GPT/LLM links

Ethan Mollick on misunderstanding of LLMs; David Deming on being forced to create better assignments; Joanne Jacobs on using ChatGPT to write a high school essay; Sam Hammond projects the future

Ethan Mollick is tired of people who can’t see beyond using large language models as anything other than a tool for looking up stuff. He writes,

Thesauruses are old, they have been around longer than printed books - the first versions are over two millennia old - and have become staples of grammar checkers and online dictionaries. As a result, a thesaurus is a comfortable analog. They do a narrow task of suggesting words, and they leave humans in charge of everything else. You could use an AI as a thesaurus, but it isn’t one, since its training goes far beyond finding similar words. Instead, you can take the concept much further. Forget synonyms of words, find synonyms for paragraphs.

I asked GPT-4 to Give me 20 vastly different variations on this [the paragraph above]. Make them as different as possible in style. label each style. Some of the more exciting examples of what it came up with:

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Marketing Hype

Unlock the POWER of words with a thesaurus! Your GO-TO tool since before Gutenberg! Level UP your grammar game with this time-tested CLASSIC. Why settle for AI when you could have the ORIGINAL wordsmith's wonder?

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Think of an LLM as a friend to have fun with, not as a Gofer. Mollick writes,

Employees at companies don’t need another tool to search their corporate intranets for data, they need a way of skipping the most boring parts of their job while make their remaining work more productive and engaging. Students don’t need an improved version of Grammarly, they need tutors and advisors that will boost their learning. To do this, we need to experiment with weirder uses of AI tools, and we need to do that while paying close attention to the ethical concerns and technical limitations of AI. Careful experimentation is the key to success.

David Deming writes,

Next time I teach this course, I might ask students to make short presentations to their peers on both sides of a controversial issue and grade them on their ability to be convincing from both directions. Or I might ask them to work in groups on a semester-long project that seeks to persuade a policymaker of the importance of a particular issue through careful use of research evidence.

…You get way more feedback by presenting your work to an audience or engaging with peers on longer-term projects. Also, the feedback is instant rather than coming several days after you’ve turned in your assignment.

Feedback aids learning by pointing out gaps in understanding.

I used to say that teaching = feedback.

Joanne Jacobs writes,

I think this is like arguing that children don't need to learn how to walk because they can travel by motorized wheelchairs or flying saucers. Learning how to argue -- make a claim, support it with evidence -- is an important skill, and not just for college. Writing clearly requires thinking clearly. Texting "CU at cafeteria" is not enough.

She is arguing against having students write down a few thoughts and let ChatGPT turn it into an essay.

Actually, I think this is not such a bad idea. Schools aren’t teaching students how to write in cursive any more. Is that such a loss?

I would rather have ChatGPT show a student what a good argument looks like than have some ed school graduate teach them to say, “As a black woman, I …”

Sam Hammond writes,

There are now individuals as powerful as today’s large corporation, and large corporations as powerful as today’s nation-states. Many city governments thus abandon their historic charters and reincorporate as Singapore-esque company towns. The corporate structure provides a means for cities to pool investors’ capital and finance public goods through land rents, the most important of which is security. AVs entering city limits must pass through checkpoints that automatically scan for contraband and log their passenger’s identity; waste water is continuously monitored for genetically engineered pathogens; and EM pulse guns scan the airspace for unauthorized drone swarms. Unless you’re rich enough to afford private security, few venture beyond city limits except for travel between secure zones. The agglomeration externalities to AI are simply too great, as rural holdouts run the risk of being ransacked by roving militias or the agents of the synthetic drug cartels.

He sounds like a cross between Ray Kurzweil in The Age of Spiritual Machines and Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash.

I think that one of the hardest things to predict about technology is the extent to which it is a centralizing force or a decentralizing force. I feel burned on this topic, because as of the late 1990s I was totally convinced that the Web would be a decentralizing force, and now that seems naive.

You might find this essay of mine from 23 years ago amusing. It shows how hard it can be to gauge the state of technology.

substacks referenced above:

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AI and Leviathan: Part III

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Embracing weirdness: What it means to use AI as a (writing) tool