I've been teaching this subject since 2018, and before that, for about 5 years I was a management consultant, so pretty squarely in the crosshairs of "PMC".
That timing has, though, straddled the whole LLM thing. When I started - not even a consideration. Today? My department head wonders aloud whether we can get away with not teaching to the LLM default of the current PMC world.
I share your deep concerns with the maybe-harmful places trusting such tools goes, even leaving out the more egregious cases of folks driving themselves nuts by treating their local instance of an LLM as a girlfriend or spiritual helper (or both, bleh). At its mildest, my thinking as a teacher of writing and speaking competence, I think "well, you don't bring a forklift to the gym," by which I mean, okay, maybe an LLM might make some suggestions on how to tighten up your email or memo or academic paper, and it might even be good advice, but if you've never figured out how to judge a better piece of writing from another, how will you judge an LLM's output as "better?" Or "worse?" At the more extreme ends, you give over not only the judgment of is this good, but also what even is good? It's not like quality of writing is a wholly objective measure like gravity or the passage of time - there's a value-judgment there, and if you start giving that over to machines, it seems like trouble to me.
Maybe there's a helpful midpoint here, but I find myself more and more drawn to the "Butlerian Jihad" side of things, even as the professional pressures around me move in the exact opposite direction.
no subject
That timing has, though, straddled the whole LLM thing. When I started - not even a consideration. Today? My department head wonders aloud whether we can get away with not teaching to the LLM default of the current PMC world.
I share your deep concerns with the maybe-harmful places trusting such tools goes, even leaving out the more egregious cases of folks driving themselves nuts by treating their local instance of an LLM as a girlfriend or spiritual helper (or both, bleh). At its mildest, my thinking as a teacher of writing and speaking competence, I think "well, you don't bring a forklift to the gym," by which I mean, okay, maybe an LLM might make some suggestions on how to tighten up your email or memo or academic paper, and it might even be good advice, but if you've never figured out how to judge a better piece of writing from another, how will you judge an LLM's output as "better?" Or "worse?" At the more extreme ends, you give over not only the judgment of is this good, but also what even is good? It's not like quality of writing is a wholly objective measure like gravity or the passage of time - there's a value-judgment there, and if you start giving that over to machines, it seems like trouble to me.
Maybe there's a helpful midpoint here, but I find myself more and more drawn to the "Butlerian Jihad" side of things, even as the professional pressures around me move in the exact opposite direction.
Cheers,
Jeff