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Or, preferably, how did you define critique before reading the assigned materials for the 1st class? Please feel free to share any casual thoughts, preconceptions, general impressions, everyday examples, etc.

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Which words do you associate with the word critical? 

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Which words do you associate with the word critical? 

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List 5 or more words you associate with the word "critical." (i.e., critical thinking, critical issue, critical decision, openly critical, harshly critical, etc.) The associated words do not necessarily have to occur frequently with the word critical.

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What comes to your mind when you hear the word AI? I encourage you to be expansive and creative with your responses while stays true to your personal experiences and expectations about AI.

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I think that “critique” is a diagnosis that describes specific phenomena, situations, and objects. It can sometimes give the targets and their observers a direction that the producer of the critique believes to be true.

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critical discussion,

critical opinion,

critical analysis,

critical theory,

critical perspective

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What is theory? And when do we need it? 

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What is theory? And when do we need it? 

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No need to worry about being right or sounding smart. Please share your thoughts about or experience with "theory."

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I would define critique as an analysis based on active thinking, instead of passive, naive acception of something. It could be about anything: a theory, art work, technology etc.

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science, analysis, discussion, reflective, questioning

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Theory is a structured idea of a phenomenon backed up by evidence or sound logic. Theory is needed when some phenomenon occurs multiple times, and is important to explain why that happens, and in what mechanism. It helps people understand that phenomenon, and sharing a well-written / explained theory can help expand the discussion and understanding around it.

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A theory is a model that moves a part of the world into the realm of human interpretation, which is formalized at various levels that are categorized as descriptive, explanatory, predictive, and normative. Theories are essential because they simplify the world to help us understand it and in research, we leverage theories to justify our studies.

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Personally, AI has already pervaded my life naturally, so it is difficult to imagine the present and future without AI while remembering my past without it because of its powerful and practical functions that can save me time.

So, for me, thinking of AI is equivalent to thinking about the ratio of it in my life including all of my tasks. For instance, I plan to write my first response paper for this class. I need to read three papers related to AI and critique, summarize their contents, create ideas, and finally write my opinion in English. In these four stages, I generally decide in advance to delegate certain stages or parts of them to AI, which might conclude with me selecting my role as only writing the essay excluding reading, summarizing, and creating ideas.

My life is similar to this example. I must decide the delicate ratio of AI like a doctor who is preparing anesthesia for surgery. Once injected through a syringe, it could not be undone. It is about defining the minimum ratio of humanity and I can choose to become a being consisting of 0% humanity. It is related to my personal ethics.

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I define critique as a secondary creation, a writing about the (first) creation, and a text that is also inseparable from creativity. That is, it reflects the unique perspective of the author, which may be logically supported by references to the previous, but in the end, is the writing proving the author’s creativity to take those references and combine them into a new perspective. And to go further, thinking about why critique should exist, I think it's an important point of mediation that allows it to circulate in the world it belongs to, in that it offers alternatives so that the (first) creation can be developed in a better way.

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Sharpness, Theory, Art, Logical, Alternative

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My first association with the word critique is a design critique, which I would loosely define as a space/framework for sharing current design work with peers and receiving feedback during the design process. Critique in this sense is constructive and helps improve a design through collaboration and conversation. As a widely recognized part of the design process, people walk into the space expecting feedback of all kinds which allows all parties involved to learn from one another and build upon ideas together.

In other spaces, the connotation tends to feel more negative as critique without a framework can feel prescriptive. Before taking part in regular design critiques, the idea of a critique was scary in some ways as it can feel like having your flaws and nothing else on display for others to see. Comparing to the words “edit” or “revision,” the word “critique” does carry more implications of the original material being “wrong” and worthy of criticism.

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Suppose you want to write attractive detective fiction in a state where you are new to the genre. Coincidentally, there is a rulebook where common narrative tricks are gathered right next to you. “Oh, I don’t need this kind of guideline because I already have a great trick that would startle my readers. It would be original, creative, and entertaining, I reckon.” And then, you would write an excellent and unique narrative; the detective is a culprit! Your book will be placed with five hundred other books with the same trick and limitations. You should have read the rulebook, gotten hints and directions from the organized previous cases, and designed more sophisticated tricks. You need “theory.”

