Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI

Principle 3: Just try it!

The takeaway: in your overall quest for authoritative information, GPT-4 helps you start somewhere much closer to the finish line than if you didn’t have it as a resource.

[If ChatGPT] can do a job as well as a person, then humans shouldn’t duplicate those abilities; they must surpass them. The next task for higher education, then, is to prepare graduates to make the most effective use of the new tools and to rise above and go beyond their limitations. That means pedagogies that emphasize active and experiential lear

‘Have this evaluate your essay for ideas and content, or for sentence structure, or for organization, and then go ahead and take that feedback—that personalized feedback—and improve your essay.’”

Essentially, GPT-4 arranges vast, unstructured arrays of human knowledge and expression into a more connected and interoperable network, thus amplifying humanity’s ability to compound its collective ideas and impact.

The paradox of the AI era is this: as today’s imperfect LLMs improve, requiring less and less from us, we will need to demand more from ourselves. We must always insist on situating GPT-4 and its successors as our collaborative partners, not our replacements. We must continue to figure out how to keep human creativity, human judgment, and human val

‘Evaluate this essay for grammatical and sentence structure.’

Here are three key principles I’ve found useful in my own attempts to use GPT-4 in my work. Principle 1: Treat GPT-4 like an undergrad research assistant, not an omniscient oracle. If you’ve ever worked with an undergraduate research assistant (or if you were one in college), you know that a helper like that is both powerful and limited in specific

Principle 2: Think of yourself as a director, not a carpenter. When we work with tools, we are trained to think of them as an extension of us. A carpenter swings a hammer and gets one step closer to completing a house. He or she knows what the hammer will do each time it swings, and works accordingly. This metaphor breaks down when it comes to tool