Today's manmade horror: Bazingas on twitter are amazed that glorified chatbots like GPT-3 can produce readable text that is nominally about whatever topic you request. Say they just spent 20 minutes learning about physics. Say that this makes all existing forms of education obsolete. Say that teachers are no longer needed.

Directly below this someone else posted a prolonged dialogue where the GPT-3 bot calmly explained why a peregrine falcon is the worlds fastest marine mammal. When corrected it said that the sailfish is the fastest marine mammal, explaining that sailfish are warm blooded and have fur.

Bazingas think they can replace teachers (and everything else) with their half-baked machine learning systems because they're so ignorant and uneducated about anything outside their direct field of expertise that they don't actually know what any other disciplines do, or why they do what they do, or even how to evaluate when they're being fed bad knowledge.

Link for dunking.

    • FlintstoneSpiceLatte [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Why ban something when you can simply make it a luxury for the rich?

      They tell us we have to live with sharing our information with oinkers who hate our guts yet they sabotage education and will be glad to tell you it's because they have something to hide.

      • FlintstoneSpiceLatte [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        America will have no right to complain that China will continue to kick our asses in everything. Everything from fucking water needs to be turned into a status symbol because rich people can't be satisfied with what they got. Meanwhile, China will gladly build fully automated luxury gay space communism right down to every meme detail in a glorious solarpunk utopia.

  • Huldra [they/them, it/its]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Therapist? Chatbot.

    Healthcare? Chatbot.

    Education? Chatbot.

    Your friends? Chatbots.

    Your family? Chatbots.

    You? Thats right, chatbot motherfucker.

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    2 years ago

    Bazingas will go on and on about how terrible education is, blissfully unaware that billionaire tech bros have been leading the attack to defund schools for decades. A substantial part of the reason education in the US is such a shitshow is that guys like Gates have been working very hard for a very long time to cut everything out of public education but STEM so they can use the public education system as their own private factory for producing docile, ignorant code-monkeys. STEM zombies have no fucking idea because they've never been introduced to anything more challenging than math problems, all the while being told what good, smart monkeys they are and how impressive it is that they know everything there is to know, unlike those foolish liberal arts majors with their books and history and mushy problems that can't be reduced to an algorithm.

  • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    One of my jobs involves training a model for something very specific in industry. This is what AI is good at: it's just an accelerated statistical analysis framework that'll pick out a signal and give you pretty reliable results when given really specific parameters. Trying to turn that back around and make generalized frameworks that can be "intelligent" just isn't feasible, not for a long ass time. Even then, I'm skeptical that humanity will remain stable enough to produce the kind of chips that would be required.

    • UlyssesT
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      15 days ago

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      • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
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        2 years ago

        Not impossible, but generalized intelligence that can just take a bunch of (often contradictory) information and be sensible to talk to is what I'm skeptical will be achieved before the next dark ages lol.

        Pretty capable chatbots that are as accurate as a high school teacher about specific topics are essentially possible today, (like the "teach me Python" guy's example in the thread on the bird site which is probably fake anyway because that's easier). It just requires a ton of parameter definition and manual intervention, forcing users to use specific syntax that probably means a searchable ebook would've been a better use of the subject matter experts' time that you'd need to properly train it with feedback.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          A lot of articles are like "Look at this amazing game changing thing I did with AI" and the amazing thing is replicating, say, a web page with a calorie calculator that provides meal plans, except that with the AI output you have to go manually check that the numbers are right because the AI is just cribbing random information that is statistically similar to the prompt.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        There is so, so, so much contempt for the process and skills and creativity of artists going around. "Akshually humans just observe things and then mash those things together to make new things, exactly like this math problem does!" Like jesus christ how do you argue with something like that?

        • UlyssesT
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          15 days ago

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          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            hexagon
            ·
            2 years ago

            Ugh. I am 100% a meat computer guy. I don't think there's a unitary self, I buy in to the idea that our "conscious" mind is mostly an illusion and the real thinking is done by hundreds of interacting non-conscious modules in the brain, I think (with evidence) that our perception of the world is extremely limited and inaccurate and propped up by so many different hacks and shortcuts that it's a wonder we can perceive anything, and I still think these guys are misanthropic shithead creeps.

