Fuck AI

So, before you get the wrong impression, I'm 40. Last year I enrolled in a master program in IT to further my career. It is a special online master offered by a university near me and geared towards people who are in fulltime employement. Almost everybody is in their 30s or 40s. You actually need to show your employement contract as prove when you apply at the university.

Last semester I took a project management course. We had to find a partner and simulate a project: Basically write a project plan for an IT project, think about what problems could arise and plan how to solve them, describe what roles we'd need for the team etc. Basically do all the paperwork of a project without actually doing the project itself. My partner wrote EVERYTHING with ChatGPT. I kept having the same discussion with him over and over: Write the damn thing yourself. Don't trust ChatGPT. In the end, we'll need citations anyway, so it's faster to write it yourself and insert the citation than to retroactively figure them out for a chapter ChatGPT wrote. He didn't listen to me, had barely any citation in his part. I wrote my part myself. I got a good grade, he said he got one, too.

This semester turned out to be even more frustrating. I'm taking a database course. SQL and such. There is again a group project. We get access to a database of a fictional company and have to do certain operations on it. We decided in the group that each member will prepare the code by themselves before we get together, compare our homework and decide, what code to use on the actual database. So far whenever I checked the other group members' code it was way better than mine. A lot of things were incorporated that the script hadn't taught us at that point. I felt pretty stupid becauss they were obviously way ahead of me - until we had a videocall. One of the other girls shared her screen and was working in our database. Something didn't work. What did she do? Open a chatgpt tab and let the "AI" fix the code. She had also written a short python script to help fix some errors in the data and yes, of course that turned out to be written by chatgpt.

It's so frustrating. For me it's cheating, but a lot of professors see using ChatGPT as using the latest tools at our disposal. I would love to honestly learn how to do these things myself, but the majority of my classmates seem to see that differently.

TL;DR for AI writing warning signs:

• Use of the em-dash (—)
• Parallel sentence structure (e.g. "It's not just X, it's Y")
• Grouping things in threes or at least odd numbers
• Delineating line breaks with emojis
• Odd/unnatural verbiage
• Overuse of filler words (talking like your average LinkedIn post)
• Exaggerated and empty praise
• Weird analogies and similes
• Restating and overclarifying points

TL;DR for signs something was written by a human:

• Including anecdotes
• Written in the first person
• Tangents and nonlinear storytelling

A few colleagues and I were sat at our desks the other day, and one of them asked the group, "if you were an animal, what animal would you be?"

I answered with my favourite animal, and we had a little discussion about it. My other colleague answered with two animals, and we tossed those answers back and forth, discussing them and making jokes. We asked the colleague who had asked the question what they thought they'd be, and we discussed their answer.

Regular, normal, light-hearted (time wasting lol) small talk at work between friendly coworkers.

We asked the fourth coworker. He said he'd ask ChatGPT.

It was a really weird moment. We all just kind of sat there. He said the animal it came back with, and that was that. Any further discussion was just "yeah that's what it said" and we all just sort of went back to our work.

That was weird, right? Using ChatGPT for what is clearly just a little bit of friendly small talk? There's no bad blood between any of us, we hang out a lot, but it just struck me as really weird and a little bit sad.

(barring instances with hidden blocklists)

Apart from setting up and running your own instance to defederate*, there is no way of making your feed filter out the subset of users from dbzer0 who think they should spread their instance’s values of AI content across all parts of the Fediverse, whether or not it is welcome there. If somebody could set up an instance with this community’s values and filters in mind, I imagine that would be helpful to many of us. This instance could be adapted to defederate from other AI-spreading instances as well.

Fediseer, the default web tool for instances to document issues and endorsements of other instances, which incidentally is maintained by the admin of db0, shows that lemmy.dbzer0.com has received no censures whatsoever from other instances.

*or instead manually blocking every user from dbzer0, which would be futile as they continue to gain users

[EDIT: Since many people seem confused, here is how blocking an instance works:

Given that instances X, Y, and Z are all federated with each other:

If I am hosted on instance X and I block instance Y but don’t block instance Z, users from instance Y can still post/comment onto communities hosted on instance Z and I will still see these posts/comments.

Only by defederating from instance Y would the content made by instance Y users that is posted onto any instance become wholly filtered out for users on instance X.]

It’s only going to get worse because we’re further away from media literacy than ever before.

In a letter, Kyle said boosting the UK's AI capabilities was "critical" to national security and should be at the core of the Alan Turing Institute's activities.

Kyle suggested the institute should overhaul its leadership team to reflect its "renewed purpose".

The cabinet minister said further government investment in the institute would depend on the "delivery of the vision" he had outlined in the letter.

A spokesperson for the Alan Turing Institute said it welcomed "the recognition of our critical role and will continue to work closely with the government to support its priorities".

"The Turing is focussing on high-impact missions that support the UK's sovereign AI capabilities, including in defence and national security," the spokesperson said.

"We share the government's vision of AI transforming the UK for the better."..

Source (Mastodon)

Seems like over the last week everyone in this community is talking about how the real reason AI is bad is because it is destroying the planet. Does this even matter though? AI is bad for so many other reasons. It's destroying art. It's destroying Hollywood. It's removing jobs from the workforce, and it's concentrating power and money. And ontop of all that, it produces only soulless slop.

We have a good front line there. We can rally around those points.

When you try to bring questionable objections like power an water usage onto the table, it just makes our front-line look weaker, since opponents can easily pick these arguments apart. "Sure it's a lot of power, but this will lead to nuclear power, which is a net win environmentally." Or, "a single AI query consumes 2 litres of water?? You mean milliliters, and it's just going to rain from the sky, and nobody is putting big datacentres in California anyway, and that's only 1/6th of the amount of water it takes to grow an almond." Or "yeah, google alone uses as much power as the entire city of Toronto, but Toronto uses green power; so what?"

And yes, we all have counter-arguments to these -- "how to deal with nuclear waste?" and "only a fraction of rain water is collected as potable water" and "almonds may take more water than AI but almonds are still bad" and "there are some datacentres in California" and so on but the deeper these arguments go the harder it is to maintain a stable front.

Can we all just admit that this environmental angle is a red herring? I could almost believe it's a psy-op intended to discredit the anti-AI crowd. Even if the environmental impact of AI is bad, I still think it's worse for our cause to focus on the environmental aspect than the other aspects. The world has already decided it doesn't care about the environment.