Most don’t have a problem with AI itself and even find it useful in its proper use cases
What most of us hate about it is the corporations shoving it every which way where it doesn’t belong, doesn’t work and down all our throats for profits so they can make line go up
Seconded. I genuinely understand most of the hate against AI, but I can’t understand how some people are so completely against any possible implementation.
Sometimes, an LLM is just good at rewording documentation to provide some extra context and examples. Sometimes it’s good for reformatting notes into bullet points, or asking about that one word you can’t put your finger on but generally remember some details about, but not enough for the thesaurus to find it.
Limited, sure, but not entirely useless. Of course, when my fucking charity fundraising platform starts adding features where you can speak to it and tell it “donate $x to x charity” instead of just clicking the buttons yourself, and that’s where the development budget is going… yeah, I’m not exactly happy about that.
It’s pretty common to be pro-AI or at least neutral about it. Lemmy seems to have an echo chamber of hating it as far as I can tell, so maybe it’s just new people coming in?
It’s useful. I ain’t letting it write software. But I can let it write my stupid report and paperwork while feeding him the important bit. Because I really don’t want to bother.
Ho no, I used the reformating and rewording machine to do something that I was doing for years and still suck at doing. I can’t write a legible well formated sentence to save my life. I just feed it whatever it needs to say, it plays it’s magic and get something that looks understandable to my coworkers.
Okay I am exaggerating, but I really struggle to be either concise and this helps me.
If the ubiquity of LLMs kills the MLA essay, it’ll be worth the price.
I haven’t encountered an English teacher that knows how to teach someone how to make an effective argument or state a compelling case, what they know how to do is strictly adhere to the MLA handbook and spot minor grammatical pet peeves. From high school to university I’ve never had an English teacher call me up to discuss my paper to talk about how I could have more effectively made a point, but I’ve gotten commas written over with semicolons.
This comment completelt encapsulates what is wrong. MLA essays? The format is going to die? You have issues with shitty teachers, where are there problems due to the systems in place, you are alright with AI taking away an important human experience? Like come on. Can we stop using AI and critically think for a bit.
So, first, Yeah I’d be in favor of killing the format itself; the MLA format seems to have two functions: 1. to force tens of thousands of young adults to buy MLA handbooks every semester from college book stores, and 2. to serve as a warning to any reader that the article they’ve found was written by an ENG112 student who didn’t give the first squirt of a monday morning’s piss about it because it was assigned to him more as a barrier for him to dodge than an exercise to strengthen him. Actual scholarship is done in the APA format and we’d be better off if we just taught that.
Second, I reject the notion that writing tedious research papers qualifies as “an important human experience.” Again, a lot of folks are forced to dabble in it similarly to how they’re forced to dabble in mathematical proofs: once or twice in high school and once or twice in college, they’re required to rote memorize something for a couple weeks. I’m rather convinced that a lot of the time taken in school from about 7th grade up is designed to appear academic more than actually be academic.
Third, I’m in the camp that says scrap most of the idea we have of formal academic writing, for multiple reasons. Chiefly, the more of those worthless English teachers we can put back into food service where they belong, the better. Stepping a little bit out of my comedy internet persona a bit, I do believe the idea of “impersonal, dry, boring, jargon-laden, complicated” research papers has gone beyond any practical function it may have had. There is something to be said for using standardized language, minimizing slang and such. To me, that would be a reason to write in something like VoA simplified English rather than Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. I’m also not alone in the idea that scientific concepts and research are getting to the point that text on page isn’t the right tool for conveying it; Jupyter notebooks and other such tools are often better than a stodgy essay.
Fourth, undoing the rigorous formats of “scholarly articles” may deal a blow to junk science. I’ve seen English teachers point to the essay format, presence of citations, presence in journals etc. as how you tell a written work has any merit. In practice this has meant that anyone wanting to publish junk science has an excellent set of instructions on how to make it look genuine. Hell, all you’ve got to do is cite a source that doesn’t exist and you’ve created truth from whole cloth, like that “you swallow 8 spiders in your sleep” thing.
Finally, whether the problem lies in the bureaucracy that creates curricula or individual teachers, I’m in favor of forcing their hands by eliminating the long-form essay as a thing they can reasonably expect students to do on a “here’s this semester’s busywork, undergrad freshman” basis.
I had the same experience, but I recently helped my sister with a homework essay and she had a full page with the exact requirements and how they were graded.
90% of the points were for content, the types of arguments, proper structure and such. Only 10% were for spelling and punctuation.
