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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 potentialuses 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 filledwithpages 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
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Two Months After Robots Were Introduced Into Nursing Homes, Residents Can't See Them Leaving: 'We'd Be Screwed'
06:00 AM | December 14, 2022
Evan Xie
Labor shortages are hitting many industries hard, but in senior living homes, lack of staff is even more of a problem, especially in dining rooms. In a bid to support a sagging workforce, some senior homes run by operator Front Porch are trying out hospitality robots.
So far, the Servi robots designed by Redwood City-based Bear Robotics have received a warm reception from both guests and customers. In a two-month pilot program with senior home operator Front Porch beginning in June, four of Bear Robotics’ Servi food running and busing robots were deployed in two Front Porch locations – San Francisco Towers, and Casa de Mañana in La Jolla.
Front Porch noted in its recent report on the test program that its dining services have been “particularly hit hard” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the organization is hoping to keep its remaining staff from burning out by supplementing their shifts with robot busboys (busbots?).
Here’s a glimpse at what the tech looks like: Servi robots have three shelves to stack dishes and can handle up to seven entrees depending on plate size, can carry up to 66 pounds, and they’re designed to be relatively compact–17 inches wide and about three and a half feet tall. A smaller version, the Servi Mini, can carry 2 trays, while its larger counterpart, Servi Plus, can handle up to 10 plates at once.
Hospitality robots are still a novelty, especially in North America. But as costs to produce critical components of these bots come down and more stressed restaurant managers see the cost-benefit analysis swing in their favor, that could change.
“The innovation that's happening within the food service industry is really impressive. This will likely become much more commonplace,” Bear Robotics’ co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Juan Higueros told dot.LA.
The goal is not to replace servers with Servi, but allow them to spend more time taking orders and interacting with the senior home residents, Higueros said. Bearing in mind that loneliness can be fatal for our aging population, and that coronavirus only further isolated people, it’s easy to see how for an elderly person living alone, even an extra five minutes chatting with someone at lunch could change the tune of their day.
Image courtesy of Bear Robotics
Every robot has sensors and three cameras that network with its AI brain to help steer itself and avoid obstacles, and an auto-return feature sends it back to its place in the kitchen when jobs are done.
In addition to Front Porch, Servi robots are currently deployed at a number of places across California, including Downtown L.A.-based restaurant Chiguacle Sabor Ancestral de Mexico, Ten-Raku Korean barbeque in Lynwood, John’s Incredible Pizza in Carson and a Denny’s location in Hawthorne.
“We do think that the United States is probably going to become the biggest market for us over the course of the next couple of years,” said Higueros. “A lot of folks see the ROI because obviously [they] have tremendous turnover,” said Higueros. “It’s kind of like an insurance policy in the sense that you at least have the food runner in place, in case they decide to leave you on a Friday night.”
Not to mention, the cost. At $25 to $30 per day the robots cost a fraction of the typical salary of a person working at a nursing home. For its part, Front Porch saved $6,665 on overtime in one month.
“In the past we would have asked a staff member to come back for a split shift after working the morning shift. Now we run with the labor we got with the support of the robots,” Front Porch noted.
Two other senior living centers not affiliated with Front Porch in L.A. are also using Servi robots: Regency Grand of Cascade Senior Living in West Covina and Merrill Gardens at Rolling Hills in Rancho Palos Verdes. Hotels also use them, some Marriott and Hyatt locations employ the robots now. In total the company has Servis active in 43 states, and aims to expand to all 50 by next year. With plans to deploy more in casinos and airline lounges all over the country.
A crucial step towards even furher adoption of waiter bots depends on how customers respond. As a 2021 Boston University Hospitality Review report noted, “consumers’ acceptance of service robots is determined not only by its functionality (e.g., perceived usefulness and ease of use), but also by social-emotional and relational elements that robots can provide.” In other words, any interaction that leaves a guest unsettled could be a setback. But, in Servi’s case, since it doesn’t mimic any humanoid features, its existence in a support capacity to human staff is more tolerable.
More than half of the residents at the communities that piloted Servi bots said it felt like the robots let them have more quality time with staff. 65.4% of residents told Front Porch the robots improved their overall dining experience. One resident anonymously surveyed said the robot was “much cuter than I thought it was going to be.” Another added there were “originally many naysayers, the chair of the committee really pushed for it [and] complainers have been won over.”
Some servers, however, found hiccups. Several noted that they felt the robots were too slow.
“At first it was great/ helpful; first courses are great, but when they couldn’t talk to each other, it got frustrating,” one server wrote. Others reported their job being “less painful” since the robots helped mitigate some of the physical labor that comes with the job.
There were, of course, some glitches too. Sometimes bumpy carpets would cause the robots to spill food. A server noted, “one robot gets lost sometimes.” Servers suggested that Bear Robotics make the robots louder, as one person saw that a robot “got very close to a resident that was walking very slowly,” but avoided a collision. But by and large the feedback was positive. One server said they wished the Servi robots were bigger so they could “fit an entire table’s worth of food without worrying about it tipping over.” Another waiter joked that the Servi could only be improved by making it able to clean the table for the waiter.
