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I know people who have outsourced basic literacy to AI. Like they’re too lazy to actually read through the results page on google so they have ChatGPT summarize it for them. They won’t look for an actual recipe but ask ChatGPT to make one for them.
Americans hate thinking.
But seriously everything has to be a "hack" or a "shortcut" or whatever and that's not good. The way capitalism creates an urgency in all things in order to monetize it has gotta be bad for our brains.
Of course. It's a widely available natural language prompt with an easily verifiable right answer. People use LLMs for homework because they are good at homework because it's easy training data
All the teens I work this openly admit to doing this.
I'm also in college right now and there was this international student I was in class with last semester who straight up could not speak English, and I saw him using AI all the time. Last day of class he did a presentation that was totally incoherent cuz it was clearly written by ChatGPT.
I went to a technical college recently, and I feel like pretty much everyone but me used chatGPT for every short answer or essay question. And not like... Bouncing back and forth (or bypassing industrial copyrights. idk why Australian Standards are paywalled), but literally just asking it and copying and pasting. And then watching multiple arguments between the class and the lecturers about how that's what they'd be doing in industry (rather than, say, which job not existing because management doesn't need to hire people to put things into chatGPT).
lol incomprehensible how that isn’t a glaring indictment of “industry” in general
Bullshit work just keeps getting increasingly more bullshit and helps no one but the line. The mask is basically completely off at this point
Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation
Spatial memory critically relies on the hippocampus and people who use these strategies have greater fMRI BOLD activity and greater grey matter in the hippocampus. Our findings suggest that people with greater GPS habits may rely less on their hippocampus for navigation, as they exhibit a reduced use of spatial memory strategies, reduced cognitive mapping abilities, reduced landmark encoding, and as they have more difficulty learning navigational information. This is consistent with a recent study by Spiers’ group, in which participants who were given instructions on where to turn at decision points while navigating in a film simulation, akin to using GPS, exhibited less fMRI BOLD activity in the hippocampus than when participants self-guided and had to make decisions unaided
I’m so stoked for that to happen to the prefrontal cortex in our ChatGPT society dude, it’s gonna be so rad
I have 2 conflicting:
Before maps in cell phones I was lost all the time. Even in places I know well, I can still get lost. I used to carry a paper map around with me absolutely everywhere even after I lived somewhere for 10 years. I can still get lost easily but with a phone map I am at least able to locate where I am. I don't use it much until I actually become lost, then I am glad I have it. I do not think I have gotten any worse at navigation.
The other day I was on the bus and I was snooping into the windows of the cars in the other lanes. I noticed that virtually all of them had the GPS up on a phone mount. It was about 5pm on a weekday, probably everyone commuting from work. Just picked up the kids. Whatever. Going home. Going the same way they go every day. Even though I can get lost easily and in places I know, even I am not so helpless that I just have it up by default all of the time, telling me how to go down a main road that I take daily.
I'm honestly getting close to thinking AnPrims have a point
A conversation I had a long time ago:
Me: "Don't you worry that as a diabetic, you'd die under your ideal society?"
Anarcho-primivist: "Yeah it's a concern of course. I think I could probably inject insulin using a hollowed out thorn."
Many problems here which I won't get into. But it was the last moment I could ever take any of them seriously.
Nah they still suck
I'm disabled and would have died shortly after birth without modern medicine and even I'm almost there too
Wait until you see the survey of their teachers.
Love it or hate it (I hate it) … humanity entered a new era with this shit. It’s everywhere and most want it. Like plastic or nuclear radiation or fire or metal work … all the things that mark a point in time in the geological record … AI created content now marks the beginning of this era.
It may well simply mark the beginning of the 3rd Millennium. The 1900s are now dead and we’re on new shores.
I’m still disturbed by how little people think about ethically and structurally. All I’m seeing is consumption and tech hype.
As soon as they start charging for it, folks will stop using it as much.
It's just the same tech cycle as ever: give it out for free or very cheaply until you think people are dependent on it, then jack up the price.
Think Uber, Instacart, Netflix, things of this nature.
What would be nice is if entire nations weren't staking their futures on it.
Yes, but the uptake of this feels categorically different, like some new consumerism has been unlocked, and of course Streaming and under are still here aren’t they.
Those examples aren't great since people just keep using them despite the cost
Much fewer than at their peak and continuing to decline in most cases.
It's so wild to me that so many people apparently hate the idea of learning something new, to the point that they'll let an algorithm do their thinking for them. Kids not wanting to do their assignments I understand, but it seems so many adults just flat out hate the meat thing in their skull and wish it would atrophy away into nothing.
(cw: suicide)
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
Seems like people learnt it were forced to hate the wrong part of the push for “productivity”. And, if true, it’s frightening.
The whole AI taking over email communications thing is a horror movie.
Seems like a natural byproduct of a culture based entirely on treats and instant gratification
Pushback is futile at this point. My boss uses it in every time in his quest to climb higher up on the career ladder and it’s making me want to quit because what the fuck is the point of all this shit if thinking is moot
Some dude on my team has interrupted engineering decision meetings multiple times when we’re trying to reason through the architecture of something to give his “input”, which is “here’s something I prompted ChatGPT for”.
