8 ms·

ChatGPT Is a Gimmick

115 points by blueridge 1y ago

eru 1y ago
Seems to be a very wordy article that complains that only a proper education teaches you to think? In any case, even contemporary LLM---as primitive as they will look like in even a few months time---are already pretty useful as assistants when eg writing software programmes. They ain't gimmicks. They are also useful as a more interactive addition to an encyclopedia. Amongst other uses. The article also conflates AI in general with LLM. It's a common enough mistake to make these days, so I won't ding the author for that. Summary of the article: contemporary LLMs aren't very useful for highfalutin liberal arts people (yet). (However they can already churn out the kind of essays and corporate writing that people do in practice.)
- frereubu 1y ago
  I think you missed the entire point of the article. They're not saying that AI cannot be useful in the way you describe. They're saying that too many people are using it as a shortcut to producing verbiage that mimics the outcomes of learning, missing out the valuable things that come from the process of learning.
  - wilg 1y ago
    Is there any evidence to suggest more people are cheating now that there is AI than before, or is everybody just flipping out because the cheaters have changed tactics?
    - eru 1y ago
      It's almost always good to ask about what evidence we have. I'd say that our prior should be that there's more cheating. My logic: Almost any good or service gets consumed more when its price drops (especially if quality also goes up). Cheating has gotten massively cheaper in terms of effort: you no longer have hire a ghostwriter for your essay, or laboriously plagiarise passages from the literature yourself.
      - wilg 1y ago
        That logic is the conventional wisdom, but I just want to know whether it's true empirically.
ddxv 1y ago
I personally feel like some of the AI hype is driven by it's ability to create flashy demos which become dead end projects. It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what? I think in the same way that image generation is akin to clipart (wildly useful, but lacking in depth and meaning) the AI code generation projects are akin to webpage templates. They can help get you started, and take you further than you could on your own, but ultimately you have to decide "now what" after you take that first (AI) step.
- th0ma5 1y ago
  The demos I see all make compromises in order to work that hobble you from hardening them or otherwise lock you to very specific conceptualizations that you simply wouldn't have building from the smallest low level building blocks or even starting at a super high level state machine placeholder. In my experience no matter how hard I try it will be guided by the weights of the total generated output towards something that doesn't understand the value of compartmentalization, and will add tokens that make its probabilities work internally above all.
- cess11 1y ago
  "It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what?" Which we already had, it's just a 'git clone https://github.com/whatevs/huh https://github.com/whatevs/huh' away, or doing one of millions of tutorials on whatever topic. Pretty much everyone who can build something out of Elixir/Phoenix has a chat app, an e-commerce store and a scraping platform just laying around.
  - ljsprague 1y ago
    LLMs are easier to use than git.
    - cess11 1y ago
      Why do you think that?
notepad0x90 1y ago
Is it that ChatGPT is a gimmick or is it that people are using it as such? A lot of the author's arguments could have been said about the internet in the 90's. This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature? It is human nature to try and find silver bullets, to take solutions and find problems. The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants and suggestion makers, personal consultants even. You don't ask an agent to write an essay for you, you write an essay, and as you write consider its suggestions and corrections. The models should be familiar with your writing style and preferences. Don't blame ChatGPT for human laziness. There was this fad about every thing being smart* (smart home,smart tooth brush , smart sex toy,etc...). that wasn't smart, it was just connected to a network. This is "smart". and in the future technology might get past "smart" and become "intelligent" (we're not there yet, outside of scifi at least). At the end of the day, everyone needs to step back and consider this: It's just a tool. period. it's not "AI", not really. there is no intelligence. The problem is, the world is full of enshittification capitalists and their doomsday bandwagons.
- max_ 1y ago
  The millenial tech bros have mostly made thier money off gimmicks like Instagram, TikTok et al I was very disgusted when I saw VC firms with billions in AUM put money into things like FartCoin, Digital Twins The Boomer VCs financed stuff that is genuinely useful, MRI Scanners, Google, Apple Computers, Genetech (brought insulin to the masses). The milenial VCs fund stuff that is at best convenient to have (Airbnb, Uber) but usually gimmicks, Instagram, Tiktok. Sam Altman is the master of gimmicks. He took the GPT model that already existed and wrapped it into chat format similar to Elizer[0] Got Neural style that existed for a long time and paired it with Studio Ghibli fanatics. [1] [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_style_transfer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_style_transfer
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  > This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature? Because its fans act as though it is, and this article is a response to that overly-enthusiastic outlook on what the tool can do.
elric 1y ago
> “Human interaction is not as important to today’s students,” Latham claims Goodness that's depressing. Is this going to crank individualism up to 11? I remember hating having to do group projects in school. Most often, 3/5 of the group would contribute jack shit, while the remaining people had to pick up the slack. But even with lazy gits, the interactions were what made it valuable. Maybe human/-I cooperation is an important skill for people to learn, but it shouldn't come at the cost of losing even more human-human cooperation and interaction.
- DaSHacka 1y ago
  > Most often, 3/5 of the group would contribute jack shit, while the remaining people had to pick up the slack. Never fear, nowadays 3/5 do squat with the 4th sending you largely-incoherent GPT sludge, before dropping off the face of the earth until 11:30PM on the night the assignment's due. I've seen it said college is supposed to teach you the skills to navigate working with others moreso than your specific field of study. Glad to see they've still got it.
danlitt 1y ago
It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.
- admissionsguy 1y ago
  > It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong. Have been wondering this ever since 1 week after the initial ChatGPT release. My cynical take is that most people don't do real work (i.e. one that is objectively evaluated against reality), so are not able to see the difference between a gimmick and the real thing. Most people are in the business of making impressions, and LLMs are pretty good at that. It's good that we have markets that will eventually sort it out.
