Category: Writing
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A notebook for seeing with language models
https://thesephist.com/posts/spc/ I want to share with you some of my early design explorations for what future creative thinking tools may look like, based on these techniques and ideas. This particular exploration involves what I’ve labelled a computational notebook for ideas. This computational notebook is designed based on one cornerstone principle: documents aren’t a collection of…
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Rebooting the reboot of the weekly digest posts
I’m going to make another attempt at publishing a curated weekly collection of artifacts that readers of this blog might find useful. The content will almost always have something to do with higher education, mostly technology, and usually AI.
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Zettlr is an open-source writing platform for academics
I’ve always been fascinated with the tools people use to write (I should write a follow-up to that post), and over the last couple of years that interest has been focused on what I think of as . Your one-stop publication workbench. From idea to publication in one app: Zettlr accompanies you while writing your…
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Most papers should be blog posts
“Most books should be papers, most papers should be blog posts, most blog posts should be tweets, and most tweets should be answers given in long-form interviews.” Robert Wiblin (2021)
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Hybrid writing is becoming the norm
Sarah Eaton has envisaged a “post-plagiarism era where we can’t know where the human ends and AI begins” – one in which hybrid outputs are the norm. To accept that, we must acknowledge the ways in which artificial intelligence might change the ways we understand concepts like cheating, and what constitutes good learning. Eva Alcock.…
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Building custom GPTs to provide feedback on samples of writing
Introduction “Our results show that i) ChatGPT is capable of generating more detailed feedback that fluently and coherently summarizes students’ performance than human instructors; ii) ChatGPT achieved high agreement with the instructor when assessing the topic of students’ assignments; and iii) ChatGPT could provide feedback on the process of students completing the task, which benefits…
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Lex: An AI-supported writing app
I’ve used the Lex writing app a few times for putting together a draft of longer pieces, when I would previously have gone to Google Docs. I like the experience and the interface, and have always enjoyed the experience. They’ve just put out an update to the product, called Checks. Checks will basically review your…
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Link: How are you using AI in writing?
https://www.publishnotperish.net/p/how-are-you-using-ai-in-writing “…quickly free-write letters of recommendation, allowing the AI tool to transform them into an appropriate format for the letter genre while correcting my spelling and grammar errors done in haste.”
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Link: The value of a long-term personal blog in the next phase of GAI
https://markcarrigan.net/2024/01/27/the-value-of-a-long-term-personal-blog-in-the-next-phase-of-gai/ “At this stage I’ve largely given up on social media to devote myself to blogging, in part because it feels like I’m helping realise something I will be very glad about further down the line.“
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Great titles do one of the following…
Great titles are PINC (pronounced “pink”). they do at least one of the following: make a promise, create intrigue, identify a need, or simply state the content. Michael Hyatt (2012). Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World.
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Outsourcing thinking to AI
It’s incredibly hard to think through a problem without writing about it, and you can’t write about it if you’re outsourcing it to AI. Farnam Street. Why Write. Obviously there are benefits to having AI produce output in some contexts. One example that comes to mind is the generic email sent to a large group,…
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Claude, help me convert a process into a narrative
Recently I needed to provide a description of a process that we’re going to implement for an upcoming conference, but the process we’d developed in our meetings was written as a list i.e. short, incomplete sentences in bullet point format. We wanted to submit a narrative description so I took that outline and gave it…
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Scaling output with no additional input
One of the ideas that makes generative AI so powerful is that it takes me exactly the same amount of time to create a 250-word summary, or a 1000-word summary of a document. For example, if I want to share an overview of a report I’ve written, or a lecture or presentation I’ve given, the…
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Claude, help me to write
Yesterday I published a post describing my concerns with how universities are responding to the new paradigm of expertise-on-demand that’s facilitated by generative AI. At the end of that post I noted that I wrote it collaboratively with Claude, and this post describes what that process (kind-of) looked like. I also want to be clear…
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A trilogy of posts on using AI for academic articles
Earlier today I published a short series of posts on some ideas I had for using language models (e.g. ChatGPT and Claude) to help support academic writing. I didn’t plan to write a series of posts. I initially had the idea to test Claude’s capability as a peer reviewer, and as I was finishing up…
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Claude, help me draft the outline of my academic paper
My last 2 posts have dealt with 1) the use of Claude to complete a peer review, and 2) how journals could include this process in their workflow. It follows that authors should be using LLMs as well. There are the obvious use cases; rephrasing passages, summarising, expanding, correcting, and so on. However, I think…
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Journals should be experimenting with LLMs in their editorial workflow
I recently wrote a post about using Claude to peer review an academic paper, and the decent job it did. Based on that experience, I started thinking about the probable impact on journal editorial workflows, a significant part of which is the peer review process. If I was still on an editorial board of a…