It’s a joke and all but also not really? You might have to go do a chalk talk at some point, and that is basically the only part of this article that is actually not real. The rest (about how everyone in academia is prompting everything) is absolutely VERY real.
The word around all the scientific communities which I’m in contact with (to be honest, not so many) is basically “oh, there is no way to stop it, so we’ll embrace it”. All the conferences which I’m active in (say a handful of them) are just pretending nothing is happening and dealing only with blatant and obvious exaggerated cases. If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.
To be honest, given the overwhelming (and unfair, and unreasonable) pressure against them from the Leviathan, which the other companies do not have to deal with, they’re doing pretty damn good. In my mind the trust has actually increased that they can handle bad times and still push forward.
That’s a great scene, with great writing, and a nice article written about it, but we’ve all been there. Anyone with a couple of synapses has thought “AI is not like humans”. To realize that is not the issue; the issue is: how do you deal with the fact that we now live a world where you cannot actually tell the difference anymore? The awful truth is that nowadays AI could have written that dialogue, or something even “better”. If that movie had come out last month, I’d probably dismiss it as potentially AI.
So how do we maintain the parts of our lives as a group that rely on the “soul”? Imagine you meet your soulmate, and they write the most beautiful love letter you ever read. But, the language is a bit too fancy, and they made less mistakes than usual. Hell, you’re quite sure they don’t even know exactly what a couple of those words even mean. So how do you deal with that? Or even worse, suppose the writing is exactly as they would have written it. How do you deal with the doubt?
So what happens to the “human soul” if our output is identical to a robot? If humans are black boxes, but we replicate the box perfectly, the how will the contents of the box survive? And how do we find them?
It’s funny when people dismiss this as some kind of Luddite argument, when the reality is so simple: you have a producer-consumer system where the producer has been accelerated 1000x but the consumer remained the same. How can that work?
” Perhaps we’ll get used to this new tool, and move on.”
Perhaps we’ll be flooded with slop to the point where nobody can distinguish reality from fiction anymore, because it takes too long to check and reason about it with our outdated tools and thinking processes. Then perhaps people will lose faith in the “truth” and simply accept that one-sided ideology and biased belief is all that exists and matters, and corrupt leaders (at all levels) will make use of that to sway masses of useful idiots.
It does not matter, to be honest. Slowly people are realizing that nobody checks anything anymore, and when they check, nobody cares about positives or negatives, be them true or false. Actually, if you write something by hand today, all you’re doing is slowing yourself down, because truthfully nobody else will do that. Do you really think that you will have 100 times the benefit for doing 100 times more work than the other medíocre competition? No, because the audience does not care, and will care less and less as time goes on.
Not only that but the vacation is real. If someone is off then you should not expect them to answer at all (because if you do you’ll get very disappointed).
I understand what you mean and it’s not wrong, but still there is a contract that is being fulfilled: human in both ends. Whether it’s rambling or not, someone wrote it, and it represents a person’s idea of whatever is being discussed. That contract is now broken, but in an asymmetrical way, only one side gets to save time. My brain refuses to spend time reading crap that I don’t even know if someone even took time to prompt. Maybe they just wrote “give me something to post, whatever makes me look smart”. It’s just completely broke for me and makes me actually sick in the stomach when I read almost anything (textual uncanny valley?)
I’m still holding on to my hope that LLMs will destroy verbosity and usher in an era of concise and objective human-written works. Especially in academia. In my research area people write 10-page articles that could easily have been 2 or 3, for no reason other than that 10 page is the publication limit most of the time and if you write less it’s seen as lazy or something. Not to mention 20-page journal articles with humongous literature reviews that everyone skips, and so many meaningless diagrams and sections. I still hope that LLMs will make people so tired of reading slop that they’ll beg you to please submit shorter articles.