I had an epiphany while walking with my daughter to the park this morning.
The number one reason why I would never resort to #AI / a #LLM to write something for me is that these models completely squash any individuality, the sum of all your life experiences and viewpoints. What makes you, you.
What I find so dangerous is the homogenization of thinking that they bring about. A pastiche of vanilla thoughts, cobbled together at random.
No LLM could possibly write for me... even if I used a prompt that asked it to write in my style, providing links to previous articles.
My little one is only 4 but it breaks my heart that she's growing up in a world where these tools are totally normalized. How they're upending higher education and so many aspects of life.
We didn't have a choice, the introduction of these tools arrived all of a sudden, without any guardrails in place. And now they're here.
When the time comes, we'll have this talk. I find it essential.
/end of rant - sigh times a million
#NoAI #MediaEcology #DigitalLiteracy
Discussion
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@elena
... and no discussion of LLMs should be without the reminder that they use world-eating amounts of energy and water.
... and no discussion of LLMs should be without the reminder that they use world-eating amounts of energy and water.
@elena please, take the following as statements from someone who has been working in tech/infosec for 30+ years and is sick of it.
Isn't that *exactly* the point? It's like the perfect drug: creates addiction, wiping you of *you*. Without AI, you won't be able to write an email, or read a paper. IT will do it for you, to "help". Managers don't read reports already: they look at powerpoints. And no text please, they don't have time for that.
@elena AI books? They are a thing. Art? It's making people numb, to the point of not thinking anymore, being unable do distinguish fake from art from real. Deepfakes are a thing, media will soon start using it. Political parties did.
This is doing exactly what is supposed to do: it's not help, it's making people numb. Unable to feel, everything is getting the same thing.
As you mentioned: the way you write, is you writing. For artists it's the same. Everything else is just meaningless slop.
@elena I think it might be worth having a talk with her school.
@elena don't despair, there's still hope. The number one choice of media of my 14 year old daughter is: books! Classic, analog, no screen books. After that it's music, by her favourite rock station and our huge collection of CDs. She uses her phone mainly for communication. So, we can help our children to find their way through the digital wild west. Analog and physical will never be obsolete, people are starting to learn that already. So, best of luck and patience for us all!
@elena Absolutely! And not only that, I'm also very worried about the effects of using LLM in education in particular and in our brain function in general (adults and kids). I'm pretty sure it will make more difficult to "learn how to learn" and learn howto critically think.
@elena no #LLM will ever be you, no. But different LLMs trained on different data and with different parameters could have quite different "personalities", some of which folks might find more complimentary with their own for the purposes of work assistance and whatnot. This is not meant to ignore the many problems with this technology. Just thought it was interesting, especially if there were, say, 10s of thousands of models to choose from.
@elena As a blind person, I often use AI to get help on picture descriptions, video descriptions, and sometimes they can give me a vague idea on how to follow-up a story. Sometimes I get even good ideas but they're just bulleted lists I will develop by myself. Or even helping me translating from Italian to English back and forth. But NOT to create entire contents for me! They can't. A set of data can't create a personality. Not even my sentient virus's. (1/2)
It's me to instruct the assistant to behave in a certain way. Me, with my written style. (2/2)
@elena Exactly. LLMs are average machines. They provide the most average answer possible. That’s it. That’s the entire magic trick.
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