"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
It's absolutely terrifying. I am a returning student to uni in my thirties and the only person not using any AI. They literally depend on it.
I just had a classmate the other day turn to me, frustrated, saying "You ever ask chat(gpt) a question and it gives you a whole, like, paragraph you then have to read? like, why can't it simplify it?"
So yeah, even reading paragraphs is too much for these people. Future workforce is fucking cooked.
I have a friend who was frustrated that his programming exam was too hard (Python) and stated " why do I need to learn this? I can just use ai and get the job done ". We're absolutely fugged.
It's honestly disheartening. I understand our education system is not well in that tests aren't actually very condusive to learning, but they treat the idea of learning a skill like it's some obnoxious chore they just want over with so they never have to do it again when its like... bruh civilization/tech grows exponentially, y'all gotta learn your whole lives and it should be something you ENJOY it should give you pride to be good at something or understand a subject thoroughly.
i don't even know what to begin doing about this problem but even if you pretend the environmental impacts are fine/manageable, I can't help but think this shits gotta be destroyed for the future of humanity.
So much ai slop in the professional world too
I got my first obviously AI email from a boss recently. The tone didn't match his normal cadence of writing, it was sterile, repetitive, and could have really been summed up as, "Do you have additional information about item X that can help explain this to our customer?"
It was three paragraphs long.
No shit. LLMs are the anti-thesis of education. The basis of which is hands on practice. Using a glorified autocomplete-my-assignments should be barred from education without exception.
This is the tip of the iceberg. The world is facing a critical collapse of profession. We're nearing a point that was foretold ins sci-fi where humans no longer understand how the machine works.Just that they can use it and it works.
Except sci-fi was too optimistic. Science fiction has actual AGI. We have glorified autocomplete. A non-intelligence.
it's the equivalent of trying become a marathon running while you sit on your ass on the couch and and flying FPV drone for your 'training' and saying it's the same thing.
I've heard much of the same from my friends who teach middle and high schoolers: most alarmingly that they can put information up on the board, ask a question about it, and the students don't even connect that the answer is already in front of their eyes.
And sadly, a very common question they get is: "If AI can do this for me, why do I need to learn it in the first place?"
The worst part is that, in the short-term, the only recourse people have is suing social media and LLM companies, who are awash in cash and happy to settle, or throw their weight behind age verification, which in its various forms poses a security risk. Parents, clearly, are parking their kids in front of screens and unwilling to parent, so that's not something you can depend upon.
I'm just glad I never procreated, but this problem is going to affect us all when these kids try to enter the work force and can't actually do anything.
The kids who were 12 when the pandemic happened are now 18 and will be having their own kids soon.
and will be having their own kids soon
that's a stretch. iirc people have kids at 32 these days
It seems like a huge pervasive part of modern culture is that success and fortune equal never having to get your hands dirty, never worry about the details, and never learning to figure shit out because you can just pay somebody else to do it (or ask the "AI" to).
Obviously some amount of specialization and delegation is good. That's how you get a society.
But to just exist passively is something else. It's bad for us, and I don't mean that as a moral judgment. Nobody needs certain skills to justify their existence. I mean it in the clinical sense, like that you can be sedentary with more than just your physical body.
what they're doing to push back against the tech.
Classify it as a cheating tool.
Works in theory, but not in practice, as there are no tools that can tell 100% reliably if something was written by AI. Best way IMO to test students is via oral exams. Let them explain certain things and topics they allegedly wrote about in their thesis; that way you can quickly see who actually bothered to learn and understand and not only let their thesis write by AI.
There was this cool initiative by a professor who is a friend of mine. He would give a pretty standard homework, but then the additional instructions were to complete said homework using an LLM. Then, the students would have to write, by hand, an analysis of all that the LLM got wrong, or could've done better. They then proceeded to discuss their analysis in class. Participating in the discussion with actual meaningful arguments was half of the points, the other half being the quality of the handwritten analysis.
It was more work, but at least the fuckers quickly appreciated that the machine was actually shit at doing their homework, and even if it could pass, it would be with the bare minimum. It also pruned the students who actually wanted to learn from the slackers who were just wasting their parent's money.
They should bring back oral exams and blue books.
This is it. Stop it with these take-home test. Homework was always bullshit.
But then professors and teachers would have to think themselves instead of regurgitating the same lesson plan and worksheets from two decades ago
Hot take incoming: good public school teachers are criminally underpaid. Most teachers are paid exactly what they're worth.
Then fail them. Oh, that would look bad? The "system "won't allow it? Remind me, what's your fucking job again?
in India, it's common to pay someone to take exams. congratulations Doctor
A huge part is the tools they're using to "detect" AI use. My sister in law fought with Grammarly, which she was required to pay for and use by the school, to prove her paper wasn't written by AI.