Meaning she could hand in a complete mess, but as long as her argument was solid and she divided the introduction, arguments and conclusion into paragraphs, she’d still get a 9/10. No grumpy teachers docking half her grade for a few commas.
She gets similar detailed instructions for every subject where I used to struggle with vague assignments like “give a good presentation”. It was so bad sometimes, the teacher let the class grade each other.
Pretty much how I use it. Unimportant waste of time tasks like forms from HR and mandatory “anonymous” surveys. Refuse to do it until told directly and then get AI to write the most inoffensive and meaningless corporate bullshit.
Of course not having to do the task at all would be a more efficient use of my time but we get ignored when we say these forms are pointless. Not heard any one day anything positive about them in over a year.
In addition to niche political audiences, Lemmy is full of tech professionals who have probably integrated AI into their daily workflow in some meaningful ways.
I just got a high priority request to write a couple of VBA macros to fetch data from a database then use it to make a bunch of API queries. I know VBA about as well as I know Chinese or Icelandic. I figured out the query and told Chat GPT to use it in a macro. It wrote all the VBA code. I went through a few rounds of “fix this bug, add this feature” and now my client is happy and I didn’t have to think much about VBA. I knew what and how to ask it for what I wanted and it saved me days of searching google and reading about VBA. That’s high value to me because I don’t care about VBA and don’t really want to know how to use it.
if i have reason to doubt it, and that depends on how i feel the importance on the data i am working with, it gives me the source of its information. So i can verify it. Google is even worse at providing misinformation because it’s just a hose of information with a bunch of ads hidden amongst it, and people bidding for elevated results, and spam.
No matter what tool you use to harness the internet, it’s up to the user to parse that info.
What is up with the rise of pro AI people on here? I just “talked” to some kind of person in support of it. Are tankies pro AI now?
Most don’t have a problem with AI itself and even find it useful in its proper use cases
What most of us hate about it is the corporations shoving it every which way where it doesn’t belong, doesn’t work and down all our throats for profits so they can make line go up
Seconded. I genuinely understand most of the hate against AI, but I can’t understand how some people are so completely against any possible implementation.
Sometimes, an LLM is just good at rewording documentation to provide some extra context and examples. Sometimes it’s good for reformatting notes into bullet points, or asking about that one word you can’t put your finger on but generally remember some details about, but not enough for the thesaurus to find it.
Limited, sure, but not entirely useless. Of course, when my fucking charity fundraising platform starts adding features where you can speak to it and tell it “donate $x to x charity” instead of just clicking the buttons yourself, and that’s where the development budget is going… yeah, I’m not exactly happy about that.
It’s pretty common to be pro-AI or at least neutral about it. Lemmy seems to have an echo chamber of hating it as far as I can tell, so maybe it’s just new people coming in?
Might be people who don’t give a shit one way or another are getting tired of the front page being filled with anti-AI memes every day.
who else would it be? They’re the only people on the internet, don’t you know?
Yes, and it must be fascists. But, I repeat you.
It’s useful. I ain’t letting it write software. But I can let it write my stupid report and paperwork while feeding him the important bit. Because I really don’t want to bother.
If that report and paperwork is inane, rat race stuff, i won’t be as hard. But if that is part of school work, you’re mentally cooked then.
Ho no, I used the reformating and rewording machine to do something that I was doing for years and still suck at doing. I can’t write a legible well formated sentence to save my life. I just feed it whatever it needs to say, it plays it’s magic and get something that looks understandable to my coworkers.
Okay I am exaggerating, but I really struggle to be either concise and this helps me.
But this is a problem with society. AI won’t fix this at all. It will just exacerbate the issue.
If the ubiquity of LLMs kills the MLA essay, it’ll be worth the price.
I haven’t encountered an English teacher that knows how to teach someone how to make an effective argument or state a compelling case, what they know how to do is strictly adhere to the MLA handbook and spot minor grammatical pet peeves. From high school to university I’ve never had an English teacher call me up to discuss my paper to talk about how I could have more effectively made a point, but I’ve gotten commas written over with semicolons.
This comment completelt encapsulates what is wrong. MLA essays? The format is going to die? You have issues with shitty teachers, where are there problems due to the systems in place, you are alright with AI taking away an important human experience? Like come on. Can we stop using AI and critically think for a bit.
So, first, Yeah I’d be in favor of killing the format itself; the MLA format seems to have two functions: 1. to force tens of thousands of young adults to buy MLA handbooks every semester from college book stores, and 2. to serve as a warning to any reader that the article they’ve found was written by an ENG112 student who didn’t give the first squirt of a monday morning’s piss about it because it was assigned to him more as a barrier for him to dodge than an exercise to strengthen him. Actual scholarship is done in the APA format and we’d be better off if we just taught that.