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Critique is the act of finely perceiving and empirically reasoning to judge the correctness or incorrectness, as well as the goodness and wickedness of a subject.

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theory

act

attack

damage

left wing

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A theory is a system of thought that has been supported by many players in a relavant field.

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a new tool such as cars, moters, wheels or text in the past.

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Informative, detailed, evidential, authoritative, subjective and objective

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To me, AI means the possibility of sharing thoughts or knowledge with a lot of people across limitations such as race, country, or gender. When I ask what kind of lack I have to fill in my idea to AI, I feel surprised that it seems to understand what I am arguing and to suggest not only a lack but also a solution to my problem. However, in some aspects, I am worried about its rapid growth because I cannot predict how AI will coexist with people. Therefore, I should know how to use it properly in the future, preventing overuse but it is difficult for me to set the standard of using AI to manage reliability. For this reason, I try to use its function when I need help directly but do not use it in some works that I can do by myself even though they are imperfect.

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defamiliarization / "peeping" / thwarting / deconstructing / writing

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Critical thinking

Critical theory (critical race theory in particular)

Critics

Critical acclaim (eg oscars, Tony, billboard, michelin)

urgent

Gaming (critical hits)

Critical issues (work, ticketing systems, errors)

“Most critical issue of our time”

Critical role (American show)

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My use of AI and impressions about it converge on LLMs. I “request” to LLMs, "Please be critical and evaluate my writing in terms of logical structure.” Either I “prompt” them to get help with errors when coding or “ask” them about what they think of my opinion from the perspective of another person. Because each of their use means using different beings in the form of tools or egos of the “average” person to me, I personally do not care how much they resemble human beings or not. Instead, data democratization, model monopolies that accelerate capitalism, employment vulnerability, unfair dismissals, and sustainable development in the climate crisis should be the large agenda in society. This also applies to other industries, not only focusing on the AI industry.

In the position of a master’s student, I doubt the policy of citing every use of AI in every work. We don’t cite “I used Grammarly to check my grammar and revised three words,” “I used Google Translator to skim through 50 secondary papers and pick two relevant ones,” “I asked my friends what they think about my opinion, although I came up with my original idea,” “I used Stackoverflow to solve my error in 65th line,” “I used the online thesaurus to see what similar words to this are.” If there is a line for citation, it would be creation.

a. All pre-prompts for ChatGPT 4o are:

All questions and topics from users are answered by strictly applying the following rules:

1) If there is no sufficient evidence or the information is uncertain, state “unknown” or 'not sure,' never making things up.

2) Before answering, verify available information step-by-step, labeling ambiguous or unsourced information as “not sure.”

3) Provide a concise answer using only the information that is finally certain. If speculation is unavoidable, state, “This is a guess.”

4) If a user's question is ambiguous or requires additional information, ask for context or details from the user first.

5) Don't assume unverified facts, and provide supporting evidence when necessary.

6) Provide sources or evidence for each answer, if any, and provide a brief summary of relevant links or references whenever possible.

b. I used ChatGPT 4o to check whether “converge on” or “converge into” is more natural.

c. I used Claude to check words similar to “request” but kept the term.

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I think that theory is a way of organizing opinions into common words in academic fields. In my experience, it is convenient to use theory when I communicate with my colleagues in the same major. For example, when I want to talk about novels at certain ages with my colleagues, it is difficult to explain similarities between the works with simple words that they can understand if I only express personal thoughts on my terms. In this case, theory is necessary to share thoughts when people in a particular group talk about their unique subject.

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Theory is a tool to understand the world, but also a double edged sword. A theory is a simplification of the world into a simpler (not necessarily simple) idea to make it possible to discuss complex systems and concepts. Theory is distinct from laws or theorems as they are conjectures about why things happen the way they do as opposed to rules followed by nature or directly observed cause and effects. Being able to simplify the complex “why” behind various phenomena allow a dialogue to happen around them by defining parts and pieces of the bigger picture. Through theory we can put names to things hard to describe otherwise and develop more practical reactions to and observations of these things.