  - Hoasi 1y ago
    > It's good that we have markets that will eventually sort it out. But then again, it's not as if markets always rewarded real work either.
    - admissionsguy 1y ago
      It's noisy, biased, and slow, but it generally does eventually reward what works better, in most cases.
    - bsaul 1y ago
      Ultimately markets do ask the only relevant question : are people going to pay for LLMs' output.
  - melagonster 1y ago
    There were many people just input text from paper to computer. Did they do real jobs in the past?
- 1y ago
fedeb95 1y ago
Some companies may save money by employing LLMs to do shallow things. Others may not. Also, LLMs are not all AIs. AI is a broad field with many models and applications that were already omnipresent in our lives but less marketable to the general public as revolutionary, such as spam filter. AI is NOT a gimmick per se. Some users are. P.S.: consider that when there are huge investments in something, people will do anything to see a return, including paying other people to create hype.
wilg 1y ago
> But look at what people actually use this wonder for: brain-dead books and videos, scam-filled ads, polished but boring homework essays. Another presenter at the workshop I attended said he used AI to help him decide what to give his kids for breakfast that morning. The last example is actually the most interesting! The essays are whatever, dumb or lazy kids are gonna cheat on their homework, schools have long needed better ways of teaching kids than regurgitative essays, but in the mean time just use an in-class essay or exam. But people aren't really making the brain-dead books and videos as anything other than a curiosity, despite the fears of various humanities professors. The interesting part of AI, and I suspect the primary actual use case, is everything else.
- panstromek 1y ago
  There's also a selection bias, people use AI for a ton of stuff but you don't notice because it's not slop. The most sloppy examples are the most visible ones.
- snickerer 1y ago
  I love to use ChatGPT for creative cooking. In my camping car, somewhere in the desert, I sometimes have limited resources. Like a can of beans, some fresh potatoes, an apple, Italian spices, and so on. I like to ask ChatGPT: Listen, I have this stuff, I want to create some food with strong umami taste, do you have an idea? It is very good at that, the results were often amazing. This is its core feature: 'feel' loose connections between concepts. Italian pasta with maple syrup? Yes, but only if you add some Arabic spices... "AI" is, due to the nature of artificial neuronal networks, not intelligent. It does not learn intelligence, it does learn feelings. Not emotions, but feelings in the sense of unconscious learning ('I get a feeling how to ride the bicycle off-road ').
isaacfrond 1y ago
> The claim of inevitability is crucial to technology hype cycles, from the railroad to television to AI. Well. You know. We still have plenty of railroad, and television has had a pretty good run too. So if that are the models to compare AI to, then I have bad news for how 'hype cycle' AI is going to be.
liamwire 1y ago
I read the entire essay. It comes across wholly uninspired. Some thoughts: > But do the apologists even believe it themselves? Latham, the professor of strategy, gives away the game at the end of his reverie. “None of this can happen, though,” he writes, “if professors and administrators continue to have their heads in the sand.” So it’s not inevitable after all? Whoops. This self-assured ‘gotcha’ attitude is pungent throughout the whole piece, but this may be as good an example as any. It’s ridden with cherry-picked choices and quotes from singular actors as if they’re representative of every educator, every decision maker, and it’s such a bad look from someone that clearly knows better. I don’t expect the author to take the most charitable position, but one of intellectual honesty would be nice. To pretend there isn’t, or perhaps ignore, those out there applying technological advancement, including current AI, in education in thoughtful, meaningful, and beneficial even if challenging to quantify ways, is obtuse. To decide there isn’t the possibility of those things being true, given their exclusion, is to do the same head-burying he ridicules others for. … > After I got her feedback, I finally asked ChatGPT if generative AI could be considered a gimmick in Ngai’s sense. I did not read its answer carefully. Whenever I see the words cascade down my computer screen, I get a sinking feeling. Do I really have to read this? I know I am unlikely to find anything truly interesting or surprising, and the ease with which the words appear really does cheapen them. It may have well been the author’s point, but the disdain for the technology that drips from sentences like these, which are rife throughout, taints any appreciation for the argument they’re trying to make — and I’m really trying to take it in good faith. Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper. Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point?
- alexdowad 1y ago
  Wholeheartedly agree.
- jrflowers 1y ago
  > Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper. >Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point? I like that you point out here that the author clearly has a strong opinion, and then immediately say that the act of expressing that opinion may suggest that they do not hold that opinion at all. By this logic, are you trying to convince us that you don’t love the way this article is written, or are you trying to convince yourself of that?
crowcroft 1y ago
Microprocessors are a gimmick, they're just toys compared to mainframes.
lexandstuff 1y ago
One of the realisations I've had recently is that the AI hype feels like another level from what's come before because AI itself is creating the "hype" content fed to me (and my bosses and colleagues) all over social media. The FOMO tech people are having with AI is out of control - everyone assumes that everyone else is having way more success with it than they are.
- namaria 1y ago
  A product that hypes itself. What a world. That does explain a lot of the cognitive dissonance going around.
keiferski 1y ago
These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible. The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and not just treating it like a magic button that solves all problems without fine-tuning. To give you a few examples: - There is something called the Picture Superiority Effect, which states that humans remember images better than merely words. I have been interested in applying this to language learning – imagine a unique image for each word you’re learning in German, for example. A few years ago I was about to hire an illustrator to make these images for me, but now with Midjourney or other image creators, I can functionally make unlimited unique images for $30 a month. This is a massive new development that wasn’t possible before. - I have been working on a list of AI tools that would be useful for “thinking” or analyzing a piece of writing. Things like: analyze the assumptions in this piece; find related concepts with genealogical links; check if this idea is original or not; rephrase this argument as a series of Socratic dialogues. And so on. This kind of thing has been immensely helpful in evaluating my own personal essays and ideas, and prior to AI tools it, again, was not really possible unless I hired someone to critique my work. The key for both of these example use cases is that I have absolutely no expectation of perfection. I don’t expect the AI images or text to be free of errors. The point is to use them as messy, creative tools that open up possibilities and unconsidered angles, not to do all the work for you.
