Rhetory.com		Daniel Kies Department of English College of DuPage
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"a bot rote my paper cuz riting iz dificult"

 —  an internet meme

"However great their intellectual degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my sympathy…."

 —  H. G. Wells (1895, p. 65)

I have configured my server to redirect people using large language models (LLMs) — such as chat bots — to this page when a LLM pulls information from my web sites. I do this because I do not like copyright infringment, and I worry about academic dishonesty.

Students reading this page: You and I both know that people cheat in academics, and if you want to do this then you will become like the Eloi in Wells' The Time Machine. The Eloi inherited all the technology from the people who lived before their time, but the Eloi had no clue how or why it worked or how to repair or to improve it.

A bot — like ChatGPT — can offer you only a summation of what other real humans have already learned. It cannot derive insights. As Karl Popper (1962, p. 58) noted about the goals of knowledge, "we do not seek highly probable theories but explanations; that is to say, powerful and highly improbable theories," those "a-ha!" moments when humans find a novel solution in a sea of data or new insights in a sea of words and ideas. What kind of human do you wish to become, an Eloi or another Karl Popper?

Teachers reading this page: Your student used a bot to write an assignment and the bot took something from my web sites that the student incorporated into her/his work, possibly without attribution.

References

Popper, K. R. (1962). Conjectures and refutations: The growth of scientific knowledge. New York: Basic Books.

Wells, H. G. (1895). The Time Machine. Reprinted 2015. London: Penguin Random House UK.