Wild times ahead
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.
agreed. cheating wasn’t invented yesterday
the credential doesn’t get the job. the credential is the baseline for not having your application ignored. the credential doesn’t keep the job. valuable work product, demonstrate initiative, interpersonal skills and professional development do.
the kids who take only shortcuts with their own education to minimize learning, unless they have family connections, are 100% shortchanging themselves and can be spotted a mile away.
one of the most important skills higher education develops is learning how to learn, and the people who sidestep the opportunity to do that screw themselves so hard.
Lol, no. The person who can bullshit the best keeps the job. Valuable people have the self-destructive tendency of delivering honest bad news.
I say this as someone who has both been a valuable employee and managed fairly large departments. And who grew up long before LLMs existed. An important thing to remember is that hiring and firing decisions are generally above the team lead’s pay grade, meaning that a bullshitter just has to network upwards.
Sure, cheating at uni will cripple the kids, but only the frontline employees, not those who tip straight into management.
this is the most accurate from my own experience of having worked for decades
the idiot who knows absolutely nothing, isn’t even afraid to admit they don’t know anything but is able to bullshit the best, and suck up to the uppers without pissing them off, is the one who advances the furthest and quickest
anecdotally i’ve seen this time and again in IT. someone who really has no business being in IT support managing to get the job through bullshit interviews and name dropping, clearly having no skills whatsoever to troubleshoot or even do the most basic requirements of the job, but being able to shamelessly kiss ass and self-promote makes it to the lead IT position in 2 years, meanwhile the folks who know their shit inside and out end up leaving the job because they get no raises or promotions and just keep getting more work piled on endlessly
the credential is the baseline for not having your application ignored
your application is still ignored
It’s not only ignored but actively avoided too.
school fails to instil a love of learning in the vast majority of folks which is one of its great shortcomings. the exam model makes it into a chore. I also never really learned how to study in school. also yeah bit of a lib comment, kinda bootstrapper vibes. kill the project manager in your head or whatever
pursuing education is not liberal. credentialism? sure. careerism? absolutely. the managerial university? 100% lib as fuck. widespread formal education? nope. it is revolutionary and that is why capital formations are working overtime to capture and dismantle these institutions as a project to discourage and limit proletarian access to them and their networks.
there is a lot of work needing to get done that requires formal and ongoing education. social work, child education, healthcare, adult education, literacy programs, environmental protection, pollution mitigation, climate change adaptation, the list goes on for miles. these people find each other through formal education networks and share knowledge as friends and allies to find multidisciplinary solutions. millions of formally educated people are out there doing this critical work for their communities. and it is a world that seems to be invisible to those unable to resist cultural hegemony’s grip on their imagination of what sort of workers we must all become.
the credential doesn’t get the job. the credential is the baseline for not having your application ignored. the credential doesn’t keep the job. valuable work product, demonstrate initiative, interpersonal skills and professional development do.
stop talking like a career coach. you are always replaceable.
stop talking like a fool. it’s one thing to understand the ideological frame of neoliberal capitalism that our society operates within.
it is something else entirely to internalize it and believe it so thoroughly you abandon your own agency and education.
where did i write anything about abandoning your own education?
“work hard and you will be rewarded” like come on, at least add a bit of an ironic bent to it, I don’t feel like reading unsolicited milquetoast career advice on my communist shitposting forum, if i wanted that I’d be on reddit
thank you, not a big fan of seeing bootstraps individualist mentality like that getting upbears on here.
it is something else entirely to internalize it and believe it so thoroughly you abandon your own agency and education.
In a system that is already captured, and oppressive, you have very low odds (zero if POC/woman) of ascending to the top of the oppression food chain by playing within the system
you have better odds by playing outside the system. Parts of traditional education are important for that. Parts are totally useless. Parts are only trivially important in the sense that they help you make social connections with other people brainwashed by the same trivia.
Even that’s a long shot though, and at the end of the day if you enjoy something then it’s worthwhile, and a lot of people enjoy not crunching numbers.
you have better odds by playing outside the system. Parts of traditional education are important for that. Parts are totally useless. Parts are only trivially important in the sense that they help you make social connections with other people brainwashed by the same trivia.
The thing is that the kid who uses chatgpt to do homework is woefully ill-equipped to know which is which. There’s no shortcuts to reading theory, so to speak.
There’s no shortcuts to reading theory, so to speak.
I’m pretty sure reading and internalizing communist theory is not part of any westoid school curriculum
Maybe not in most places. The important thing is that it requires the same skills and engages with the same sources.
The point being there are no shortcuts to any kind of knowledge.
As someone who has given far more technical interviews than I ever asked to, I can safely say that the biggest thing you can have on a resume to get fast tracked to an interview is a degree from some Ivy League school. I can also safely say that those people are no smarter, cleverer, or harder working than people with no degree at all, and in fact most of these people were completely useless. Doubly so if they’d spent 5+ years at a FAANG company.
One of my worst professional experiences was working with someone who was an MIT grad and Amazon alum. They didn’t do anything unless given extremely clear and detailed step-by-step instructions and didn’t seem to have any intrinsic motivation at all.
didn’t seem to have any intrinsic motivation at all.
