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@taylor @cwebber And we know that everybody will use the second approach, because they will.

Human nature, managerial pressure, whatever. It will happen.
And it will seep from software into bridge building, aircraft design and construction and everything else.

Extreme pedantry about processes can counteract this, but the current trend is to gut that.

What I'd love to know - who uses AI to build stuff :)

@catarinac acho que antes da ia isso na estava acontecendo

@cwebber it’s amazing how many smart people have their heads in the sand about this. They’re so sure that GenAI must be useful for something. Or perhaps, their investors are.

@cwebber Finding information is also a missing skillset. If it weren't, people wouldn't be using AI for that in the first place.

@cwebber i think even among people who have higher than average awareness of how these work, a lot of people are still unprepared for something that produces unreliable information in a way that so strongly resembles real information. like if someone's mental model was previously to associate decently structured writing with "the author at least has last Some understanding of the actual subject matter" then they are already at a disadvantage to parse llm output imo

@cwebber yeah it’s pretty much use it or lose it situation

@cwebber And for this we are told - not just by Republicans - that we must be willing to give up any hope of reducing climate change to a manageable level.

@cwebber this is a feature. tech-barons need a malleable, dependent populace.

simon wardley had an excellent article where he likens ai to a new theocracy. while i disagree with his longer term ai optimism, its a very well reasoned piece:

"the change of language, medium and tools raises a concern because if you can gain control over these, you can change a person’s reasoning of the world around them. You can tell them how to think."

couple this with reduced critical thinking facilities, and you could "legitimately" capture a democracy for generations by managing truth through AI.

we are seeing this today in the US: language bans and a massive a push for AI. this is key to the tech-baron's strategy, especially given the raw access people like elon have -- money, tech/x, influence, political access, physical access. the folks in control are exploiting the opportunity to cement their power.

the scary future of ai isn't robots rising up: it's the humans in control.

https://medium.com/mapai/ai-and-the-new-theocracies-9b573eb9ab1b

@cwebber @jstatepost

Having #AI do your work is exactly like bullying or paying the class #nerd to do your #homework.

In the short term, you pass, and in the long term, you failed to learn that lesson.

And, the more you do it, the less you learn.

@cwebber
People clamor for labor saving devices, but when they get one, they want it to think. That's not the labor you're saving.

@cwebber @hacks4pancakes Hear hear.

I’d been using perplexity.ai for a few months — it was recommended in an article I read for actually supplying straight-forward answers to queries instead of supplying a list of related articles or topics, and usually did so in satisfying ways — but I had a few results from it that were blatantly wrong with an even basic knowledge of the topic. Which then eroded any confidence about how correct it was about subjects I don’t know the answers to, which is of course a lot of what one would query.

That was when I deleted it.

@cwebber This is why I refuse to use them and did not participate in creating them.

@cwebber Oh, yeah.
Before AI we had to collaborate with people, who were lazy thinkers, bad data analysts and liars. Now we have to collaborate with people, who are lazy thinkers, bad data analysts and liars - and an AI, which is a lazy thinker, a bad data analyst and a liar.
Nicely done humanity.

@cwebber "and harder to spot too"

This is a thing that I feel is underestimated by so many people: these tools are trained to generate output that is as *convincing* as possible, regardless of whether the output is *correct*.

@cwebber yes, when you have a question, the ability to look at various sources and analyse the information to take your own conclusion is so important. The ability to research. AI clouds all of the sources, instead of looking at all the information available you’re looking at a wall.

@cwebber as somebody who actively takes coding risks to the point where I have to be mindful of things breaking and coding being not easily understandable by outsiders, it seems perverse seeing a (growing?) body of people accepting increased chaos and brittleness of processes for instant convenience. En masse, it looks like a dangerous moral hazard experiment. A shame ML hasnt been explored by more prior to AI. Its adoption is akin to caffeine, amphetamine or opiates as an industrial strategy.

@cwebber So, funny story, I'm a technical translator (mostly German to English, mostly pharma these days) and I've been through this story five years ago.

Machine translation *so very* erodes your translation skills if you're not paying attention. Catching the errors of MT is "less work" so it's paid significantly less (the more corporate the customer, the more likely they'll consider productivity gains to belong to them and them only).

@cwebber At some level, it feels like we've already been going there anyway. But it is getting worse.

As a 40 year old who grew up alongside the Internet (which is a capitalised word, damn it!), I probably don't retain as much knowledge as older people do because "I'll search it when I need it" became prevalent and so the knowledge shifted slightly more towards "how to rediscover the information" rather than "how to retain everything".

BUT I think my cohort still a) needed critical thinking for parsing those results and b) at least retained the knowledge of the important/frequent stuff and a sense of what was out there.

LLM usage? Not so much. It's "Artificial Intelligence" therefore it can Just Do It™

@cwebber Sadly, this is because #LLMs (which most people think are AI instead of just a particular tool in the toolset) are primaily designed to "fill in the blank" with the most statistically likely words.

Being a very computationally expensive type of Mad Libs makes them sound convincing even when they are spouting nonsense. People can do this too, but LLMs often excel at it.

AI is great at a lot of things. As a natural language search of a given data set, it can be very effective and a heck of a lot easier to use than a search engine or regular expression, both of which require you to already have a good idea of what keywords you need to look for to find the information.

Even the new chain-of-thought systems are really just layering another pass through the LLM to turn its search strategy into natural language. It's not really #XAI yet. Someday, but not today.

I'm glad you're calling out the critical thinking part! Using current AI tools is a lot like using a calculator: it can make things easier, but you have to already know what you're trying to do and have at least a ballpark idea of what a valid answer should be to use one. Metaphors are tricky, but "AI as a calculator" is my current go-to for explaining when not to use one.