I'm sick and tired of hearing about how LLMs are somehow going to cultivate a society of "creative people full of ideas" when increasingly the people who are using it the most are accepting the LLMs ideas without question.
MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
31–40 of 89 posts
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#32This is a bunch of fluff. I hope at least the snacks and lunches during the discussions were good. "Guiding principles: Be bold. Be humble. Put humanity front and center. Lean into learning. Teach with intentionality. No one size fits all." "Recommendations: Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world. Center people, community, and the residential experience. Build processes, teams and tools for continuous refl…
It's going to be difficult not to be "fluffy" as no one really knows the true impact and what's going to happen. And it's especially challenging for universities as voices questioning the value of higher education will only grow louder.
I grew up with PC‘s starting with DOS 1.0. I built a career as a systems engineer, basically by being confronted with thousands of problems that took four hours to figure out because the Windows world was changing so fast there was no documentation to easily find your answer. Those same problems now take me five minutes to figure out by using AI, so I’m able to move onto the next challenge and learn the next thing. That’s one aspect that I think isn’t well recognized in the anti-AI mindset.
That fact, multiplied over 1000 different disciplines, is one of the ways that AI is going to bring amazing progress to our world.
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have always dressed it up as concerned humanitarianism. They did it already with large donations in the past: https://www.philanthropy.com/news/can-a-350-million-gift-cha... All concerns, while the real goal is stated right in the article: "With this new approach, he says, experts in many fields can gain a deeper understanding of AI so they can better harness it. Meanwhile, computing experts are gaining greater…
Makes me sick. MIT is so very, very overcapitalized. These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.
It sounds like you want a return to a time before a lot of the government research money coming to institutions like MIT was gutted.
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#34[deleted]
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#35Was expecting something more concrete with a set of deliverables that can actually be acted on.
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess prolific em-dashes is not considered a sign of LLM writing anymore.
It's actually not em-dashes, they are en-dashes, which is either intentionally to deceive (e.g., swapped) or used incorrectly. Both of which are bad, it's up to everyone to decide on which is worse coming from MITality.
Spaced en dashes – like this – are a correct and accepted typographical choice. Whether to use spaced en dashes or (spaced or unspaced) em dashes is a matter of taste or local convention, and varies from one publication to another. Other than a typo or two where the space was left out on one side of a dash, the dashes in this linked document are just fine. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash_versus_em_dash
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#37This is a bunch of fluff. I hope at least the snacks and lunches during the discussions were good. "Guiding principles: Be bold. Be humble. Put humanity front and center. Lean into learning. Teach with intentionality. No one size fits all." "Recommendations: Adapt educational processes for an AI-aware world. Center people, community, and the residential experience. Build processes, teams and tools for continuous refl…
Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen.
Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set aside to promote experiences -- both in the context of assessments but also even in the social sphere -- there the influence of AI will be very purposefully prevented.
That is an actual stake in the ground, I think (as far as it goes in context like this). I think I would have been hard-pressed to have predicted that there would be such a revolutionary technology where the explicit ask of MIT faculty would be to prevent its influence in the school.
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Makes me sick. MIT is so very, very overcapitalized. These things don't lead to anything other than a rich guy getting his name on a building, and more corruption in academia. By far the best thing which could happen to MIT would be for 95% of the endowment to go up in a poof of smoke, bringing it back to nineties levels. That's the end of the period when the Institute did high-integrity research.
It sounds like you want a return to a time before a lot of the government research money coming to institutions like MIT was gutted.
No, today institutions like Georgia Tech -- which has an endowment of just about the same as MIT in the nineties adjusted for inflation -- seem to function just about the same way as MIT did back then.
I want to get back to the era before people went to MIT as a center of wealth, power, and prestige, and would lie and cheat to get tenured positions there, to where it was a place where nerds went to nerd together.
And to a place where every !@#$% done didn't lead to a self-hyping press release, but where statements were precise, measured, calibrated, and most importantly, scientifically-accurate.
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly think about what they did to Aaron Swartz.
They also formed committees and investigated after the fact back then!
And then they adopted it as a tactic.
No, I can't provide a cite. Insider information. But whistleblowers have been threatened with being "Shwartzed" since (e.g. have frivolous criminal charges filed, to make their lives hell). In every case I've seen, whistleblowers signed an NDA, a non-disparage, and backed down.
That's why I don't trust a !@#$% thing from MIT anymore. Lies and fraud get covered up. Once that starts happening, you can't trust anything.
Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ok, but did AI and LLMs make the cheating easier, faster, harder to detect? Whatabout the past doesn't change the problems now. "My leg already had a cut on it. No need to worry about the new stab wound in my chest!"
Absolutely; it's a real problem. But institutions like MIT have also been participating in, and benefiting from, this transactional relationship from their side in offering degrees that they know carry so much value.
MIT makes all its money from research (and investing its endowment more successfully than most schools), not tuition, and the success in research comes from having such a high-achieving community of faculty and graduate students. They're pretty incentivized to keep the bar for academic achievement genuinely high.