I feel this. I do as little as possible since the only reward for hard work is more work. I do not care if I put more profits into my overlords hands
the kids who take only shortcuts with their own education to minimize learning, unless they have family connections, are 100% shortchanging themselves and can be spotted a mile away.
I agree with you and I’m definitely not one of the ones with family connections
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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.
Will probably result in a population even more susceptible to propaganda.
100%. I don’t think that was an intended consequence but it definitely is happening. People already chose not to think, no they can externalize it to a source that will by default agree with the status quo.
Out goes one kind of naivete, “Gramma said it so it’s right,” and in comes another: “the LLM has spoken; this is universal truth, not Gramma’s small-minded rubbish.” But now we can be smug against ol’ boomer Gramma, so we lap it up all the more dearly.
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The boomers with the “kids and always being on their damn phones” rhetoric did a lot to delegitimize a pressing issue that kids can now easily dismiss
But I’m not going to lie, it’s kinda fun to track this and see that those with a “hahahahaha good luck getting a job with that degree” are correct about things that actually matter in life.
yeah, I’ve realised being on my phone a lot is probably a big part of a lot of problems in my life, but because old folks criticized it in such a silly way, it’s hard to genuinely talk about it.
But yeah students are asking shit like “why make art” and this is actually scary as hell.
Same here, though I’m reminded of one of my undergrad classes in my technological ethics course where my professor talked about trade-offs with phones and how you risk being left behind if you don’t use all the new phone programs/apps because it’ll be ubiquitous eventually
I think we’ve reached the ubiquitous part now
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”
Sounds like what’s happening in corporate America
Love to report to a boss who thinks taking 5 minutes to write a python script that pulls json data can just be “chatgpt’d”
The first wave of propaganda around this was very effective. AI brained people would sing praises of open minded teachers who embraced the torrent of AI slop rather than oppose it. I remember reading about a professor who instead of banning ChatGPT instead gave his students a ChatGPT generated essay and asked them to critically analyse it.
Those AI brained people are all over now. I have a friend who sent me the AI questionnaire they had to fill out, and God damn, not only was it written poorly but it was effectively just a piece of propaganda written by someone who both loves and does not understand what these ML generators do.
I’d never seen so many instances of begging the question in one place before. It was basically:
Q: Because AI is actually good, do you think it’s good?
A. I love AI, it is my god
B. AI is good because it’s good
C. AI is bad, but it’s because I don’t understand it
Sam Altman and his pack of freaks treat it like God, and they want the state to make them the official priesthood.
He says that humans are stochastic parrots and that hallucinations is how LLMs express creativity. I feel the next techbro huckster cannot be more absurd than this but reality has its ways of disappointing me.
“It never makes mistakes, it expresses itself creatively,” bro it told me smoking is fine for pregnant women, no.
ban abortions
AI tells women to smoke
(cybernetic) life finds a way
Its been a historical path to power. What they do with that power is probably more of the same idiocy
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.
Yeah there are a lot of jobs that are theoretically useless in an ideal economic system or even a better economic system, but are actually productive in our current byzantine capitalist system.
It’s very easy to create actually useless jobs, jobs that presently do nothing. They definitely exist, but it’s really hard to pick them out broadly because their only utility is to appear productive.
A fun one to try and find when job hunting is the project lead for a project that requires approval from both c-level and other departments. This will never be approved and suggested changes will take months to percolate through, leaving your team free to do whatever the hell they want.
How would one find such a job?
Look for medium-sized companies with original founders and aging consumer bases.
Graeber talks about this in bullshit jobs
noncritical
Iirc, they didn’t have janitors which led to a pandemic
phone sanitizers specifically
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.
Its a fancy autocomplete algorithm.
That is crowd sourced.
And requires entire nuclear reactors to power only itself and nothing else.
…
… People were freaking out over cryptomining farms.
This is so much worse.
We are entering an era where the goal is to consume as much energy as possible - not for any benefit or tangible productivity, but solely for “growth”
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.
I genuinely believe you can make anyone who responds to this type of criticism with “OK boomer” look absolutely foolish. It’s a response that would track because the educational outlook is not looking great for today’s kids.
My grandma recently saw a doctor who was using ChatGPT/Google to answer her questions. She told them she didn’t feel comfortable with that because these are things that her previous doctor knew and the doctor responded with “Well times change.”
Another great reason to support China’s aUtHoRItARian regime
My grandma recently saw a doctor who was using ChatGPT/Google to answer her questions. She told them she didn’t feel comfortable with that because these are things that her previous doctor knew and the doctor responded with “Well times change.”
That’s the sort of thing that should get a doctor investigated and maybe even fired. This is malpractice.
See that’s what I thought, but turns out it’s much more common than you think
Small town shit
Are you in the US? If so, I heard US healthcare is bad, but if so, it’s even worse than I thought. Still fucked up wherever in the world it happens though.
