As a long-time AI+HCI person, I have mixed feelings about "AI", but just last night I was remarking to colleagues/friends that even I have mostly stopped clicking through from Google searches. The "AI" summary now usually plagiarizes a good enough answer.
I'm sure Google knows this, and also knows that that many of these answers wouldn't pass any prior standard of copyright fair use.
I suspect Google were kinda "forced" into it by the sudden popularity of OpenAI-Microsoft (who have fewer ethical qualms) and the desire to keep feeling their gazillion-dollar machine rather than have it wither and become a has-been.
"If we don't do it, everyone else will anyway, and we'll be less evil with that power than those guys." Usually that's just a convenient selfish rationalization, but this time it might actually be true.
Still, Google is currently ripping off and screwing over the Web, in a way that they still knew was wrong as recently as a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT.
Google News was definitely doing this level of "summary" before ChatGPT. I'm don't think OpenAI-MS have fewer ethical qualms, just Google had more recent memories of the negative consequences.
I just used ChatGPT (or Gemini, no idea) the other night to generate me a story.
I live abroad, so I don't have unlimited access to books in my native language and all the websites were crappy sites with dozens of ads on it, made it unusable.
I was fed up with searching, so I went to ChatGPT, told it to generate me a story in my native tongue about a boy named $MySonsName and his partner $FavoriteAnimalOfTheDay, who is doing $WhateverMySonDidThatDay. It was a good story, used phrases commonly used in children's books in my language, and all.
I think the aspect of being with my son, hugging him while reading something before going to sleep is much more important than who came up with the story. And as parents, after a day of full time work and constantly helping at the household, sleep deprivation, my stories would be two sentences before I run out of ideas.
I think it'd be amazing if I had the energy to make up improv bedtime stories every night. (We have a "King Dragon" improv series happening lately, which involves a lot of farts)
BUT, I don't always have that energy, and I already spend hours a day reading stories to my kids, so I am okay with them spending some fraction of time hearing stories from robots/screens/etc. (Lately, it's "Hey Google, tell a story" if mommy is too busy to read)
I hope we never stop paying amazing children's book illustrators though! I have so many books where I marvel at each page and the ingenuity of the illustrative style.
> I think it'd be amazing if I had the energy to make up improv bedtime stories every night [...] (Lately, it's "Hey Google, tell a story" if mommy is too busy to read)
This feels like the crux of my issues with AI. We're passing the human side of life to machines to do for us; music, art, storytelling with our kids. So often I hear that these are the things that people want to spend their time on, but AI has come to "free" us from "not having energy" to do those things, so we can instead continue to spend our energy toiling away, safe in the knowledge that our children will still get a bedtime story (albeit from a machine and not from a loving parent).
I get it, I know parents have no energy on top of everything else they're doing, this just feels so much like when I walk into a restaurant to a family with their kids, but the kids are all on tablets with headphones.
Lol, I just tried to get it to draw the story about King Dragon farting, but it could not come up with a picture of a dragon farting - it turned it into fire coming from its mouth instead! It's too far outside its training data.
How much of the story was generated by Gemini? The dragon overcomes the problem by using a fart to blow away the fog. Wouldn't that just be replacing one cloud with an equally visibility limiting cloud... only worse smelling?
Feels like this could have been an opportunity by the LLM to take the story in a less pedestrian direction with a loose parable around a noxious equivalent to Maslow's hammer.
Gemini wrote that whole story with a short prompt about a "King Dragon that farts". I assure you that our actual improv'd story is far superior in plot points.
And yes, I was confused too as to how farting would clear away fog.
Lol, yes, the dragon's torso turned into a man. That man does show up earlier in the story - I think perhaps the model so closely associates dragon stories with stories of men, it just desperately wanted to add one in? The text itself never actually mentions the man/dragon/torso.
If Gemini added a reflection step to its book drawing routine, I think the model could easily notice the errors, and generate images to correct them - the errors do not seem unsurmountable.
Given that, I'm assuming Amazon is or will soon be filled with decently illustrated somewhat amusing stories.