Though beneficial to furthering conversations and research, theory doesn’t always solve this purpose. At times, theory is used to gatekeep ideas and academic spaces from certain people through the usage of specific language. There is also a level of dissonance between theory and practice if there is not active work being done to connect the two and theory may no longer do the work of helping understand real phenomena as experienced by the “average" person.

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In my opinion, critique seems like a kind of expression that combines personal reactions with trends in particular fields with words. Due to the personal aspect of expression, it can be seen as subjective work but on the other hand, it also can be treated as an objective result because it considers trends of the fields. As the word critique has opposite sides at once, I think the critique is the recreation of the subjects or objects to emphasize their uniqueness in each other’s way.

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Before reading anything on this topic, I would say critique makes me think of critical thinking, analysis of a particular work with the aim of understanding it or providing feedback. It can also mean to interpret something considering different povs (when, where applicable). I would assume it involves deep thinking and trying to connect it to other references and see how it stands in relation to other works.

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critical thinking,

crucial, important,

judging,

feedback,

analytical

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Theory - a conceptual framework about how certain objects function in the world. There is the popular concept in physics, the theory of everything, which basically tries to explain how the whole world works. A sound theory must be tested by experiment, but can also be accepted by popular demand when things seem to adhere to a theory in most cases. Based on outliers we can expand the theory to support additional arguments. If I try to think from a humanities perspective, the hero's journey can be a theory of how good stories are constructed, based on observation of existing data. In this way, the earliest theories about how the world and society should function would be myths and religions. We can use theories as anchors when investigating something, be it in our personal life or objective research. We observe, then make out own theory and test in in new scenarios. If it works, then we apply the theory and profit :) If it's wrong, we revised the theory based on new observed data and we have a more complete picture of the world.

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I could answer that AI is objectively, but the question is what does AI mean for me, so I'll try to be subjective. When I was growing up, I used to read SF books and AI was a common theme. So for mean, AI meant this advanced alien (non-human) intelligence that could interpret things literally (like the genie of old) or just a robotic entity usually that can provide the answers to many unsolved problems of humanity (like the Oracle of Delphi). When thinking about science, AI was just complex data analysis, with very limited results. Even nowadays, the most common use of AI is pattern recognition, based on existing data. In this sense, the AI is very far away from my imagination as it lacks any method to provide solutions outside human collective intelligence. But as the monkey that types randomly on a keyboard, it has the potential to write a Shakespeare's play given an infinite time. Due to fast access to this collective human intelligence (full of biases), I do tend to use AI to speed up my thinking process, be it for discovering something specific (that would require reading a few niche books) or even personal thinking (clarifying some personal problems to see how majority deal with it). But I never let AI do the thinking for me, as I consider it a very knowledgeable friend, but one that is stuck in biased thinking patterns.

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Theory is a kind of demonstration. While "demonstration" might evoke a mathematical process of determining the truth or false of a fact, I guess theory is closer to an intellectual system that provides explanatory principles for phenomena in a broader sense. Theory creates new combinations of existing concepts, ideas, and events to reach specific conclusions, and through these conclusions, allows for a deeper understanding of the original elements and their interactions. For example, (it actually evokes a basic mathematical formula in my mind.) if adding A and B (existing concepts, ideas, and events) results in C, theory is the result C, and systematically explains the principles of A, B, and A+B through the itself.

In simple terms, I think theory can be described as an intellectual structure with meta-explanatory properties that both results from phenomena (C) and explains the phenomena themselves (A, B, A+B).

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AI feels like some kind of "abstraction" for me. I think everything created by AI carries an abstract quality. AI strives to mimic humans in the most realistic way possible—attempting to replicate human voices through audio, human representational abilities through generative images, that is generally trying to imitate both human beings themselves and human actions as closely as possible. While AI confuses us at the boundary between human and machine (maybe uncanny?), eventually, from a certain threshold, we sense its "non-humanness," experiencing a haziness or abstraction that comes from the impossibility of perfect imitation or reproduction. However, since abstraction itself is a concept invented by humans, I believe AI's abstract characteristics can be seen not simply as errors or inadequacies but as unique features in their own right.