- kumarvvr 1y ago
  > value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) The one area I would agree that AI and ML tools have been surprisingly good, art generation. But then, I see the flood of AI generated pictures and overall, feel it has made a already troublesome world, even more troublesome. I am starting to see the "the picture is AI made, or AI modified" excuses coming into mainstream. A picture now, has lost all meaning. > be useful for “thinking” or analyzing a piece of writing This, I am highly skeptical of. If you train an LLM with words of "trains can fly", then it spits that out. They may be good as summarizing or search tools, but to claim them to be "thinking" and "analyzing", nah.
ohxh 1y ago
This seems unusually shallow for the hedgehog review. I thought we'd largely moved on from this sort of sentimental, "I can't get good outputs therefore nobody can" style essay -- not to mention the water use argument! They've published far better writing on LLMs too: see "Language Machinery" from fall 23 [1] [1] https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-machinery https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/artic...
BlindEyeHalo 1y ago
For me the usefulness of LLMs is proportional to how shitty google has become. When searching for something you get a bunch of blog spam or other SSO optimised shit results to pages that open dozens of popups asking you to subscribe or make an account. ChatGPT gives you the answer immediately and I must say I find it helpful 90% of the time. For simple coding questions it is also very good because it takes your current context into account. It is basically a smarter "copy paste from stack overflow". At least for now LLMs do not replace any meaningful work for me, but they replace google more and more.
mirekrusin 1y ago
> After I got her feedback, I finally asked ChatGPT if generative AI could be considered a gimmick in Ngai’s sense. I did not read its answer carefully. Whenever I see the words cascade down my computer screen, I get a sinking feeling. Do I really have to read this? Does the author know he can include "be concise" in the prompt if that's what he wants? I do agree with the author this whole thing is challenging. Frankly I wouldn't like to be youngster nowadays – so much information, so many options, so much flood of tip of success that makes you feel like shit, so easy not to learn anything, so much feeling of "pointless" discipline and hard work, such a wide distance to excel at something - just summarizing available avenues is project on its own. Anyway there is no turning back. What we see now as best of models will get replaced quickly with better ones and that change will only accelerate with time. I'm still positive – I think we'll find a way to be happy in this completely new reality. I like it at work - time from business idea to PoC did shrink so much, it's easier than ever to win business (not sure for how long but that's today), agentic coding helps a lot with documentation, tests, finding medium-obvious mistakes that sit above linter/typechecker – that part is amazing as well. We'll continue focusing on low effort/high value tasks it currently excels at and keep expanding it. At the same time we all know where it's going and it makes me uneasy as well. I don't think I have anything substantial to add – just advice to try to enjoy the ride, take it easy and keep in mind well being of your colleagues. There is a sweet spot to use it – don't overuse it (don't fight with it where it struggles), don't under-use it either (don't say all of it is shit and you won't touch it ever), don't abuse it (do not drop llm output for others to review without knowing what you're pushing).
wiseowise 1y ago
AI is gimmick, smartphones are gimmick, computers are gimmick, automation is gimmick, books are gimmick, only %MY_ENLIGHTMENT% is not. Seriously, I understand saying something lime this about crypto or whatever meme of the day, but even current LLMs are literal magic. Instead of reading 10 pages of empty water and wasting my time, ChatGPT can summarize this as > Malesic argues that AI hype—especially in education—is a shallow gimmick: it overpromises revolutionary change but delivers banal, low-value outputs. True teaching thrives on slow, sacrificial human labor and deep discussion, which no AI shortcut can replicate. Hardly any revolutionary thought.
- AndrewDucker 1y ago
  Turns out that AI is not good at summarising things: https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-summarizing-research https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-summarizing-research
  - johnb231 1y ago
    As usual the paper is dead on arrival. They tested with obsolete models and non-reasoning models. Try again with any SOTA reasoning model (GPT-o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 3).
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    It was good enough with summarizing this empty rant.
  - Gud 1y ago
    Ok, I disagree. Out of curiosity, I used ChatGPT to make a summary of “FreeBSD vs Linux comparison”, and if came out as extremely fair and to the point, in my opinion.
  - TiredOfLife 1y ago
    There was this widely discussed paper about how using ai generated data for training will be the death of llms that was published about a week before all llms switched to using ai generated data for training and becoming twice as good as before
babyent 1y ago
For AI to be useful, it needs smart humans to progress its knowledge base. An educators job (like an actual teacher) should be to help people (key) progress and be smarter humans. Deal with progress.
bushbaba 1y ago
About 60% of my job is writing. Writing slack, writing code, writing design docs, writing strategies, writing calibrations. ChatGPT has allowed me to write 50%+ faster with 50%+ better quality. It’s been one of the largest productivity boosts in the last 10+ years.
- windowshopping 1y ago
  One of?? Please tell me what other tools have been more impactful for you, I want to use them.
frank20022 1y ago
As Woody Allen said: ChatGPT is a meaningless autocomplete, but as far as meaningless autocompletes go, its pretty damn good.
SuperHeavy256 1y ago
In the dictionary if you look up the term 'pessimist' it shows you a picture of the author of this article.
blixt 1y ago
