Yeah. It’s definitely a major contributor to the dumbing of humanity. We’re barreling towards Idocracy with open ~~arms~~. AI.

I'm in software development and land on both sides of this argument.

Having to review or maintain AI slop is infuriating.

That said, it has replaced traditional web searching for me. A good assistant setup can run multiple web searches for me, distill the useful info cutting through the blog spam and ads, run follow up searches for additional info if needed, and summarize the results in seconds with references if I want to validate its output.

There was a post a couple days ago about it solving a hard math problem with guidance from a mathematician. Sparked a discussion about AI being a powerful tool in the right hands.

Hey I'm an educator and I found a way to trick the chatgpt so students can't use it.

I have two methods I employ to reduce they use of chatgpt

Method 1.

I use examples of people in my questions and the people are characters from popular TV shows. Like star trek. You could also use names of athletes or anyone that likely has a lot of content on them in media and internet.

For example : Spock and Uhura both were given an image of a dress to determine if it matched the dress of the missing scientist. Spock perceived the colors to match and Uhura did not. What would explain this difference in color perception?

The answer would be color constancy. It's also a reference to the blue/black gold/white dress. But chatgpt would not be able to understand that.
(I'm a perception researcher and educator).

Anywho if they copy paste , they are likely to get replies based on episodes of star trek tos.

The other thing I do in conjunction with the first is make it so that the resources I give them are easier and less work to use than dealing with the chatgpt answers that would require a lot of additional edits of the text to finally get the correct answer. And may not ever give the correct answer.

If they have a resource like a PDF of the PowerPoint lecture, they will use it instead if it's easier to use.

So make it the easier choice.

It's because humans naturally want to avoid unpleasant work, and public schools teach us that learning is hard and work for some reason, rather than something fun. For instance, I used to read for fun an unbelievable amount, but then I was forced to do book reports with a required list of books to "prove" I was reading them, and it was just absolutely no fun at all. Why not have a discussion about it and the teacher can check the spark notes? This changes at community college back to learning is fun, but just years of being told to do busywork and be a drone kills learning for a lot of people I feel.

We used to be graded on penmanship in our writing. Nobody was particularly upset when typing rendered a penmanship grade irrelevant. It became an unimportant metric to track; people with truly abysmal handwriting became perfectly capable authors. Penmanship was handed from author to artist.

LLMs are rapidly making structure and composition unimportant to the author. They are beginning to be able to convey ideas without being overly concerned with format. We need not be particularly concerned with the diminishing importance of this metric; people with little understanding of format can now become perfectly capable authors. Structure and composition is being handed over from author to poet.

AI provides a direct, immediate answer to every question you put before it. It provides that in a well-crafted, predictable, easy-to-read format. The student is not wrong for wanting this kind of response. It is what they, themselves, are asked to provide.

That the answer is rarely correct doesn't particularly phase them: They lack the experience to be able to identify the falsehoods. They haven't learned to question the lack of citation and attribution, or to cross check sources.

Where we now need to focus is on the roots of thought. The formation of ideas. The determination between fact and fiction.

Divide the class up into groups of three. The members of each group are to individually write a paper on the same, narrow topic. But, they are to deliberately include in their paper one to four significant falsehoods on their subject. Feel free to use AI.

Give the three papers to another group, and have them identify and prove the lies.

As the author, any intentional lie you manage to slip past the checkers earns big points. Any undeclared lie caught by the checkers costs you big points.

As the checker, every intentional lie you discover earns a few points. Every unintentional lie you catch earns big points. Every intentional lie you miss costs big points.

Your students were so focused on critical thinking tasks that they barely realize how much research they have put into the two topics they worked on.

You can use AI to learn everything OR to learn nothing. They've made the second choice.

what to say to somebody who hates ai?

"Acknowledge their concerns and express understanding of their feelings, as many people have valid worries about AI's impact on society. You can also share that AI has potential benefits and that discussing its responsible use can be more productive than outright rejection."

Yeah that doesn't sound like it's gonna work....

I'm a non-traditional student and I have used AI to help with math.

Let me explain something. When I try to do a general search for help on how to solve a problem the top results in most search engines aren't the old Academy style videos of guides anymore. They are sponsored links, paid tutoring websites, and YouTube videos of people playing at influencer instead of teaching.

The same is true for researching most given topics.

I have tried to use AI ethically but I know it's problematic.

When trying to find sources the old academic websites still hold but finding those websites I had to ask AI with a crafted prompt. At times I did ask it to suggest papers a academic sources. I then used my own critical analysis to decide the sources biases and value for the source and explored around further by looking at the good papers source list.

