Off My Chest
RULES:
I am looking for mods!
1. The "good" part of our community means we are pro-empathy and anti-harassment. However, we don't intend to make this a "safe space" where everyone has to be a saint. Sh*t happens, and life is messy. That's why we get things off our chests.
2. Bigotry is not allowed. That includes racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, and religiophobia. (If you want to vent about religion, that's fine; but religion is not inherently evil.)
3. Frustrated, venting, or angry posts are still welcome.
4. Posts and comments that bait, threaten, or incite harassment are not allowed.
5. If anyone offers mental, medical, or professional advice here, please remember to take it with a grain of salt. Seek out real professionals if needed.
6. Please put NSFW behind NSFW tags.
view the rest of the comments
Perhaps handwritten in-class research papers need to make a comeback
I had an English teacher accuse me of plagiarism on a hand-written, in-class essay in 2001. The god damn guidance counselor even sided with her. I was so pissed, I peeled out in the school parking lot, got pulled over by the SRO, and then the SRO sided with her.
Research and in class seem to be at odds
When I was at university in the late '90s, back when EbscoHost was just gaining a foothold, my biology professor required us to turn in physical copies of every article we cited along with our term papers. I spent hours copying journal articles in the periodicals section of the library that semester.
Professors absolutely could say, "Bring copies of the articles you want to cite to class so you can write your research paper by hand."
But the research still happened outside, right? Not sure if you imply you had to actually write in the class, but gathering the relevant papers/info is the bulk of the research, and they was done somewhere else.
Offline research and note taking too. Digital if you don't want to waste paper, but encyclopedias should make a comeback.
Remember encyclopedias shouldn't be your primary source.. (And with search engines now worse than the altivista days, and paywalls good research is getting harder these days)
Granted, I'm okay with whatever works best for teaching the process.
I believe a great deal of people of all ages simply treat Google, and now chatbots, as "answer machines". They grab a hold of something out of the first few results, sometimes it's just the text of the link itself, and that's your answer. No analysis, no critical thinking, no further thought needed.
I feel like search engines and AI have become a form of thought terminating cliche for some. People trust the information presented far more than they should and don't seem to be able to analyze or apply it in a broader context. They double check if a human tells them the sky is blue, but site a Facebook post as gospel even after it's led them to disaster.
I get this is human nature to an extent, but it's also partly the nature of the medium. Something about the internet and computers makes people want to trust that information without deeper analysis. I think that's partly because of how we regard them culturally and we should move away from the unfounded belief that computers do better analysis than humans, faster, more apt to find certain types of small details, but not necessarily better in all contexts. Critical thinking and analysis should be assisted by technology, not replaced by it.
Sitting down, reading, collatecting information, processing and analyzing that information, and then writing what you've learned is a skill everyone needs to cultivate no matter how advanced our technology becomes.
As I alluded to in another comment in this thread, the worst I've personally seen were procedures develeoped that would have had people entering areas that were not just hazardous, but incompatible with human life, and performing maintenance on fully energized industrial systems without safety constraints in place. Both cases would have caused fatalities if someone blindly followed the checklist as written. An internal review caught these mistakes, but they should have never made it that far.
The people designing the procedure checklists missed them possibly because, as you said, AI lies beautifully, but I think it was also because many people seem to have an inclinination is to trust it over their own judgements and knowledge. These were supervisors with years of direct experience, the red flags should have been instantly obvious. If they'd written it out by hand, the proper order of events would have been almost muscle memory, what made them so careless?
They claimed they just used AI to format and grammar check their work, and I don't have logs to prove or disporve that. But this is more than just a hallucination, it's a lack of reasoning similar to the car wash problem, but with much more severe consequences. TBH I'm not sure even adding specific knowledge of our equipment and facilities would fix it, let alone just a reduction in hallucinations.
On top of that, I've seen a long, long time trend of people who just will not take the time to read and understand the sum total of information needed to safely and correctly perform our work. It's a lot, but we do complicated and dangerous things. They've replaced knowing things with Googling them or searching through documents to find a possibly out of context quote. Failed safety and regulatory compliance inspections are far more common because people just don't know what they need to know despite having all that information at their finger tips. Nothing seems to be processed or retained, it's just sort of gawked at and repeated.
