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Academics Need to Wake Up on AI
- dyauspitr 5mo agoIs this the new clickbait? AI written AI scare papers.
- buffer_overlord 5mo agoand web's dead baby....web's dead.
- laughingcurve 5mo agoAs an academic this article was a fantastic position piece. I loved this and enjoyed reading it even if I didn't agree 100% thank you for sharing
- 34ajHa 5mo ago"P.P.S. That is, entirely generated based on my artisanal, hand-crafted human social media posts and thoughts on the topic. So who wrote it, really? You tell me." We can't since it is a vapid, unsourced, AI mania fueled piece that could have been written by AI. I suppose the associate professor wants AI funding.
- LeCompteSftware 5mo ago"Haw haw, you couldn't tell it was written with AI!" "Oh! That explains it!" "Uh..." "I didn't want to say anything rude, but the whole time I was like 'yikes, how did this idiot become a professor at Notre Dame?'" "Actually -" "Heh! You got me good! Of course it was written with AI. Duh. These ideas are so vacuous and shallow, there's no way a fancy professor like you-" "Actually, I asked the AI to write an essay summarizing my arguments from social media." "...oh." "..." "...hey you should log off BlueSky, it's not healthy there."
- jdlyga 5mo agoCS Academia tends to lag behind industry practices. The research frontier can be very cutting edge, but course curriculum, assignments, and institutional norms are slower and more conservative. That’s usually manageable when the shift is something like cloud adoption, new tooling, or a new dominant programming language. But this particular industry trend, use of AI in software development, is massive and fast moving (especially the agentic workflow growth over the last 6 months). And we're just now understanding where everything fits in and its limitations.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- frozenseven 5mo agoJournal articles are sometimes years behind. There are still papers coming out that use GPT-3.5 (!) for their main result. These days I'm basically only reading arXiv preprints (and whatever is trending on GitHub).
- kazinator 5mo agoAuthor doesn't seem to understand that LLM AI works by predicting tokens out of training data. The model writes a research summary because it digested academic papers and other sources in its training. When you say "AI can already do social science research better than most professors" that is false unless you mean the colloquial sense of "research" meaning "reading other people's existing stuff and paraphrasing it in my own words". But the AI doesn't even have "own words"; they are the training data's words. If all scientists suddnenly do nothing all day but play with AI --- all research grinds to a halt!
- squidbeak 5mo agoWhat about Alphafold? > But the AI doesn't even have "own words"; they are the training data's words. If the AI understands those words, in what sense aren't they its 'own words'? Are you arguing that nothing but neologisms count?
- kazinator 5mo agoI would say that I don't consider that to be an LLM.
- Legend2440 5mo agoIt's not literally an LLM because the L stands for language, and it's not trained on language. But it is the same transformer architecture, and it is able to generate novel proteins in the same way that an LLM is able to generate novel sentences. AlphaFold 3 is a diffusion model, so it's most similar to the AI art generators.
- kazinator 5mo agoBut it's used on the thing that it's trained for. LLMs are trained on language, but then used as a substitute for thinking, which it naively looks like they are doing due to the smooth language. Protein folding is a kind of syntax. If you train on protein folding and then use it to obtain protein folding results, you are using a screwdriver to drive a screw: that checks out. Nobody should be arguing along lines analogous to the claim that a good neural net trained on handwritten digits is not suitable for classifying handwritten digits.
- Legend2440 5mo ago>7. Much of the opposition to AI is status protection dressed up as principle. Absolutely true haha, even outside of academia. Software developers wax poetic about the value of 'handcrafted human-made software', but really they just don't want to lose their cushy $300k WFH job.
- Vrondi 5mo agoWell, if you're a real human, you're also probably not in a hurry to go from a decent quality of life to homeless, either.
- Our_Benefactors 5mo ago> Software developers wax poetic about the value of 'handcrafted human-made software' They really don't; devs are the highest consumers of AI by far. Designers, on the other hand, have already been obsoleted and exist basically as makework generators. They can put plenty of useless bullshit in figma and have zero ability to execute.
- giannicmptr1000 5mo agoacademics are a thing of the past (ancient greece that is...) nowadays people are dumber than rocks, thank god (the expression) for AI arriving when she did.
- coolThingsFirst 5mo agoNope. Ai tools are simply not there at this stage. Very useful as autocomplete and quick overview and prototyping but can’t create new knowledge at all.