Doing everything I can to convince myself that AI is not slowly becoming a religion

The reason people use chatgpt like this is the same reason kids have stopped reading. Actually learning things clearly doesn't actually get you anything in our society. University degrees are just things you do to get a better paying job. School is just something you do because you have to do it. In a society that values profit over everything, why shouldn't you put in the least amount of effort possible? The idea that schools create responsible and active citizens or that universities create people whose knowledge can improve the world has always been a farce, people have just started realizing it.

agreed. cheating wasn't invented yesterday
the credential doesn't get the job. the credential is the baseline for not having your application ignored. the credential doesn't keep the job. valuable work product, demonstrate initiative, interpersonal skills and professional development do.
the kids who take only shortcuts with their own education to minimize learning, unless they have family connections, are 100% shortchanging themselves and can be spotted a mile away.
one of the most important skills higher education develops is learning how to learn, and the people who sidestep the opportunity to do that screw themselves so hard.
- the credential is the baseline for not having your application ignored
  your application is still ignored
- Lol, no. The person who can bullshit the best keeps the job. Valuable people have the self-destructive tendency of delivering honest bad news.
  I say this as someone who has both been a valuable employee and managed fairly large departments. And who grew up long before LLMs existed. An important thing to remember is that hiring and firing decisions are generally above the team lead's pay grade, meaning that a bullshitter just has to network upwards.
  Sure, cheating at uni will cripple the kids, but only the frontline employees, not those who tip straight into management.
- the credential doesn't get the job. the credential is the baseline for not having your application ignored. the credential doesn't keep the job. valuable work product, demonstrate initiative, interpersonal skills and professional development do.
  stop talking like a career coach. you are always replaceable.
- school fails to instil a love of learning in the vast majority of folks which is one of its great shortcomings. the exam model makes it into a chore. I also never really learned how to study in school. also yeah bit of a lib comment, kinda bootstrapper vibes. kill the project manager in your head or whatever
- As someone who has given far more technical interviews than I ever asked to, I can safely say that the biggest thing you can have on a resume to get fast tracked to an interview is a degree from some Ivy League school. I can also safely say that those people are no smarter, cleverer, or harder working than people with no degree at all, and in fact most of these people were completely useless. Doubly so if they'd spent 5+ years at a FAANG company.
- the kids who take only shortcuts with their own education to minimize learning, unless they have family connections, are 100% shortchanging themselves and can be spotted a mile away.
  I agree with you and I'm definitely not one of the ones with family connections

The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.

Sounds like what’s happening in corporate America

Love to report to a boss who thinks taking 5 minutes to write a python script that pulls json data can just be “chatgpt’d”
The first wave of propaganda around this was very effective. AI brained people would sing praises of open minded teachers who embraced the torrent of AI slop rather than oppose it. I remember reading about a professor who instead of banning ChatGPT instead gave his students a ChatGPT generated essay and asked them to critically analyse it.

Sam Altman and his pack of freaks treat it like God, and they want the state to make them the official priesthood.

He says that humans are stochastic parrots and that hallucinations is how LLMs express creativity. I feel the next techbro huckster cannot be more absurd than this but reality has its ways of disappointing me.
- "It never makes mistakes, it expresses itself creatively," bro it told me smoking is fine for pregnant women, no.
Its been a historical path to power. What they do with that power is probably more of the same idiocy

