I'm not worried about AI in the way some of the people I know are freaking out about it -- it must be a social media perspective that's spun them up, as they are irrational about this as the other things that people on social media worry about -- I can now identify who is on social media at work based on the common things they are freaked out by.
To your measured concerns though, I agree entirely. However there have always been lazy students. I see AI as being just the latest tool in their toolbox to exploit. The bigger problem is the pay for play Universities that now seem to give everyone a passing grade and diploma.
The other problem I have with Ai is the misapplication of the term -- it's being used broadly for marketing purposes.
The valid uses for AI will lead to layoffs in the writing and art producing industries, and result in lower quality content, but for how long? I don't see outlets using that slop succeeding.
There are two things "AI" is good at: inflating the shares of tech companies and crunching data. Everwhere else it has succeeded, is where standards are already low.
The cases that LLMs are good are quiet little features like noise reduction filtering. Anything patternistic. It's awful for anything that requires precision. Not in a "completely wrong" kind of way that it's useful, but in a "this seems mostly correct, oh wait, this is incredibly misleading" kind of dangerously wrong.
My main issue is that they've managed to find another way to speed up climate change with the obscene levels of energy resources it uses. Aside from climate change, LLMs aren't hurting kids. Guns and social media algorithms pushing impossible beauty standards are hurting kids.
Oh, and I wish people's lesson from LLM image generation wasn't "make copyright stricter" when copyright only ever helped corporations. (Mostly) Abolish copyright instead.
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Tell me to get back to rewriting this site so it's not horrible on mobile
And I'm not talking about gaming, but society in general. I just saw a news report on how students are using AI all the time to help them to easier understand their courses. Personally I'm a bit weary about how AI is quicly becoming comonplace in society. I guess this is akin to people grumbling 100 years ago about how electricity was changing everything, and I think we can all agree that was a big step up. But all these advancements have also brought us more pressure and anxiety, leading to more burnouts and mental illness.
Now we're saying 'look at how much easier this AI is making life for me', which will soon lead to bosses saying 'well, now you can and should be twice as productive and I can fire your colleague'. I'm sure plenty new jobs will surface, just as the rise of electiricty didn't render us all unemployed either. But the new jobs will be for those better educated, while it won't be those people who will be most at risk of losing theirs in the first place.
And to come back to the students, it feels as if AI is once more lowering the bar to achieve certain diploma's and I don't think that's a good thing. We don't need our next generation of engineers, architects and doctors to be less capable, much the opposite.