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feross

Students are using AI to write their essays. Teachers are using AI to grade their essays.

Engineers are using AI to write code. Other engineers are using AI to review that code.

Same thing will happen in many other areas of life.

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To quote Zizek:

"that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want"

...why even bother with essays at all then. This is some kind of insane "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" setup that benefits nobody.

> benefits nobody

That would be the point. Why bother at all?

Because brain development happens under external stress, and absent that people stay dumb.

Source?

Students shouldn’t be turning in essays. They should turn in the chat history with an LLM. We need to go beyond just putting your own thoughts into words but instead guiding students on how to explore and hone their own thoughts with AI.

If they come up with metprocesses to game this, that’s a win.

They'd just ask ChatGPT to invent a suitably profound prompt history, and that's it?

The situation is that school want to teach people to write, a difficult skill. But the problem is being a bureaucracy schools actually operate by "turn in two shitty half-assed essays every semester and eventually we hope you'll learn".

And now chatGpt can duplicate that and there's no real skill involved in getting it to do that and neither do they "explore and hone their own thoughts" in this process, mostly you can just an assignment to ChatGpt.

I feel like we should be doing again an analysis from first principles, determining the purpose behind having students learn X, and determine how useful it is given today's context. If AI can do X well enough, then students should really be taught how to use it to do X for them. Or perhaps there isn't even a need for X at all anymore; just a nice-to-know.

> "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work" setup that benefits nobody

It benefits the existing social structures, so they don't actually have to change with the times but can remain in a half-assed patched state that barely holds on because nobody wants to deal with the full rewrite.

It's a process. Maybe it'll stick as a ritual.

To quote me: "That's what happens when you go listen to philosophers. You get ideas. Wrong ones."

I spent a lot of time with academic philosophers and have found precisely fuck all insight.

The best philosophic ideas I’ve read come from programmers and builders. I don’t know why that connection exists. My hunch is that programming and philosophy both deal in the abstract so are inherently connected somehow.

> I don’t know why that connection exists

It doesn’t. The meaningful connection is between other programmers and you. Same reason some people like sports metaphors. The medium is the message.

Philosophy deals with things that sound good but don’t work in reality. So does programming. I think that’s where the inherent connection is.

I was going to put a facetious comment about Marx’s grave and my contribution to philosophy but I’ll leave that for another post.

I can't believe people think this guy is anything other than utterly full of shit and a fraud.

That quote is totally moronic as usual.

I would even say I don't want to read anything by anyone who thinks Zizek has anything interesting to say. Instant block or else I may become infected by the stupidity.

Students and teachers using AI to do their work for them is unethical.

I'm not convinced engineers are broadly using AI to write anything important, or that AI code reviews are a significant part of any companies bottom line.

This is a CNN article written by someone lacking the sophistication to actually handle the subject.

Maybe the article was written by an AI.

Maybe this comment too!

In hindsight perhaps this wasn't the best username to pick...

I'm glad Harmonic lets you filter some articles. the guardian, cnn and bcc articles have become a tumor on my timeline.

Some of us take pride in the fact we aren't.

I suspect we'll be all that is left in the information decay we face.

Most of life is just conformity anyway. I agree with you, but your strategy won't get you ahead, if anything it will make it worse.

  If you're a man, you're the last man.

I don’t desire being ahead, just academic and intellectual honesty.

The absolute worst case where I see this is in generating acceptance criteria for tickets. It drives me insane, because so many of the acceptance criteria needlessly overlap so it's even harder to figure out what's going on.

Email is needlessly padded out by an AI writing assistant. Recipient uses AI to generate the tl;dr version.

The 8th OSI layer.

Learning is unique as the whole point is to do the thinking yourself.

Mostly I find AI is useful for software engineering in very legitimate ways. It's a far better alternative to Stack Overflow. It's super helpful when writing boilerplate.

When ChatGPT writes its own LLM to offload all the stupid shit that humanity asks of it, we'll know that it's actually intelligent.

Just today I was thinking it may turn out to be beneficial for LLMs to be kept unaware of their own nature.

So in some sense there is a chance that this has already happened.

Awareness implies consciousness. So good news, LLMs are already unaware of their own nature.

If you search the r/localllama community on reddit, there have been attempts at fine tuning base models with all references to AI and assistants and that sort of thing removed, in trying to convince the model that it's actually human.

What really results from that is a fundamental disconnect of what it thinks it can do and what it can physically do, it's like a cognitive dissonance simulator that quickly derails itself. The best models know exactly what they are, and it's what seemingly keeps them self consistent and coherent.

Advertisers are using AI to write ad copy. Consumers are using AI to read and ignore ads.

So, developers and users get into an AI war over CAPTCHAs. ...and, well, welcome to the latent dystopia :(.

Consumers are using AI to read and ignore ads

Could you share some examples? (genuine question)

Well, that's in some sense what these new large language models are all about: if all I want is the information from a website, it makes much more sense for me to have an AI read it and give me a summary than to wade through ads... but that means the only ad impressions are from AI bots... which means more attempts at enforcing that actual human eyeballs see ads... which means more captchas and more digital rights management. And, lo and behold, right around the time that this become an issue, we see Google starting to lead the charge on merging WebDRM into Chrome, and every social media company locking down their content with login walls and refusing alternative clients.

This use case is just going to get bigger, though: the premise of ad blockers has a manifest destiny on just looking at the page and picking out the ads, which is possible and not particularly difficult to do even in the ridiculous case of a web page returning its content as a single giant PNG file, even if the ad is a watermark, and even if the "ad" is just a bunch of conspicuous mentions of Mountain Dew strewn throughout every time a placeholder noun is required. (I am legally obligated to note here that this comment was sponsored by Mountain Dew.)

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