A.I. Mopologetics

[Moksha]

Thanks, Shulem. I appreciate that, ribbing and all.

It's time to polish up the ceramic mug and get back to the coffee table.

[Kishkumen]

Thanks, Shulem. I appreciate that, ribbing and all.

It's time to polish up the ceramic mug and get back to the coffee table.

I know! Dang it, I have been so busy with my first priorities of family and work. Thank you, Moksha. You are great.

[Kishkumen]

You can automate things like that with agentic A.I. tools now. Pretty crazy what's possible.

One could just as easily set up an agent to read every new Sic et Non post and formulate a relevant comment which is tuned to various degrees of agreement/disagreement, sarcasm, humor, intelligence, and even additive in terms of offering corrections or useful historical analogies to improve the post. What a time to be alive!

Indeed! I found the whole thing surprising and fascinating! I reported the account as fake, but the wisdom of the Facebook algorithm or whatever decided it was real enough for Facebook.

[Kishkumen]

I would be kind of creeped out by that. How bizarre.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m already feeling a bit burned out by A.I..

The hullabaloo over A.I. is wearing. Being a professor in the age of A.I., especially if you are not really into "tech," can be exhausting. All of the academic dishonesty that springs from people using A.I. to do their writing for them.

[drumdude]

I would be kind of creeped out by that. How bizarre.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m already feeling a bit burned out by A.I..

The hullabaloo over A.I. is wearing. Being a professor in the age of A.I., especially if you are not really into "tech," can be exhausting. All of the academic dishonesty that springs from people using A.I. to do their writing for them.

I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to see students cheat with it. Fortunately, it seems to have a distinctive voice... for now.

[Kishkumen]

I can't imagine how frustrating it must be to see students cheat with it. Fortunately, it seems to have a distinctive voice... for now.

Yeah, kinda. It is easier to notice all of the factual errors it introduces. The text sounds generally convincing, but the expertise that draws the correct conclusions from historical evidence is not there.

[Philo Sofee]

You can automate things like that with agentic A.I. tools now. Pretty crazy what's possible.

One could just as easily set up an agent to read every new Sic et Non post and formulate a relevant comment which is tuned to various degrees of agreement/disagreement, sarcasm, humor, intelligence, and even additive in terms of offering corrections or useful historical analogies to improve the post. What a time to be alive!

Just wow. Not sure about this.

[Equality]

It's possible Jared the Mormonbot was actually created by Meta itself. The company has been caught creating fake bot accounts for reasons that remain murky.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-med ... rcna186177

[Physics Guy]

Being a professor in the age of A.I., especially if you are not really into "tech," can be exhausting. All of the academic dishonesty that springs from people using A.I. to do their writing for them.

This may not be any more constructive than the Ghost Riders in the Sky parody, but I think there's a chance that chatbots will turn out to be as big a deal as the advents of writing and printing. Even though they're still far from real artificial intelligence, they may well change what it means to be an educated person.

Plato's Socrates lamented how writing was rotting the brains of the youth of his day. They were getting so used to relying on written notes that they couldn't properly listen any more, or frame a coherent speech in their heads. And I understand that before printing made books common, most of learning consisted of memorising great books in their entirety. That became worthless once anyone could just pull the book of their shelf, and soon nobody actually knew anything any more, in the way that knowing things used to mean. People only remembered isolated quotes or vague impressions of a book's content, and this must have seemed to the scholars of the handwritten age like an awful decay.

We got over those outraged reactions and learned that although some things may indeed have been lost, in spontaneous rhetorical fluency or immediate recall, the things that were lost were never really as great as they seemed. A lot of oral culture is repetitive and formulaic, and relying on it overvalues shallow intellectual feats at the expense of deeper ones. Rote memorisation of longwinded old books in full length is a terrible way to learn. From a modern perspective it's alarmingly easy to consider that ancient and medieval education actually deformed people's minds, because all that focus on glib rhetoric and memorisation carried the invisible but high opportunity cost of never thinking more deeply and critically.

Writing took away from the human brain the job of remembering what was just said, and what should be said next. Printing took away the job of remembering what had been said a long time ago. For centuries those were the main intellectual tasks, and performing them was the gold standard of intellectual ability. Now the chatbots are taking away the tasks of gathering what purports to be data, of composing fluent paragraphs, and of writing valid software code. For most of our lives, excelling at those tasks was enough to get you a well-paying job. That's gone now and it will never come back.

It's the end of the world. But I don't think it actually will be. Instead I optimistically think that future generations will look back at the time before generative A.I. as an intellectual dark age in which humans slaved at mechanical intellectual tasks and had no time for real thought.

Those poor old people, they'll think: they pored through card catalogs and Google lists—by hand! They flipped through thesauruses for alternative adjectives and worried about run-on sentences. They even fussed about spelling! It was impressive, I guess, that humans back then could actually get almost as good at those things as a modern A.I.. A few people still practice the old ways, as an art form, and it can be fun to read some artisanal prose and realise it was all made by hand. If you're into that, you should check out this author I found who writes her own texts by hand with a quill. And I've heard about this one artist who just sits there and talks about any subject you choose. Must be wild.

The task I see for us now is to figure out as quickly as possible just what it is that we are now freed to do, full-time, that before we could only do in short pauses from our mechanical tasks. We'll discover a new way of thinking. It will probably seem to us now like something frivolous, an unimportant distraction from actual mental work. In the future they'll just call it thinking.

[Moksha]

I think Mormon critics would love proving A.I. apologists wrong.