If you thought software was shitty and getting shittier over the last 15 years, have I got a fun future full of broken and buggy systems for you!
I’m still disturbed by how little people think about it ethically and structurally.
As pessimistic as I am - I would have never thought the public's reaction to a tech-related Pandora's box situation is "Ethical and other problems? Blah blah blah. Open it! And there's gotta be more than one box right? Open them all! Why wait?"
Yep. Just the other day someone dumped an AI response into chat out of nowhere. When I said I didn’t want to call it out as it might have been rude to point out they weren’t capable of knowing that stuff … their reply was that it’s everywhere now, so it couldn’t be rude.
And they’re likely right. But my god it shocked me.
Jesus. I may complain about living in a rural backwater at times but at least people are genuine in their interactions and not using AI for everything
welcome to Costco, I love you
Teacher’s expectations will likely go up in response, fully leaving any honest student behind.
Likely only for freshman level work. It works for short answers (sometimes) but it struggles to create coherency with anything that is mildly complex, unique, or unusual. Mostly teachers seeking to avoid it will have to start actually changing their prompts. The question is more if teachers will actually bother to do so, as they are really not paid enough to actively alter the curriculum year by year.
That low?
I use LLMs for the functions of my job that are firmly in Graeber's bullshit categories
I think ChatGPT is a good tool for studying, similar to how saying things aloud/writing things out is a good tool for studying because it forces you to think, except with ChatGPT you can have a back and forth. Verifying the output for truth also seems like a good exercise for learning (as long as you don't use ChatGPT to verify itself)
The issue I see is you need to have some base of critical thinking skills and general knowledge to work from in order to get the most out of ChatGPT and I doubt most students are at that level. I don't even consider myself at that level. I assume the worst and students are just taking the output and rewording it.
If we collectively agree ChatGPT is here to stay, then maybe we ought to teach how to use it in a productive way that doesn't dumb us down. I know this isn't a well-defined thing though but probably it would be worth researching. We live under capitalism though so the odds of that happening are probably next to none, but I'm thinking about what we should do if ChatGPT existed under a different system.
Of course ChatGPT isn't inherently evil. It's a tool. The issue is that we, as a society, are nowhere close to the level of social progress that is required to use these tools in a way that doesn't result in more advanced forms of oppression or ignorance.
For me, the problem isn't even one of vagaries of social dynamics and use. The problem is that ChatGPT is ultimately just a more complex, more energy inefficient, search engine. That, on it's own, isn't evil, just stupid, but in the context of a global climate crisis driven by energy usage, it becomes evil. In this context, there is very much no discernable ethical use for this technology.
Perhaps under a clean energy economy, an argument could be made for it's use, but even then, why? For what actual purpose does this serve other than as an intellectual exercise?
It definitely doesn't warrant its cost and at this point just feels like a tech demo that no one can figure out how to monetize effectively. As well, the energy costs are just absurd for the purpose it serves.
As far as the horrifying shit I’ve seen from LLMs. I have to let this slide so long as it’s not forced on anyone. Hell, Google’s AI crap would be a lot more tolerable if there was a third button right next to “I’m feeling lucky” that just said “Try Gemini today!”
Like if I can ask a specific question and have a concept explained to me. Cool! Now it’s just a matter of making that more environmentally friendly.
literacy rate is about to go below 50%
im skeptical that homework helps the literacy rate
retvrn to 1 on 1 exams.
The future of the developed world isn’t looking good. Perhaps their downfall really will be their own undoing. Now hopefully the developing world doesn’t fall into the usual trend of aping whatever the developed world is doing and import this as well.
I don’t see any issue with using it at all as a tool to help studying, the problem is when students just have it do their homework for them.
The problem is the euphemism here. I can't imagine more than a tenth of the people who use LLMs when doing their homework are being restrained and not copying the output, i.e. using it to help. And part of the issue for that is that you'd have to be stupid not to just use the output directly if you know how to avoid getting caught. Only students that value learning for its own sake will ever bother using these tools appropriately and capitalism has only ever taught children that education is a means to an end, getting hired, so there's only more cheating ahead.
Being honest, I’ve found it helpful for rewording complex ideas into simpler language so i can get another perspective on books I’m reading, or give me references/jumping off points for more reading. The idea of an interactive book is quite cool, even if uttterly unreliable thanks to the architecture of LLMs inevitably leading to hallucinations (a misleading term - everything is a hallucination).
But our ignorant, short term, profit driven culture means that I’m a fucking oddity for doing that and not just using it to replace thinking.
It must be much higher than that
Admit to using*
tbh this is one of those instances im not too worried. I fucking hated homework more than anything as a kid, and did basically whatever i could to avoid it, i would calculate how many assignments i could skip or leave half undone etc. while still maintaining an A. honestly not sure if i would have even used chatgpt because it would have meant copying the answers down lol. also as a sidenote i think thats why math always used to be my favorite class, the homework would only be worth 10% of the grade so i could basically ignore them and just do a few here and there during class and be good lol
all that to say i think homework 99% of the time is very dumb and useless and im glad kids are using the latest and greatest tech to get around doing it lol. if you want kids to learn discipline or smthing like that it should be part of an extracurricular like sports or music or something