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Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

skarlso.github.io

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Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#21

Post by energy123 »

auggierose wrote: post #4

> And as a last point, I fear very much what’s going on in schools. My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous. And if you think that’s okay or you don’t see a serious problem with this, then that’s an even greater problem. If that is tru…

Students will need to use the same LLM as their teacher, since LLMs are biased to grade their own outputs higher.

Imagine getting downgraded because the substrings "Honestly?" and "—" didn't constitute 3.2% of your submission.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#22

Post by bowsamic »

Yes that was my thought exactly. The original article did not address by far my biggest concern which is skill degradation. It happens rapidly and drastically: I know developers with 10+ years experience who now feel useless without the LLM to write their emails and code for them.

My wife is pregnant and the education stuff terrifies me. I may have to make huge sacrifices to avoid schools that use LLMs. Hopefully by the time he’s school age people will have realised that relying entirely on LLMs will degrade your thinking, reading, and writing, but I’m not confident

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#24

Post by throw93484i4 »

CSDude wrote: post #10

I agree that education needs overhaul, it's scary for new comers, AI can make mistakes that you need to be careful (so does old StackOverflow answers) but let’s be honest: Most employers aren’t paying for your art or your dopamine.

Most employers aren’t paying for your degrees!

Universities as we know them are obsolete.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#25

Post by JustinCS »

auggierose wrote: post #4

> And as a last point, I fear very much what’s going on in schools. My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous. And if you think that’s okay or you don’t see a serious problem with this, then that’s an even greater problem. If that is tru…

This sounds like an assignment to learn to use LLMs, which as an isolated assignment sounds reasonable. Students should learn how to use tools of all kinds to maximize their effectiveness. It might be a bigger problem if all assignments are done like this but I doubt that's the case.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#26

Post by stavros »

I feel like this article makes the same tired point I see every time a new technology comes alone: "but if we don't know how to shoe our own horses any more because we got cars, soon nobody will know how to shoe horses!"

Yeah. And that's OK. Because nobody will need to shoe horses any more!

If I forget how to write tests, what's the problem? It means that I never need to write tests any more. If I do need to write tests, for some reason (maybe because the LLM is bad at it) then I won't forget how to!

That's how atrophy works: the skills that atrophy are, by definition, the ones you no longer need at all, and this argument does this sleight of hand where it goes "don't let the skills you don't need atrophy, because you need them!".

Well, do I need them, or not?

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#27

Post by tw04 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #5

I feel (hah!) that we've reached a point where instead of focusing on objective things that the LLM-based systems can do, we are wasting energy and "ink" on how they make us feel. And how others using them make us feel. And how Hollywood-style stories about "AI" make us feel. And how people commenting on these things make us feel. And so on. IMO it's best to focus on objective things that the systems can do today, wi…

> instead of "let's see if they can drive from point A to point B first". We are now at the point where they can do that, somewhat reliably,

No, we really aren’t. Let me know when any of those systems can get me from Souix falls South Dakota to Thunder Bay Ontario without multiple disengagements and we can talk.

Based on what I’ve seen we’re still about 10 years away best case scenario and more likely 20+ assuming society doesn’t collapse first.

I think people in the Bay Area commenting on how well self driving works need to visit middle America and find out just how bad and dangerous it still is…

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#29

Post by ttiurani »

JustinCS wrote: post #17
ttiurani wrote: post #8

Solid point. A bit tangential, but I've recently been baffled as to why is this belief held by so many: "since LLMs are trained on online data, they are re-trained with their own AI slop, further damaging them. Soon bad code will get even worse, basically." together with: "I’m sure it will get better with time, but it’s not there yet." What improvements people think will overcome the poisoning of the well? I'm not an…

Even as AI generates more writing and code, we still have a way of ranking quality: Good writing and successful projects tend to get more popular and prominent. This selection can allow LLMs to continue to improve. They get a huge flow of slop, but they generate based on the patterns correlated with better quality. The model developers can also develop better ways to curate the input data themselves and keep the slop…

Maybe.

As a counterpoint: isn't popularity of a library more a metric of API convemience than actual code quality?

And isn't popularity of an essay more about how it conforms to existing beliefs than the quality of the thinking?

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#30

Post by zveyaeyv3sfye »

auggierose wrote: post #4

> And as a last point, I fear very much what’s going on in schools. My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM otherwise they won’t score high enough because the other pupils are using LLMs and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous. And if you think that’s okay or you don’t see a serious problem with this, then that’s an even greater problem. If that is tru…

The school situation is indeed in serious problems.

I just read this piece the other day with countless witnesses from teachers in the US:

https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/

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