BlueMonday1984 @ BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

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Found a couple articles about blunting AI's impact on education (got them off of Audrey Watters' blog, for the record).

The first is a New York Times guest essay by NYU vice provost Clay Shirky, which recommends "moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward [...] assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time."

The second is an article by Kate Manne calling for professors to prevent cheating via AI, which details her efforts in doing so:

Instead of take-home essays to write in their own time, I’ll have students complete in-class assignments that will be hand-written. I won’t allow electronic devices in my class, except for students who tell me they need them as a caregiver or first responder or due to a disability. Students who do need to use a laptop will have to complete the assignment using google docs, so I can see their revision history.

Manne does note the problems with this (outing disabled students, class time spent writing, and difficulties in editing, rewriting, and make-up work), but still believes "it is better, on balance, to take this approach rather than risk a significant proportion of students using AI to write their essays."

Hmm, is it better or worse that they’re now officially treating SICP as a literal holy book?

I'm gonna say "worse", because it turned the SCP writers into unwitting accomplices to a literal cult.

The deaths just keep coming: the Wall Street Journal's just reported on a murder-suicide caused by ChatGPT.

Its probably the most reliable AI detector there is.

Even if someone's actively misrepresenting statistics/sources to push some kind of grift, those underlying stats/sources are near-certainly going to be genuine if they aren't using AI - not out of any moral obligation, but because made-up stats/sources will get their entire grift thrown out if they're discovered.

(wonder how long it is before the US degrades far enough that other countries start ratcheting up border/traveller defenses, compared to the current ~free rein they have (which, y’know, was owed to years of hard and soft power that the orange man is also rapidly pissing away))

By my guess, not that long. If you have reports of American inadequacy during an outbreak (pretty likely), or horror stories of your countrymen getting persecuted (should be easy to find), you should have a solid political case for border lockdowns.

Focusing on Canada and Mexico specifically, I expect Canada will build its metaphorical walls first - the ongoing drug war in Mexico, plus the brutality of its cartels, will likely act to deter would-be American refugees from there.

Discovered a solid sneer online today, aptly titled "I Am An AI Hater"

OpenAI has stated its scanning users' conversations (as if they weren't already) and reporting conversations to the cops in response to the recent teen suicide I mentioned a couple days ago.

So, rather than let ChatGPT drive users to kill themselves, its just going to SWAT users and have the cops do the job.

(On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)

Ethan Marcotte's given his thoughts on the new "America by Design" web page, noting how its shittiness aligns perfectly with the Trump administration's values.

Besides, there's better things to scam the Saudis with. Like getting them to put money into Newcastle United, an investment which earned us our first domestic trophy since 1955 and earned the club a whole lot of money in general.

To repeat: $43 billion in imaginary dollars beats $22.5 billion in real, actual dollars in your hands.

If this doesn't sum up the entire bubble in a single sentence, I don't know what does.

Quantum as a concept doesn't really have any way to co-opt creativity that I can see - its a rather "science-y" concept in the public eye, far away from anything associated with the arts.

Probably won't stop the hucksters, though - they'll happily make shit up if it means butting in on artists' turf.

It also wouldn't give Microsoft something to justify AI's existence with - they aren't selling "automated Excel commands", they're selling "magical chatbots which do everything".

I struggle to imagine what might supplant the HTML generator suggestion in the future.

I can't really think of anything to supplant it either. The only addition I can think of would be some complementary arts education, to build students' creative abilities and further highlight the expressive elements of software.

Found the original Tweet, with a reply from Yud himself:

Thought 1: This is the kind of incident that makes politicians vote for a law named after a dead kid. It behooves us to think of what kind of legislation could actually address the problem without becoming a clusterfuck that worsens everyone’s life, including children’s. cough #OnlineSafetyAct cough

A complete ban on chatbots/LLMs would be enough. These things have basically zero ethical use case, it'd be a net positive if they were legally wiped from existence.

Thought 2: Hey, all you guys using LLMs to replace opinion surveys or do “research” on social interactions because it’s cheaper than gathering real data… How many human beings talk like the suicide-encouragement bot here?

Against my better judgment, I decided to follow that link and check the quotes. Thankfully, there was nobody defending this - calling for a ban on AI, calling for ChatGPT's shutdown, calling for Sam Altman to be charged, pretty much everyone was out for blood.

Thought 3: Oh, remember when OpenAI paid $10 million to buy off the American Federation of Teachers? Because Pepperidge Farm still has that browser tab open. Every school administrator who breathes a word about bringing “AI” into the classroom deserves to get lit up by parents asking why they are embracing suicide tech.

If I had written this article I’d just be telling people to ban python in coding education.

I'd be happy to hear your reasons why.

The NYT's reported on the suicide of a 16-year old boy, noting how ChatGPT assisted him in said suicide and deterred him from seeking help.

This is not the first time a chatbot's driven someone to suicide. And I fully expect it won't be the last.

Textbook case of anthropomorphisation from The Guardian, trying to posit that AI systems are capable of feeling pain.

You want my unsolicited opinion, machines cannot feel pain/emotion, only imitate it, and the rise of LLMs have made this crystal clear. Much like with being creative or making art, feeling genuine emotion is the exclusive domain of human/animal minds.

The billionaires who listened are spending hundreds of billions of dollars - soon to be trillions, if not already - on trying to prove Yudkowsky right by having an AI kill everyone. They literally tout “our product might kill everyone, idk” to raise even more cash. The only saving grace is that it is dumb as fuck and will only make the world a slightly worse place.

Given they're going out of their way to cause as much damage as possible (throwing billions into the AI money pit, boiling oceans of water and generating tons of CO₂, looting the commons through Biblical levels of plagiarism, and destroying the commons by flooding the zone with AI-generated shit), they're arguably en route to proving Yud right in the dumbest way possible.

Not by creating a genuine AGI that turns malevolent and kills everyone, but in destroying the foundations of civilization and making the world damn-nigh uninhabitable.