Mastodawn

Had a lot of fun with my stats students today. I gave them two data sets. One from a random number generator, the other was one I made up that was not random, but designed to look random. They were able to figure out which one was fake.

Then we had ChatGPT make the same kind of data set (random numbers 1-6 set of 100) and it had the same problems as my fake set but in a different way.

We talked about the study about AI generated passwords.

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myrmepropagandist Feb 20

There is something very creepy about the way LLMs willy cheerfully give lists of "random" numbers. But they aren't random in frequency, and as my students pointed out "it's probably from some webpage about how to generate random numbers"

But even then, why is the frequency so unnaturally regular? Is that an artifact from mixing lists of real random numbers together?

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myrmepropagandist Feb 20

The LLM is like a little box of computer horrors that we peer into from time to time.

I'm sorry but the whole interface is just so silly.

You ask for random numbers with sentences and it pretends to give them to you? What are we doooooing?

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Leo Ré Jorge Feb 21

@futurebird the first time I had to go nuclear about LLM use in my department was when my boss was showing me her design for a major experiment where they were planting actual trees of different species in long term plots, and when I asked how did they randomise the distribution of species she said the post doc responsible for setting up the experiment had asked chatgpt to randomise it! (1/2)

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Leo Ré Jorge Feb 21

@futurebird And that was about 2 years ago, when this kind of thing would probably be even worse. It took me half an hour to write code to generate the plots and some nice figures with the positions of every tree... I wonder how long they were fighting the chat box to get any kind of answer. Let alone the fact this experiment will be running for years to come. How can people be so careless? (2/2)

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Orion Ussner kidder

@LeoRJorge @futurebird Over and over again, if you know what you're doing, the LLM-generated version of it is so bad that doing it from scratch is easier and faster. Only people who don't know what they're doing, and usually people who sneer at learning to do something, really want to use LLMs. They think it's a cheat-code against acquiring skills, but it just makes them look lazy and uncaring. That's the owner-class dream, of course.