.A.'s tech scene.
The findings are based on self-reported data from 173 companies that have signed onto PledgeLA's initiative, including Bird, sweetgreen and Dollar Shave Club.
The report found Black and Latinx workers make less money than their peers. On average, East Asians made $120,000, South Asians made $100,000, white workers made $90,000, while Black and Latinx workers made $75,000 and $60,000 on average, respectively — a disparity shared even at higher levels of experience.
Employees who identify as LGBTQ+ and employees with disabilities responded that they "cover" a part of their identities at work, and said they "felt the need to avoid conversations about their identity at work."
"We're paid – and I'm saying 'we're' because I'm Black – significantly less than our white, Asian counterparts," said Qiana Patterson, the chair of PledgeLA. "And I think we all know that that's just not because Black and Latinx people don't have the degrees, or the experience, but that there's just bias embedded in our hiring practices."
Hill said the report is not representative of the entire L.A. tech scene because it only includes data from the participating PledgeLA companies. PledgeLA was able to get a higher participation rate from PledgeLA companies for its survey this year – from around 65% to around 81% – which allowed the nonprofit to break down earning data by race.
Other findings of the report include:
- Workers reported improvements in company culture and transparency in hiring. Workers at mid and large-sized companies also reported improvements.
- Though PledgeLA VCs predominantly funded white and Asian-owned businesses, they are more likely to fund female, Latinx and Black-owned businesses compared to the U.S. average.
- Investments to businesses with Black founders increased by 71% from 2020.
- Investors at PledgeLA VCs are predominantly white, though VCs reported increases in investors who identify as LGBTQ+ and investors with disabilities.
- Women earned an average of $20,000 less than men regardless of role or experience, and women who have over 20 years of experience earned $90,000 less than men with a similar level of experience.
- Nearly a third of workers reported feeling "neutral to very uncomfortable" when reporting workplace issues and nearly half said their coworkers were the source of improper conduct at work.
PledgeLA is hoping to carry the momentum built after the nation experienced a racial reckoning following the death of George Floyd in May 2020.
Calvin Selth, a program lead at Annenberg Tech, said he was encouraged to see lots of VCs and companies continue to support underrepresented groups after the summer of 2020 – shown by the increase in VC funding to Black founders – but emphasized the need for improvement.
"We're tracking this every year because we want to know that it's not a blip," Selth said. "I'm encouraged by more open dialogue about this, but I think there needs to be continued focus and more effort from VCs to track this kind of data themselves."
In addition collecting the data, PledgeLA hosts the PledgeLA Founders Fund, which gives $25,000 grants to Black and Latinx-owned businesses, and a VC internship program aimed at women, people of color and underrepresented groups.
PledgeLA also plans to raise $1 million in the next two years for the PledgeLA Founders Fund and is aiming to create a task force to help companies address racial and gender pay equity.
"The data itself is only as powerful as the action that we take," Patterson said. "And I hope that, in reading this analysis and the data around it, It spurs more people to sign the pledge, more people to be a part of this ecosystem in a meaningful and an intentional way."
Editor's note: dot.LA is a participant in PledgeLA and co-founder Spencer Rascoff sits on the board.
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Bernard Mendez
Bernard Mendez is an editorial intern at dot.LA. He attends UCLA, where he is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics. Mendez was previously an editor at the Daily Bruin, the student newspaper at UCLA.
https://twitter.com/bernardhmendez
bernard@dot.la
DogVacay Founder Aaron Hirschhorn Dies in Miami Boating Accident
03:48 PM | March 31, 2021
Aaron Hirschhorn, a well-known investor and entrepreneur in the Los Angeles tech scene who founded the pet sitting startup DogVacay died Sunday in a boating accident near Miami Beach, Fla. He was 42.
Hirschhorn started DogVacay with his wife Karine Nissim in 2012. The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company raised nearly $50 million and was a leading competitor in the pet services industry before being acquired by Rover in 2017.
Hirschhorn moved from Los Angeles to Miami Beach about three years ago, according to the Miami Herald.
Hirschhorn held a seat on Rover's board for a year. A month ago on LinkedIn, he called news of Rover's plans to go public via a SPAC deal "an amazing day."
"All of us at Rover were saddened to learn of Aaron's sudden passing. Our thoughts are with his family, friends, and colleagues during this painful time," Rover said in a statement provided to GeekWire on Wednesday. "His love of animals and commitment to pet parents was exemplified in his founding and leadership of DogVacay and Gallant, but his vision for what was possible in the pet industry went well beyond what he already had accomplished."
In 2018 Hirschhorn founded another pet-focused startup called Gallant, which stores dog stem cells so that they're accessible for future treatments.
The Miami Herald reported that the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and the U.S. Coast Guard reported a crash on Sunday between a 38-foot Chris-Craft motorboat and a personal watercraft.
Hirschhorn was reportedly riding his electric foil surfboard and died at the scene. In an Instagram post on Monday, his wife wrote: "My beloved husband of ten years died yesterday in an accident. We are broken and will never be the same."
Hirschhorn's Instagram shows numerous family images and scenes from his active lifestyle. "I play sports and get hurt a lot," his profile description reads.
The photo feed also illustrates his love for dogs.
After the Rover acquisition, Hirschhorn called the growing of DogVacay "an incredible journey."
"Our goal has always been to make quality pet care accessible to everyone, and with Rover and DogVacay's experience and expertise, we will continue to create the best solution for our host community, our pet parents and most importantly, our pets that we love as family," he said at the time.
According to the Gallant website, Hirschhorn founded that company "after experiencing the power of regenerative medicine for himself" when he underwent a single stem cell treatment "to heal a debilitating back injury."
Hirschhorn pitched Gallant in a 2019 episode of the ABC TV series "Shark Tank" and snagged an investment from Lori Greiner and Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.
The Miami Herald reported that Hirschhorn is survived by his wife and their three young children: a daughter in kindergarten, a son in first grade and a son in second grade.
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Kurt Schlosser, GeekWire
Kurt Schlosser covers the Geek Life beat for GeekWire. A longtime journalist, photographer and designer, he has worked previously for NBC News, msnbc.com and the Seattle P-I.
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