Künstliche Intelligenz

I feel awful for using AI every time I do. I have used it for the kind of braindead shit people worry about because my brain’s executive functioning is theoretical at best, and sometimes I do need to break things down into very small steps, but I get overwhelmed by the number of small steps in normal activities, so I can’t think about reasonable ways to break them down.

I’m torn, because on the one hand, that’s the reasonable use case- I’m correcting for a dysfunction. On the other hand, it can’t be helping my executive function in general to outsource all of the instructions. On the first hand again (sorry), if LLM-based AI is here to stay, I might just be worried about the equivalent of not knowing my times tables (it’s important to know, but anyone can look it up at any time and I’m not holding it against people with dyscalculia if they don’t).

Super clickbait title, so in case you just want the conclusion here it is: "To my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so."

But to anyone that might want stop at the title and the tl;dr, i highly recommend to take some time and read the article. It is a well written short story that talks about delegating critical thinking and problem solving to a cheap cop-out and philosophize about the disruptive effects of the technology for students.

And it has some memorable parts, like "The essays produced by ChatGPT, for instance, are soulless, boring abominations. Words, phrases and punctuation rarely used by the average college student — or anyone for that matter (em dash included) — are pervasive."

It's so upsetting and frustrating to see this tech utterly sabotage education. It of course sounds like the ageless echo of elders decrying new technology for "corrupting the youth". Maybe it is, maybe we're all utterly wrong, but this feels fundamentally different than books, television, the internet, etc. Students are not learning in new ways, or learning any skills to improve or expand their knowledge - they are copy-pasting and accepting whatever slop they get without further critique or oversight. They are turning their crucial education into a button press and not giving it a second thought. That's never going to lead to intellectual improvement.