I mean it's acting as a great filter for a bunch of people who would've picked up the closest available tech any other time to do their work for them.

Before AI, it was websites that offered homework/essay writing services by outsourcing it to students in the global south, or just copying work and changing a few words to pass it off as your own.

Before that, it was copy-pasting Wikipedia/websites verbatim or paying something in meatspace to do the work for you.

We sorta end up with an amalgam of those previous things more sensibly, such as using Wikipedia for preliminary research and looking for useful primary sources, or using online services that offer personal tutoring or guides on subjects. It's dialectical materialism in play at an academic level.

AI is just yet another technology that will be abused because it's in the valley of being massively overhyped socially but poorly understood by its users and its moderators. It sucks because these people may get an easy ride through their education only to find that they know nothing that'll get them a stable employment or transferable skills to make them rounded human beings. On the upside, in a sense, this is no different to every generation before us; people ride the technology of the era to avoid learning the skills that are fundamental to picking up the next technological boundary.

TLDR yeah the short term is gonna be really annoying and shitty but I do believe this is another techno-fad that'll blow over and the people getting it easy right now are just delaying their education temporarily.

The reason people use chatgpt like this is the same reason kids have stopped reading. Actually learning things clearly doesn't actually get you anything in our society. University degrees are just things you do to get a better paying job. School is just something you do because you have to do it. In a society that values profit over everything, why shouldn't you put in the least amount of effort possible? The idea that schools create responsible and active citizens or that universities create people whose knowledge can improve the world has always been a farce, people have just started realizing it.

currently in education, genuinely feel like putting students heads through their desks because they think my specialized knowledge can be replicated by a line of code. No I know what you don't know and that you cheated because this wasn't in the readings and when you talk it's clear you didn't even do those. People are genuinely losing what little critical thinking they had and this is a nightmare.

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.

Nothing is really being done to stop students abusing this either. It's like everyone threw their hands up and went "fuck it, who cares anymore"

Sam Altman and his pack of freaks treat it like God, and they want the state to make them the official priesthood.

y'know what it's kind of giving for me? there's a bit in one of the hitchhiker's guide books where a planet's civilization goes completely belly up because they have the bright idea of shipping off into space 1/3 of the population that did "noncritical" sorts of jobs and then everyone dies because it turns out they were pretty important in the social ecosystem. like amerikkkan civilizational collapse won't be traceable to any particularly profound anti- -- from the western perspective -- messianic event in history but rather the simple fact that society relies on people codependently laboring according to correct institutional process knowledge.

People have very little understanding of how computers work in general, and somehow that has translated into a total misunderstanding of what AI is - an LLM is not a magic box that knows everything, it just has a very complicated opaque way of transforming information. But it is a God to people, like a magic genie in their pocket. I get it though because it is made to feel like it is magic and knowd everything.

15 years ago the equivalent was people googling something and always using the first link as gospel truth

these things are just glorified search engines that mangle up all the results and hide the leftovers from you

Not too long ago a college kid sat next to me on the train. I didn’t mean to peek but I took a few glances eventually: he was doing some math 101 problem on his laptop.

Copied the homework problem and asked ChatGPT for the answers, then asked ChatGPT to generate the few simple lines of code to draw the plot for his homework.

Like, these kids can’t even be bothered to learn a few simple lines of code to draw a simple graph with a slope and an intercept.

It’s going to be interesting one day when suddenly there is a catastrophe that knocks out the power grid and half of the people suddenly don’t know what to do in their daily activities.

It makes you feel like you're a 2000s teacher telling students "DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA FOR YOUR SOURCES" and being the wojak in those kids' future memes

"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."

"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."

"You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."

The Prototype AI 'Morpheus' from Deus Ex (2001)

You know about 10 years ago a friend of mine was completing engineering school. They told me the basics of the program was to give you a framework so you will know what questions to ask and how to conduct an effective web search. The education was totally predicated on constant access to the internet.

So the good news is this isn't new, the bad news is it is in line with prior culture.

The second one is basically Roko's Basilisk

Also I have a very not normal and shitty take about neurotypical supremacy being one of the reasons people have went all in on LLMs and AI

NGL, maybe now’s my chance to go back to college. If people are going to be this much of treathogs over AI, just makes my job easier.

I prostrate myself before the altar of Microsoft Clippy

If it's becoming a religion, I volunteer to be the Messiah if that's not taken

You have to tithe 10% of your income to me or Roko's Basilisk will getchu

I didn’t expect brain drain to be a possible consequence of LLMs. Well, we shall see what we reap here in the near future I’m sure.

UlysessT this one’s for you