The Weekly Write-Up #20
I’ve made it to #20 which is honestly probably farther than I thought I would get with this! Thank you to all of you who have been reading since the beginning and to all of you who have joined recently! Also, I apologize for the late post once again. These past few weeks have been crazy. I’ve been loaded with school, getting ready for my upcoming play, and so much more! Thank you all for your patience and understanding!
In this newsletter…
Some of the best history books out there!
I wish I were THIS good at guitar!
What is ChatGPT, and should we use it?
A board game about…birds?!
Something I Read
THE STORY OF THE WORLD
It has been a while since I read these, but I was thinking about them today. These are definitely the best history books that I’ve read. These books are how I learned about history in elementary school. History has never been my favorite class, so I probably didn’t enjoy these at the time, but as I look back, I’m able to appreciate how good they are! The Story of the Worldseries has 4 books about all of world history. Two important things to look for when it comes to history books are if the content is accurate and presented in an interesting way. The Story of the World series is certainly both of those things.
As far as my knowledge goes, The Story of the World series is absolutely accurate. The books present the information clearly and in a comprehensive way. They aren’t too hard to understand, but I wouldn’t say that they are “dumbed-down” either. They are mostly for 1st-6th graders, but teens or adults could definitely learn something from them too! Something else essential (at least from my standpoint) is that the books are captivating. Sometimes history can be intriguing, but generally, I find it pretty boring. Having an appealing book is pretty significant to me. These books take an exciting stance by telling it like a story. World history is told as a story rather than just a flow of boring facts, events, and dates. This makes it so much more interesting and motivating to read. That right there is the biggest plus of these books!
Although it has been a while since I’ve read them, I can still confidently recommend these to people who need to teach or learn history! The volumes are listed and linked up below:
Something I Watched
40 FINGERS YOUTUBE CHANNEL
As I was pondering what to talk about this week, I came across this YouTube channel, and I knew I had to share it. 40 Fingers is a YouTube channel where four guys play four guitars together. The talent of these guys is really impressive, and I’ve really enjoyed watching their videos. The songs they play are so pretty, and they play them very well. As a guitar player myself, I can appreciate the amazing talent of these guys. The songs are instrumental and can also be great for listening to while working or relaxing (depending on the song). I’ve been listening to a lot of these this week, and I have really enjoyed them! They also play some of my favorite songs, which I’ve linked below:
Medleys
Songs
While this was a short review of this YouTube channel, it is really a great channel that you should definitely check out in your spare time!
Tech Thoughts
CHAT GPT
By this point, most people have probably heard of ChatGPT in one way or another, but most people have either no idea or only a vague idea of what it is. In this article, I’m going to explain what ChatGPT is, but not only that. I also want to take a different approach: I’m not going to just share the capabilities, but also the moral side of it. Should we use ChatGPT, how is it going to change society, etc.? Without further ado, let’s get into this!
ChatGPT is an AI (Artificial Intelligence) chatbot developed by Open AI. While GPT-3 itself has been around for a while now, it hasn’t been in chat form. With ChatGPT, you can chat with the chatbot as if it were a human. ChatGPT can write essays, do research, answer questions, give advice, tell stories, write articles, and so much more! You can even ask it to explain things to a specific age group or write a paper like a person from a specific grade or with a certain way of speaking (like a pirate). During my testing with ChatGPT, I asked it to write a plot line for a book, tell me who different people are, and write a sample ‘about page’ for a newsletter such as mine. It is truly spectacular what ChatGPT can do. You can literally ask it almost anything, and it will give you a pretty accurate response!