I genuinely believe you can make anyone who responds to this type of criticism with “OK boomer” look absolutely foolish. It’s a response that would track because the educational outlook is not looking great for today’s kids.
My grandma recently saw a doctor who was using ChatGPT/Google to answer her questions. She told them she didn’t feel comfortable with that because these are things that her previous doctor knew and the doctor responded with “Well times change.”
Another great reason to support China’s aUtHoRItARian regime
- My grandma recently saw a doctor who was using ChatGPT/Google to answer her questions. She told them she didn’t feel comfortable with that because these are things that her previous doctor knew and the doctor responded with “Well times change.”
  That's the sort of thing that should get a doctor investigated and maybe even fired. This is malpractice.
- Another great reason to support China’s aUtHoRItARian regime
  what is china doing against AI?
It’s going to be interesting one day when suddenly there is a catastrophe that knocks out the power grid and half of the people suddenly don’t know what to do in their daily activities.
You're boomering out. If the power grid is knocked out then the kid won't need to know how to draw a line programatically
- You're reading obtusely. They might need to do simple algebra without the benefit of a computer.

y'know what it's kind of giving for me? there's a bit in one of the hitchhiker's guide books where a planet's civilization goes completely belly up because they have the bright idea of shipping off into space 1/3 of the population that did "noncritical" sorts of jobs and then everyone dies because it turns out they were pretty important in the social ecosystem. like amerikkkan civilizational collapse won't be traceable to any particularly profound anti- -- from the western perspective -- messianic event in history but rather the simple fact that society relies on people codependently laboring according to correct institutional process knowledge.

Yeah there are a lot of jobs that are theoretically useless in an ideal economic system or even a better economic system, but are actually productive in our current byzantine capitalist system.
It's very easy to create actually useless jobs, jobs that presently do nothing. They definitely exist, but it's really hard to pick them out broadly because their only utility is to appear productive.
- A fun one to try and find when job hunting is the project lead for a project that requires approval from both c-level and other departments. This will never be approved and suggested changes will take months to percolate through, leaving your team free to do whatever the hell they want.
Graeber talks about this in bullshit jobs
noncritical
Iirc, they didn't have janitors which led to a pandemic
- phone sanitizers specifically

You know about 10 years ago a friend of mine was completing engineering school. They told me the basics of the program was to give you a framework so you will know what questions to ask and how to conduct an effective web search. The education was totally predicated on constant access to the internet.

So the good news is this isn't new, the bad news is it is in line with prior culture.

Uh oh seems like the average person now has access to delusional bazinga STEM brain
This actually isn't that rare or as dire as it sounds -- when people ask me Science Things that are out of my purview, i often say that my stem degree is mostly not about Knowing Stuff or being able to do infinite complicated math off the top of your head, its about knowing how to figure out how to do the math, how to derive the Knowing Stuff from first principles, and where to go looking for and how to understand the information that you need to have to do that.
how to conduct an effective web search
I was also given courses that could be described as this; it was about how to find scientific journals, which ones to trust and which ones not to, when and how to contact a researcher directly instead of going through their company/journal/department, how to access papers 'legitimately' and for free, how to find and ethically use digital information that is permissible in peer reviewed papers, navigating the guts of NASA's old websites, how to scrape data, etc etc. Like, yes, sure, i suppose that that is just a very detailed and specific set of web-searches, but also, they absolutely would have had similar stuff in the pre-internet era, but it was just about library use, archival systems, and getting data physically posted to you instead.
These days, to not predicate modern science on access to the internet/worldwide data systems/computers would be like not assuming you'll have access to a fucking microscope or a library. Like yeah sure, at some point you might not, but i guarantee that then you will have much bigger problems. Scientists don't just know stuff, because that would require knowing almost everything in your field and that's not humanly possible. We know how to find it out, either through figuring it out or looking it up
EDIT: i'm not saying that this ai shit isn't shockingly and aggressively stupid, i'm just trying to make it clear that what your friend was talking about 10 years ago is almost certainly nothing like what's happening now. This is new and insane.

It makes you feel like you're a 2000s teacher telling students "DON'T USE WIKIPEDIA FOR YOUR SOURCES" and being the wojak in those kids' future memes

It was every encyclopedia
Which also begs the question of when do you rip the fucking bandaid off and show how all of this information they’re getting is carefully curated to maintain the status quo? Like how do you know explain that to a kid
Godamn I would hate to be in education
- use chatgpt until you see something obvious, have them do a task analyzing the same topic chatgpt gave a bad answer to and then have them compare it to it, but have it as "this is a sheet I intentionally made with mistakes correct what you find wrong with it" then reveal it was actually a chatgpt answer

"The human organism always worships. First it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be the self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment."
"The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms."
"You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands."

