I hope I've been part of this community long enough that people will assume I'm coming at this issue in good faith, because I truly am! As an IT professional, the thing that's frustrating for me is that "using the plagiarism machine to do your homework" and "using AI to help you troubleshoot technical issues in a fraction of the amount of time it would have taken before" are put in the same context. I can serve my clients better by being able to feed a string of error messages into AI and getting a workable solution back almost immediately rather than spending a bunch of time flailing around and trying different things. (Here I will note that my years of experience help me solve a lot of problems on my own, and I'm grateful I had the opportunity to learn how to do lots of stuff myself!) I try to be judicious in my use of it (I use claude.ai) and I even have my Google searches set to NOT show AI results (thanks to https://tenbluelinks.org/). I just feel like there's a little nuance that goes missing when you just declare "AI=bad, full stop." I hope this admission doesn't get me kicked out of the White Pages club!
Sue, I'll always assume good faith with you, and I also know that there's no perfect way to make the distinction here between clear professional uses of AI in the IT world (or, for instance, in the biomedical world-- I hear that it's great tech for gene sequencing) and the consumer facing uses, which are the ones I'm particularly urging people to resist. I try to talk about generative AI or consumer facing AI, but I'm sure that my language isn't super perfect. You'll never get kicked out of the White Pages club and loved that you still wrote in.
I wrote this on another newsletter about AI yesterday, but it's so apt that I will write it again:
"I heard someone say recently that the way that tech bros talk about AI is not unlike how rapists talk about rape: "It's inevitable", "There's nothing you can do to stop it", and my personal favorite, "It'll go easier if you just submit.""
That creepy feeling that many of us get in the face of AI? It's the same feeling you get when you're walking alone on a dark street and some guy appears to be following you. The part we have to remember is that we're not alone on this street. There are more of us than the AI trying to follow us, and we should all turn on him and tell him to screw off.
You know I have so much to say about this topic that I do not know where to begin, Garrett. My students (undergrad and grad) on the whole hate AI. In addition to all of the environmental and ethical and economic concerns, they are now engaged in a kind of AI arms race in which they have not only to learn how to write but how to write in a way that is just human enough not to get flagged as AI. I find it heartening to talk to my students about it, though there are of course exceptions. I recently encountered some excellent anti-AI graffiti in the student bathroom across the hall from where I usually teach. You can see the photo here: https://mas.to/@svhaag/116574228111672068
I am heartened by seeing so many more conversations about folks rejecting AI (or at least the idea of it). It is so incredibly pervasive and time consuming to disable - there are no fewer than a dozen things to click to disable it on Zoom. Getting rid of it on my email server is so far impossible. I had to switch browsers in order to find one that will let me completely cancel the use of AI for search features, etc.
But, I love seeing that folks are changing their minds and starting to talk about it more and more. One friend I have who is a college professor explained it to her students like this: using AI in school is like going to the gym with a robot, putting the robot on the treadmill, and telling it to strengthen your muscles and increase your cardio fitness. You aren't actually doing the work. Your muscles won't get any stronger, you won't learn anything, you're not practicing the thing. What makes you think AI will make you any smarter/stronger/more capable?
I keep thinking about how much I love the process of learning. That includes the phase where you fail more than succeed, but by keeping at it, you reverse that ratio and the sense of accomplishment that comes from that is powerful. I love the feeling of catharsis that comes from pouring our my jumble of ideas and hypotheses into a written work. I love how much my friends and I laugh when we attempt a paint-and-sip or a pottery workshop and our attempt is nothing like the professional version and no one would pay money for it but the end result is imbued with that joy and feels priceless. Why would I want to outsource any of those experiences to a technology that gives me nothing in return?
I hope I've been part of this community long enough that people will assume I'm coming at this issue in good faith, because I truly am! As an IT professional, the thing that's frustrating for me is that "using the plagiarism machine to do your homework" and "using AI to help you troubleshoot technical issues in a fraction of the amount of time it would have taken before" are put in the same context. I can serve my clients better by being able to feed a string of error messages into AI and getting a workable solution back almost immediately rather than spending a bunch of time flailing around and trying different things. (Here I will note that my years of experience help me solve a lot of problems on my own, and I'm grateful I had the opportunity to learn how to do lots of stuff myself!) I try to be judicious in my use of it (I use claude.ai) and I even have my Google searches set to NOT show AI results (thanks to https://tenbluelinks.org/). I just feel like there's a little nuance that goes missing when you just declare "AI=bad, full stop." I hope this admission doesn't get me kicked out of the White Pages club!
Sue, I'll always assume good faith with you, and I also know that there's no perfect way to make the distinction here between clear professional uses of AI in the IT world (or, for instance, in the biomedical world-- I hear that it's great tech for gene sequencing) and the consumer facing uses, which are the ones I'm particularly urging people to resist. I try to talk about generative AI or consumer facing AI, but I'm sure that my language isn't super perfect. You'll never get kicked out of the White Pages club and loved that you still wrote in.
And yet I'm still the one who has to clean out the shower drain while LLMs supposedly "do my job for me." Brave new world indeed!
I wrote this on another newsletter about AI yesterday, but it's so apt that I will write it again:
"I heard someone say recently that the way that tech bros talk about AI is not unlike how rapists talk about rape: "It's inevitable", "There's nothing you can do to stop it", and my personal favorite, "It'll go easier if you just submit.""
That creepy feeling that many of us get in the face of AI? It's the same feeling you get when you're walking alone on a dark street and some guy appears to be following you. The part we have to remember is that we're not alone on this street. There are more of us than the AI trying to follow us, and we should all turn on him and tell him to screw off.
This is such an apt analogy, Asha. The whole discourse is designed to make us believe we have no agency.
You know I have so much to say about this topic that I do not know where to begin, Garrett. My students (undergrad and grad) on the whole hate AI. In addition to all of the environmental and ethical and economic concerns, they are now engaged in a kind of AI arms race in which they have not only to learn how to write but how to write in a way that is just human enough not to get flagged as AI. I find it heartening to talk to my students about it, though there are of course exceptions. I recently encountered some excellent anti-AI graffiti in the student bathroom across the hall from where I usually teach. You can see the photo here: https://mas.to/@svhaag/116574228111672068
I am heartened by seeing so many more conversations about folks rejecting AI (or at least the idea of it). It is so incredibly pervasive and time consuming to disable - there are no fewer than a dozen things to click to disable it on Zoom. Getting rid of it on my email server is so far impossible. I had to switch browsers in order to find one that will let me completely cancel the use of AI for search features, etc.
But, I love seeing that folks are changing their minds and starting to talk about it more and more. One friend I have who is a college professor explained it to her students like this: using AI in school is like going to the gym with a robot, putting the robot on the treadmill, and telling it to strengthen your muscles and increase your cardio fitness. You aren't actually doing the work. Your muscles won't get any stronger, you won't learn anything, you're not practicing the thing. What makes you think AI will make you any smarter/stronger/more capable?
I keep thinking about how much I love the process of learning. That includes the phase where you fail more than succeed, but by keeping at it, you reverse that ratio and the sense of accomplishment that comes from that is powerful. I love the feeling of catharsis that comes from pouring our my jumble of ideas and hypotheses into a written work. I love how much my friends and I laugh when we attempt a paint-and-sip or a pottery workshop and our attempt is nothing like the professional version and no one would pay money for it but the end result is imbued with that joy and feels priceless. Why would I want to outsource any of those experiences to a technology that gives me nothing in return?