I think it's in human nature to force any topic to be all "good" or "bad". I agree with most criticisms this author has about the performance of AI -- it _is_ very bad at writing essays, and dare I say most things (including code), based on a single prompt. But to say it is a gimmick and compare it with technologies that died or are dying seems to me like a visceral response, perhaps after experiencing the overflow of AI-generated homework (a use of AI that ultimately just wastes everyone's time). I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them. I suppose if you're _very_ positive about AI, then it's good to have a polarized negative article to make us remember all the ways AI is being overpromised. I'm definitely very excited about finding new ways to apply AI, and that explorative phase can come off as trying to sell snake oil. We have to be realistic and acknowledge this is a technology that can produce content faster than we can consume it. Content that takes effort to distinguish useful vs. not. All that said I disagree with the idea that the only way "to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds" is via teaching and not via technologies such as AI. The education system certainly failed me and I found a lot of joy in technology instead. For me it was the start of the internet, but I can only imagine for many today it will be the start of AI.
- mort96 1y ago
  > I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them The only thing that really comes to mind is making something in a domain where I have almost no prior expertise. But then ChatGPT is so frequently wrong, and so frequently repeatedly wrong when it tries to "correct" problems when pointed out, that even then I always have to go and read relevant documentation and re-write the thing regardless. Maybe there's some slight usefulness here in giving me a starting point, but it's marginal.
  - blixt 1y ago
    My list of uses of AI includes: - Turning a lot of data into a small amount of data, such as extracting facts from a text, translating and querying a PDF, cleaning up a data dump such as getting a clean Markdown table from a copy/pasted HTML source of a web page etc (IMO it often goes wrong when you go the other way and try to turn a small prompt into a lot of data) - Creating illustrations representing ephemeral data (eg my daily weather report illustration which I enjoy looking at every day even if the data it produces is not super useful: https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink) - Using Cursor to perform coding tasks that are tedious but I know what the end result should look like (so I can spend low effort verifying it) -- it has an 80% success rate and I deem it to save time but it's not perfect - Exploration of a topic I'm not familiar with (I've used o3 extensively while double checking facts, learning about laws, answering random questions that would be too difficult to Google, etc etc) -- o3 is good at giving sources so I can double check important things Beyond this, AI is also a form of entertainment for me, like using realtime voice chat, or video/image generation to explore random ideas and seeing what comes out. Or turning my ugly sketches into nicer drawings, and so forth.
potato-peeler 1y ago
Slightly meta, this entire article is filled with quotes from other speakers to highlight a point the author is trying to make, in many cases too hard. It’s as if the author himself didn’t have his own thoughts, and borrowed some sentences others made to write this piece. I don’t know what kind of writing style this is. If you are writing an opinion, why not devote some effort to articulate your own thoughts, or at the very least, provide reasons why other people which the author relies on to make their point, is correct?
- johnisgood 1y ago
  He may have used an LLM. :D
panstromek 1y ago
If anyone is interested in AI in relation to learning, I think the best take on that I've seen so far was from Derek (Veritasium) in this recent talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70 It's a lot more balanced compared to the doomy attitude in the primary post.
alkonaut 1y ago
I always found myself to be very good at Googling/Searching. Or asking: like emailing an expert or colleague. I'm good at condensing what I'm trying to ask and good at knowing what they could be misunderstanding, or what follow up questions they might have, to save some back- and forth. The corresponding thing on google is predicting what I might see, and adding negative search terms for them. BUT, and this is I think why some of us feel ChatGPT is poor: asking in this way that guides a human or a search engine, makes ChatGPT produce worse answers(!). If you say "What can be wrong with X? I'm pretty sure it's not Y or Z which I ruled out, could it be Q or perhaps W"? Then ChatGPT and other language models quickly reinforce your belief instead of challenging them. It would rather give you an incorrect reason why you are right, than provide you an additional problem, or challenge your assumptions. If LLMs could get over the bullshit problem, it would be so much better. Having a confidence and being able to express it is invaluable. But somehow I doubt it's possible - if it was, then they would be doing it already as it's a killer feature. So I fear that it's somehow not achievable with LLMs? In which case the title is correct.
pzo 1y ago
I used AI to summarize this whole article and give me takeaways - it already saved me like 0.5h of reading something that in the end I would disagree with since the article is IMHO to harsh on AI. I found AI extremely useful and easy sell for me to spend $20/m even if not used professionally for coding and I'm the person who avoid any type of subscription as a plague. Even in educational setting that this article mostly focus about it can be super useful. Not everyone has access to mentors and scholars. I saved a lot of time helping family with typical tech questions and troubleshooting by teaching them how to use it and trying to solve their tech problem themselves.
SebFender 1y ago
For the time being - These are just another type of search engine - just with "better" answers.
jbverschoor 1y ago
Exactly like 90% of what people do at work. They’re a gimmick and don’t do anything. Just noise and word generation.
echan00 1y ago
clickbait
mgrant24601 1y ago
[flagged]
karmakaze 1y ago
The context is AI in education. It argues that AI in education is a gimmick and true learning requires time, care, and the presence of humans who are willing to do difficult work together. I don't dispute what learning requires, but I also don't exclude AI in that picture. What we have is almost a 'Young Lady's Primer' from "The Diamond Age". All we have to do is ask the right questions. If anything education should be teaching how to use the new tools well. Funny how it also refutes that AI use is inevitable. The only debate I've heard is when not if.
runjake 1y ago
The vast majority of people aren’t very skilled in using LLMs, an emerging and rapidly evolving technology. This does not make AI a gimmick. Meanwhile, many of us use it on a daily basis and have a long list of ways it’s revolutionized our work and productivity and even lives. Excuse me while I eye roll at yet another article.
johnbanks-a86 1y ago
Many people are just negative about most everything... I've always been curious and I love to learn about technology. I use ChatGPT every day in my work as an independent English teacher and in my hobbies as a photographer, a writer, and graphic designer. I can't wait to see the next big thing. BTW, I'm 62 years old... Yes, I'm a Boomer!
Florencesophia 1y ago
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tim333 1y ago
>AI cannot save us from the effort of learning to live and die You could substitute pretty much anything for the word AI and the sentence would be true. Cars, houses or love also cannot save us from that but it doesn't show they are gimmicks.
KeycheinX 1y ago
[dead]