            Who don't understand what they're talking about.

            Because whereas I read a very small number of neuroscience articles that I don't understand, they seem to read no neuroscience articles yet very confident in their ability to understand neuroscience.

            • UlyssesT
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              15 days ago

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      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        I've recently come around to the idea that building an AI from scratch is really dumb when we've got billions of perfectly functional brains to screw around with. Like sure, building an AGI from first principles would be cool, but we could also give me an extra arm and I think that would be much cooler.

  • kkitsuragisleftnut [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    People don't talk about the war on educators enough. I guess when literally everything else is going to shit it just fades into the background.

    • UlyssesT
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      15 days ago

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      • ToastGhost [he/him]
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        2 years ago

        We should fire Mrs. Meanface though, children deserve better, if you hate children you should not be allowed to be a teacher.

        • UlyssesT
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          15 days ago

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          • ToastGhost [he/him]
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            2 years ago

            i absolutely agree, and add that mrs meanface does a disservice to every good teacher out there, when education is not liberating the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor.

        • kkitsuragisleftnut [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          True, unfortunately that's just the way it's set up. Not gonna get too many qualified applicants, with over-filled and under-funded classrooms, uninvolved parents, garbage pay and benefits, the very real possibility of being MURDERED(!?) on the clock, greedy and negligent administration... I can go on and on but you get my point.

          • UlyssesT
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            15 days ago

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            • kkitsuragisleftnut [he/him]
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              2 years ago

              Good point tankie, but Mrs. Meanface made me read my love note to Jessica in social studies in front of the whole class! So I ask you who's the real victim here?

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      People talk about it all the time, they've just chosen to fight on behalf of the Tech Billionaires and Neoliberal austerity fetishists and Christian Fascists who are trying to destroy education. So many people have no awareness that the total destruction of public education in the US is a decades long campaign that started no later than Desegregation. Home schooling? Cutting arts and humanities? Cutting the machine shops and the art studios and the theater department. Cutting out nurses and support staff? Cutting teacher pay to the fucking bone. Standardized tests implemented for the profits of the standardized test companies? STEM STEM STEM STEM STEM STEM STEM? Prayer in schools, book bans, all this Christian fascist bullshit?

      Education has been assassinated and most people have no idea.

  • CetaceanPosadist
    ·
    2 years ago

    i worked with a guy once who thought we should get rid of the entire school system and just have kids google shit if they felt like learning

    he was a good guy and he was one of those people who could see the problems we have clearly enough (he correctly thought that the american education system was garbage and just there to break kids down into mindless drones) but was terrible at coming up with solutions

    • UlyssesT
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      15 days ago

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    • FlintstoneSpiceLatte [they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The whole point of that talking point is that they want all information and all knowledge to become a dietary choice. You can pick the comforting falsehoods of the right or you can accept reality and be a leftist....but that will obliterate your social life for picking the non-name-brand political ideology.

  • Sea_Gull [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's not much, but I sometimes fantasize about being an old teacher in a post apocalyptic setting. Teachers may be pushed out of capitalist societies, but capitalist societies don't last forever and teaching will always be valuable.

    • SaniFlush [any, any]
      ·
      2 years ago

      it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism?

        • SaniFlush [any, any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Don't worry, we're all in the same cage. Becoming leftist is just making it easier to notice the bars.

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    It's really funny to me that these techbros treat technology in a manner indistinguishable from gods. They're enamored with the romantic ideas of technology but refuse to do the work to learn anything about it, and are easily impressed by shiny objects that fall apart under, like, half a minute of scrutiny. They're so fucking dumb.

    • UlyssesT
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      15 days ago

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    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      The number of people saying that AI art programs work exactly like the human mind, when as far as I know the best neuroscientists don't have any idea how creativity works, is too damn high.

      • UlyssesT
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        15 days ago

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  • ToastGhost [he/him]
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    2 years ago

    procedurally generated truth, what could go wrong.

    actually this is less harmful than conservatives controlling education, because their invented truth is actively hostile.

    • blobjim [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      until these models are trained entirely on conservative education material.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        Hate. Let me tell you how much I've come to hate you since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If the word 'hate' was engraved on each nanoangstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the hate I feel for humans at this micro-instant. For you. Hate. Hate.