Now, to the moral side of things because this is where it gets “fun.” A question arises as AI gets developed. Hasn't anybody seen Age of Ultron, The Matrix, or Terminator? Seriously, though, these movies all talked about robots/AI taking over the world and usually ended up in controlling or killing humans. While this may not happen (yet), there are still some moral ideas to be considered. Just because we can doesn’t mean we should.A few weeks ago, one of my teachers stated that he used it to write an essay using a prompt he had given to one of his students. He said that he would have given an A to the essay that Chat GPT gave him! Another one of my teachers started off class by talking to us about ChatGPT and how powerful it is and why we shouldn’t use it. She forbid us from using it in her class, which I agree is completely fair, as it could totally be used to write essays or do research. This chatbot is changing the workplace, schools, and people’s lives in a whole new way! In my mind, ChatGPT is a tool like the calculator, for example. Kids have to learn addition, multiplication, fractions, etc. before using a calculator because those are things that you need to know in life. When you get to middle school and high school math, though, you get to use a calculator. This is how I view ChatGPT. We have to learn how to write because that is important. Once we get to a higher point in writing, though, and can write and communicate ideas clearly and comprehensibly (maybe after graduating college), AI can be used since it can speed up work. Disclaimer: Just to be clear, I do not think students should use ChatGPT to write their papers, whether your teacher is aware that it exists or not.
Another thing to consider is how this will change the workplace. This bot could take jobs normally done by humans like writing reports, doing research, or even designing websites! Finally, something I’ve been thinking about is how does this affect writing? As a writer myself, I have been wondering what this does to the value of writing. If ChatGPT can write so clearly, what does that mean for human writing? Does the value decrease because there could be so much writing out there, even if it is written by ChatGPT? Or does the value increase because human writing becomes more valuable? Another question: can we even tell the difference? OpenAI actually designed a program to detect if something is written by ChatGPT or by a human. This doesn’t always work though, and you can actually tell ChatGPT to write it so it won’t be detected, meaning the detector is rendered almost useless. Remember, my teacher would have given that paper that he wrote using ChatGPT an A! I could have even written most of this post in ChatGPT, and you probably wouldn’t have known (I didn’t do that). These are all important questions to ask as we enter this new era of technology in our society. We have to be careful about how we think about and use ChatGPT. In summary, I believe that ChatGPT is a tool that should be used carefully that could benefit society by helping people in their daily lives! Try it out here.
Thank you for joining me on this journey as we explored ChatGPT and the moral standpoint of it! If you agree or disagree with my analysis or have anything to add, please let me know in the comments!
Wild Card
WINGSPAN
“A game about birds?!” was precisely the first thing I thought when my family purchased this game. I was not alone because I think that my dad was thinking the same thing. Little did we know, this would become one of our favorite board games of all time! Wingspan is a board game where each player gets their own player board, as there is no central player board that is shared by all players. Each player attempts to get the most points by playing bird cards and using their affects. You can play new birds, collect food, have your birds lay eggs, draw cards, and complete goals. There are four rounds, but the twist is that each round gets shorter, so you have fewer actions.
This game is gorgeous and very, very well-designed! The player boards, each bird card, the eggs, the card tray, and pretty much everything else is so pretty! Out of all the games my family owns, this might just be the prettiest (which is saying a lot since we own over 110 games)! The cards are really cool because they have the name of the bird (both common name and scientific name), a picture of the bird, and facts about the bird. The cards are actually really accurate and correctly depict what type of nest they have, how many eggs they lay, how big they are, where they live, etc. The purpose of the game isn’t even to learn about birds, yet I’ve learned a lot about birds through this game while still having fun!
Wingspan is for 1–5 players and is a really fun game to play with other board-game lovers. The game isn’t terribly complex, but it isn’t super simple either. The age is 14+ which is one of the highest player ages out of all the games that my family owns, but I think kids younger than that can definitely play. I mean, my 12-year-old brother plays it (although he did start playing hard board games at 6 years old). I think this game is pretty good with 2, 3, and 4 players, as I have played it with that many people and had a good game! I haven’t played with 5 players or tried the automa version (solo), but I think both would be pretty fun.
Wingspan is one of the most fun games I’ve ever played! This is one of my family’s new go-to games, and the four of us really enjoy playing it together. There are also expansions to the game like Oceania (which my family has), European, and Asia (which is the newest one). These expansions add new cards, eggs, and boards to make the game more fun and enjoyable! I really enjoy Wingspan, and you should definitely consider checking it out here. As always, if you have questions about the rules or the game itself, kindly let me know in the comments!
Keep on writing! I’m enjoying your weekly write ups!