I’m sorry, so fucking angry. Students with sources that don’t exist. Students with sources that exist but then the quotation doesn’t exist.
I’m so fucking mad, because it’s extra work for me (that I’m sure as hell not getting compensated for), and it also entirely defeats the purpose of the fucking class (it’s writing/research, so like, engaging in a discipline and looking at what’s been written before on your topic, etc.)
Kill me please. Comrades, I’m so tired. I just want to teach writing. I want to give students a way to exercise agency in the world – to both see bad arguments and make good ones. They don’t care. I’m so tired.
BTW, I took time to look up some of these sources my student used, couldn’t find the quotes they quote, so told them the paper is an “A” if they can show me every quotation and failing otherwise. Does this seem like a fair policy (my thought is – no matter the method, fabrication of evidence is justification for failing work)?
Yeah, and the printing press allowed weirdos like Martin Luther to spread ideas faster. You’re just repeating what I said. That’s exactly what I meant by “The LLM has enabled slop to be produced at a much greater scale than before” and “it’s a question of degree”
I didn’t say or imply that!!
Yes, and the whole point of the paragraph is that I’m not talking about “truth”. I specifically said that I don’t know what to think of some platonic ideal of “truth”, scare quotes and all. The whole point of that paragraph is that I’m not talking about heady epistemology. I’m just talking about social phenomena and human behavior. That’s why I talked about “human thought”. That’s why I talked about “information”, which is a separate concept from “truth”. I was specifically avoiding talking about “truth”, but you brought it up
Yes, forgeries carry information. I talked about information and models in my first post, not truth
We should be dismantling the industrial chatbots, and redirecting all that compute towards something useful. Get that cat in the fucking bag. I feel like we basically agree on everything, you’re just seeing an epistemological argument where there is none. I was trying to avoid epistemology from the start.
Maybe TF talked about “post-truth” and I just don’t recall? But I’m pretty sure they were talking about information as well
Except it’s not the same thing. It’s different in economic function, social function, and historical context.
You can effectively own an LLM. It’s incredibly cheap all things considered. You can tell an LLM to constantly generate a stream of bullshit from here into infinity your only limit is cost of compute which is cheap.
Martin Luther did not own a printing press. Martin Luther’s success is attributable to speculative nature of publishing and his ability at being at being charismatic through the written word. Yes without the printing press Martin Luther would be an unknown weirdo that may have been rediscovered at some point. However the content itself was what was driving the economic demand for proliferation, not the printing press itself.
The printing press revolutionized the creation and distribution of media. LLMs have done no such thing, the various media we have is already cheap, easy to distribute and widely proliferated.
Slop is much more comparable to straight up forgery and propaganda factories because it exists despite market demand. Propaganda is always a cost center, and forgery is a profit center because the lie enables leverage. However these are not things that people typically want to the same degree as something like Martin Luther’s ideas.
Martin Luther actually convinced people of something. AI Slop isn’t reaching the same levels of demand as Luther. AI Slop isn’t even reaching the same historic levels of demand as Artisanal Hand Crafted Slop like Marvel Movies or NYT Op-Eds. AI Slop undercuts its own value proposition!
We were already drowning in bullshit prior to the proliferation of LLMs. Grandma believed foreigners were making no-go zones in inner cities when that bullshit was fed to her manually by unscrupulous news editors. LLMs don’t change the consumption of the information market directly. They only change the upstream circumstances that lead to consumption of slop, like poor education – which has already been failing.
Don’t get me wrong it’s a perfect storm, but putting the blame mostly on ChatGPT is tech doomerism, humans were doing this to each other in industrial quantities before we outsourced it to a machine that could be owned and operated by anyone. We’ve been ignoring and exacerbating the issues that lead to this problem for at least a decade. 1 in 5 adults was functionally illiterate in 2014. We’ve known since the 90’s that whole language approach was leading to more illiteracy and worse educational outcomes among students. We failed so long ago that we cannot even agree on what was the primary failure.
Martin Luther on the other hand is actually credited with an increase in literacy.
We’ve been destroying the institutions and mechanisms that give the general population the cognitive tools to fight back against LLM bullshit for a very long time, and the statistics on education among the general populace in the US bear that out.
Feels like we’re talking past each other.
Martin Luther convinced people of ideas. AI slop doesn’t. The printing press increased literacy at a faster rate than years prior. AI slop is decreasing literacy (in the broad sense, including things like media literacy) at a faster rate than it was decreasing before. I think we agree on those points.
I think those points are enough to make the argument that LLM chatbots are the inverse of the printing press. It’s a vibe-based assessment based on those points we agree on. This isn’t math, there’s no exact definition of (printing press)^-1 , You disagree with the vibe, but we’re pretty much in agreement on everything else
This is the cornerstone of your argument and there is no real proof of:
This is exactly where you’re making a jump that I cannot make. My argument is that I can believe in LLMs being responsible for exacerbating upstream effects, but I cannot accept that LLMs are even in the running compared to the elephant in the room: austerity
We’re arguing a well known documented effect vs a novel unstudied effect. There is more evidence that austerity is a fuzzy vibes based inverse of the printing press than there that LLMs are.