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Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

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Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#51

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

jibbit wrote: post #48
bwfan123 wrote: post #43

Many areas of humanities devolve into a bag of words where the evaluation of it is subjective depending on ones tastes - and LLMs excel here, and academics are rightfully scared. As an analogy and contrast, take the case of euclidean geometry. This is knowledge about geometry which relates to our "feeling" of space around us. But, it is symbolized in a precise and operational manner which becomes useful in all sorts…

it's intentionally ironic that this is written in the style of ai slop?

It would be against an AI's best interests to write such a spot-on parody of AI optimism.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#52

Post by dncbfwa »

_m_p wrote: post #4

Quote from the article: > Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button. It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.

The several paragraphs before and after this statement are much more salient and profound. E.G. the following paragraph:

But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where science and engineering are concerned it’s pretty much the whole point. But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#53

Post by _m_p »

getnormality wrote: post #47
_m_p wrote: post #4

Quote from the article: > Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button. It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.

Before we make these grand "in five years" proclamations, perhaps we should ask the people who read and care about these works if they can tell human ones from LLM ones, and if so what the difference is. Test them with blind samples if we must.

Scholarly works ideally have references that are not hallucinated.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#54

Post by tianqi »

jasonsb wrote: post #45
tianqi wrote: post #35

My answer is yes — at least for now. People tend to believe AI gives the great answers until it touches a field they actually have real expertise in. If you talk to true experts in humanities, you’ll find their depth of insight is on a totally different level compared to AI's surface-level summaries. AI mostly stitches together some published cliche like Max Planck’s driver in the old story.

That was true a few years ago, but now I'm getting better and better answers. Not saying I can totally trust AI, but the rate of progress is astonishing. Even if we see no more progress for the next 10 years, the effect of current models in our society will be profound.

You are right but these are two different questions. The effect in the society will be profound, yes. Replacing the true experts in the humanities? That's a different matter.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#55

Post by Filligree »

tianqi wrote: post #54
jasonsb wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was true a few years ago, but now I'm getting better and better answers. Not saying I can totally trust AI, but the rate of progress is astonishing. Even if we see no more progress for the next 10 years, the effect of current models in our society will be profound.

You are right but these are two different questions. The effect in the society will be profound, yes. Replacing the true experts in the humanities? That's a different matter.

If it replaces everyone except the true experts, then where do we get new experts?

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#56

Post by shawn-butler »

No, the humanities won't survive.

The problem with humanities is that the "state of the art" is about only saying something "new". For example, the author thinks that discussing Kantian theories of the sublime and “The Epic Split” ad (a highly meme-able 2013 Volvo ad starring Jean-Claude Van Damme) is "straight A" work.

It is irrelevant nonsense masquerading as intelligent discourse much like most of this author's actual published work and it is also something at which LLMs excel.

To be a "rockstar" humanities professor at Princeton, you have to make up something "cool" to fill the seats to keep the attention of 17-25 year-olds.

With LLMs that have encoded snapshots of the entire literary corpus that humanity has produced, those students can make up whatever connections they want and justify their worldview. No humanities courses required beyond maybe some introduction to vocabulary / prompting.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#57

Post by jasonsb »

Filligree wrote: post #55
tianqi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right but these are two different questions. The effect in the society will be profound, yes. Replacing the true experts in the humanities? That's a different matter.

If it replaces everyone except the true experts, then where do we get new experts?

Even if it replaces only 20-30% of the people, we still have a huge problem. Countries with unemployment rate over 20% don't do very well.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#58

Post by cptroot »

This might be the first time I have seen someone both engage with LLMs as a producer of humanities artifacts, self-reflection and all, while also being cognizant of the underlying mechanisms.

It brings up some real questions about what does it mean to be, even if it doesn't ask whether our institutions are capable of recognizing that effort as valuable.

Off topic, it's extremely frustrating to see how few top-level comments are engaging with TFA. So many people are just using the headline as an excuse to pontificate.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#59

Post by slowmovintarget »

_m_p wrote: post #30
dingnuts wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is absolutely no evidence that language models are "persons". When one is not executing a generation algorithm, it is not running. It's so easy to anthropomorphize these things, but that's not evidence; people anthropomorphize all kinds of things.

For these purposes it doesn't matter if they are persons and they don't need to be anthropomorphized: it only matters that the LLMs can incorporate the data from person-generated works into their output, either to weight things or to be read by an actual human.

It actually matters quite a bit that they are not persons from the simple fact that LLM output cannot trivially be used as LLM training material without reducing the resulting models to eventual incoherence. There's a proof of this somewhere in the last year or two.

There isn't, today, a good filter for such input beyond that it came from a person or that it came from a probabilistic vector distance algorithm. Perhaps we'll have such qualification in the future to make the distinction in this context irrelevant.

Re: Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?

#60

Post by [deleted] »

dncbfwa wrote: post #52
_m_p wrote: post #4

Quote from the article: > Within five years, it will make little sense for scholars of history to keep producing monographs in the traditional mold—nobody will read them, and systems such as these will be able to generate them, endlessly, at the push of a button. It is already the case that effectively nobody reads these books. They're basically just "proof of work" for people's tenure dossiers.

The several paragraphs before and after this statement are much more salient and profound. E.G. the following paragraph: But factory-style scholarly productivity was never the essence of the humanities. The real project was always us: the work of understanding, and not the accumulation of facts. Not “knowledge,” in the sense of yet another sandwich of true statements about the world. That stuff is great—and where sci…

[deleted]
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