not_IOeveryone hates AI
nucleativePeople around me use AI all the time to get answers to generalized topics. More and more they use it like a search engine / information augmentation system.
They are not technical people. They mostly know that the information needs to be double checked and might be wrong. But usually take it in face value if the importance is low.
Honestly this is about what they did before. They would search Google, click on the first blog, take it as the word of God, and claim to have “done their research”.
I too use AI regularly for brainstorming, quickly summarizing massive text messages people send me, etc.
I don’t love it or hate it. In some cases it saves a lot of time and is useful tool. In other cases it outputs trash that we cannot use for any serious case.
Just like a hammer or a shovel, it’s a tool. Can be used the right way and it can be used the wrong way.
I think of an LLM as extraordinarily lossy compression. All the training data is essentially encoded in the model. You can get an approximation of the data back out again with the right input.
I don’t think it’s any less reliable that random blogs on the web, and I don’t have to wear through SEO tripe either.
The annoying thing though is that all the random blogs on the web are written with using these LLMs now. It makes it much harder to be critical of your sources, because they’re all coming from a unnamed, proprietary LLM with no information about who owns it or the training data. At least before, I could look up the user or check out their other articles, now every article is randomly generated from some unknown prompt.
I would argue this isn’t only a bad thing though. Even before AI, many bogus articles and information existed. Eg. that people swallow spiders in their sleep
I would guess most people never checked (m)any sources on most information they found. There is no cure to make reality simple, and the more pressure we have to teach people to think critically, the better.
No disagreement here. I’m simply saying because you are more likely to be misled now than ever, being lazy about it isn’t an option anymore, and teachers can use that fact to drive the point home stronger. In the past if you were lazy about checking sources and verifying information, chances were much higher you got valid information that didn’t harm your life down the road. Now you might just hurt yourself by putting glue on your pizza. Not saying I desire that, but the consequences of intellectual laziness have never been bigger, so the emphasis on understanding must follow, since the alternative is being taken advantage of.
#3 is very important, as this is the core thing a school should teach. But lets not kid ourselves that kids weren’t cheating their way out of homework since the start of time 😄
But lets not kid ourselves that kids weren’t cheating their way out of homework since the start of time 😄
I don’t mean to come off as too aggressive because I don’t think we’re really arguing with each other. But, I tend to see statements like this as a kind of handwaving apologia for something that, to be clear, real people are doing to us on purpose. The same way that people might lament the coming of a hurricane season; nothing really to be done about it.
It can certainly be used for that, I will admit. But no that isn’t my intention. I hear many good stories on that front of teachers that have gotten a really good nose for AI and are using it as learning moments for their students. The world is filled with ways to cheat, and teachers are well aware of that. In the end, the process to unlearn them from cheating with AI is the same as cheating in conventional manners, is all I’m saying.