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A special thank you to the useful idiots in the tech world who spent the last decade vilifying those of us who spoke out against Big Tech while providing them with social capital and legitimacy, oftentimes benefitting financially from the transaction.
We couldn’t have made it here without you.
@aral And there are so many useful idiots. Lots of them even nominally antifascist. But even now they keep simping for companies doing DRM and shit and spitting out condescending takes on critics.
@dalias @aral #edtech has been captured since the early days of "free" Google and Apple's dominance of schools. The language used by teachers and administrators is telling, tech coaches are see as 'evangelists' for products and services. It's mostly about how to use a product or tool and rarely about what is being produced. And every few years a new saviour arrives. Ten years ago every child who didn't learn to code was going to be left behind. Now it's AI.
@fredb @aral Basic idea is to take a few pages from a book they're reading, break up into groups, and tabulate the words that appear, then what words follow them, and do a Markov bot on paper with dice, no computers needed so nothing is hidden. The details I need to work out are balancing the order of the chain with what's practical for size to work with and how decent the output looks for candidate inputs.
@dalias @aral Great stuff. Like all tech, there are some life changing applications, but a lot of the time it boils down to 'what makes things easier for me to get through the day?' Which of course just kicks the problem down the calendar... I suppose you can use Chat GPT to do your goal-setting and self-reflection docs though :)
@fredb @aral I think you kinda missed my point. The goal is to see that the whole process is about making random sentences that look vaguely (LLMs more convincingly) like something you'd expect a human could have written, but that have no meaning behind them. Only reason I don't intend to promote it with "AI is a scam" snark is that I want it to be something teachers eager to have students learn about "AI" might be attracted to and where the moral is something you discover yourself rather than being preached to.
@dalias @aral I'd be curious to see if the teachers actually care that LLM outputs are statistical in nature, to my mind they're more concerned if it sounds about right. A lot of what we have to/tend to write day to day is pretty vacuous and template based. Success in standardised assessment systems is driven by the need for answers that fall within a certain set of parameters. I wish teachers were more conscious of the politics and the ethics of the use of these tools.