@olivia Olivia, what would it mean for me to “refuse adoption” in universities when it is students who are the drivers for my courses and they are widely using AI in ways that are already forbidden?

I feel like the “resistance” and critique of inevitability talk isn’t quite connecting with my reality on the ground

@UlrikeHahn @olivia

I glanced at your work on "Science communication as collective intelligence".

I think that we need to redesign university courses so that learning is communal for the solution of a specific goal.

I think though that Olivia's points are complementary to that goal. Universities should resist AI adoption as imposed by external economic forces.

@apostolis @olivia I’ve have already redesigned both my assessments and my teaching in response to students’ AI use, but that kind of adaptation feels like it conceptually falls more into “inevitability” than “resist”

right now, what’s most valuable to me personally (given the starting point that every single student in my courses has somehow used AI, and a good proportion uses it *a lot*) is advice from other academics on how exactly they are trying to change what they do in response.

telling me “I can resist” doesn’t feel helpful in that way

@apostolis @olivia I guess a different way of putting this all is that for the multiple ways in which AI is currently negatively affecting my work, both in teaching and research, the drivers underlying the use are not ,industry forces’ in the way the quoted passage in Olivia’s post is assuming, it is the independent, voluntary action of other individuals within the system (students, other researchers)

that whole frame (industry forces) captures well what is happening in many jobs, but it doesn’t capture what is happening in mine

@apostolis @olivia the reason why this ultimately matters that pushing back against the real driver (the “organic” adoption of these tools by individuals) requires me to understand and engage with the perceived value and function these tools have for them…

…and that means trying to understand both what they can and what they can’t do. Simply declaring that these tools are garbage (“semantically meaningless random text generator”) isn’t useful for actually productively countering AI use in this configuration…(if they genuinely were meaningless random text generators I wouldn’t be faced with the negative effects in the first place).

the Fodor quote doesn’t feel like it’s aimed at that kind of understanding

@abucci @UlrikeHahn @apostolis @olivia

Wouldn't an approach where the AIs have to pass the class as students, be better. After all, regurgitating data is not the way to learn how to think. As for the pollitical/economics of the whole mess, well, that's on us to some extent. It's a problem educated people deal with all the time, even among each other. IMHO, humanity is still growing up. We've not abandoned our superstitions for the hard real wonder of actual nature. Is AI part of our nature?

@lednaBM @abucci @UlrikeHahn @apostolis @olivia

The tacit assumption here is that LLMs possess intelligence is false. Their purpose is not to give intelligent answers. Their purpose is surveillance.

AGI = Automated Gathering of Intel

@teledyn @lednaBM @abucci @apostolis @olivia I think the “intelligence” issue is a red herring, personally

in the contexts I’m concerned with, people’s use is driven by the practical value they find in the actual outputs

(I also don’t personally see anyone in this thread that has been assuming that)