I've noticed a big shift toward, "We should be teaching kids how to cite AI."
That's antithetical to citations. A citation points you to the original source. Citing AI is effectively erasing original sources in a misguided effort to "teach students how to responsibly use AI tools."
Responsible use is teaching people that AI tools are plagiarism machines. Period.
So, this got kind of big.
I wrote a more detailed and thought out post about this topic on my blog. Comments are open and you're welcome to add your thoughts there.
Also, if your kids' teachers do something like this, be kind. Take time to talk with them. Don't berate. We all work hard to make sure kids are taught well.
@brianb Sorry, I'm deeply confused.
This is to say, 'Please tell us what the machine either made up or stole from somewhere, and it certainly won't tell you which, that you used in your work'?
If we could get these LLMs to source their data, that would be lovely (but they literally can't, reliably, so that will never happen), so asking you to say 'I heard it from Bob' has about as much weight here.
@brianb oh dear. Honestly I think knowledge about AI and it's ethical considerations is so limited, because technologists voices, and big tech voices, dominate the discourse so much.
It doesn't seem surprising that a teacher or administrator world struggle to fit it into the framework they have.
We should be teaching kids NOT to cite AI.
Ok, likely unproductive response, but what the actual fuck!
Is this the education system still getting to grips with Wikipedia and the internet maybe being not entirely irrelevant and so applying the same degree of acceptance of Wikipedia to AI?
Or is this corporate propaganda?
Or just desperation at not know what to do anymore as tech disrupts traditional education structures (a real problem I’d wager)?
Either way, citing AI is just dumb and betrays someone who’s confused about AI
Makes sense. But still, seems like a quick capitulation which implies there’s more perceived heft behind AI. In part I’d say because it actually looks convincing and that traditional assessment is actually disrupted by it.
My bias here being that I suspect it a largely good thing that AI does disrupt traditional educational assessment as it likely reveals the superficiality in education that AI achieves.
In the sense that the whole concept is outdated and we should stop selecting for it, but society has decided to value it to maintain some sort of crappy established order?
Madonna is not a virgin, but she is “like a virgin” in all the ways it matters (it doesn’t matter, to anyone but weird fetishists), so you’re saying Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia, but that shouldn’t matter unless you have some bizarre and socially regressive point to make?
The correct citation style feels like it would follow the rules for citing a personal conversation.
You could cite a random granny about spectroscopy. It doesn't mean what she says about it is accurate.
@brianb I wrote this in response to your toot and the majority of replies you've been getting, but made it is own post because I will be referring back to it often: https://infosec.exchange/@magnesium/112467935216416521
I'm happy to have a conversation about it, where we can get into specifics and compromise our opinions, or not and just find our lines in the sand
I'm noticing a loud anti-AI gut-feeling knee jerk reaction echoing across my fediverse follows for the past 3 days or so. I guess the sentiment is coming partially from a background rebellious feeling against the over-marketting of the term AI in what seems like everything these days, and the overstep of Slack forcing people to opt out of being part of their AI/ML training data. I've never been a fan of knee jerk reactions though since they are never really well thought through, and this recent trend is no exception to that rule. For one thing I wish people would be a little more precise with their anger. If you're mad at LLMs being trained on intellectual property without consent and without compensation then awesome, I can get behind your anger and maybe even help you do something about it, but I can't get behind a general sense of malaise against AI and ML in general. In my opinion, and experience, AI and ML have many applications that are too beneficial to progressing humanity's use of technology. It should not be generally feared and hated.
@magnesium Ok, I'm with you on the specificity problem. LLMs are different than ML and other neural training AI that _do_ have promise. My post was coming from a position of generalized "generative AI" for knowledge because that's what we (teachers) see happening in classrooms.
Either way, it's a move that looks proactive (let's teach them how to use the stuff they're going to use anyways) without dealing with the root issue. I suspect it's because most don't understand the root problem.
@brianb I've been thinking lately that the world needs robust reference management tools a hell of a lot more than it needs these "AI" gadgets.
Suggestions that LLM output be citable on a par with works of intellect just might be the Big Dumb that shocks me out of my doldrums, to put fresh energy into #Jurism maintenance.
@brianb true. It makes me cringe that capitalists so bent on making the future have convinced a generation to not miss out on it. For the low monthly fee of…
I still wonder, if someone couldn’t be bothered to make the effort of writing it, why on Earth would I make the effort to read it? Is the point of education to bloviate into the void and get a good number?
@brianb
Citing AI is like saying "I found this on Google".
Perhaps that is why AI might become popular. People now use Google to find stuff and pay no attention to the source Google sent them to, they just found it "on Google". AI is meant for those folks.
@brianb it also misses the point. I tell a lot of post-grad students. Citations do a lot more than get you out of plagiarism issues. They form the scaffolding for your paper.
I tell them that citation demonstrate you have consulted expert sources and established facts that are agreed upon by others in the field.
Especially for students, when YOU state something as fact, remember, you are not an expert (yet), you don’t have your masters yet, so why should the reader believe you?
Instead, I want students to show interesting, well formed analysis and synthesis built on established facts which are cited from reputable and preferably peer reviewed sources.
@brianb @me_ I remember when wikipedia was gaining prominence folks were real worked up about students using it as though it was a primary source, and getting very frustrated that people talked about the Internet/online part as if that was the problem. Like, I was taught in school in the early ‘90s that no encyclopedia was an appropriate primary source. That just isn’t what they are.
Citing AI is like citing an encyclopedia written by people who don’t care about correctness.
From my recent experience in searching for things and not using AI, who's to say that some craptastic AI didn't write the piece you just found?...
Simply frustrating that none of your first page results ever look to be written by an intelligent human being and without a video ad between every paragraph.
My wife had to listen to an idiot pushing the whole let AI write for your students nonsense some months ago.
Society would be better served without it.
@MyWoolyMastadon Yup, searching has gotten much, much worse. I'm limited to Google at school (domain-wide policy), but this tweak helped to default to web-only results. Pairing it with the before:2023 flag also helps.
https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/
@brianb
citing AI is like citing
"well, everyone knows this, or at least my cousin Bill said that at the family barbecue, or come to think of it, he said his room-mate believed that"
@brianb LLMs are not AI in the first place.
I would be in favor of teaching kids how to bootstrap research using LLMs, so long as it never, ever stops there, and instead follows up with finding the original citation the LLM was trained on and verifying its contents as accurately represented in the LLM response.
LLMs can be used like any other aggregator or indexing program: they provide a reference to other work.
But that's it. They need to be treated as the limited tool they are.
I absolutely hate that perfectly legitimate tech is being ruined by overzealous early-adopters and grifters.
Just like crypto-bros ruined the value of blockchain by reducing it to NFT and cryptocurrency bullshit, we're seeing the same thing happen with LLMs.
@brianb Others have made vague mentions to it, but there's a fundamental mistake here: the assumption that AI gives real information rather than information-shaped sentences.
It doesn't actually understand the question, because it doesn't understand anything. It's a machine that takes the words you throw at it and dumps them into a big bucket that knocks loose the series of words that generally come next to fall out the bottom.
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