> Is there something lost, when it's not the adult telling the child a bedtime improv story? (IME, kids love this.)
Kids use their imagination because they're encouraged to do so. It's somewhat of a challenge to find the cusp between what is plain and what is incomprehensible (think of the ZPD but for creativity).
When I've seen parents amuse kids with AI slop, the kids ask for more slop. When I've seen parents amuse kids with improv, the kids participate. Kids love both, and like nutrition... kids love sugar.
The better question is in what ways do you trust, and not trust, the company you work for?
And the answer to that can be very complicated, and depend on the company a great deal. It also depends on who might buy the company in the future, and they might not be trustworthy at all.
It starts when companies decide they have a right to time outside the employee's official hours and that they shouldn't have to properly reflect it in their employees' salaries, nor in their employment guarantees.
And furthermore, as an employee end of the day it's your right to have to be look out for yourself. You probably don't realize that because you're infected with startupitis where everyone has to be all in to succeed.
I do realize that employees have to look out for themselves (because companies, including startups, will usually take, take take from the employee, and then throw away the carcass, if they can).
However, employees work in a company with other people, so we'd like to know what we can and can't trust from each other.
If a colleague engages in criminal fraud, do they have a rigorous philosophy about when and when not to do that? How do they behave towards the team? Is defrauding the company OK, over something they think they company shouldn't demand anyway, but they will still be honest and responsible towards their teammates? That would be very good to know.
If so many people weren't so anxious to downvote things that don't suit their kneejerk reactions, we could discuss this.
Ok, but corporations also lie to and defraud their employees all the time. In ways large and small.
Nobody is entirely honest to everyone about everything in their workplace. You really think everyone is actually sick on every single sick day, or that every single doctor's appointment on their calendar is a real doctor's appointment? People never make excuses to their manager that are lies? Managers never lie to their employees about a justification or a deadline or a promise or a policy?
Workplace dishonesty is everywhere. Because workplaces are made of human beings. It's just something you learn to manage in a realistic way. People are mostly honest, but they're never entirely honest.
> Ok, but corporations also lie to and defraud their employees all the time. In ways large and small.
That's 100% true, and lamentable. But two wrongs don't make a right. And while one can't control the company's behavior, a person can control their own behavior. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to criticize them when they choose to act without integrity.
> while one can't control the company's behavior, a person can control their own behavior. As such, it is perfectly reasonable to criticize them when they choose to act without integrity.
That leads to a society where people are punished and corporations are not, simply because they are too big to be criticised.
Much more often than people, large and publicly quoted corporations end up becoming inherently evil.
The total self-serving lies made by individuals will always be a drop in the ocean when compared to the self-serving lies of a single S&P500.
They're both wrong, but the real issue here is to start by criticizing and correcting the corporations, not the people. Once it feels like a drop in a glass of water, we can start thinking of criticizing the people.
Actually going along with the BS Of corpos is the bigger and biggest wrong alongside what the corpos do. Not all of us view integrity the same way. Not at all.
> You really think everyone is actually sick on every single sick day, or that every single doctor's appointment on their calendar is a real doctor's appointment?
I used to run standups using a Slack plug-in, because my team was in several different time zones. It was really effective. We met once/week in a meeting....
My team does this, with the only downside that people are unlikely to pay attention. It at least satisfies mgmt without getting the team bogged down for an hour.
But if there's a problem I already bring it up via online chat, and will at least get private messages from the extremely shy people (which is most of them).
If stand up takes an hour, there’s some real issues there. I have the occasional one take longer but they generally last 5-10 minutes. Anything that needs discussion is taken to separate calls.
I viewed academia as altruistic and relatively enlightened. And I've certainly met many who live up to that.
I've also occasionally heard of entire academic departments who should be in jail, for being pieces of crud.
Then there's what I'm guessing is the bulk of academia: care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be.
That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
> That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
I regularly see both worlds. What I find more troubling in academia is that it is difficult to openly talk about how flawed the system is, that people make mistakes, that papers have mistakes (the own ones as well as others'). We know all software has bugs; but the code that a PhD student hacks together over night is assumed to be flawless (the more senior people rarely even glance at it), otherwise the paper is all wrong, and papers are set in stone...