She spent twenty hours trying to "de-ai" a paper that wasn't written by AI. The only things that worked were using bad grammar and poor sentence structure. The class was pass/fail, and probably for that reason.
It's not really surprising, and there are already quite a few studies on cognitive decline related to AI usage out there. I guess the wide scale effects will only be visible in a few decades, but I suspect it will look a lot like Idiocracy.
This is a consequence that the Epstein class will welcome and invest more heavily in. And the rest of us will have to deal with literal idiots for the rest of our lives.
Having to add AI to the products I work on is destroying my ability to think.
I would like to think if I were a student, that I would use AI to explain things to me that I had too much anxiety to ask. I'd probably to use it to do my homework but to mainly check that I did it right? I'd "like" to think that but I wonder how the temptation would get me to just shortcut it ...?
I'm in software and we have to use it for work. There's some toxic positivity going around with it and everyone is just saying how they don't write code any more and how proud they are of that. They even turn their nose at me because I don't use it as much because I'm lower on the Cursor dashboards than them. I like using AI to explain things to me but I'm mainly a senior so I don't write as much code, I actually spend more time reading and it's far more arduous. We actually have juniors turning into prompt monkeys were they just put everything into AI and if you ask them why, they just put your question into AI and giving it back to you. To be clear, that's been happening to other seniors that work with them. If it was me, I'd rip them apart and tell them I can find a quick way to cut cost in the company if they don't wanna learn anything.
… they just put everything into AI and if you ask them why, they just put your question into AI and giving it back to you.
This must be what it's like for your planet to be taken over by an alien hive mind.
I refuse to believe that the Pluribus series from Vince Gilligan is not actually about AI. There are so many scenes in it that could be adopted to people overusing LLMs.
On Thursday there was a guy in my history class who was using ChatGPT the entire time.
We were watching a documentary and supposed to take notes on a physical sheet of paper. Some of the boxes on that sheet of paper only needed like 4 or 5 words to get the gist of it.
During a conversation with my sister about going back to school to finish her electrical engineering degree she basically said this:
As an older student. What /I/ see is a bunch of students who don't really know how the workforce works, but who HAVE grasped these facts:
- The school wants you to have a social life. That's why there's all these events, and they cancel class for games and stuff sometimes. So you SHOULD be doing social stuff.
- It's a dog-eat-dog world, and the only way to get ahead is to use every tool at your disposal, including and especially GenAI.
- Everybody is doing it, especially the smart people, including the grad students, AND sometimes even the teachers. Even the professionals are like "this is how you can use ChatGPT!"
- So, to get everything done and have A Good College Experience, obviously you just use ChatGPT! Why spend hours in the library like all those losers?????
And, then, on the other hand, I see:
A bunch of very tired, overworked, overwhelmed teachers who are doing their damndest with students who can't do even half of the bare minimum that was expected when they went through college.
Bending over backwards and then back upwards to pass these kids, by hook or by crook.
Like, people giving 100s of points of extra credit.
People putting together a whole website of specific terms for each unit AND the slide shows from the classes, quizzes that are pass/fail - as in, you get the credit if you take the quiz on time, period, regardless of what you get, so you can use it to review, AND the weekly essays are either:
- 750 word summary of the reading + answer 4 questions (no word limit) + pose two questions about the text, no specifc formatting required.
OR
- 250 word reflection: how does what we learned apply to your life? No specific format required.
I was writing 5 page research papers for classes my first year of college. What the fuck. What the fuck.
(She went back to school to finish her degree)
You're telling me you can't write a 750 word SUMMARY that doesn't need to be formatted beyond "put your name on it and use punctuation"?????????
The classes themselves are not hard. IF you have a good grounding in logic and math and writing. Which these people DO NOT.
They have a good grounding in letting ChatGPT do the work for them and letting the teacher tell them how to do everything.
And goddamn I might get 77s because I can't do algebra and I can't do math fast enough to finish a test.
But at least I'm not failing because I can't THINK.
This is the peak of civilization, get ready for regress.
So, it's all going to plan then?
I’d say that social media platforms opened that door a long time a go. A bunch of people telling others what’s cool, what “truth” is being hidden from you, click here for the “fact” you won’t believe, how to do anything but actually think critically about what you’re presented with. People search social media for answers before they look at wikipedia, forget considering a summary from actual scientific sites.
Coupled with algorithms pushing tailored engagement bait over boring facts and AI just wraps it all up in a top search result shoehorned above 10 “Sponsored” links and SEO garbage, there’s no room for boring old critical thought and truth anymore.
