There was a recently a review of Apple Classical in The New Yorker [1], which compares it to a few other services, some also mentioned in this thread. Apparently, many fare better on grouping compositions as an serious listener would appreciate.
I'm not sure if the other options own their own label(s), though. It will be interesting to see how this acquisition shapes the content available on the app.
The article being reported on does not make this conclusion. The study authors are interested only in the time it takes for (human) users to complete CAPTCHAs, and did not examine the speed at which bots solve them.
The fact that bots can solve them -- and solve them fast -- is apparently a well-established fact in the literature. There is a table in the article comparing its (human) participants' solve times to a number of previous studies which examined how fast/accurate bots can be.
The Register (and the New Scientist, which most of this is cribbed from) is looking for a headline, so whatever. But the study's authors say that the "surprising" part is that "solving time and user perception are not always correlated" for human users. Game-based CAPTCHAs with sliders may take longer, but the users in the study still enjoyed them more than image-selection-based ones.
The texts in the sample set are too short for this to be meaningful. The human-authored TOEFL tests (which compare unfavorably with the eighth-grader essays) are ~100 words. The longest sample is under 1000 words.
GPT detection ought to be optimized for longform texts, so tests of its efficacy should be, too. Perhaps the current detectors on the market are trying to assess writing at the sentence level, but if that's the case then it should be obvious that they will be inaccurate.
GMail can write most of a 100-word email for me if I type "Thanks so much" and hit tab. That's a good thing. If GPT is useful as a "productivity" tool, it is for low-level "writing" tasks like this, which aren't really writing at all, just rote responses. Anyone who can access this tool (if they have confidence in its prowess) should use it.
Writing proper is about developing ideas, and it's this that people need to be concerned about. It's true that if your college admissions essay is riddled with typos, eyebrows may be raised, but its ultimate significance is whether you can and are willing to reason. If someone is using ChatGPT (or spellcheck, or Grammarly) in order to cultivate the appearance of having "proper English," who cares? But if they're using GPT to avoid thinking altogether, that's a problem.
At ~250 words, I guess the only thing you can assess is good formal usage. It's patently obvious that both GPT and non-native English speakers will outperform native speakers on this.
Of course, I hope that anyone in the position to assess short-form writing is made aware of this research, and is cautious about GPT detection. On the other hand, it'd be pretty funny if idiosyncratic grammatical choices became the marker of a human hand.
My introduction to roff and co. as a typesetting system was the 1997 edition of Dale Dougherty and Arnold Robbins's Sed & Awk. Many of the book's examples are geared toward automatically inserting/correcting roff macros. I can't recall a specific example from the book, but it would be something like "insert the roff 'section' macro on matches of `/^CHAPTER/`."
Ultimately, it's probably not practical, but I liked the idea of using UNIX utilities to get around worrying about markup altogether during the writing process. The book isn't really about roff, so I only got a sideways view of this kind of workflow. Was this "a thing" in the 90s?
This reminds me of an article in the Atlantic I liked [1], which argued that the real problem for American education is that it places too much emphasis on the mechanics of reading comprehension, leaving content-oriented coursework such as history, science, and sociology on the back burner. Three-cueing or any other inference-based approach to reading isn't going to work when kids don't have enough knowledge about the world to make good inferences.
It's good to hear that phonics are making something of a comeback. But it seems like other things will need to change too. I spent some time teaching freshman English at a state university -- when a kid stumbles over a word like "infrastructure," one senses that the literacy problem goes beyond the sonic properties of printed text.
I love hating on how bad the modern search experience is -- SEO spam has ruined everything.
But I'm a little confused by the exact wording of this post. Google's Bard is in competition with GPT, isn't it? Is it not? Was there a news item I missed about this?
I don't use Google often enough to have a strong sense of what might be different and what remains the same, but I've just run a couple of searches and don't notice any drastic interface changes?
This is not a complaint -- I just really want to know the new reasons to complain about Google!
I just checked to see if Ctrl-F and Ctrl-B work, and found that the former kills one word forward and the latter acts like Ctrl-W ought to?