115 points by blueridge 1y ago

eru 1y ago

Seems to be a very wordy article that complains that only a proper education teaches you to think? In any case, even contemporary LLM---as primitive as they will look like in even a few months time---are already pretty useful as assistants when eg writing software programmes. They ain't gimmicks. They are also useful as a more interactive addition to an encyclopedia. Amongst other uses. The article also conflates AI in general with LLM. It's a common enough mistake to make these days, so I won't ding the author for that. Summary of the article: contemporary LLMs aren't very useful for highfalutin liberal arts people (yet). (However they can already churn out the kind of essays and corporate writing that people do in practice.)

frereubu 1y ago
I think you missed the entire point of the article. They're not saying that AI cannot be useful in the way you describe. They're saying that too many people are using it as a shortcut to producing verbiage that mimics the outcomes of learning, missing out the valuable things that come from the process of learning.
- wilg 1y ago
  Is there any evidence to suggest more people are cheating now that there is AI than before, or is everybody just flipping out because the cheaters have changed tactics?
  - eru 1y ago
    It's almost always good to ask about what evidence we have. I'd say that our prior should be that there's more cheating. My logic: Almost any good or service gets consumed more when its price drops (especially if quality also goes up). Cheating has gotten massively cheaper in terms of effort: you no longer have hire a ghostwriter for your essay, or laboriously plagiarise passages from the literature yourself.
    - wilg 1y ago
      That logic is the conventional wisdom, but I just want to know whether it's true empirically.

ddxv 1y ago

I personally feel like some of the AI hype is driven by it's ability to create flashy demos which become dead end projects. It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what? I think in the same way that image generation is akin to clipart (wildly useful, but lacking in depth and meaning) the AI code generation projects are akin to webpage templates. They can help get you started, and take you further than you could on your own, but ultimately you have to decide "now what" after you take that first (AI) step.

th0ma5 1y ago
The demos I see all make compromises in order to work that hobble you from hardening them or otherwise lock you to very specific conceptualizations that you simply wouldn't have building from the smallest low level building blocks or even starting at a super high level state machine placeholder. In my experience no matter how hard I try it will be guided by the weights of the total generated output towards something that doesn't understand the value of compartmentalization, and will add tokens that make its probabilities work internally above all.
cess11 1y ago
"It's so easy to spin up an example "write me a sample chat app" or whatever and be amazed how quickly and fully it realizes this idea, but it does kinda beg the question, now what?" Which we already had, it's just a 'git clone https://github.com/whatevs/huh https://github.com/whatevs/huh' away, or doing one of millions of tutorials on whatever topic. Pretty much everyone who can build something out of Elixir/Phoenix has a chat app, an e-commerce store and a scraping platform just laying around.
- ljsprague 1y ago
  LLMs are easier to use than git.
  - cess11 1y ago
    Why do you think that?

notepad0x90 1y ago

Is it that ChatGPT is a gimmick or is it that people are using it as such? A lot of the author's arguments could have been said about the internet in the 90's. This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature? It is human nature to try and find silver bullets, to take solutions and find problems. The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants and suggestion makers, personal consultants even. You don't ask an agent to write an essay for you, you write an essay, and as you write consider its suggestions and corrections. The models should be familiar with your writing style and preferences. Don't blame ChatGPT for human laziness. There was this fad about every thing being smart* (smart home,smart tooth brush , smart sex toy,etc...). that wasn't smart, it was just connected to a network. This is "smart". and in the future technology might get past "smart" and become "intelligent" (we're not there yet, outside of scifi at least). At the end of the day, everyone needs to step back and consider this: It's just a tool. period. it's not "AI", not really. there is no intelligence. The problem is, the world is full of enshittification capitalists and their doomsday bandwagons.

max_ 1y ago
The millenial tech bros have mostly made thier money off gimmicks like Instagram, TikTok et al I was very disgusted when I saw VC firms with billions in AUM put money into things like FartCoin, Digital Twins The Boomer VCs financed stuff that is genuinely useful, MRI Scanners, Google, Apple Computers, Genetech (brought insulin to the masses). The milenial VCs fund stuff that is at best convenient to have (Airbnb, Uber) but usually gimmicks, Instagram, Tiktok. Sam Altman is the master of gimmicks. He took the GPT model that already existed and wrapped it into chat format similar to Elizer[0] Got Neural style that existed for a long time and paired it with Studio Ghibli fanatics. [1] [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_style_transfer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_style_transfer
bigstrat2003 1y ago
> This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature? Because its fans act as though it is, and this article is a response to that overly-enthusiastic outlook on what the tool can do.

elric 1y ago

> “Human interaction is not as important to today’s students,” Latham claims Goodness that's depressing. Is this going to crank individualism up to 11? I remember hating having to do group projects in school. Most often, 3/5 of the group would contribute jack shit, while the remaining people had to pick up the slack. But even with lazy gits, the interactions were what made it valuable. Maybe human/-I cooperation is an important skill for people to learn, but it shouldn't come at the cost of losing even more human-human cooperation and interaction.

DaSHacka 1y ago
> Most often, 3/5 of the group would contribute jack shit, while the remaining people had to pick up the slack. Never fear, nowadays 3/5 do squat with the 4th sending you largely-incoherent GPT sludge, before dropping off the face of the earth until 11:30PM on the night the assignment's due. I've seen it said college is supposed to teach you the skills to navigate working with others moreso than your specific field of study. Glad to see they've still got it.

danlitt 1y ago

It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast. It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

admissionsguy 1y ago
> It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong. Have been wondering this ever since 1 week after the initial ChatGPT release. My cynical take is that most people don't do real work (i.e. one that is objectively evaluated against reality), so are not able to see the difference between a gimmick and the real thing. Most people are in the business of making impressions, and LLMs are pretty good at that. It's good that we have markets that will eventually sort it out.
- Hoasi 1y ago
  > It's good that we have markets that will eventually sort it out. But then again, it's not as if markets always rewarded real work either.
  - admissionsguy 1y ago
    It's noisy, biased, and slow, but it generally does eventually reward what works better, in most cases.
  - bsaul 1y ago
    Ultimately markets do ask the only relevant question : are people going to pay for LLMs' output.
- melagonster 1y ago
  There were many people just input text from paper to computer. Did they do real jobs in the past?
1y ago

fedeb95 1y ago

Some companies may save money by employing LLMs to do shallow things. Others may not. Also, LLMs are not all AIs. AI is a broad field with many models and applications that were already omnipresent in our lives but less marketable to the general public as revolutionary, such as spam filter. AI is NOT a gimmick per se. Some users are. P.S.: consider that when there are huge investments in something, people will do anything to see a return, including paying other people to create hype.

