People who tell you 'AI is changing everything' are lying

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> AI has had a profound and irreversible impact on higher ed, it has changed students completely, it has changed how professors operate, and it is changing how papers are written.

University CS instructor here. The above is true, but it's not generally for-the-better. We're working with it, of course, since there is no choice. But students need to develop problem-solving skills that LLMs only steal from them. And they need to learn problem-solving skills that involve LLMs.

And so I work hard to help the students develop skill while using the very tool that robs them of it. It's possible, but it's extremely challenging for instructors and students, alike. It's a challenge that I rise to every day to maximize student benefit.

But LLM misuse during school makes the drawbacks completely negate all benefits, making LLMs positively dangerous for students who are mesmerized by the siren song.

In short, the snark isn't entirely unwarranted. Many students are bringing their robot to the gym to lift the weights for them. And when we, with pen and paper, corner these poor souls who haven't learned to think, they simply fail out and are lost. It's a problem.

So... great with the math breakthroughs and the whole "thinking at a higher level of abstraction" thing, but we have to work with the significant dark side of all this.

"You're not imagining it—the brain-rot is real."

Interesting, two anti-AI articles were flagged in around 2-4 hours. Finding no supporting AI articles are flagged. Why?

I work for a company with every AI tool imaginable. It's quite dystopian. Emails are flying back and forth with detailed AI analysis which is responded to with a copy and pasted response from another AI. And it's 95% noise. It begs the question of why people are even sending the emails anymore.

From the programming standpoint, it seems like the devs who honed their skills without AI being available to them are the most capable and productive at using it. But we are downsizing to increase spend on tokens, sales people are building apps that are nothing more than untested PoCs and asking how to deploy it into production, our executives believe the technology is some kind of magic...

I hope someday to hire some young developers again, when that day comes: thanks for your efforts getting them ready.

Stross in Reddit, five days ago https://np.reddit.com/r/accelerate/comments/1vbtdga/what_is_...>:

>The current generative AI is just spicy autocomplete on steroids—doing phrase and paragraph level prediction rather than character/word level prediction. It doesn't "answer" questions, it just extrapolates the statistically most likely answer-shaped string based on its training set.

My reply:

>How do you explain the multiple unsolved math problems that AI has recently solved?

No answer by Stross.