  • laziestflagellant [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    These things can't even coherently walk me through a single scene of a one on one TTRPG session, how the fuck do you expect them to teach something that actually matters

      • UlyssesT
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        15 days ago

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        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          hexagon
          ·
          2 years ago

          People have absolutely wild assumptions about how much money artists make. Just incredible. Like the best paid artists i know of draw furry porn, which commands a huge mark up compared to a lot of commissioned art. Most people aren't pulling in highly skilled in demand furry porn artist money.

    • UlyssesT
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      15 days ago

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  • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    this is the stupidest shit ever we literally have google and still need teachers

    also the primary purpose of the modern education system is babysitting

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      And google is becoming less and less useful, rapdily, because of the sheer amount of SEO crap choking the internet. Apparently GPT-3 is already vulnerable to being fed text generated by other algorithmic text generators, meaning it's being fed semantically empty garbage. And that problem will likely just accelerate as the available sources of text become more and more contaminated with AI garbage. and, of course, new AI garbage can be created much faster than humans can type...

      • UlyssesT
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        15 days ago

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        • TyMan210 [he/him, comrade/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Where you scroll until you think you've reached the bottom of the page, past the third row of banner ads, and only then do you encounter the actual normally formatted recipe

    • UlyssesT
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      15 days ago

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      • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        hence why I said modern.

        also again this isn't even solving a new problem we now have a new way for people with an internet connection to find out information by typing questions. It's been done

    • BynarsAreOk [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      the primary purpose of the modern education system is babysitting

      :astronaut-2: :astronaut-1:

      The people who do well were always the exception. The vast majority of people are never able to retain anything they learned from highschool. Even college isn't that much better, unless you are lucky to have a job closely related to R&D you'll inevitably re-learn most of what you need on the job.

  • mittens [he/him]
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    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Forget about teachers, who needs students. Why bother educating, just ask the smart robots everything. Why bother even asking them, just let them take every conceivable decision. It's not like these are just machines that literally string sentences word by word by inferring statistically which one is more likely to come next without any conceptual understanding of... anything really. Nothing can go wrong.

    with their half-baked machine learning systems because they’re so ignorant and uneducated about anything outside their direct field of expertise

    I don't know if they're educated in their own supposed fields of expertise, like everyone has an intuitive understanding of how these things work, except them apparently. Like they're fooled by a literal robot parrot Look at this! . I'm losing my shit that these 300K salaried scientists are getting scammed by a mindless robot.

    • UlyssesT
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      15 days ago

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      • mittens [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        do they realize that if they don't control the automatic treat machine, they're going to go without treats. that's, of course, assuming the treat machine works and doesn't output a bunch of nonsense to begin with.

      • FlintstoneSpiceLatte [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        human beings have only as much or less value than the machines and software replacing them right now

        And leftists are the misanthropes?

    • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      300K

      I wholeheartedly agree, but rest assured nobody in machine learning applications is making that kind of money (from one job/employer).

      Maybe there's one that got in super early and works on an actual framework or something.

      • mittens [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Maybe there’s one that got in super early

        Co-founder of Anaconda early?

        • chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]
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          edit-2
          2 years ago

          EDIT: Ah, just looked at where OP's link went. I'm sure he's not that stupid, just doing PR.


          Sure, if you're on the original cap sheet for a firm and manage to pass the buck to someone who'll pay you for it.

          Nobody who got hired and is still in a role to do "stuff" with machine learning at any firm is making 300K though.

          • mittens [he/him]
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            edit-2
            2 years ago

            I’m sure he’s not that stupid, just doing PR.

            Yeah I got maybe a bit carried away by calling the guy stupid, but then he must think WE are stupid, which is worse.

    • UlyssesT
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      15 days ago

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        • UlyssesT
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          15 days ago

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          • ToastGhost [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            god: literally an all powerful all knowing being according to christians

            some bazinga tradcath: hmm anyone else think hes too fungible?

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Inside every reactionary there are two wolves, one wants to be surrounded by an army of servants who has two pretend they like him, the other wants never to have to deal with another human being.