The LLM Blues

LLMs depress me.

It's not so much the existential threat to my profession and livelihood (though that does lurk in the background, at least over the midterm).*

Rather, right now the depression stems from the fact that LLMs are almost inevitably going to diminish the importance of teaching writing skills in my law school classes. And helping people become better writers is one of my great joys as a professor. It's something I truly love doing. Yet the take-home essay -- essential to providing the sort of close reading and feedback I use to develop people as writers -- feels like one of those assignments that LLMs are going to make largely obsolete, or at least shift dramatically in terms of structure. I'm already pivoting in my syllabus -- this year is going to be a relatively experimental in terms of how to accommodate the existence of LLM -- and while I still expect that I'll do some amount of writing coaching, it definitely feels like the ground is shifting, and I'm already mourning what I anticipate losing.

* On the more existential threats, there does seem to be a bit of literary irony here for persons in the highly-educated literati contingent. I don't think I've personally engaged in this, but on a class level it certainly seems that the intelligentsia often blithely responded to the risks of tech disruption with "learn to code!" bromides, back when we thought that the machines were going to displace largely blue-collar workers. It turns out that while it's hard for a machine to develop the fine motor coordination necessary to serve as your plumber, one thing the robots are really great at is being smarter than the smart people. Whoops. "Learn to woodwork, radiologists!"