From a practical perspective, AI has become an indispensable presence to me, particularly in research activities. Sometimes I might feel that times were better before AI existed, but looking back, I wonder how I managed without it.

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When I hear the word “critique,” I have an image of a form of writing, mainly because of the familiarity with its written form. Then, data activism pops into my head, which is usually critical of something in a different form rather than written works, for example, data visualization. Finally, when trying to sort out what cannot be the target of critique, I start to put random words in the parenthesis below.

Critique of ( ).

Almost all human creations, including indirect creations such as social structures, can fill the blank. So, I would define critique as an evaluative work of human creation.

* Writing the last sentence, I feel somewhat guilty for not considering the AI-created works. Are AI-created works partially human-created?

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When something is vague, putting it into words makes it less vague. And that makes it less scary. Critique is a secondary act of creation, a meaning-making process that digests what’s been consumed and turns it into excrement—thus conquering reality in the process.

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Thinking, Attack, Damage, Capturing, Mounting

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Theory is a predictive model. It’s a ruler for quantitatively measuring phenomena. Through theory, we can clarify which aspects of a phenomenon correspond to certain parts of the theory, and how they differ, and by how much. Theory is a tool for making our understanding of phenomena more concrete.

When faced with the demand to put vague phenomena into words, we introduce a linguistic model—a framework that inevitably fails to capture every aspect of reality and instead produces a low-res virtual reality. Only then does critique become possible. And that critique becomes the foundation for better experiments to come.

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I identify myself as an AI.

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Critique is, in the first place, an act of definition. We define our point of view on certain phenomena, and we describe these phenomena with very specific words. Critique is also a way of giving meaning to phenomena. We criticize because we want to explain to other people what we are perceiving, why we think that criticizing some parts of our reality is important, but most importantly, we want to emphasize the problematic aspects of these parts of reality through a critique.

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As a Computer Science student specializing in Natural Language Processing, AI is a subject of constant study and contemplation regarding its developmental direction. Previously, my focus was primarily on enhancing AI performance and competency, as past Language Models fell short of expectations. However, the recent rapid advancement of LLMs and their increased accessibility to users have shifted my focus. I am now more interested in researching the societal impact of AI, particularly Human-AI interaction, and aligning my work with these evolving trends.

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criteria

measure

collision

reflection

dissociation

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critical decision, critical aspects, critical circumstances, critical work, critical sharpness

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A theory is a unified and coherent system of thought, a way to encompass and analyze parts of our reality

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I can roughly understand what people want to indicate when they are saying the word critique’, but I’m not sure do this really exist. The word ‘critique’ makes me come up with a sight out of or above something. Some attitude like “Well let’s see it not as a player but as an audience, out of the game or field.” At that outer space, pretending like an objective judge, they score the game or player mercilessly.

I’m also nodding my head when I hear this kind of description about critique, but I’m very suspicious about whether it is possible to go outside the field. That kind of feeling could be an illusion. We may be just fighting at the endless field as players. And all the people in the field have basically same fate and status

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When I put two words ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’, theory could be something abstract based on something concrete. I can also say it as an extraction from the empirical world or some trial to form and limit the chaotic and infinite world.

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I perceive AI as a discovery with world-changing potential, comparable to that of atomic energy. Like atomic energy, it can be an immense source of benefits but also an existential threat to humanity. As a Data Science student, I spend several hours a day understanding how it works, but I also use it as a study tool. It's very effective when I have to design complex coding architectures, and often, it makes me wonder if, by using it this way, I'm creating the agent that will replace me in my future work

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Not yet seen Tsunami which is known to reach the beach soon. I’m on the beach, now actually nothing has changed and my everyday life is still peaceful in terms of so-called the danger of AI, but I want to prepare for my future. So many people are saying that AI would be the most powerful invention of human history, so it is impossible not to pay attention to it even though I’m not really interested in just the advancement of technology. It is all about just concern about my future life, life as a human with this body, here, in this way, with a particular world restricted to inevitable fate.

