Something I would find useful would be an undergrad-friendly history of AI, from perceptron to transformer, explaining the rise of different ideas, the “AI winter,” etc. I know of encyclopedia articles that don’t quite do that and books that tell the story at length, but I need a v concise version.
Reflecting on a conversation with my students about AI in teaching. The promise of AI is infinite productivity, at infinite speed. But the implicit promise of teaching is that an expert will give you some of their very *finite* time. You are important enough that your instructor will incur a loss.
A friend mentioned that his teen daughter and her friends use “AI” as a kind of pejorative: “Seems AI” or “AI vibes.” I realized the 13yo uses it similarly: AI is for elderly FB users charmed by suspiciously precocious toddlers and unlikely animal friends.
I Saw It With My Own Eyes: I’m not trying to spy, but a college student in front of me is writing an essay about Carracci’s Assumption of the Virgin: just painstaking typing, looking at the painting, looking at articles. No ChatGPT, no Gemini, no nothing. I might actually hug them.
I actually pay to use a search engine that lets me turn off AI overviews and penalizes AI-likely search results because I find Google AI overviews absolutely infuriating.
“…I see, so you won’t use ChatGPT because you love to write?” *laughing* “Oh God no, it’s the fucking worst.”
Interesting AI-assisted sales pitch: an offer to write a Wikipedia article about me. This must be really common, but it’s the first time I’ve gotten one.
