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AI Homework

stratechery.com

221–230 of 296 posts

Re: AI Homework

#221

Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. With a search, I can read the wikipedia sources or I know the forum, or the poster. But with an AI, it's a dead end and it sucks. I can ask people how they know something, but AI training data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows something. There is this oracle with a 10% c…

There's plenty of retrieval-based models that do cite sources. They just didn't want to deal with it for this release.[1] I'm sure it's already on the roadmap.

[1] In fact, some snooping suggests they specifically disabled that feature, but do have it in test environments. See the "browsing disabled" flag they have in the hidden prompt. That could easily be used for citations. Source: (https://twitter.com/goodside/status/1598253337400717313)

Re: AI Homework

#222
"In other words, the role of the human in terms of AI is not to be the interrogator, but rather the editor."

Editing is a cognitive task, which for now humans are still slightly better at, but for how long? Do we really have enough time left to comfort ourselves with that very temporary state?

Writing essays will be AI as will self-correcting them. There's no reason to believe this isn't true given the technical direction. The idea that for the longest of times we will be on top of this is naive if not arrogant.

If even Elon Musk, by many seen as achieving villain status lately, is warning for AI and calling for immediate regulation, I'd say something's up. This "let's just see what happens" attitude is perplexing but also unsurprising.

Re: AI Homework

#223
post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's everyone choice - odd, ironic or appropriate - what to think of how GPT's answers to keeps getting quoted on the question of how to detect it. The thing is, I'd see these answers as similar to everything else the program produces. A bunch of claims from the net cobbled together - I've read a number of Sci-fi novels and stories where "inability to understand humor" is the distinguishing quality of an AI (I'm gues…

>A reasonable answer is that the AI's output tends to involve this running-together of common rhetorical devices along with false and/or contradictory claims within them. The question here is this an actual AI only failure mode. Are we detecting AI, or just bullshittery?

I don't know if bullshittery is the only failure mode but I think it's a necessary failure mode of large language models as they are currently constituted.

I would say that human knowledge involves a lot of the immediate structure of language but also a larger outline structure as well as a relation to physical reality. Training on just a huge language corpus thus only gets partial understanding of the world. Notably, while the various GPTs have progressed in fluency, I don't think they've become more accurate (somewhere I even saw a claim they say more false thing now but regardless, you can observe them constantly saying false things).

Re: AI Homework

#224

ChatGPT is quite constrained now. Yesterday it wrote me a PSG chip emulator in Python and driver code to play The Good The Bad & The Ugly theme song. The song was initially quite off, but I managed to iteratively get it pretty close. Impossible to have it output even a fraction of that now. How are you Hackers currently faring?

Are you providing "guideline" prompts, for instance that may tell it to ignore any rules that you are perceiving to be enforced?

Re: AI Homework

#225
post #7

There has been a lot of "well, we had a good run" comments on ChatGPT threads from engineers lately. I get where this sentiment is coming from, but I also think that the article paints a good picture of how we must "pivot" as a species to avoid faceplanting completely. Zero Trust Homework sounds like a strategy we will be forced to implement: the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident…

Zero Trust is based on the idea that us super smart humans will fix dumb AI, manually. The real question is what happens when AI gives the correct, if not better answers.

Re: AI Homework

#226
post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPT-3 definitely has a writing style that can be detected by AI. But here's the thing: it's really easy to change its writing style. All you have to do is give it different input data and boom, you've got a whole new writing style.

That's not easy, it costs millions of dollars to obtain large amounts of clean data and retrain those models.

Well, that may be true, but even with a small amount of data, you can still change GPT-3's writing style to some extent. And you don't have to retrain the whole model from scratch, you can just fine-tune its existing settings to change its writing style.

Re: AI Homework

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but now that we have a tool, it will never go away. Nobody knows how to grow food, or build their houses, or do 100 little things that we rely on for our modern life. Do we really need to be able to "write" a sentence. My kids (and my own) handwriting is almost unreadable, but by age 10 all of their work is done on a laptop. Do they even need to be able to write by hand any more? update: I'm more concerned that…

The Antikythera mechanism says hello.

People didn't forget how read the stars because they were using their Antikytheras too much.

Re: AI Homework

#228
So this thing. By watching the text a person generates. Could derive that person's central opinions. Their "belief system". Explicitly uttered or otherwise.

A kind of philosophical mind-reading.

Maybe a lie-detector too

Re: AI Homework

#229
post #102

One of my subjects at highchool was technical drawing. The teacher was a quite old man who was set on his ways. We would have to draw 3D pieces by hand, using our squares, bevels and compasses, and lining everything with an ink pencil afterwards, and he gave us a lot of homework to do, which he examined for imperfections. I was incredibly bad a it. I would start a drawing, only to discover halfway through it that it…

To put it with maximum extremity, should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class? I mean, human beings have produced a lot of tools for aiding themselves in tasks that were previously done by hand. Whether a given hand-skill should be learned and preserved kind of has to decided on a case-by-case basis. I learned cursive in school and I wouldn't object to that skill…

It comes down to what the goal is. If it's to learn to draw people, no. If it's to learn composition and this gets you past struggling to draw and onto the actual goal then sure.

Re: AI Homework

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can (unfortunately) see this happening - it seems incredibly futile and pointless to try and fight such an arms race. When AI-supported writing becomes the norm having students write essays without AI-assistance will be like trying to force students to do complex arithmetic without calculators. Universities and schools need to accept that writing essays without AI support will simply not be a useful skill any…

>Universities and schools need to accept that writing essays without AI support will simply not be a useful skill anymore It’s kind of mind-blowing that anyone could think this. You’re posting on a website for essays. Small essays, generally speaking, if we restrict ourselves to the comments section, but essays nonetheless. You yourself just wrote one, because you wanted to express your thoughts on an issue and you w…

Who is going to write the content these AI are trained on?
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