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Highly recommend the Neal Stephenson book The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, for an interesting exploration of a custom AI tutor for each s

Highly recommend the Neal Stephenson book The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, for an interesting exploration of a custom AI tutor for each student. In that book, students have a "magic book" that teaches them lessons in a story form while encouraging certain life paths. It's pretty fascinating to consider the implications and whether that's something we'll want, bc it may soon be possible.

turtleyacht 4y ago
Ractors for hire! Once AI can generate videos, we just need pervasive surveillance capability to insert context-aware content into the stories. The Primer was able to identify the protagonist's family member and pet toys in its personalized myth. I wonder which TTRPG sourcebook will have the first credit to ChatGPT in DriveThruRPG :) Procedurally-generated worlds plus conversational NPCs!
- hesdeadjim 4y ago
  Unfortunately the guard rails of the current systems prevent, in my opinion, interesting antagonists in fiction or games. I’ve experimented with some writing and when you can convince ChatGPT to give you some examples of negative behavior it will attempt to bring things back to a wholesome version. GPT-4 having more effective guard rails makes this problem worse.
  - turtleyacht 4y ago
    Thank-you, that is interesting. I wonder if ChatGPT has been trained on Dramatica. If not, if we teach it that first in a prompt. The idea of the Storymind is to present a model of a "single brain solving a problem" as a structure of story. So we wrap conflict in this meta-model as "narrative interactions" among a set of quads, without mentioning antagonist or resistance. Instead, somehow we ask ChatGPT to pose as philosophers in a dialog, stressing there is no "physical" action taking place.
marsven_422 4y ago
[dead]
wesleychen 4y ago
Khan Academy's integration of GPT-4 already steers students towards particular modes of thought. According to the article, they want "to get students thinking deeply about the content that they’re learning" and in the examples, Khanmigo prompts students to recall information from the lesson rather than directly explaining how to solve the problem. I think what Khan Academy has done here is desirable, but just as Stephenson's Primer enforces its creator's values through AI tutoring, Khanmigo is enforcing Khan Academy's values. It's easy to imagine how someone with more authoritarian values could use this same technology (e.g. to teach students to follow instructions without doubt) to indoctrinate students with scale.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  Interesting. Should they drop support for Chinese?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    If openAI can do it, so can other companies in time. At best they would cause competitive systems faster and likely with fewer safeguards by hard blocking languages or users.
- hrn_34 4y ago
  More authoritarian values? Isn't this what's happening now from the perspective of foreign countries? The USA enforcing values foreign to these countries.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  > Khanmigo is enforcing Khan Academy's values Every teacher does that, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.
  - tclancy 4y ago
    But individual teachers don't scale to planet-size. Or at least they didn't used to.
ortusdux 4y ago
See also: the Mind Game from Ender's Game https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Mind_Game https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Mind_Game
LegitShady 4y ago
For younger readers Monica Hughes' classic "Devil on my back" is more explicitly about a society where those who can interface with the web via computers installed into them become higher caste and those who cannot become lower caste, resulting in a revolution. Definitely aimed at a younger audience than Stephenson.
vsareto 4y ago
>It's pretty fascinating to consider the implications and whether that's something we'll want, bc it may soon be possible. I wouldn't be surprised if it told people to take some path of least resistance to $10+ million so you don't have to work to survive, then you can mostly do whatever you want.
basch 4y ago
(I havent read The Diamond Age) The eventuality I see is everybody talking to each other through LLM's, and the world ending up in some kind of tower of babel situation. You wear an AR/MR headset, and all conversation is dual translated, with some kind of bytecode intermediary. Each persons language evolves to be incompatible with anyone else's, and only your LLM can understand you. The power goes out, and nobody can talk to anybody.
falcor84 4y ago
Having heard many recommendations, I tried reading that book more than once, but have real issues with Stephenson's writing style there. Could you please recommend an overview of the qualities of the AI tutor that I could go over instead?

turtleyacht 4y ago

Ractors for hire! Once AI can generate videos, we just need pervasive surveillance capability to insert context-aware content into the stories. The Primer was able to identify the protagonist's family member and pet toys in its personalized myth. I wonder which TTRPG sourcebook will have the first credit to ChatGPT in DriveThruRPG :) Procedurally-generated worlds plus conversational NPCs!

hesdeadjim 4y ago
Unfortunately the guard rails of the current systems prevent, in my opinion, interesting antagonists in fiction or games. I’ve experimented with some writing and when you can convince ChatGPT to give you some examples of negative behavior it will attempt to bring things back to a wholesome version. GPT-4 having more effective guard rails makes this problem worse.
- turtleyacht 4y ago
  Thank-you, that is interesting. I wonder if ChatGPT has been trained on Dramatica. If not, if we teach it that first in a prompt. The idea of the Storymind is to present a model of a "single brain solving a problem" as a structure of story. So we wrap conflict in this meta-model as "narrative interactions" among a set of quads, without mentioning antagonist or resistance. Instead, somehow we ask ChatGPT to pose as philosophers in a dialog, stressing there is no "physical" action taking place.

marsven_422 4y ago

[dead]

wesleychen 4y ago

Khan Academy's integration of GPT-4 already steers students towards particular modes of thought. According to the article, they want "to get students thinking deeply about the content that they’re learning" and in the examples, Khanmigo prompts students to recall information from the lesson rather than directly explaining how to solve the problem. I think what Khan Academy has done here is desirable, but just as Stephenson's Primer enforces its creator's values through AI tutoring, Khanmigo is enforcing Khan Academy's values. It's easy to imagine how someone with more authoritarian values could use this same technology (e.g. to teach students to follow instructions without doubt) to indoctrinate students with scale.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Interesting. Should they drop support for Chinese?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  If openAI can do it, so can other companies in time. At best they would cause competitive systems faster and likely with fewer safeguards by hard blocking languages or users.
hrn_34 4y ago
More authoritarian values? Isn't this what's happening now from the perspective of foreign countries? The USA enforcing values foreign to these countries.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
> Khanmigo is enforcing Khan Academy's values Every teacher does that, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not.
- tclancy 4y ago
  But individual teachers don't scale to planet-size. Or at least they didn't used to.

ortusdux 4y ago

See also: the Mind Game from Ender's Game https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Mind_Game https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Mind_Game

LegitShady 4y ago

For younger readers Monica Hughes' classic "Devil on my back" is more explicitly about a society where those who can interface with the web via computers installed into them become higher caste and those who cannot become lower caste, resulting in a revolution. Definitely aimed at a younger audience than Stephenson.

vsareto 4y ago

>It's pretty fascinating to consider the implications and whether that's something we'll want, bc it may soon be possible. I wouldn't be surprised if it told people to take some path of least resistance to $10+ million so you don't have to work to survive, then you can mostly do whatever you want.

basch 4y ago

(I havent read The Diamond Age) The eventuality I see is everybody talking to each other through LLM's, and the world ending up in some kind of tower of babel situation. You wear an AR/MR headset, and all conversation is dual translated, with some kind of bytecode intermediary. Each persons language evolves to be incompatible with anyone else's, and only your LLM can understand you. The power goes out, and nobody can talk to anybody.

falcor84 4y ago

Having heard many recommendations, I tried reading that book more than once, but have real issues with Stephenson's writing style there. Could you please recommend an overview of the qualities of the AI tutor that I could go over instead?