So I genuinely struggle with the lack of a proper failure culture in academia, as it is designed as a system that is fundamentally geared against openly discussing failure.
I suspect there's many reasons for the field/department cultures.
One of them, which was surprising to me (which I first heard from a friend in a hard STEM field), was what happens when student A's thesis result is found to be wrong due to flawed experiment... but only after student B is well into their own dissertation building upon A's result. Reportedly, everyone involved (A, B, their PI, the department, the university) has incentive to keep quiet about student A's bad result. B has an academic career to move forward, within funding and timeframes, and everyone else cares about reputation and money. And there is only downside for bystanders to complain, especially if it's other students especially vulnerable to retaliation/disfavor.
Another one I've seen, which is less surprising, is when there seems to be a culture of alliance or truce among faculty. So, if someone is misbehaving, or makes a mistake, it's understood that no one is going to call them out or interfere, and no one wants to even know about it more than they have to. In general, no selfish benefit can come from that, but a whole lot of negative feedback can. Mind your own business, glass houses, etc.
> care/cared about the field and their impact to some extent, try to do their jobs competently, look out for their students, maybe still try to find interest in the work, and operate within whatever hostile politics they're at the mercy of, without being cruddier than they absolutely have to be. That's not as inspiring as it could be, but it's a lot better than the tech industry overall.
That's pretty much my experience from 20+ years ago.
One thing that I didn't appreciate when I left the ivory tower was the extent of the replication "crisis."
If other academics can't replicate your work in some esoteric corner of bio research, it's no big deal--some people get burned wasting time, but the research just atrophies in the end.
But in the biotech / pharma industry, we in-licensed a lot of un-replicatable garbage from academia.
And replication was important to us because we actually had to make a drug that was effective (which loosely translates to ... "clinicians must be able to replicate your drug's efficacy.").*
* I'm not sure how true this is anymore, given politicization of regulatory bodies, but it was an eye-opener to me years ago.
Yeah, I would say that my time in academia disillusioned me somewhat, but not to the level that some people here are expressing. I never got the sense that people were falsifying data, directly (but covertly) backstabbing one another, or anything really awful like that.
But there are plenty of disheartening things that don't rise to that level of actual malfeasance. People get so comfortable in their tenured positions that they can lose touch with reality (e.g., the reality of how difficult their grad students' lives are). Even if they don't engage in actual research misconduct, there's a tendency for people to put their thumb on the scale in various ways (often, I think, without being aware of it), many of them connected to a sort of confirmation bias, in terms of who they think is a "good fit" for a job, what kind of work they want to support, etc. In my experience they are at best dismissive and at worst offended by the idea that maybe the current financial/employment model of higher education isn't the best (e.g., that maybe you shouldn't have a two-tiered system of tenure-track and non-ladder faculty with wildly differing payscales, but rather should just have a larger number of people doing varying amounts of teaching and research for varying but roughly comparable levels of pay).
I felt like virtually everyone I met was in some sense committed to the truth, but often they were committed to their own view of the truth, which was usually a defensible and reasonable view but not the only view, and not as clearly distinct from other reasonable views as they felt it was. And they varied considerably in how much they felt it was acceptable or necessary to engage in minor shenanigans in order to keep moving forward (e.g., to what extent they'd compromise their actual beliefs in order to placate journal editors and get something published).
Also, there is often something endearing about how academics can be genuinely emotionally invested, sometimes to the point of rage or ecstasy, in matters so obscure that the average person wouldn't give them a second thought. It's sort of like finding someone who's a fan of some TV show that ran for 12 episodes in 1983 and is adorably gushy about it. Even the people I met who were quite cognizant of making strategic career moves and other such practical stuff still had a lot of this geeky obsession about them.
A lot of this may vary from one field to another. But on the whole there are many worse people in the world than academics.