They aren't dumb. I work with them. I know them. It's not just stupidity and it's not just hallucinations. Our tools are using us, and it should always be the other way around. A tool that can't be used, in both the philosophical and literal sense, should be discarded.
I'm not trusting AI anytime soon, and I remain suspicious of everyone until they prove themselves to actually understand what's going on.
I'm willing to reconsider things as technology improves, but I wouldn't bet my 401k on LLMs being worth a shit anytime before I retire.
You're right that we can't rule complacency and human error. And we have internal reviews precisely to account for complacency. Again, I'm intimately familiar with both the safety culture and people involved, this is an unusual and recent development. But I suppose asking you to take my word for it might strain credulity. That is what it is.
I'd be inclined to agree with you more if it weren't for how widespread the smaller issues are. The general trend, among the old and young, is less actual knowledge of the job and more reliance on quick access to information that often isn't applied properly in context. It existed before AI, and has gotten worse with it's introduction. Something about instant access to information seems to harm retention and application of that info. Pretty obvious trend for me, as part of my job is to ensure it's retained and applied properly.
Those procedures built around autopilot, along with other issues of flying more complicated modern aircraft, were dealt with by controlling how information flowed, how it was communicated, and the weight of authority it was given, often with human processes like Crew Resource Management. As I've said, the presentation of information absolutely changes how people understand and apply it. CRM helps because it prompts people to present information to each other in a way that facilitates better decision making and delegation in a crisis.
But autopilot has always been beneficial, right from the start it was obvious. It reduces pilot fatigue on long-haul flights and helps keep air traffic in the right place. Pilot complacency was never really a worry, but malfunctions were.
In the end, it's not that it can't be done. We could adjust our processes to include LLMs simply because people think they're neat. It's just that there's no compelling evidence that its better for distributing information, developing procedures, or teaching people how not to die.
Right. We can't blame the existence or even the use of AI fully. But the way AI is often used, and the way my armchair studies of human nature tell me it will continue to be used, I think will lead to more events like this. The trend of easy access and low retention did indeed start before LLMs, but they don't seem to be a remedy for it from what I can tell. If anything, they're neutral, and I'd argue they make it worse.
We could (and frankly probably will need to because I doubt AI will be abandoned due to the sheer volume of cash that has been dumped into it), build processes to account for the failings of LLMs and the failings in how we use them. Or we could look at existing methods, those we understand and have learned to work effectively with, and reapply them as needed.
My bet is that LLMs and genAI will exacerbate the trend of being info rich and knowledge poor, and the processes we have to create in order to safely and effectively apply it are going to be more costly than any efficiency we get out of adopting it. I could be wrong, but I'd bet you a six-pack of whatever you drink that I'm not. Collectable in five years, if Lemmy hasn't been replaced by LLMmy by then. I'll even ship international if need be. =)
Yup. I'll take the bet.
After all, your expectation of the impact of AI is arguably the better outcome for humanity, isn't it? I'm expecting a sharp increase in horrific industrial accidents and the slow but steady regression of human intellect until we're all mindless drones from sector 7-C. =P
That's a good bet to lose.
Besides, actually paying out on oddball, five year old bets is the kind of thing that made the pre-social media, pre-AI internet great, and I miss that.
Guilty as charged. I often wonder what effect dealing with quality control and safety has on my mentality. Much like first responders see a lot of people at their worst, I see a lot of them at their dumbest and laziest.
I think we're still at a net gain over where we were in 1906, but that's subjective. Most of us live longer and more comfortable lives, but that could change if we're not careful, and I don't think we're being particularly careful in this decade. I'm a bit pessimistic, but I don't see it as a bad thing. Back on aviation, the old saying is that it takes an optimist to invent the airplane, and it takes a pessimist to invent the parachute.
I'd rather keep meteors out of it. Some of the planet is quite pretty and whatever species takes over for us might appreciate the view.
What if you can't get access to the primary source?
I recall getting points taken off in middle/high school if the only source was the world book dictionary.. So either find a book at the library or fire up the family computer hope the phone is free and search the '90s net for some source? (Avoiding the popups/unders) [and be fast as we only had so many mins/mo included]
Well for example Wikipedia might link to a book that costs money or an article that's paywalled. Which for serious research it might be worth paying for but not for a random essay.