@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?

@UlrikeHahn @abucci @apostolis @olivia

I understand what you're saying, and maybe language is not serving us well. You seemed to have juxtaposed helping it be better versus creating a disruption. And again, maybe I fully don't understand the dilemma. When I need very technical information that I can not recall or need help with, I would go to a book or a specification. Now, I can ask AI, check its results, and decide whether I can rely upon what's being presented. It's a tool... 1/2

@lednaBM @UlrikeHahn @abucci @apostolis @olivia At the risk of butting into this conversation, I think the problem here is that you think that "just a tool" is a neutral concept.

Tools, by their very nature, change the way we interact with the world. Cars are "just a tool", but dependence on cars for transport has both positive and negative effects, because of how their use changes how we behave (and what other things we want to change about the world now "we" want to use cars all the time). Is "car-using humanity" healthier than "pre-car humanity"?

In this sense, even if "AI is just a tool", the existence of cognitive tools *clearly* implies that use of them will change the way people behave - *regardless* of any concept of "applications being identified as misapplications". Dependence on a tool for *thinking* feels inherently more problematic than dependence on a tool for travelling distances...

@abucci

They even tried "nuclear weapons are just tools", with Project Plowshare, saying we could use them for excavating canals or mining.

Boys with toys, or corporations hoping to get contracts, IDK, though at least most people knew this was ridiculous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare

@aoanla @lednaBM @UlrikeHahn @apostolis @olivia

Respectfully @EricLawton

I understand your sentiment, but people were not as knowledgeable about radiation back then. So yes, these things were boasted about in ignorance. And yes, we see it today with the fools (Musk) of our time talking about colonizing Mars, not even thinking about how radioactive it is. Foolish talk is foolish talk in any century. This is why we have scientists and researchers to sort the how's, while engineers apply them.
@abucci @aoanla @UlrikeHahn @apostolis @olivia