Awful doesn’t even begin to describe it. The only hospital in town was recently bought out by a private equity company
My grandpa went to the emergency room around 10pm on a night last week and was told they had to wait because they didn’t have a doctor in. This was after telling us he had liver failure and when we took him to a better hospital there were absolutely no signs of liver failure
Another great reason to support China’s aUtHoRItARian regime
what is china doing against AI?
I don’t know about any AI regulations in particular but one thing is for sure, you have to actually know things to pass exams in China, and those exams start young. It is very competitive and you don’t have access to Chat GPT during the exams.
that sounds fucking awful though
While I’m sure there is some improvement that can be made, it seems to be serving China and the Chinese people well. Everyone I know from China who is from my generation is infinitely more well adjusted than the majority of Westerners I know of any generation. They speak fondly of their childhoods too, most Americans I know can’t say that, even without the more challenging education systems. Everyone I know in America has educational trauma and still doesn’t know shit, at least in China they get some value for their alleged educational trauma.
so does getting shot in the middle of whitesville
How is that related?
it pertains to white people so in that spirit I saw fit to insert myself into any discussion humanly possible
I agree. But better than the sheer nepotism and money that guides US admissions.
I dont think making kids study so much they try to off themselves is a good idea
Anecdotal but at my engineering university of about 4k students we got emails basically monthly about students doing this. And those were only sent if the parents were willing to share, the actual rate was much higher
Is suicide amongst students less or more per capita in China versus the US? Are students who are killing themselves doing it because of the education system or because of relationships outside of school?
You are saying your statement as if 1) anyone here suggested that students should be studying to the point of killing themselves, 2) there is a serious amount of young people killing themselves in China specifically and directly because of the education system so please, come with some data about how China fares versus the rest of the world about education standards, the outcomes of students in general in China, China suicide rates and motivations versus other nations, or other relevant comparisons.
To be honest the position that China is killing their kids with tough education sounds like the type of orientalist click bait title we would see hexbes risers making fun of for being so obviously racist
Not necessarily anything when it comes to LLMs, but It’s the clear that China has instead embraced the physical-systems/robotics side of AI instead of the garbage plagiarism generators brought to us by Microsoft and OpenAI
Because they haven’t abandoned education like we have in America
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.
You’re boomering out. If the power grid is knocked out then the kid won’t need to know how to draw a line programatically
You’re reading obtusely. They might need to do simple algebra without the benefit of a computer.
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
That brings up a good point that I think most comments have missed. These days it’s well accepted to caricature professional programming as cribbing from Stack Overflow and Google.
Both are great tools, if used as tools, with an understanding of their weaknesses and the ability yourself to make something correct from what you’ve learnt.
Perhaps we need to think more about how to teach people to get the best use out of LLMs the same way we get use out of Google, Wikipedia and calculators.
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
It was every encyclopedia
Which also begs the question of when do you rip the fucking bandaid off and show how all of this information they’re getting is carefully curated to maintain the status quo? Like how do you know explain that to a kid
Godamn I would hate to be in education
use chatgpt until you see something obvious, have them do a task analyzing the same topic chatgpt gave a bad answer to and then have them compare it to it, but have it as “this is a sheet I intentionally made with mistakes correct what you find wrong with it” then reveal it was actually a chatgpt answer
“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.
This actually isn’t that rare or as dire as it sounds – when people ask me Science Things that are out of my purview, i often say that my stem degree is mostly not about Knowing Stuff or being able to do infinite complicated math off the top of your head, its about knowing how to figure out how to do the math, how to derive the Knowing Stuff from first principles, and where to go looking for and how to understand the information that you need to have to do that.
how to conduct an effective web search
I was also given courses that could be described as this; it was about how to find scientific journals, which ones to trust and which ones not to, when and how to contact a researcher directly instead of going through their company/journal/department, how to access papers ‘legitimately’ and for free, how to find and ethically use digital information that is permissible in peer reviewed papers, navigating the guts of NASA’s old websites, how to scrape data, etc etc. Like, yes, sure, i suppose that that is just a very detailed and specific set of web-searches, but also, they absolutely would have had similar stuff in the pre-internet era, but it was just about library use, archival systems, and getting data physically posted to you instead.
These days, to not predicate modern science on access to the internet/worldwide data systems/computers would be like not assuming you’ll have access to a fucking microscope or a library. Like yeah sure, at some point you might not, but i guarantee that then you will have much bigger problems. Scientists don’t just know stuff, because that would require knowing almost everything in your field and that’s not humanly possible. We know how to find it out, either through figuring it out or looking it up
EDIT: i’m not saying that this ai shit isn’t shockingly and aggressively stupid, i’m just trying to make it clear that what your friend was talking about 10 years ago is almost certainly nothing like what’s happening now. This is new and insane.
Uh oh seems like the average person now has access to delusional bazinga STEM brain
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
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
I must know
Oh boy do I have a comm for you
And I’m all ears because I’ve thought the same thing, I’m very logic-oriented and sometimes I see someone call what I would say “something that ChatGPT would say”
Relevant video
Is it [email protected]?
No lol [email protected] i will be your audience of one at the very least, let er rip
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
POST
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.
