ai – News For Wombats

Doctor gpt

At Daily Nous, there’s discussion of Rebecca Lowe’s post about how great it is to talk philosophy with the latest version of Chat GPT.

There’s pushback in the comments. Others reply that the critics haven’t used the latest version (which is only available behind a paywall). Discussion of LLMs will always allow this: Complaints about their shortcomings are answered by pointing to the next version that’s supposed to resolve all the issues.

Lowe and other commenters reveal that lots of philosophers are using LLMs in the regular day-to-day of their research. I’m still trying to figure out what I think about that. For now, let’s deflect Lowe’s ridiculous offhand claim that “Gpt could easily get a PhD on any philosophical topic.” I say ridiculous for a few reasons—

Sorry, not sorry

I’m involved in an interdisciplinary collaboration about chatbot apologies. One product of that, from the philosophers’ side, is a paper that I’ve cowritten with my colleagues Alessandra Buccella and Jason D’Cruz.

link: Chatbot Apologies: Beyond Bullshit

It’s still a work in progress, so any feedback is welcome.

It’s still rapacious capitalism

From Cory Doctorow:

The fact that AI can’t do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can’t do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market.

I’m not sure that it’s the central fact of contemporary labor, what with the resurgence of fascism, the retheming of jobs as gigs, and the casual evasion of hard-fought safeguards. But, as I’ve noted before, it is a thing.

Calling a foul on referees

The tidal wave of LLM use in academic writing and peer review cannot be stopped.

— James Zou in Nature

Short reply: F*ck.

Longer reply: I mean, really? Are scholars really using chatbots to write referee reports? There aren’t enough *s in f*ck to capture how utterly f*cked that is.

Labour-squandering technology

Australian regulators sponsored a test using generative AI to summarize documents. The soft-spoken conclusion was that “AI outputs could potentially create more work… due to the need to fact check outputs, or because the original source material actually presented information better.”

Coverage of the study leads with the headline: AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information

Parrot progress

Emily Bender famously coined the phrase stochastic parrot to describe text-only chatbots. The trend towards parrots continutes: Ars Technica has a clip of a ChatGPT-4o test run where the bot, which has a canned voice it is supposed to use, replies in the user’s own voice.

OpenAI promises that the actual release version totally doesn’t do this.¹

AI problem solving, a snapshot

I ask Copilot: “A man and a goat are on one side of the river. They have a boat. How can they go across?”

It replies: “The man takes the goat across the river first, leaving the goat on the other side. Then he returns alone to get the boat and brings it back to the original side. Finally, he takes the goat across the river again. 🚣‍♂️🐐”

Finishing with relevant emoji is very much on-brand for Copilot. In ability to find relevant emoji, it is a match for any human.

On writing and thinking

My forthcoming paper On trusting chatbots is centrally about the challenge of believing claims that appear in LLM output. I am sceptical about the prospects of AI-generated summaries of facts, but I also throw a bit of shade on the suggestion that AI should be used for brainstorming and conjuring up early drafts. Sifting through bullshit is not like editing in the usual sense, I suggest.

Nevertheless, I know people who advocate using chatbots for early drafts of formulaic things like work e-mails and formal proposals. That’s fine, I suppose, but only for the sorts of things where one might just as well find some boilerplate example on-line and use that as a starting place. For anything more original, there’s a real danger in letting a chatbot guide early writing.

Chatbots!

My paper On trusting chatbots— a paper on trusting chatbots— has been accepted at Episteme.

ScabGPT

Via Daily Beast and Daily Nous: The administration at Boston University has made a number of tone-deaf suggestions for how faculty can juggle students while their graduate student TAs are on strike. Among these: “Engage generative AI tools to give feedback or facilitate ‘discussion’ on readings or assignments.”

Last year, I wrote that “there will be people who lose their jobs because of generative algorithms. This won’t be because they can be replaced, but instead because of rapacious capitalism. To put it in plainer terms, because their management is a bunch of dicks.”

Dots. Connected.