Second, I reject the notion that writing tedious research papers qualifies as “an important human experience.” Again, a lot of folks are forced to dabble in it similarly to how they’re forced to dabble in mathematical proofs: once or twice in high school and once or twice in college, they’re required to rote memorize something for a couple weeks. I’m rather convinced that a lot of the time taken in school from about 7th grade up is designed to appear academic more than actually be academic.
Third, I’m in the camp that says scrap most of the idea we have of formal academic writing, for multiple reasons. Chiefly, the more of those worthless English teachers we can put back into food service where they belong, the better. Stepping a little bit out of my comedy internet persona a bit, I do believe the idea of “impersonal, dry, boring, jargon-laden, complicated” research papers has gone beyond any practical function it may have had. There is something to be said for using standardized language, minimizing slang and such. To me, that would be a reason to write in something like VoA simplified English rather than Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. I’m also not alone in the idea that scientific concepts and research are getting to the point that text on page isn’t the right tool for conveying it; Jupyter notebooks and other such tools are often better than a stodgy essay.
Fourth, undoing the rigorous formats of “scholarly articles” may deal a blow to junk science. I’ve seen English teachers point to the essay format, presence of citations, presence in journals etc. as how you tell a written work has any merit. In practice this has meant that anyone wanting to publish junk science has an excellent set of instructions on how to make it look genuine. Hell, all you’ve got to do is cite a source that doesn’t exist and you’ve created truth from whole cloth, like that “you swallow 8 spiders in your sleep” thing.
Finally, whether the problem lies in the bureaucracy that creates curricula or individual teachers, I’m in favor of forcing their hands by eliminating the long-form essay as a thing they can reasonably expect students to do on a “here’s this semester’s busywork, undergrad freshman” basis.
I had the same experience, but I recently helped my sister with a homework essay and she had a full page with the exact requirements and how they were graded.
90% of the points were for content, the types of arguments, proper structure and such. Only 10% were for spelling and punctuation.
Meaning she could hand in a complete mess, but as long as her argument was solid and she divided the introduction, arguments and conclusion into paragraphs, she’d still get a 9/10. No grumpy teachers docking half her grade for a few commas. She gets similar detailed instructions for every subject where I used to struggle with vague assignments like “give a good presentation”. It was so bad sometimes, the teacher let the class grade each other.
(Note we aren’t American, not even English.)
Btw, I’d suggest to install deepseek (or any other model) locally so that you don’t give your data for free to others (also for security reasons).
Take advantage that it is a free/open software and somewhat easy to install.
Pretty much how I use it. Unimportant waste of time tasks like forms from HR and mandatory “anonymous” surveys. Refuse to do it until told directly and then get AI to write the most inoffensive and meaningless corporate bullshit.
Of course not having to do the task at all would be a more efficient use of my time but we get ignored when we say these forms are pointless. Not heard any one day anything positive about them in over a year.
In addition to niche political audiences, Lemmy is full of tech professionals who have probably integrated AI into their daily workflow in some meaningful ways.
Name one use.
Converting technician to HR
I just got a high priority request to write a couple of VBA macros to fetch data from a database then use it to make a bunch of API queries. I know VBA about as well as I know Chinese or Icelandic. I figured out the query and told Chat GPT to use it in a macro. It wrote all the VBA code. I went through a few rounds of “fix this bug, add this feature” and now my client is happy and I didn’t have to think much about VBA. I knew what and how to ask it for what I wanted and it saved me days of searching google and reading about VBA. That’s high value to me because I don’t care about VBA and don’t really want to know how to use it.
So use it on things no one cares about, got it.
I mean, its great finding me sources of information.
Could google do it? Not as good as it used too or as good as ai, but yes.
I also use it to format my brain storms.
Or where it’s located or what the name of the function i need.
Or if i want info on items i am looking to buy, like what the benefit of waxing my bike chain is over oils. That sort of thing
Ai is absolutely amazing at finding you misinformation, no doubt about that.
You are needlessly combative.
if i have reason to doubt it, and that depends on how i feel the importance on the data i am working with, it gives me the source of its information. So i can verify it. Google is even worse at providing misinformation because it’s just a hose of information with a bunch of ads hidden amongst it, and people bidding for elevated results, and spam.
No matter what tool you use to harness the internet, it’s up to the user to parse that info.
And a lot of that spam is now written by ChatGPT.
True but irrelevant.
People hate new things, they get used to them when they become actually useful and forget what was the reason in the first place repeat ad nauseam
It’s called astroturfing.