wilg 1y ago

> But look at what people actually use this wonder for: brain-dead books and videos, scam-filled ads, polished but boring homework essays. Another presenter at the workshop I attended said he used AI to help him decide what to give his kids for breakfast that morning. The last example is actually the most interesting! The essays are whatever, dumb or lazy kids are gonna cheat on their homework, schools have long needed better ways of teaching kids than regurgitative essays, but in the mean time just use an in-class essay or exam. But people aren't really making the brain-dead books and videos as anything other than a curiosity, despite the fears of various humanities professors. The interesting part of AI, and I suspect the primary actual use case, is everything else.

panstromek 1y ago
There's also a selection bias, people use AI for a ton of stuff but you don't notice because it's not slop. The most sloppy examples are the most visible ones.
snickerer 1y ago
I love to use ChatGPT for creative cooking. In my camping car, somewhere in the desert, I sometimes have limited resources. Like a can of beans, some fresh potatoes, an apple, Italian spices, and so on. I like to ask ChatGPT: Listen, I have this stuff, I want to create some food with strong umami taste, do you have an idea? It is very good at that, the results were often amazing. This is its core feature: 'feel' loose connections between concepts. Italian pasta with maple syrup? Yes, but only if you add some Arabic spices... "AI" is, due to the nature of artificial neuronal networks, not intelligent. It does not learn intelligence, it does learn feelings. Not emotions, but feelings in the sense of unconscious learning ('I get a feeling how to ride the bicycle off-road ').

isaacfrond 1y ago

> The claim of inevitability is crucial to technology hype cycles, from the railroad to television to AI. Well. You know. We still have plenty of railroad, and television has had a pretty good run too. So if that are the models to compare AI to, then I have bad news for how 'hype cycle' AI is going to be.

liamwire 1y ago

I read the entire essay. It comes across wholly uninspired. Some thoughts: > But do the apologists even believe it themselves? Latham, the professor of strategy, gives away the game at the end of his reverie. “None of this can happen, though,” he writes, “if professors and administrators continue to have their heads in the sand.” So it’s not inevitable after all? Whoops. This self-assured ‘gotcha’ attitude is pungent throughout the whole piece, but this may be as good an example as any. It’s ridden with cherry-picked choices and quotes from singular actors as if they’re representative of every educator, every decision maker, and it’s such a bad look from someone that clearly knows better. I don’t expect the author to take the most charitable position, but one of intellectual honesty would be nice. To pretend there isn’t, or perhaps ignore, those out there applying technological advancement, including current AI, in education in thoughtful, meaningful, and beneficial even if challenging to quantify ways, is obtuse. To decide there isn’t the possibility of those things being true, given their exclusion, is to do the same head-burying he ridicules others for. … > After I got her feedback, I finally asked ChatGPT if generative AI could be considered a gimmick in Ngai’s sense. I did not read its answer carefully. Whenever I see the words cascade down my computer screen, I get a sinking feeling. Do I really have to read this? I know I am unlikely to find anything truly interesting or surprising, and the ease with which the words appear really does cheapen them. It may have well been the author’s point, but the disdain for the technology that drips from sentences like these, which are rife throughout, taints any appreciation for the argument they’re trying to make — and I’m really trying to take it in good faith. Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper. Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point?

alexdowad 1y ago
Wholeheartedly agree.
jrflowers 1y ago
> Knowing they come in with such strongly held preconceived notions makes me reflexively question their own introspection before putting pen to paper. >Ultimately, are you writing to convince me, or yourself, of your point? I like that you point out here that the author clearly has a strong opinion, and then immediately say that the act of expressing that opinion may suggest that they do not hold that opinion at all. By this logic, are you trying to convince us that you don’t love the way this article is written, or are you trying to convince yourself of that?

crowcroft 1y ago

Microprocessors are a gimmick, they're just toys compared to mainframes.

lexandstuff 1y ago

One of the realisations I've had recently is that the AI hype feels like another level from what's come before because AI itself is creating the "hype" content fed to me (and my bosses and colleagues) all over social media. The FOMO tech people are having with AI is out of control - everyone assumes that everyone else is having way more success with it than they are.

namaria 1y ago
A product that hypes itself. What a world. That does explain a lot of the cognitive dissonance going around.

keiferski 1y ago

These “AI is a gimmick that does nothing” articles mostly just communicate to me that most people lack imagination. I have gotten so much value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) that it’s hard to imagine that a few years ago this was not even remotely possible. The difference, it seems, is that I’ve been looking at these tools and thinking how I can use them in creative ways to accomplish a goal - and not just treating it like a magic button that solves all problems without fine-tuning. To give you a few examples: - There is something called the Picture Superiority Effect, which states that humans remember images better than merely words. I have been interested in applying this to language learning – imagine a unique image for each word you’re learning in German, for example. A few years ago I was about to hire an illustrator to make these images for me, but now with Midjourney or other image creators, I can functionally make unlimited unique images for $30 a month. This is a massive new development that wasn’t possible before. - I have been working on a list of AI tools that would be useful for “thinking” or analyzing a piece of writing. Things like: analyze the assumptions in this piece; find related concepts with genealogical links; check if this idea is original or not; rephrase this argument as a series of Socratic dialogues. And so on. This kind of thing has been immensely helpful in evaluating my own personal essays and ideas, and prior to AI tools it, again, was not really possible unless I hired someone to critique my work. The key for both of these example use cases is that I have absolutely no expectation of perfection. I don’t expect the AI images or text to be free of errors. The point is to use them as messy, creative tools that open up possibilities and unconsidered angles, not to do all the work for you.

