Fuck AI

So much ai slop in the professional world too

The bubble needs to pop yesterday

It's not really surprising, and there are already quite a few studies on cognitive decline related to AI usage out there. I guess the wide scale effects will only be visible in a few decades, but I suspect it will look a lot like Idiocracy.

A huge part is the tools they're using to "detect" AI use. My sister in law fought with Grammarly, which she was required to pay for and use by the school, to prove her paper wasn't written by AI.

She spent twenty hours trying to "de-ai" a paper that wasn't written by AI. The only things that worked were using bad grammar and poor sentence structure. The class was pass/fail, and probably for that reason.

I've heard much of the same from my friends who teach middle and high schoolers: most alarmingly that they can put information up on the board, ask a question about it, and the students don't even connect that the answer is already in front of their eyes.

And sadly, a very common question they get is: "If AI can do this for me, why do I need to learn it in the first place?"

The worst part is that, in the short-term, the only recourse people have is suing social media and LLM companies, who are awash in cash and happy to settle, or throw their weight behind age verification, which in its various forms poses a security risk. Parents, clearly, are parking their kids in front of screens and unwilling to parent, so that's not something you can depend upon.

I'm just glad I never procreated, but this problem is going to affect us all when these kids try to enter the work force and can't actually do anything.

The kids who were 12 when the pandemic happened are now 18 and will be having their own kids soon.

Then fail them. Oh, that would look bad? The "system "won't allow it? Remind me, what's your fucking job again?

Having to add AI to the products I work on is destroying my ability to think.

During a conversation with my sister about going back to school to finish her electrical engineering degree she basically said this:

As an older student. What /I/ see is a bunch of students who don't really know how the workforce works, but who HAVE grasped these facts:

1. The school wants you to have a social life. That's why there's all these events, and they cancel class for games and stuff sometimes. So you SHOULD be doing social stuff.

2. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and the only way to get ahead is to use every tool at your disposal, including and especially GenAI.

3. Everybody is doing it, especially the smart people, including the grad students, AND sometimes even the teachers. Even the professionals are like "this is how you can use ChatGPT!"

4. So, to get everything done and have A Good College Experience, obviously you just use ChatGPT! Why spend hours in the library like all those losers?????

And, then, on the other hand, I see:

A bunch of very tired, overworked, overwhelmed teachers who are doing their damndest with students who can't do even half of the bare minimum that was expected when they went through college.

Bending over backwards and then back upwards to pass these kids, by hook or by crook.

Like, people giving 100s of points of extra credit.

People putting together a whole website of specific terms for each unit AND the slide shows from the classes, quizzes that are pass/fail - as in, you get the credit if you take the quiz on time, period, regardless of what you get, so you can use it to review, AND the weekly essays are either:

1. 750 word summary of the reading + answer 4 questions (no word limit) + pose two questions about the text, no specifc formatting required.

OR

2. 250 word reflection: how does what we learned apply to your life? No specific format required.

I was writing 5 page research papers for classes my first year of college. What the fuck. What the fuck.

(She went back to school to finish her degree)

You're telling me you can't write a 750 word SUMMARY that doesn't need to be formatted beyond "put your name on it and use punctuation"?????????

The classes themselves are not hard. IF you have a good grounding in logic and math and writing. Which these people DO NOT.

They have a good grounding in letting ChatGPT do the work for them and letting the teacher tell them how to do everything.

And goddamn I might get 77s because I can't do algebra and I can't do math fast enough to finish a test.

But at least I'm not failing because I can't THINK.

She also mentioned that a lot of professors are kind of trying to walk the thin line between failing students (who will then go to places like "ratemyprofessor.com and leave what essentially amount to bad reviews which can threaten their employment), and passing students who aren't actually grasping the basics and I think social media is just compounding the problem because of that.

Imagine working in fast food and already getting complaints all the time and then having to worry about someone putting you on a rate my server website where they trash talk you and you have no recourse to have that information taken down.

At least with yelp it's not first and last names and it's the business that takes the flak.

This is a consequence that the Epstein class will welcome and invest more heavily in. And the rest of us will have to deal with literal idiots for the rest of our lives.