This Valentine's Day my (very corporate) landlord paid somebody to hang a little bag containing confetti, a small twix candy bar and a mechanical pencil on my door. What am I, in third grade? Totally tone deaf, but what can I really expect from a soulless corporation?
Honestly, the disclosure probably had nothing to do with the message itself. I'm sure it was all about institutional beliefs and policies regarding plagiarism. If some student took credit for an unattributed ChatGPT essay, they'd probably be pitilessly be given a zero at best.
However, including the disclaimer totally undermined the message (which was a pro-forma thing no one would probably have cared about otherwise). The message said "we care," but the disclaimer said "but not that much," and that would understandably offend people if noticed.
The futility of the whole situation has resulted in a culture of ceremony around the devastation as a way to cope. Now that people have violated the coping ceremony, we're mad at them. But why? Because we are powerful enough to at least scold them in an attempt to preserve the coping ceremony. But they're not the ones shooting people. They're not the ones directing policy that causes mass shootings.
Instead, we need to direct all that anger to changing the situation such that they never are put in a position of writing letters about shotting victims. Instead of smugly stating they are worthless people because their jobs can be replaced by a chatbot, we should question why it is the case that someone's job is to write condolence letters after shootings. Why aren't we mad that's an acceptable job function in the US? The solution students are looking for is not more empathy toward shooting victims, it's fewer shooting victims in the first place!
You're kind of missing the point:
1. Institutional practices/beliefs about plagiarism will influence its behavior in other areas.
2. "Empty platitudes," are often necessary, as a social lubricant. People aren't robots. Sometimes you can't do anything, but also you can't say nothing.
3. I very much doubt the university administration only exists to send out these messages, so you can't reasonably question if their job should exist based on this narrow episode.
To put the “respect their consensus reality” claim into a different format: every computer’s implementation of == will return true for the two strings, but most human brain implementations of == will return false - i.e. the difference isn’t in the string, it’s in the comparator function. The human brain implementation is obviously bugged, but the maintainer (whether God or evolution) isn’t accepting pull requests, so the bug is unlikely to ever be fixed. If you have to interface with the human implementation anyway, you simply have to account for this oddity. It’s like supporting Internet Explorer on your website.
Same with words. Provenance for text will be a thing.
And you might say "what's the difference???" and what you have to realize is, this is entirely emotional and that is the point. The community wants real empathy. They do not believe they are getting it, and you can't logic your way out of that.
Think about the effect on the writer, in one case you need to sit down and face the blank page finding the right words to reassure, calm down and empathise with young adults who are scared and look up to you. You might even change as a person, just by the mere act of having to find those words and thinking about what those kids need and feel.
In AI generated text you can just ask for platitudes, copy paste, send and never have to confront anything. You can borderline become a worse person by becoming calloused at how easy it is to have to face a difficult situation
The words themselves are fairly unimportant in this whole situation, what people want out of the letter is to be heard, understood and have actual leadership. By having a glorified clippy write it for you, you are letting them down regardless of the quality of the text
The only thing that matters is a cultural change that will lead to fewer mass shootings. Getting angry at university administrators for whatever lack of empathy they demonstrate is myopic. There's plenty enough reason for people to get angry about the way things are, but this is the wrong thing to be mad about.
> Why was the author even considering using AI in the first place?
Maybe because there aren't anymore words to be said about these things. They happen so frequently, that the expectation is words will be said after the fact, rather than action will be taken to prevent the next occurrence. So here we are, days after the shooting, mad at the words someone said after the shooting, rather than the fact there was a shooting.
Who here is still mad about the shooting? Who here is going to do something today to make the next shooting less likely?
I'm still mad about Sandy Hook. That's in my home county. I'm still mad about Tucson - that was the local grocery store I went to during school. I'm still mad about Virginia Tech, I'm still mad about Vegas, and every other mass shooting. I'm still mad that it took Alex Jones nearly a decade to be convicted for the continued harassment and verbal abuse of people that had to deal with their 6 year olds get shot up by a psycho while sitting in 1st grade class.
Unfortunately, there's a powerful voting bloc both in DC and around the US that will vote to make sure nothing happens. Forget about enforcing the laws on the books - lots of police sheriffs around the nation have said they have no interest in doing so.