anotherman554
Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
Depending on the assignment you aren't necessarily expected to read anyone else's take on a book and you aren't expected to make sure you are saying something that hasn't been said before or anything like that.
You are simply expected to analyze the book and offer an interpretation.
And it's not like that's the only way to use the AI. With a few minutes of effort, I just got CHATGPT to write an essay using "post-colonial theory" to interpret the Wizard of Oz, which was pretty interesting.
This isn't a field like engineering where there are objective right and wrong answers and anyone dies if you pass the students who are not so great at writing essays on literature.
"As a literary critic, describe how Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz is a religious figure."
The divine being contained within I would think would match Buddhism pretty well.
The reference to relics is too vague to pin down to any religion, there's probably lots of examples of it in lots of religions. If I had to defend it off the top if my head I'd compare the Ruby slippers to the "holy moly" herb Athena gives Odysseus to defend him from Circe.
If anything I think GPT went wrong saying strength is one of the virtues associated with the Lion. It would be much easier to focus on courage and say he needs to learn to be like a brave apostle who says things like "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me:"
My point wasn't that this essay was particularly good, necessarily, only that it was was good enough for undergraduate work.
I just asked Chat GPT 4 to explain the religious significance of the Wizard of Oz as a literary critic. Here's some of what it gave me, it doesn't write anything like you claim it does:
"Moreover, Dorothy's companions -- the Scarecrow seeking a brain (wisdom), the Tin Man seeking a heart (love/compassion), and the Lion seeking courage (strength) -- symbolize spiritual virtues that are often extolled in religious texts. They embark on this quest together, mirroring the communal aspect of many religions.
The slippers (silver in the book, ruby in the film) can be viewed as sacred objects, or relics, that assist her in her journey, providing divine protection and eventually leading her to salvation (returning home).
Finally, the revelation that the Wizard is a mere mortal, and that Dorothy had the power to return home all along, imparts a spiritual lesson often found in religious narratives: the divine or the sacred is not external, but within us."
If I was a student I could have easily expanded on these concepts (with or without GPT) and turned in a good essay.
The fact an inspection document is impressive to read doesn't mean it is accurate. If he blew you away with his ability to name 100 minor things, but missed a structural issue, you'd be screwed, and would have no way to know this until the structure starting cracking.
Look at it this way:
Imagine you have $200 dollars to invest. You can invest in country A or Country B. You know in a year one country will be up 10% and one will be up 1%. You don't know which country will be up the 10% and which will be up the 1%.
In a year, you need $205 dollars. Unless you like to live dangerously the rational thing to do is invest equally in both countries where you'll get a 6 dollar return. If you pick a single country you'll have a 50% chance of not having enough money.
Of course real world investing is more complicated, but my example demonstrates it's about probabilities of success at meeting your goals. Country A and country B have equal expected returns but investing in both decreases the probability of running out of money when you need it. Or it should, if we've modeled the expected returns of each country correctly.
We also haven't had a official recession in the U.S. over that time period, I believe, so the topic of recession seems like a red herring.