thunderfish

 Is the phenomenon of "quiet quitting" a positive shift in American's relationship with their work, workplaces, and employers? My immediate reaction is negative, but I wonder if I need to rethink this. Even though I'm often less productive than I feel I "should" be, I have a pretty high self-imposed expectation for showing up and doing my job. When I was a kid, I think I had perfect attendance for at least 4 years of elementary school (and most years in middle- and high-school, too). I was lucky not to be sick often, for sure, and my family was too poor to pull my sister and I out of school for non-school trips. But the expectation for showing up was also deeply instilled in me by my parents. That was partially because my dad, at least until I was 12 or so, was self-employed, driving his own logging truck into the woods every morning (often leaving the house by 5). If he didn't work, he didn't get paid. There was no health care, no paid time off, no ...

 I haven't been exploring AI as much as I feel I should be.  Because my job is about teaching writing, the set of LLM-based platforms that have become mainstream since Nov. 2022 (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Co-pilot, ...) will become a Very Big Thing in my professional life. I do fully expect that they will entirely transform teaching writing as it currently exists--from pre-K on. Early on (Spring 2023) I helped facilitate discussions and a speaker series, hoping to provide some guidance to faculty as they adapted to the availability of these AI applications. But, aside from trying to develop an understanding  of generative AI, I haven't spent much real time trying to figure out how to apply  them to my own work tasks. Or, rather: when I have tried, I've been pretty quickly discouraged at how clumsy ChatGPT has been at responding to my requests.  By its nature, generative AI manages a mostly conservative  response to queries: It generates text based on reasona...