We already have a real-world scourge of tech bros who view learning about other subjects as beneath them and who rate their ignorance as more valuable than experts in that subject. This wonderful new world of AI is only going to exacerbate that problem.
Point is, it's not a problem with academia and it's not easy to solve. If we could just magically peer into people's minds and figure out what they know definitively then we'd solve a lot of world issues. Alas, we must settle for numbers and papers instead.
I gave it the prompt "Suppose you are in a job interview for a front-end web position and someone asks you about how you use the React library and the hardest problem you even had to solve with it. How might you react, along with a somewhat amusing anecdote?"[1] and it did pretty well. I think I'd play with it a bit to see if I can still suppress some of the LLM-isms that came out, but a human could edit them out in real-time with just a bit of practice too... it's not like you can just read it to your interviewer, you will need to Drama Class 101 this up a bit anyhow. It'll be easier to improv a bit over this than a bare Wikipedia list.
In other words, as with the question the article title asks, the question isn't about what happens "when" this starts being possible... the capability has run ahead of all but the most fervent AI user's understanding and it is already here. It's just a matter of the word-of-mouth getting around as to how to prompt the AIs to be less obvious. I also anticipate that in the next couple of years, the AI companies will be getting tired of people complaining about the "default LLM voice" and it'll shift to be something less obvious than it is now. Both remote interviews and college writing are really already destroyed, the news just hasn't gotten around to everybody yet.
(In fact I suspect that "default LLM voice" will eventually become a sort of cultural touchstone of 2024-2026 and be deliberately used in future cultural references to set stories in this time period. It's a transient quality of current-day LLMs, easy to get them out of even today, and I expect future LLMs to have much different "default voices".)
[1]: And in keeping with my own philosophy of "there's not a lot of value of just pasting in LLM responses" if you want to see what comes out you are welcome to play with it yourself. No huge surprises though. It did the job.
Can you provide an example?
I encountered this imposter too.
I understand companies want to protect themselves. They need to understand some people just don’t want to be on social media (HN aside).
In other words, there needs to be a middle ground. Job hunting is already an arduous, demoralizing task. Forcing people to be on social media for a just another layer of stress