https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/choosing-to-stay-human

At some point soon - Ethan Mollick will serve as an expert witness in trials on behalf of #LLM sagely saying "the problem is the person and not the tool" - no different than psychiatrists serving #gun companies.

Choosing to Stay Human

If you go to your favorite social media site, you will find it full of posts that start to look suspiciously similar to each other:

One Useful Thing

@TinJar I found his article (not familiar with who he is) unpersuasive perhaps because I strongly disagree with him on all parts when it comes to education and my child. I am very happy that my child learned cursive, is learning to do math without a calculator, is learning how to make a schedule on his own etc. I don’t think those are good things to abandon and I’m glad my son goes to a school that does teach them (a Waldorf school)

I’ve seen firsthand how big a change learning cursive was

@TinJar and I don’t think running your writing by multiple AI agents pretending to readers is a good thing. But then count me firmly in the camp if I’ve yet to find a persuasive use for current AI (and even the limited uses I don’t mind much - like voice recognition to enter a destination into a mapping app while driving) seem to unfortunately be getting worse not better. At present it’s about 1 in 5-6 times when I try to ask Apple for directions that it just fails spectacularly
@TinJar for example if I ask for directions to “Pho Now” (a real excellent Pho place in San Jose) Apple Maps returns with where my car is as I’m asking it. And I can never get it to actually give me directions to Coffee Bar (any of their locations) because it just tries to give me directions to the nearest Starbucks - that’s perhaps amusing but similar things keep happening.