jakelsaunders94Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
https://blog.jakesaunders.dev/is-anybody-else-bored-of-talking-about-ai/
This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it.
My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost, with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy.
Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandably) completely belligerent to the idea.
Students are being told conflicting information -- in one class that "ChatGPT is cheating" and in the very next class that using AI is mandatory for a good grade.
Its an absolute disaster.
The wild part is they’re having this reaction while using the most rigid and limited interfaces to the LLMs. Imagine when the capabilities of coding agents surface up to these professions. It’s already starting to happen with Claude Cowork. I swear if I see another presentation with that default theme…
When industrialization was taking root yes indeed the factory jobs sucked AND it was the future. Two things can be true
By my understanding, the administrators at small colleges are among the least capable professionals one might find anywhere in the economy.
I've been telling my curious/adrift relatives that it's a machine takes a document and guesses what "usually" comes next based on other documents. You're not "chatting with it" as much as helping it construct a chat document.
The closer they can map their real problems to make-document-bigger, the better their results will be.
Alas, that alignment is nearly 100% when it comes to academic cheating.