The unfolding history of artificial intelligence has now arrived at what may be its most dangerous moment. There are two barely controlled AI races, one between around five American companies—@Anthropic, @GoogleDeepMind, @Meta, @OpenAI, and @xai lead the field—and the other between the two geopolitical superpowers: the United States and China, with its own competing companies. The leadership of the competitors in this race is, to say the least, of mixed quality. 1/10
@bocowgill@alexolegimas Interesting. Would also appreciate thoughts on what The Lorax (1971) teaches us about unchecked consumption of AI and associated environmental harms thx
@akoustov Probably a good lesson in here -- academia would be better off as a collective if we all made good faith efforts to understand the priorities and concerns of folks* in other disciplines.
*except the ones who disagree with us and are therefore wrong
@SethLargo I'm actually ok with this. At the end of the day its up to faculty to decide what is worth testing, and how to test it. I had to write code on paper in undergrad and it was honestly pretty effective.
@ShriramKMurthi@tallinzen But an immediate use case in the humanities shouldn't be a requirement for at least some curiosity about the impacts in STEM. If anything, the big questions around AI and knowledge discovery belong firmly in the humanities
Can someone give me the steelman version of the rationale behind giving students access to the *internet* in their *dorm rooms* where they *write papers*?
There is no policing use of LLMs in "academia" or "scholarship". The various little niches of academic endeavors, each different in its priorities and purposes in reading, writing, and analyzing texts, needs to articulate and enforce its own standards from within.
Can someone give me the steelman version of the rationale behind giving students access to the *internet* in their *dorm rooms* where they *write papers*?
Genuinely, can someone give me the steel man version of the rationale behind the new “give everyone AI” university strategy? What is the theory of the case here? Do universities think it’s sustainable to ask students to pay over $90k per year to cheat their way through college?