135 lines
No EOL
6.3 KiB
Markdown
135 lines
No EOL
6.3 KiB
Markdown
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title = "I'm sick of AI"
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date = 2025-01-15
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{% important() %}
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This is a bit of an unhinged rant, feel free to completely ignore it.
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If you're not in the mood to read somebody's upset rant about AI taking over, just do yourself a favor and skip this.
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{% end %}
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{% note() %}
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It should be obvious, but when talking about to AI, I'm referring to generative AI, and *primarily* ChatGPT.
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{% end %}
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Earlier today, one of my professors gave our class an assignment along the lines of
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> Co-create a 1000-1500 word creative piece with ChatGPT by next class.
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Creative writing.
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Generative AI.
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What????
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Something about that just didn't make sense to me. It didn't compute.
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Is that really what we're doing now?
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It's graded *specifically* on the use of AI.
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Oh, and the grading rubric? Yeah, that's AI generated too.
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And I guess that was sort of a wake-up call for me.
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Why is a thousand words of AI slop considered more valuable than a couple hundred of actual, genuine, human-generated words?
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There's no chance the professor will actually *read* the forty-odd submissions for this assignment, chances are they'll be summarized by AI and spat right back to us, just like the last assignment was.
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And everyone else was just... okay with this?
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Nobody else in the class seemed to care, at all.
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And that *genuinely terrifies me*.
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`--- BEGIN ANGRY RANT ---`
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---
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If we're going to make generative AI so central to everything, it **cannot** be ChatGPT.
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We can not be building our education, our society, around OpenAI's inscrutable magic word box, that almost none of us actually understand.
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This is pointless.
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Actually, no, this is worse than pointless, it's actively harmful.
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It's like those AI email generation tools that send emails to people who don't read them, and instead just summarize them with a different AI tool.
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It's just a shitty form of lossy anti-compression. It's introducing a middleman that does not need to be there.
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***It doesn't need to be this way.*** This doesn't help *anyone*.
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{% note() %}
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Arguably, it helps the companies behind the AI-as-a-service stuff.
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Have you read any of their privacy policies lately? They're farming you for both training data and profit.
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And *nobody* cares.
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{% end %}
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Am I just backwards and stuck in the past? Maybe. I know some people would say so.
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Most people seem to be able to embrace it.
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Maybe it's just necessary practice.
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Maybe AI crammed into every aspect of life is the inevitable future we're heading toward, and I need to get used to it, adapt, embrace it.
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But AAAAAAAAAAAAAA I *REALLY* DON'T WANT TO.
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We're supposed to pretend that this is *good*? This is *human progress*?
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- AI is being shoved into *everything*, where it doesn't even provide any actual benefit
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- It's trained on questionably-obtained source material (copyright, anyone?)
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- The computing resource consumption is astronomical
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- It (well, ChatGPT at least) is controlled by giant companies
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We've jumped headfirst into this AI mess without stopping to consider the consequences.
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Generative AI has valid uses, but obfuscating human-to-human communication should not be one of them.
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Creating slop that nobody wants to read or look at should not be one of them.
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{% note() %}
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I want to be very clear that I don't hate the *technology*. The technology itself is super cool.
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I think AI generated images and video is an amazing feat of computing. Quick summarization of text is genuinely super useful.
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Easy brainstorming of project or gift ideas? Epic! Code line completion that doesn't suck? Yeah, I want that.
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But at least to me, there is a very clear line between using the technology *for a valid purpose*, and just generating slop that nobody actually wants.
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It's not the tools themselves that bother me, but rather the overuse and abuse of them.
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{% end %}
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I know a lot of people, who when getting stuck on a homework problem go *straight* to ChatGPT.
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Not to a friend, not the textbook, not a TA or professor, ChatGPT.
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What kind of precedent is that setting for where people get their information?
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ChatGPT is *not* a search engine, despite what a concerning number of people seem to think.
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A week or so ago, my dad sent me an article comparing and contrasting different programming languages.
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It was obviously AI generated. I don't think he *cared*.
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Generative AI is integral to too much at this point. We **can't** go back. It's too late for that.
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Legislature can not and will not fix this. I don't think most people *want* to fix this.
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I have no idea what it will look like five or ten years into the future, but I doubt it'll be better.
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When I was in high school, I watched AI take over writing essays in English classes.
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And now in college, I'm watching AI take over the teaching side too.
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It's taken over online search results, it's taken over communication apps.
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We are wayyy beyond going back to how it was before.
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Something's being lost here, though I can't quantify it.
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I don't want to keep having to second-guess whether something was written by a machine, and not a human.
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Because yes, for some stupid reason, that still matters to me.
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I'd rather read an actual person's broken, disorganized, messy pile of words than some perfect Idealized Text™ from a machine.
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I'll be the first to admit that my writing is not the best.
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I actively struggle to produce words that are at all close to coherent. (heck, I mean, just look at this post)
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At least when I'm done, it's words that *I've* written.
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*Me.*
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Not some mysterious algorithm trained on stolen data and shoved down my throat when I don't want it.
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I don't *want* to get used to this.
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I don't *want* this to be the new normal.
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I DON'T *WANT* AI IN MY CHAT APP, I WANT TO TALK TO *PEOPLE*.
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I really, *really* hope I'm not alone in feeling this way.
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{% note() %}
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Oh also, go watch [this video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-opBifFfsMY).
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{% end %}
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---
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`--- END ANGRY RANT ---`
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This will (hopefully) be the only time I write anything like this.
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I don't like being upset, I just wanted to get this off my chest.
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I plan to go right back to sticking my head in the sand and pretending the constant bombardment of everything with AI isn't a problem, and try my best to just ignore it.
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I really don't know what else I can do at this point.
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Hopefully my next blog post will be about gamedev or something I actually *want* to write/think about.
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Oh, also, the funny part? This is now just as long as that assignment would have been, had I written it by hand. |