"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
Using a chat bot for "learning" is antithical to learning, ie it's the not-learning type of learning.
So let them. It's shown to cause cognitive decline, and while they're regressing to "vegetable" you can look forward to better job prospects owing to their decline.
You're looking at it wrong. They're going to use AI. Instead show them how often it's wrong. Find examples of it giving bad or incorrect responses. Get them involved. Ask them to try to trick it into lying or giving bad answers. Then kick it up a notch. Poison the data well. A few months back a reporter was able to convince AI that he was a hotdog eating champion by putting the right posts in the right places. Have them do a project where they invent a fake topic, seed it across the internet and watch how quickly AI gobbles it up. You'll teach them how AI actually works by data harvesting and not to blindly trust it. How to check sources and verify content.
This is a deeper problem than AI, and my immediate thought is that arguing against AI usage would be much more tractable if you had conceded on schooling and framed your pushback against AI around usage outside of classes. Arguing not to use it for class is going to be an uphill battle because its prevalence there is a pushback against the rot in our education system.
A decent-paying job is a dramatic improvement in quality-of-life, and kids are heavily propagandized into believing that degrees are the path there. Most students don't actually want to be spending time on their classwork, they just feel pressured to. Educators understand this, so classes are built around the idea that students would rather pass the class than learn the material. The required curriculum for each class will be extensive enough that not a lot of time can be spent on entertaining tangential questions or digging into a rabbit hole a student is curious about, and students don't really consider doing that once they've internalized this culture that they're not to stray out of bounds for too long. That all reinforces that the purpose of taking a class is to pass it. (If it's not clear, I resent the role I play in this, but I have to pay my own bills and if other professors get students that don't have a decent understanding of a prerequisite they took with me that will quickly become a problem.)
AI usage in education has fully exposed what a lot of us already understood. Students who use AI do so because they see their time as valuable and they see schoolwork as burning that time. They don't think schoolwork is good for them, they just feel societal pressure to accomplish it.
It's much harder to successfully argue a point when the person you're trying to convince thinks they'll have to sacrifice something if they concede. That much time is a nontrivial sacrifice. There are countless solid arguments that AI is poison, but if someone legitimately wouldn't be learning something if they didn't feel forced to and legitimately believes the only purpose for learning it themselves is to earn a grade, that might be the worst focal point to start from.
Why do you care?
I dont know man, some people just have this weird compulsion to actually help the next gen of kids.
Next gen?
Help people who want your help instead of forcing it onto them. Force will just push them away and bury in their heels deeper.
What does any of this have to do with "pure efficiency?" The alleged efficiency of these models is only on the user side of the equation. It can do things for you in milliseconds that would take you hours to do yourself. Except it doesn't do this reliably and you need to double check its work a lot, which often negates any efficiency gains.
On the backend it's tying up resources in chip making with negative knock-on effects for any other products needing chips, wasting drinking water because that's cheaper then building circular cooling systems, cutting into any progress in switching to renewable energy sources and thus putting this planet in further peril, and it's making people dumber overall because they feel they can outsource thinking to some juiced to spell checking algorithm.
Efficiency where?
I think my classmates think it’s efficient partly because many of them ask it about stuff they didn’t pay attention to because they were yapping amongst themselves during class so they can’t even tell when the AI is pulling a fast one, they just get a nebulous and possibly correct understanding of the material which is better than nothing
I suppose a better question is how to remove AI as a lifeline for lazyboneses or take away its appeal but the former would involve dealing with authorities and I have little support on this in my school 😭
What they think is wrong and is borne out of laziness and the misguided mass hysteria that this is the future. Other futures are available. Your phrasing of the question led me to believe you have absorbed the bs marketing of the peddlers of so-called AI. There is nothing efficient about it at present.
Don't use it whenever you don't get punished for it in school, i.e. people should know how to use it so it should be taught in schools. Along with how to spot mistakes and general media savvyness. Highlight the mistakes and shortcomings whenever possible. Stay away from people who need to ask a chat bot first before they do anything. Be the fucking salmon that swims upstream past lurching bears to get laid (and let's say not die during or afterwards, to keep it light).
There have always been ways to not do the work, even before AI or online classes. I always tried to make my students think of it as wasting money (either theirs or their parents) paying for school and not learning. Once in a while a student would argue employers only cared about the diploma and I would always encourage them to drop out and become the next Mark Zuckerberg. The truth is, teens and young adults are not ready yet to understand this and my hope was someone would remember my words in the future, just as I understood some of my teachers advice way after I took their classes.
A lot of employers only care about the diploma. They use it to weed out applicants. I'm really stuck out here without one when I can easily perform many jobs. What's crazy is that I can make more money without one than those jobs but I don't want to work nights and weekends. I just don't see the value of 4 years of school if jobs are only paying $20/hr.
I don't know exactly how to best phrase it, But once they start getting the bill I think they're going to regret relying so much on AI.
Like we're just starting to get to the end of the honeymoon phase with AI pricing. Because only Nvidia is making any money out of any of this which is not good business for all the rest.
My work which was pushing AI hard before, I've already started seeing a little bit of panic now that GitHub co-pilot changed it's pricing model. Like some people have already used like 70% of this month's allotted tokens
So cost is going to be very prohibitive.
And on the flip side, if I was in a technical interview, I'm putting you in a position where you can't use AI. If you can't answer the questions correctly without AI I'm not hiring you.
I think in the future there will be lower cost chips that require less power consumption. You'll have your own llm on your phone or whatever. The current state of things is like when computers were mainframes and took up a whole room.
Just one more funding round, I swear bro, then it will become cost efficient
I think that these big companies will crash and burn and llms will be like voice assistants. Basically a novelty. At this point too much data is in private hands and locked behind paywalls for an llm to be truly useful. For instance car repair and legal process are locked behind expensive subscriptions and frankly using an llm on a specialty like law, vehicle repair and medical is a horrible idea. An llm in those aspects might help steer you in the right direction but you still have to have expert knowledge.
Life bites lazy people in the arse. They will have some short term wins but plateau. But honestly, if they're just there for the piece of paper then I think you're going to struggle to change their minds. Why do you want to convince them to change? And what is your school doing to curb brain rot AI usage?