Microblog Memes

"Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them."

Frank Herbert in Dune, 1965.

Relevant as ever

So funny to be like AI can retrieve facts in .3 seconds. First of all, no it can't. Second of all, can't search engines do this? Haven't they been doing this for years? Like AI is slower, less accurate and more wasteful than duckduckgo. Shouldn't all her points have been true years ago?

she wrote a comment that a bot could have written better

I just looked at that woman’s twitter and it’s an absolute nightmare. AI really makes some stupid people think they are smart.

Theres a reason American slaves weren't allowed to read or write. Why little girls in Afghanistan aren't allowed to go to school past 3rd grade.

What's going to happen when you can't read agreements or reports. And just have to believe what someone else tells you it says.

?

Exactly! Learn those kids stuff ai can't do! Send them to the mines!

When they filmed the movie 'Van Helsing' in Prague they needed one hundred couples who knew how to ballroom dance. Everyone thought this was going to be difficult to set up, but it turned out that literally every extra they hired could waltz. Back in Soviet days, the country didn't have a lot of money for sports equipment, but every school had a record player. They taught the kids ballroom dancing for the Physical Education requirement.

AI "retrieves" facts? Not my experience.

I was personally not able to reproduce this https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/52tYaGQgaEPvZaHTb/was-barack-obama-still-serving-as-president-in-december but it should still provide an illustration of what AI's ideas of retrieving facts looks like.

I never thought this would need saying, but the point of writing essays in school is not the final product.

That essay will almost never be good enough to be relevant or published; no one expects it to be. The goal is to engage with the material, and learn to synthesise and present your ideas logically.

We must grade the process of writing an essay, never the final product; especially not based on how “good” an essay that final product is.

We’ve got to stop and ask ourselves why people don’t have AI complete video games for them, but do so for essays. It’s because in one case, the value is in the process, while in the other, the value is believed to be the result, but it shouldn’t be.

If people understood this, it would make no sense having AI write students’ essays. You can blame people for wanting to take shortcuts, but I believe our society and culture at large play a much bigger role in that trend.

"Don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health"

(via)

Sometimes advances in technology do mean that things that they teach in school are outdated and can probably safely be removed.

I'd say cursive writing is one of those things. Writing in general is important, and obviously kids need to learn how to write upper case and lower case block letters. But, with computers everywhere, a whole secondary set of characters that is designed to be linked together seems useless.

I also do think that schools probably focus too much on memorization. I absolutely hated history in school because that's how it was taught. Memorize the name of these battles and the dates and then regurgitate them for the test. I didn't actually learn anything meaningful. What would have been much more useful and much more interesting would have been to learn more of the backstory. What was going on in the country that led it to go to war. Were they trying to distract from something, or get the people to unite against a common enemy? Were they supremely confident that they could easily win and gain important territory or resources? Were they backed into a corner?

I'd support not memorizing as many things because it's true that you can look them up (of course, AI is not how you should ever look anything up because it might just 'hallucinate'). I think most teachers would agree. But, it's also a lot harder to write and grade a good test when you're not doing names and dates. So, I assume that's another big part of the reason that memorization is the focus.

God forbid they learn how to think, when LLMs can do it (kind of) for them

"Hey ChatGPT, was the American Civil War about slavery?" Having that fact stored in your head is inherently different than looking it up. Knowing that America has a history of racism and the south have a history of revisionism is very important. This is why some gullible folks really do believe confederate monuments are just about heritage despite being built in during the civil rights movement. It's not the sort of thing you'd think to "ask AI" at all if you didn't already have some of the groundwork. An education is important.

sigh... how can one be so dumb? has to be a troll... right? pretty please.

Why learn to read and write while there's speech recognition and text-to-speech apps nowadays?

What a braindead take, I seriously hope this idiot doesn't have children of her own