So
yesterday a colleague in another department asked her students to
explain specific ways they use AI in their classes. Do they ask an AI to
help them come up with ideas for papers, summarize readings, or find
sources for research projects? The first kid to raise his hand said, "I
cheat." Then he explained, in detail, how he cheats. Brazen but not
surprising. At least he was honest, I guess, if that's what counts as
honesty these days.
Now
I'm dealing with AI-generated blog comments. It's nice to find in my
inbox a comment full of fulsome praise for my prose, except when it
includes an embedded link to a sketchy website shilling certain goods
and services. And why does the comment sound like it was written by a
particularly sycophantic robot? I like praise as much as the next
blogger, but I'm not interested in robotic sycophancy!
Of
course this makes me question other comments as well. I have moderation
turned on for posts more than a week old, but couldn't AI comments
sneak into more recent posts without my awareness? I've long suspected
that many of the thousands of purported visitors to my blog are bots,
but how often do they fool me into believing they're real people? Maybe
I'm paranoid, but in the current environment it's a well-deserved
paranoid.
My
paranoia went a little too far yesterday when I convinced myself that
the weather was targeting me personally. I had to walk down the hill to
pick up a tray of sandwiches and then walk back up the hill again to
deliver them to a meeting, but the sky got dark just before I stepped out the door and the rain poured down throughout the process
of fetching sandwiches. Then within minutes after I'd stepped back
inside, the sky cleared and the sun came out. Good thing I had a
(borrowed) umbrella! And good thing my bum knee didn't fail me on the
slippery steps! But if we must endure a 20-minute downpour, why does it
have to happen just when I can't avoid being outside?
The weather may hate me, but the AI bots love me. Honestly, it's nice to be appreciated by someone, although I'm not sure what really counts as honesty these days.
4 comments:
I'm a real people! Honest!
Also I appreciate you!
I know you are a person and I appreciate you too! Are you getting flooded by AI and bots on your blog or is it just me?
I am a real person too even if I am anonymous :) and only rarely comment. I am fairly well siloed in my job (the only AI my students normally use is to help them to write computer programs - and in many ways that is just using a better search engine than google to find subroutines people already have written - which is sort of OK) - but I got my first experience of almost-definitely-just-AI, when someone applying for a job submitted a cover letter that said that they had done xx and yy (where xx and yy were *exactly* as described in the job advert...) while, strangely, when looking at their CV - there seemed to be nothing like that kind of experience there... what do these kids think we are? stoopid?? anyway, "Paranoia is only crazy if you're wrong about the odds" (Outpassage, by J and C Morris - don't remember anything about the book apart from that phrase), don't let the AI bots stop you writing - Cathy.
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