kumarvvr 1y ago
> value out of AI (specifically ChatGPT and Midjourney) The one area I would agree that AI and ML tools have been surprisingly good, art generation. But then, I see the flood of AI generated pictures and overall, feel it has made a already troublesome world, even more troublesome. I am starting to see the "the picture is AI made, or AI modified" excuses coming into mainstream. A picture now, has lost all meaning. > be useful for “thinking” or analyzing a piece of writing This, I am highly skeptical of. If you train an LLM with words of "trains can fly", then it spits that out. They may be good as summarizing or search tools, but to claim them to be "thinking" and "analyzing", nah.

ohxh 1y ago

This seems unusually shallow for the hedgehog review. I thought we'd largely moved on from this sort of sentimental, "I can't get good outputs therefore nobody can" style essay -- not to mention the water use argument! They've published far better writing on LLMs too: see "Language Machinery" from fall 23 [1] [1] https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-machinery https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/artic...

BlindEyeHalo 1y ago

For me the usefulness of LLMs is proportional to how shitty google has become. When searching for something you get a bunch of blog spam or other SSO optimised shit results to pages that open dozens of popups asking you to subscribe or make an account. ChatGPT gives you the answer immediately and I must say I find it helpful 90% of the time. For simple coding questions it is also very good because it takes your current context into account. It is basically a smarter "copy paste from stack overflow". At least for now LLMs do not replace any meaningful work for me, but they replace google more and more.

mirekrusin 1y ago

> After I got her feedback, I finally asked ChatGPT if generative AI could be considered a gimmick in Ngai’s sense. I did not read its answer carefully. Whenever I see the words cascade down my computer screen, I get a sinking feeling. Do I really have to read this? Does the author know he can include "be concise" in the prompt if that's what he wants? I do agree with the author this whole thing is challenging. Frankly I wouldn't like to be youngster nowadays – so much information, so many options, so much flood of tip of success that makes you feel like shit, so easy not to learn anything, so much feeling of "pointless" discipline and hard work, such a wide distance to excel at something - just summarizing available avenues is project on its own. Anyway there is no turning back. What we see now as best of models will get replaced quickly with better ones and that change will only accelerate with time. I'm still positive – I think we'll find a way to be happy in this completely new reality. I like it at work - time from business idea to PoC did shrink so much, it's easier than ever to win business (not sure for how long but that's today), agentic coding helps a lot with documentation, tests, finding medium-obvious mistakes that sit above linter/typechecker – that part is amazing as well. We'll continue focusing on low effort/high value tasks it currently excels at and keep expanding it. At the same time we all know where it's going and it makes me uneasy as well. I don't think I have anything substantial to add – just advice to try to enjoy the ride, take it easy and keep in mind well being of your colleagues. There is a sweet spot to use it – don't overuse it (don't fight with it where it struggles), don't under-use it either (don't say all of it is shit and you won't touch it ever), don't abuse it (do not drop llm output for others to review without knowing what you're pushing).

wiseowise 1y ago

AI is gimmick, smartphones are gimmick, computers are gimmick, automation is gimmick, books are gimmick, only %MY_ENLIGHTMENT% is not. Seriously, I understand saying something lime this about crypto or whatever meme of the day, but even current LLMs are literal magic. Instead of reading 10 pages of empty water and wasting my time, ChatGPT can summarize this as > Malesic argues that AI hype—especially in education—is a shallow gimmick: it overpromises revolutionary change but delivers banal, low-value outputs. True teaching thrives on slow, sacrificial human labor and deep discussion, which no AI shortcut can replicate. Hardly any revolutionary thought.

AndrewDucker 1y ago
Turns out that AI is not good at summarising things: https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-summarizing-research https://futurism.com/ai-chatbots-summarizing-research
- johnb231 1y ago
  As usual the paper is dead on arrival. They tested with obsolete models and non-reasoning models. Try again with any SOTA reasoning model (GPT-o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Grok 3).
- wiseowise 1y ago
  It was good enough with summarizing this empty rant.
- Gud 1y ago
  Ok, I disagree. Out of curiosity, I used ChatGPT to make a summary of “FreeBSD vs Linux comparison”, and if came out as extremely fair and to the point, in my opinion.
- TiredOfLife 1y ago
  There was this widely discussed paper about how using ai generated data for training will be the death of llms that was published about a week before all llms switched to using ai generated data for training and becoming twice as good as before

babyent 1y ago

For AI to be useful, it needs smart humans to progress its knowledge base. An educators job (like an actual teacher) should be to help people (key) progress and be smarter humans. Deal with progress.

bushbaba 1y ago

About 60% of my job is writing. Writing slack, writing code, writing design docs, writing strategies, writing calibrations. ChatGPT has allowed me to write 50%+ faster with 50%+ better quality. It’s been one of the largest productivity boosts in the last 10+ years.

windowshopping 1y ago
One of?? Please tell me what other tools have been more impactful for you, I want to use them.

frank20022 1y ago

As Woody Allen said: ChatGPT is a meaningless autocomplete, but as far as meaningless autocompletes go, its pretty damn good.