I see the problems with AI but a boolean search only works so well these days.

Going back to math, I could watch a video, but it's sitting through precious time when an AI will answer my question directly and explain the reason I was wrong.

Even if I'm trying to use a math website that actually answers the problem, there will be pop-ups (on the phone) useless text (as if it's a damn recipe website) and possibly mathematical syntax that is above my course level.

Using the AI I can have that syntax explained.

I do understand that AI is a problem and I hate HATE getting info from a middle man like this but I complete understand why a student would.

I also see how tempting it is to just skip those extra steps and take an answer, but I know it also is often wrong. My verification steps and further digging ensures that the AI is returning valid info.

But why do students do it? Because the internet today is a slop bog that they have to navigate on thier phones. Often with minimal protection from ads and other useless garbage.

I feel like this is a progression of a trend I've been railing against for a while. My workplace has to contend with a massive amount of ever-changing regulatory and engineering information. There are thousands of pages of documents, with differing levels of authority and detail, governing all aspects of what we do.

I've been begging people to read the docs. Don't just ask your manager or predecessor, don't just skim through it, and for fuck's sake don't ctrl+f until you find something that looks good and run with it out of context. Treating this sort of research like a Google search is killing us during compliance inspections. Read the docs!

Shit changes, often. I have to constantly remind them, it's not what the docs said last year. It's what they say now. Know your responsibilities, know where to find the info that pertains to them, and review it often. Read it, know it, or at least know where to find it.

It's getting worse. I've seen experienced people submit supplemental documents with egregious errors after they "just used AI for grammar checking". I've seen proposed policy docs with references to regulations that are decades out of date. I've gotten questions about implementing things that were outlawed or obsolete before I was born, and I've been around a looooong while.

We can't meat puppet our way through this, blindly following AI, or people are going to die in horrible industrial accidents. I mean that literally. People will be killed. This is why we have the current mass quanties of regulatory documents, to prevent people from literally dying in awful ways.

I'm to old for this shit.

I don't know how to solve your core problem you are hinting at without society at large realizing many of our problems are the brainwashing of the masses. This problem is why we initially were taught math without calculators in my day, by college they were expected to help with simple math to focus on the more complicated problems.

Here with llms it's important to still write, learn to research something (even more than the don't use encyclopedias as a primary source) learning to read with deep understanding and learning to skim. Learning math and logic is as important as ever.

What I see missing quite a bit in the antiai art world is the importance of creating art to convey your meaning (if AI is a tool involved or not for writing images ect is this thing showing the meaning and nuance you want not just a off the top of your head comment and auto ship the slop output) and the only way you can go no that's not what I want is to have some idea how to make the piece of writing or art yourself even at a high level.

I personally like the tech but see it accelerating the brain drain for those that rely on it too for answers as the learn.

There is no reason to avoid getting better at writing.

I feel like people often misunderstand that writing isn't just busywork, but rather instrumental for developing a deeper understanding. Formulating a sentence forces you to clear out uncertainties you might have. And writing it down serves as extended working memory.

I can imagine there being some middleground, like not bothering to learn where to place commas and having an LLM insert them for you, but from my biased position of already knowing how to write correctly, I do struggle to come up with scenarios where this actually makes a difference.
If you know how to read, you'll have a sense where commas aid with that. Anything beyond that is just pedantic wankery anyways.

I'm glad I retired from the profession when I did. I was seeing that "no interest in learning anything" with the tools they had then. I can't imagine it now.

yep. watching kids squander their one chance at university education over their reliance on this shit is depressing as fuck.

Because learning for kids/young adults isn't really the point anymore. The point of doing the learning is to "pass test" or, "get job" or, "move on to the next link in the education chain". So young people often feel faced with a choice, engage with the process to accomplish the tasks, or dissociate from the process entirely.

This systemic issue is likely why steiner schools and the like are seeing increased interest from parents.

Academic writing is really hard. It requires intense concentration over a long period of time. I don't know that your kids would be doing more work if they didn't have AI- they'd probably just do what I did, phone in a shitty paper they churned out the night before/2 weeks late, because they could only start when they sufficiently felt like they were going to throw up from stress.

On one hand I don't blame people for wanting to make money.

On the other hand hand how come EVERYONE is in it for the money?

Integrity is all gone and I hate that I can be in classes with 40 CS majors and still can't share my hobby of programming with anyone.

It's a crying shame that organic shitposts are going to be gone one day.