As an US undergrad decades ago, at a major (non-elite) research school, I was already discovering these criticisms of the current academic system, in action, way back then. So I don't think we can blame much of any 'fraud' increase going on today on that system. Today, perception of fraud may be on the increase.
(I started to become alert to what that program was really about when I took one of the classes -critical- to my major. It involved a lot of heavy math, and was being taught by a TA with a -very poor- command of the English language. When I complained, my Princeton-grad advisor's reply was 'this course is to separate the men from the boys'. Yeah, thanks pal.
So far as I know, he published very few cited papers.)
Well, the amount of money being wasted is generally smaller, and often the results are not harming hundreds of millions of people around the world. (But it depends on the field.)
In Australia, a million dollars (US or AUD, doesn't matter) is a deposit on a nice home.
My former boss just sold his business and become a multi-millionaire. He'll have to go back into the workforce to be able to afford a decent -- but not palatial -- home in a nice suburb.
Some people do talk like that. For example, the well-read humanities major analogue of "10x techbro" can effortlessly whip out a more sophisticated analysis or assessment, with better prose.
And some of those will say things like that with one or more levels on top. Such as if they know the person they're talking with will get the reference or archetype, or the allusion they're making, and they're really saying something more. Like (just one example) it means: "I like you, and there's some literal truth to what I'm saying, but you get the real thing I'm saying, because we get each other, like not everybody can, and also you should remember to have a sense of humor, and I think you needed me to say it this way".
(But I'm highly skeptical of people on social media, claiming "my young child just said: [something sounding like a speech crafted by the poster]".)
Ever wonder about why articles in Sports Illustrated go off on politics? Same reason.
These writers, by and large, went to Ivy League schools. Their classmates were hired at the New York Times (serious) or Saturday Night Live (funny). They want to point out hey, I have a great vocabulary and know art and such, too. Even if I just nominally write about clothes or baseball.
> (need to find time to buy an updated one (and a spare) w/ USB-C)
Once you find a TrackPoint keyboard model that you like, buy spares, since you might have a hard time getting a good design in the future.
For example, they went to a lot of trouble to develop TrackPoint keyboard SK-8855, with community input, and then discontinued it. To cries of anguish, scalpers and price-gouging on last remaining stock, and, years later, people selling filthy broken used ones for more than they cost new.
I don't think Lenovo has quite the same design sensibilities as IBM ThinkPad team had:
* "You, the user, want to throw away IBM's famed keyboards, and have a chiclet keyboard as the only option." (No.)
* "You want to remove the function keys that aren't necessary for Twitter." (No.)
* "You want to remove the tactile cues from TrackPoint buttons, so it looks more sleek, for your TikTok scrolling." (No. This is not a mindless "content consumer" device. "Think" is right there, in the name.)
* "You want to remove the TrackPoint buttons altogether, from a workstation laptop, so you can get RSI from clicking with your thumb on the touchpad below instead." (No, and now I think you are just trying to sabotage all the smart people who were using ThinkPads before.)
I'm still surprised that IBM was even allowed by the US gov't to sell ThinkPad to China. It was beloved fleet tech of US big business and government, as well beloved by techies ("innovators"). And maybe also a source of technology excellence pride, like fewer companies are now. Imagine the iPhone business being sold to China. Or Cisco being sold.
The writer didn't actually say they feel "guilty" about it, nor that they should feel "guilty" about it.
But that term triggers libertarian sociopaths. Any idea of care for others as a priority threatens their desire to be allowed to take whatever they can.
I'm sure Google knows this, and also knows that that many of these answers wouldn't pass any prior standard of copyright fair use.
I suspect Google were kinda "forced" into it by the sudden popularity of OpenAI-Microsoft (who have fewer ethical qualms) and the desire to keep feeling their gazillion-dollar machine rather than have it wither and become a has-been.
"If we don't do it, everyone else will anyway, and we'll be less evil with that power than those guys." Usually that's just a convenient selfish rationalization, but this time it might actually be true.
Still, Google is currently ripping off and screwing over the Web, in a way that they still knew was wrong as recently as a few years ago, pre-ChatGPT.
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