SuperHeavy256 1y ago

In the dictionary if you look up the term 'pessimist' it shows you a picture of the author of this article.

blixt 1y ago

I think it's in human nature to force any topic to be all "good" or "bad". I agree with most criticisms this author has about the performance of AI -- it _is_ very bad at writing essays, and dare I say most things (including code), based on a single prompt. But to say it is a gimmick and compare it with technologies that died or are dying seems to me like a visceral response, perhaps after experiencing the overflow of AI-generated homework (a use of AI that ultimately just wastes everyone's time). I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them. I suppose if you're _very_ positive about AI, then it's good to have a polarized negative article to make us remember all the ways AI is being overpromised. I'm definitely very excited about finding new ways to apply AI, and that explorative phase can come off as trying to sell snake oil. We have to be realistic and acknowledge this is a technology that can produce content faster than we can consume it. Content that takes effort to distinguish useful vs. not. All that said I disagree with the idea that the only way "to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds" is via teaching and not via technologies such as AI. The education system certainly failed me and I found a lot of joy in technology instead. For me it was the start of the internet, but I can only imagine for many today it will be the start of AI.

mort96 1y ago
> I think most people in here know at least a few ways they can use AI that is genuinely useful to them The only thing that really comes to mind is making something in a domain where I have almost no prior expertise. But then ChatGPT is so frequently wrong, and so frequently repeatedly wrong when it tries to "correct" problems when pointed out, that even then I always have to go and read relevant documentation and re-write the thing regardless. Maybe there's some slight usefulness here in giving me a starting point, but it's marginal.
- blixt 1y ago
  My list of uses of AI includes: - Turning a lot of data into a small amount of data, such as extracting facts from a text, translating and querying a PDF, cleaning up a data dump such as getting a clean Markdown table from a copy/pasted HTML source of a web page etc (IMO it often goes wrong when you go the other way and try to turn a small prompt into a lot of data) - Creating illustrations representing ephemeral data (eg my daily weather report illustration which I enjoy looking at every day even if the data it produces is not super useful: https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink) - Using Cursor to perform coding tasks that are tedious but I know what the end result should look like (so I can spend low effort verifying it) -- it has an 80% success rate and I deem it to save time but it's not perfect - Exploration of a topic I'm not familiar with (I've used o3 extensively while double checking facts, learning about laws, answering random questions that would be too difficult to Google, etc etc) -- o3 is good at giving sources so I can double check important things Beyond this, AI is also a form of entertainment for me, like using realtime voice chat, or video/image generation to explore random ideas and seeing what comes out. Or turning my ugly sketches into nicer drawings, and so forth.

potato-peeler 1y ago

Slightly meta, this entire article is filled with quotes from other speakers to highlight a point the author is trying to make, in many cases too hard. It’s as if the author himself didn’t have his own thoughts, and borrowed some sentences others made to write this piece. I don’t know what kind of writing style this is. If you are writing an opinion, why not devote some effort to articulate your own thoughts, or at the very least, provide reasons why other people which the author relies on to make their point, is correct?

johnisgood 1y ago
He may have used an LLM. :D

panstromek 1y ago

If anyone is interested in AI in relation to learning, I think the best take on that I've seen so far was from Derek (Veritasium) in this recent talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xS68sl2D70 It's a lot more balanced compared to the doomy attitude in the primary post.

alkonaut 1y ago

I always found myself to be very good at Googling/Searching. Or asking: like emailing an expert or colleague. I'm good at condensing what I'm trying to ask and good at knowing what they could be misunderstanding, or what follow up questions they might have, to save some back- and forth. The corresponding thing on google is predicting what I might see, and adding negative search terms for them. BUT, and this is I think why some of us feel ChatGPT is poor: asking in this way that guides a human or a search engine, makes ChatGPT produce worse answers(!). If you say "What can be wrong with X? I'm pretty sure it's not Y or Z which I ruled out, could it be Q or perhaps W"? Then ChatGPT and other language models quickly reinforce your belief instead of challenging them. It would rather give you an incorrect reason why you are right, than provide you an additional problem, or challenge your assumptions. If LLMs could get over the bullshit problem, it would be so much better. Having a confidence and being able to express it is invaluable. But somehow I doubt it's possible - if it was, then they would be doing it already as it's a killer feature. So I fear that it's somehow not achievable with LLMs? In which case the title is correct.

pzo 1y ago

I used AI to summarize this whole article and give me takeaways - it already saved me like 0.5h of reading something that in the end I would disagree with since the article is IMHO to harsh on AI. I found AI extremely useful and easy sell for me to spend $20/m even if not used professionally for coding and I'm the person who avoid any type of subscription as a plague. Even in educational setting that this article mostly focus about it can be super useful. Not everyone has access to mentors and scholars. I saved a lot of time helping family with typical tech questions and troubleshooting by teaching them how to use it and trying to solve their tech problem themselves.

SebFender 1y ago

For the time being - These are just another type of search engine - just with "better" answers.

jbverschoor 1y ago

Exactly like 90% of what people do at work. They’re a gimmick and don’t do anything. Just noise and word generation.

echan00 1y ago

clickbait

mgrant24601 1y ago

[flagged]

karmakaze 1y ago

The context is AI in education. It argues that AI in education is a gimmick and true learning requires time, care, and the presence of humans who are willing to do difficult work together. I don't dispute what learning requires, but I also don't exclude AI in that picture. What we have is almost a 'Young Lady's Primer' from "The Diamond Age". All we have to do is ask the right questions. If anything education should be teaching how to use the new tools well. Funny how it also refutes that AI use is inevitable. The only debate I've heard is when not if.

runjake 1y ago

The vast majority of people aren’t very skilled in using LLMs, an emerging and rapidly evolving technology. This does not make AI a gimmick. Meanwhile, many of us use it on a daily basis and have a long list of ways it’s revolutionized our work and productivity and even lives. Excuse me while I eye roll at yet another article.

johnbanks-a86 1y ago

Many people are just negative about most everything... I've always been curious and I love to learn about technology. I use ChatGPT every day in my work as an independent English teacher and in my hobbies as a photographer, a writer, and graphic designer. I can't wait to see the next big thing. BTW, I'm 62 years old... Yes, I'm a Boomer!

Florencesophia 1y ago

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tim333 1y ago

>AI cannot save us from the effort of learning to live and die You could substitute pretty much anything for the word AI and the sentence would be true. Cars, houses or love also cannot save us from that but it doesn't show they are gimmicks.

KeycheinX 1y ago

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