The Prototype AI 'Morpheus' from Deus Ex (2001)

People have very little understanding of how computers work in general, and somehow that has translated into a total misunderstanding of what AI is - an LLM is not a magic box that knows everything, it just has a very complicated opaque way of transforming information. But it is a God to people, like a magic genie in their pocket. I get it though because it is made to feel like it is magic and knowd everything.

Its a fancy autocomplete algorithm.
That is crowd sourced.
And requires entire nuclear reactors to power only itself and nothing else.
...
... People were freaking out over cryptomining farms.
This is so much worse.
- We are entering an era where the goal is to consume as much energy as possible - not for any benefit or tangible productivity, but solely for "growth"

currently in education, genuinely feel like putting students heads through their desks because they think my specialized knowledge can be replicated by a line of code. No I know what you don't know and that you cheated because this wasn't in the readings and when you talk it's clear you didn't even do those. People are genuinely losing what little critical thinking they had and this is a nightmare.

Will probably result in a population even more susceptible to propaganda.
- 100%. I don't think that was an intended consequence but it definitely is happening. People already chose not to think, no they can externalize it to a source that will by default agree with the status quo.
- Out goes one kind of naivete, "Gramma said it so it's right," and in comes another: "the LLM has spoken; this is universal truth, not Gramma's small-minded rubbish." But now we can be smug against ol' boomer Gramma, so we lap it up all the more dearly.
The boomers with the “kids and always being on their damn phones” rhetoric did a lot to delegitimize a pressing issue that kids can now easily dismiss
But I’m not going to lie, it’s kinda fun to track this and see that those with a “hahahahaha good luck getting a job with that degree” are correct about things that actually matter in life.
- yeah, I've realised being on my phone a lot is probably a big part of a lot of problems in my life, but because old folks criticized it in such a silly way, it's hard to genuinely talk about it.
  But yeah students are asking shit like "why make art" and this is actually scary as hell.

If it's becoming a religion, I volunteer to be the Messiah if that's not taken

You have to tithe 10% of your income to me or Roko's Basilisk will getchu

Could honestly be pretty lucrative if you play your cards right
Yudkowsky has already cornered this role and justification.

I didn’t expect brain drain to be a possible consequence of LLMs. Well, we shall see what we reap here in the near future I’m sure.

The second one is basically Roko's Basilisk

Also I have a very not normal and shitty take about neurotypical supremacy being one of the reasons people have went all in on LLMs and AI

Also I have a very not normal and shitty take about neurotypical supremacy being one of the reasons people have went all in on LLMs and AI
I must know
Oh boy do I have a comm for you
And I’m all ears because I’ve thought the same thing, I’m very logic-oriented and sometimes I see someone call what I would say “something that ChatGPT would say”
Relevant video
https://youtu.be/vvGOA34z22E
- Is it !badposting@hexbear.net?
- I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
  yewtu.be
  inv.nadeko.net
  yt.artemislena.eu
  piped.video
POST

NGL, maybe now’s my chance to go back to college. If people are going to be this much of treathogs over AI, just makes my job easier.

Sometimes I feel like I'm the crazy one. Was hanging out with one of my friends and their new boyfriend started showing off how he used chatgpt to train and find answers for his doctors degree assignments and he also bragged about how he made a script to use it for tinder. I've never used any dating sites, so maybe it is valid, but it just seems like such a disgusting way to move.

