Great piece from @zey.bsky.social on what generative AI really is and why it's wholly overblown in the media and by the people selling it (gift link)
samuel mehr
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Sure this should be public docs.google.com/document/d/1...
it'll be really interesting to see if the effects hold up to scrutiny in peer review (this is the first author [Chen's] job market paper, unpublished afaik) paper is public at fion.ac/jellyfish.pdf and on a quick read it sure looks solid !!
Recent commentary
after some in-depth discussions with my lab and also drawing on conversations on here, we've edited our new policy on AI usage in my lab feel free to adapt or re-use with attribution, or to reply to tell me how awful this policy is lol
this working paper from Harvard PhD students Fiona Chen and James Stratton is making the rounds, perhaps because it confirms many people's suspicions about the tradeoffs in vibe coding: LLMs mean lots more code written, but also lots more problems created, and relatively little productivity benefit
today I hired a graphic designer to do some scientific illustrations, and — guess what! — that's exactly how easy it is to not use generative AI to replace human artistry
certain social psychologists: we used LLMs to test simulated participants in our research study, so that we can make even more discoveries about the human mind the rest of the field:
my university's Concur subscription now includes an AI-assisted tool where you upload receipts and it populates the expense report on the one hand, this is less busywork than it was before; on the other, what could go wrong???
there are many complex ethical and practical reasons for you to forbid students from using AI for scientific writing, and to not use it yourself for scientific writing. the most compelling one is simpler: the text an LLM generates or 'polishes' reads like shit
<doing homework> 8yo: dada what is gemini Me: it's an AI thing that can do stuff in your slides if you want 8yo: why would I want it to do things to my presentation Me, straight-faced, stifling my pure joy at his comment: you mean because that's your work and nobody else's? 8yo: yeah? obviously
seems like the LLM era has ushered in a change to the canon academic saying 'you should be writing' - now it's more like 'YOU should be writing'
"I'm not sure how this was made but it looks kinda AI-generated, which may hurt you with some reviewers (whether or not it was AI-generated)" is a real comment I just made on a grant proposal
<school drop-off, on dress as a book character day> 8yo dressed as Harry Potter: you know there's a new Harry Potter show 8yo dressed as Homer Simpson: yeah and it's on HBO and they made it with AI!! so it's TOTALLY CRAP
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