Device should have been accompanied with a lot of examples so people are really aware how stored data could be misused. Alexa or any other similar device - their users are technically illiterate. Do you remember leaks of movie stars’ iPhone images? Multiply it by thousands… Court order, burglars, hackers - all bad actors imaginable…
For you, as producer, those situations can be a nightmare if not well described in operating conditions. And devices should not be pre-setup (don’t be “Google-evil”, as they track everything if you don’t set it up different; and it is always hidden deep in the third level menu under 2-steps verification)
> This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations. Congratulations to everyone involved. You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
As a power user, I feel weirdo when trying explain something what I take for granted. :)
Total commander/norton/midnight commander, bash, cron, portable apps, zip a file, automation of email processing, having a non-gmail address, markdown, “don’t touch mouse” editing, pdf manipulation, block editing in Sublime text (don’t mention vi/vim, Emacs :)
That's a wide spectrum. Not understanding that gmail isn't email is well into "How do you not know this?" territory. Whereas only very specific users know about Bash and Emacs. I do often have that experience of needing to climb 47 levels upward to successfully explain something to someone. Right now I'm just intrigued by the fact that I can go out into my neighbourhood and nobody will know what 90% of these things are, yet I'm probably far from the only person on this forum who recognizes and has experience with the vast majority of that list.
Well… it is happening. You can’t put spilled milk back to bottle. You can do future requirements that will try to stop this behaviour.
E.g. in the submission form could be a mandatory field “I hereby confirm that I wrote the paper personally.” In conditions there will be a note that violating this rule can lead to temporary or permanent ban of authors. In the world where research success is measured by points in WOS, this could lead to slow down the rise of LLM-generated papers.
Unironically, maybe they should be scored by LLMs? My first thought was that the reviewers could score the papers but that would lead to even more group-think.
Ideally whoever is paying the academics should just be paying attention to their work and its worth, but that would be crazy.
> This approach dismisses the cases where Ai submissions generally are better.
You’re perhaps missing the not so subtle subtext of Peter Woit’s post, and entire blog, which is:
While AI is getting better, it’s still not _good_ by the standards of most science. However it’s as good as hep-th where (according to Peter Woit) the bar is incredibly low. His thesis is part “the whole field is bad” and part “Arxiv for this subfield is full of human slop.”
I don’t have the background to engage with whether Peter Woit’s argument has merit, but it’s been consistent for 25+ years.
My comment was more an answer to the proposed gatekeeping of science as a human activity.
Yes, Ai is still not good in the grand scheme of things. But everybody actively using it has gotten concerned over the past 2 months by the leap frigging of LLMs - and surprised as they thought we had arrived at the plateau.
We will see in a year or two if humans still hold an advantage in research - currently very few do in software development, despite what they think about themselves.
The other side of the coin is: automating science as a machine activity.
Is that what we want? I agree with you that the use of language models in science is an inevitable paradigm shift, but now is the time to make collective decisions about how we're going to assimilate this increasingly super-human "intelligence" into academic practices, and the rest of daily life. Otherwise we will be the ones being assimilated by a force beyond our control.
The progress is so rapid that the only people who might have control over the process are the ones with self-interest, mainly financial, and not aligned with - in some aspects opposed to - the interests of humanity.
Its already automated. Do you think astronomers manually count stars or medical scientists manually run chemical reactions? Why is automation by ai wrong when all other automations were beneficial?
The single most valuable part of science is keeping the gates: not adding things to the corpus of scientific knowledge unless they can be properly substantiated.
LLMs are really eager to start coding (as interns are eager to start working), so the sentence “don’t implement yet” has to be used very often at the beginning of any project.
For you, as producer, those situations can be a nightmare if not well described in operating conditions. And devices should not be pre-setup (don’t be “Google-evil”, as they track everything if you don’t set it up different; and it is always hidden deep in the third level menu under 2-steps verification)
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