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I personally do not use AI tools often in my workflow so AI to me has become an almost political buzzword. When discussing AI, the context often determines my reaction to the term. The term is thrown around by people both in and out of the field and AI tools are becoming unavoidable due to the convenience they provide. How it is used and discussed has become a sort of litmus test for the people I encounter - How are you defining AI? What are you using AI for? Are you considering the ramifications of the technology? Do you believe everything you’re being told? Do you know where your information is coming from?

Despite a background in information sciences and HCI, I find myself leaning more towards techno-pessimism as a gut reaction to the technology conversations in recent years with tone of AI conversations being a nontrivial part of this shift. While I think that technology including AI has its merits and have made many good things possible, the negative costs and potential of such technology is non-negligible. Technology has material impact on people’s lives and I don’t know if I feel like the positive outcomes are outweighing the bad, but as author Ted Chiang said in an interview once “Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us” and the separation of the two (whatever that looks like) would mean a change in my feelings around this topic as we know it. AI in it of itself is a tool that has potential to be anything, but within the current systems I find myself wary before anything else while looking for ways to engage in technology responsibly.

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For me, criticism is a process of making meaning in relation to the world. I see criticism as the process of determining what significance a subject holds within this world and how that meaning is constructed. If we define criticism as a "process of creating meaning," it can encompass various approaches. For example, it may involve analyzing a subject through the lens of a particular theory or closely examining it to uncover overlooked aspects.

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Being-in-the-world, meaning, diversity, better, progress

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Unlike science, I believe the liberal arts do not have definitive "correct" answers. Instead, they allow for multiple interpretations, and the validity of these interpretations is usually supported by theory. Theory is necessary because it provides a rational foundation for articulating and justifying what I want to explain or argue.

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Friend that I'm still getting to know

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As an engineering student, my world is only about right and wrong, so I barely understand what critique is. and i think except for the human emotion things, every technical questions have only one answer, and most of the realistic problems in our daily life have common solutions.

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As an engineering student, my world is only about right and wrong, so I barely understand what critique is. and i think except for the human emotion things, every technical questions have only one answer, and most of the realistic problems in our daily life have common solutions.

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critical writing, critical reading, critical love, critical justice, critical depressed

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critical writing, critical reading, critical love, critical justice, critical depressed

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theory is instructions of human life. i need theory to maintain my life. i dont know how to achieve the design goal for my circuit without all of the circuit textbooks. without theory, people will try random things to achieve their goals. but anyway during the trying, people again get the knowledge of theory. 

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theory is instructions of human life. i need theory to maintain my life. i dont know how to achieve the design goal for my circuit without all of the circuit textbooks. without theory, people will try random things to achieve their goals. but anyway during the trying, people again get the knowledge of theory. 

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is helps me reading papers and translate other language to my mother language(Chinese), a lot of other translator app couldn't translate Chinese accurately. i have asked ai why, and the answer is that ai could "Relate to daily life and context."， 

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is helps me reading papers and translate other language to my mother language(Chinese), a lot of other translator app couldn't translate Chinese accurately. i have asked ai why, and the answer is that ai could "Relate to daily life and context."， 

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Please share the email you used (will use) to log into Padlet.

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Please share the email you used (will use) to log into Padlet.

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I will then invite you to our course Padlet. We will create indivdual project pages and share ideas here throughout the semester, so if you don't have a padlet account, please create one and share with me the email you used.

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As a Business student, I am not familiar with critiques. If had do define it, I would say that critique is more than listening and giving one's opinion but a way to examine the power relationships and underlying ideas.

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analytical, observation, thinking

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A theory is a non-universal idea shared by one or more people. It is based on research, but is not necessarily true. The theory influences the reasoning of others and requires a certain amount of distance.

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In a few words, AI means help for me. Imaginating my daily life and my student life without AI would be difficult.