And most importantly, when servers at both senior living facilities were asked how they’d feel if the robots were taken away after the two-month pilot, the recorded response was pretty unanimous: “We’d be screwed.”
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
These 2 Los Angeles Startups Are on the Forefront of a New Space Health Care System
06:00 AM | January 01, 2023
As human space tourism ramps up, and we continue to explore deeper into the cosmos, one alarming fact is becoming more evident: Despite decades of human spaceflight, we still have very limited information about how going to space, or staying there for sustained periods of time, affects our bodies.
So far, flights to low Earth orbit are relatively stable, and thankfully no one has perished on a trip yet. But there’s also more to come; Virgin Galactic is planning more space tourism trips next year and beyond that, longer-term missions like Elon Musk’s pet project to colonize Mars could come with some serious health risks. And, like any mission to space, nearly every variable has to be considered before launch to ensure the people undertaking these journeys are as healthy as possible.
That’s where private industry comes in. There’s a handful of startups that are focused on developing technology to make it easier to monitor human health in space. And while it may seem like a far-away pipe dream, they’ll be the first to tell you that having startups begin to develop health care products for space-related exploration is key to ensuring there aren’t mass casualties.
“The truth is, there is little that is more complex than space, and biology, and these are not things that have fast development times,” said Elizabeth Reynolds, a biologist and director of the Starburst Aerospace Care in Space Challenge. The challenge recently awarded six winning startups (three were local to Southern California) a $100,000 investment from pharmaceutical company Boryung, support for on-orbit experimentation by Axiom, a Houston-based company making private space stations, and acceptance into Starburst’s 13-week accelerator program.
“As we talk about deep space exploration, that is a point where we get into high amounts of cosmic radiation and it's an environment that will kill us,” Reynolds said. “We need solutions that are completely untethered from Earth.” Reynolds said she was “less concerned” about space tourism, and more focused on long-term habitation.
Reynolds did note that there’s one easy option, one that NASA’s relied on heavily up until now: send robots into space to do human work. That’s possible, but she noted, “I cannot imagine a future where we continue to only explore space by robots.”
There’s a myriad of issues that people face when spending long durations of time in space. Some side effects can range from motion sickness to radiation poisoning to heart and muscle atrophy. Others include bodily fluid shifting due to zero gravity, changes in vision, loss of muscle strength and changes in gut biome behavior. Of course, there’s also a host of potential mental side effects too, including depression or anxiety. A 2021 study published in the Journal of Clinical Nursing noted that these effects can also persist even after a person comes back from orbit.
Kay Olmstead, CEO of San Diego-based NanoPharma Solutions, was one of the companies selected by Starburst. She told dot.LA the company is working on a way to deliver drugs to people in space to maximize their effects.
Olmstead told dot.LA., NanoPharma “uses [a] nanocoating method developed by NASA to nanosize drugs to improve biosorption – [the] smaller the particle size, better solubility of [the] drug, hence better absorption into our body which is mostly water.”
The importance of nano-soluble drugs is key, since it could limit side effects that come from typical ingestion of drugs, such as liver and kidney damage, or systemic toxicology (when a drug is absorbed by or distributed to other parts of the body besides the specific target area), Olmstead explained.
She added that NanoPharma is working on using vacuum pressure in low Earth orbit to deliver drugs to diseased organs without needles, a potential groundbreaking solution since right now, most life-saving drugs need to be administered via IV and that’s “not suitable for space travelers.” Instead, NanoPharma is working to patent several methods of drug delivery including a nano-nasal spray and a nano-inhaler.
Olmstead noted that there’s a number of companies working on private space stations – besides Axiom, she also cited Northrop Grumman, Nanoracks and Sierra Space, who all have “grand plans of infrastructure building in space for private space travelers and in-space manufacturing.”
There’s a couple dueling local companies with ambitions to build private space stations as well: Vast Space, and Orbital Assembly.
Olmstead noted that there will have to be construction workers in space overseeing building of these outposts, and added, “Care for these space travelers and workers is the most important concern of these aerospace companies aside from the station building/maintenance.” She also said that outposts on the moon, which will likely be built after stations in low Earth orbit, come with “even more severe health hazards.”
Another local startup that won the Starburst challenge was Vibo Health. Based in Los Angeles and led by physicist and CEO Gil Travish, Vibo develops wearable health tracking technology that uses wrist scanning to give users insight into their health, with the goal of finding health risks without invasive tests.
Right now, Vibo has a growing business terrestrially, but Travish told dot.LA he’s eager to see how the tech could be applied to astronauts. “It is a niche, of course, but it's a growing niche,” Travish said. He noted that Vibo hopes to do in-space testing within the next two years.
For now, though, both Vibo and NanoPharma said they will continue developing and testing their technology on the ground with the goal of bettering patients’ lives here on earth. Travish said he’s optimistic that the work will not only better conditions for space-faring humans, but also unlock information about the human condition.
“It’s not just about going to space, it’s about learning more about ourselves,” Travish said.
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
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