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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

#61
It is just speculations. If we rely on LLMs, then something bad happens. Truly, something will happen, but will it be bad? A calculator ruins people's ability to do mental arithmetic, is it bad? I'm not sure, why I'd need to do mental arithmetic. Writing ruins memory. Is it bad? Probably, but I know no people who would reject writing to exercise their memory.

Moreover, if it will be so bad, as the author think, we can just spend like 15 minutes per day, to train the abilities that become unused with LLMs. And LLMs could help us to do it, so it will be like 15 min/day, not 2 hours/day.

> My son is in school. And the teacher literally said they need to use an LLM and the teacher is using an LLM to grade/check it. This is ridiculous.

I don't know, if it is ridiculous. I like LLMs, they really help to learn things. I mean, yes, LLMs can be detrimental to learning, if instead of doing a task at hand, the student will be asking LLM to do the task. But it can be a real help, because with the help of LLM you can do tasks, you cannot do without it. You can do tasks faster, and to do more of them. LLM can be bad for learning or it can be good, it depends on how it is used.

The teacher using LLM is very interesting. When I was at school, I thought I was smarter then my teachers at school, and I didn't like them, some of them I just hated. If they were using LLMs, I'm sure I would figure out ways to do tasks in a way, so their LLMs would hallucinate and grade my work wrongly. You can always complain and make the teacher to check it without LLM. Let them spend additional 10 minutes grading, and do it in front of other pupils, so teachers would need to admit their mistakes publicly. I would definitely do it. I did something like that with math, I would go for any length to find some non-standard solution for a problem, that cannot be checked by checking numbers in specific places of the solution. It made the teacher to make mistakes while grading, I just loved it. But if I had LLM... I would definitely do it with literature and history also. My math teacher was not so bad after all, but I hated the literature and history ones.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#62

> 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…

Any examination that isn't done in person on general course material (nothing an LLM could prepare for you) is just stubborn refusal to protect students from themselves in an age where anything else can be faked. Graded homework and take-home assignments are dead as useful pedagogical tools.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Those are good points and that's why progress is not guaranteed or trivial, just plausible.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#65

> 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…

I attended one of best high schools in the area.

One teacher, when I asked him what I can do about my failing grade, told me "you can go hang yourself". Why was I getting a failing grade in the first place? Well, it was normal that three quarters of the class would be failing his tests. That's just the kind of teacher he was.

The PE teacher thought that his role was to teach us discipline based on fear. Later I heard a fun story about him getting a new class and thinking that one of the girls was a student, while she was actually the mother of one of the students. She saw the students being yelled at for 45 minutes straight, she got yelled personally at and called retarded. Of course nothing happened to him.

The literature teacher yelled at us so hard that we were literally afraid of talking to her. She hated us, and at some point made that openly clear, by being mean on purpose. She never gave me more than "barely passing", even though at the standardized test I got a near-perfect score.

Once she did a test, threw the paper away, and assigned us grades by how much she liked each student. I brought up this story during reunion, and was told "she actually prepared us for how we'd be treated in college and adult life".

And that was one of the best schools that always took the most talented students from the region. In this context, having two LLMs talk to each other really isn't a bad thing.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#66

> 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…

I attended one of best high schools in the area. One teacher, when I asked him what I can do about my failing grade, told me "you can go hang yourself". Why was I getting a failing grade in the first place? Well, it was normal that three quarters of the class would be failing his tests. That's just the kind of teacher he was. The PE teacher thought that his role was to teach us discipline based on fear. Later I heard…

Hence why my sympathy to teachers is limited. Not zero, for sure. But there's a limit

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#67

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…

I agree that a lot of the noise at the moment is an emotional reaction to LLMs, rather than a dispassionate assessment of how useful they are. It's understandable - they are changing the way we work, and for lots of us (software developers), the reason we chose this career was because we _enjoy_ writing code and solving problems.

As with a lot of issues in today's world, each side is talking past the other. It can simultaneously be true that LLMs make writing code less enjoyable / gratifying, and that LLMs can speed up our work.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#68
They cynic in me wants to point out how for many (most?) of the programmers out there, they aren't working on novel problems that need a lot of involved thinking or using that gray matter to come up with something innovative.

Instead, your average Joe will be writing some Java code with Spring Boot (or .NET with ASP.NET, or Ruby with Ruby on Rails, or PHP with Laravel, or Python with Django) where how to do things is already largely established and they only need to answer the "what?" question - to codify a bunch of boring business rules into a technical solution that runs.

That work isn't entirely different from tasks where codegen shines - like writing DB migrations from entities, or entity mappings from some existing DB schema, or writing client code based on an OpenAPI spec, or writing an OpenAPI spec based on your endpoint definitions. The less people have to do that manually, the better the results seem to be (e.g. a bunch of deterministic code that will do everything correctly based on the inputs, given how well known the problem space is).

You could also say the same for having something like autocomplete, or automated code suggestions, or even all of those higher abstraction level frameworks there in the first place - where you don't start solving a problem with "First, I'll write something that binds to a port and takes incoming HTTP requests..." but rather "I'll look up how you add a required constraint for a business object that's mapped to a DB table so validations fail before I even try to save something bad. If I'm really lucky, I'll be able to return a user friendly error message too!"

There, it doesn't really matter whether the official docs will tell you that, a colleague, StackOverflow, ChatGPT, or anything else... you're not doing that much creative work, but something a bit more blue collar. The end result of all this is programming becoming something closer to data entry with ample amounts of code to just glue other solutions together. There, the risks posed by LLMs are far lower and the utility far greater - because a lot of the code is similarly structured and quite boring.

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#69

> 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…

I hear you, but also we need to ask why is it a problem? Used to be, it was considered critically important that students learn to write in cursive and to multiply 3 digit numbers in their head. I can't do either, and I suspect many folks these days can't either. The world has not ended. I also can't tie a square knot, lasso a steed, or mend a fence. School assignments have always been a waste of time. Essay-writing…

> Essay-writing is not a critical skill

If not that then what? Prompt engineering?

Re: Re: My AI skeptic friends are all nuts

#70
post #3

I don't think the original post took issue with what people enjoyed doing, I think it took issue with people's understanding of what is even possible with the current tech.

Agreed. The previous article made me think “this tool is probably more potent than I thought and I should give it a try”. It did not make me drop my concerns about AI in general.
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