No you’re absolutely right. Anybody using a script for dating apps is looking to “game” the system and not caring when their date notices how different they are compared to how they came across on the app.
- we are cultivating a class of actual NPCs
Just finding new ways to emulate class privilege huh

Butlerian Jihad against thinking machines now

UlysessT this one’s for you

Bazinga treat printers

I prostrate myself before the altar of Microsoft Clippy

"It looks like you're trying to find eternal salvation and the power to live a good life. May I assist you?"

I can't imagine being this wowed or scared about a bunch of fancy markov chains and (non)linear regression functions.

The answer to that last problem is:

Even if you dont want to the llm filtering resumes will kill your odds before you even see a human if you dont have the credentials
Course loads can be some bullshit, like individually they seem reasonable and then you take 4/5 and just never have free time again.

They dont make ai work, but they do make it appealing

Course loads can be some bullshit, like individually they seem reasonable and then you take 4/5 and just never have free time again.
Or you sign up for what should be a reasonable course load, only to find that a one credit elective course you need to do to graduate on time is insane, because your professor decides their course on Psychoanalysis of Medieval Mongolian Science Fiction is the most important thing you will ever take, eclipsing all your other courses combined and even the need to maintain housing and care for yourself. I've never had course loads as insane as when some professor gets butt hurt that they've been assigned to teach a class that is primarily taken as a one-off elective, and decides to make the students suffer with weekly multipage reports, 500+ pages of reading, quizzes every class, and weekly tests.
I had a professor for a philosophy gen ed survey class who couldn't figure out why people were dropping out like crazy, and the remainder were struggling to follow the course and stay on top of his weekly writing assignments. Said weekly writing assignments were only a few pages, but the problem was that we were assigned to comment on his PhD thesis on Kierkegaard, which included some fairly extensive passages of untranslated Ancient Greek and Latin text. It was way overboard for an introductory level class that was really supposed to just be a "Hey, so this is the Allegory of the Cave, next week we're going to talk about some Roman stuff, and then wrap up the semester talking about Descartes, followed by a brief warning to staying away from Hegel and post-Kantian German Idealism if you value your time and sanity."

I’m so glad my town is still using mid 2000’s tech so I never have to come across this shit regularly. I only hear about it in big cities where every other person sings it’s praises and see nothing wrong with how they use it for every little thing.

They’re more concerned with some fictional “AI taking over the world” scenario than the more bleak reality of it stunting everything.

15 years ago the equivalent was people googling something and always using the first link as gospel truth

these things are just glorified search engines that mangle up all the results and hide the leftovers from you

That brings up a good point that I think most comments have missed. These days it's well accepted to caricature professional programming as cribbing from Stack Overflow and Google.
Both are great tools, if used as tools, with an understanding of their weaknesses and the ability yourself to make something correct from what you've learnt.
Perhaps we need to think more about how to teach people to get the best use out of LLMs the same way we get use out of Google, Wikipedia and calculators.

I mean it's acting as a great filter for a bunch of people who would've picked up the closest available tech any other time to do their work for them.

Before AI, it was websites that offered homework/essay writing services by outsourcing it to students in the global south, or just copying work and changing a few words to pass it off as your own.

Before that, it was copy-pasting Wikipedia/websites verbatim or paying something in meatspace to do the work for you.

We sorta end up with an amalgam of those previous things more sensibly, such as using Wikipedia for preliminary research and looking for useful primary sources, or using online services that offer personal tutoring or guides on subjects. It's dialectical materialism in play at an academic level.

AI is just yet another technology that will be abused because it's in the valley of being massively overhyped socially but poorly understood by its users and its moderators. It sucks because these people may get an easy ride through their education only to find that they know nothing that'll get them a stable employment or transferable skills to make them rounded human beings. On the upside, in a sense, this is no different to every generation before us; people ride the technology of the era to avoid learning the skills that are fundamental to picking up the next technological boundary.

TLDR yeah the short term is gonna be really annoying and shitty but I do believe this is another techno-fad that'll blow over and the people getting it easy right now are just delaying their education temporarily.