Header image: DALL·E 2024-01-03 – a sci-fi image of an Ouroboros
I’ve been slow on taking up using text-based AI.
I jumped on image-based platforms immediately, but my fear/scepticism/ignorance around tools like Chat-GPT have left me playing catch up.
So, I’m going to make a start now, inspired by the interview below from The Ezra Klein Show
(2 Apr 2024) How Should I Be Using A.I. Right Now?
- I find it really hard to just fit it into my own day to day work
- I think getting good at working with A.I. is going to be an important skill in the next few years.
- Give me 30 versions of this sentence in radically different styles.
- The key is to use it in an area where you have expertise, so you can understand what it’s good or bad at, learn the shape of its capabilities.
- replace themselves at their next job.
- like a theme of your work is that the way to approach this is not learning a tool. It is building a relationship.
- fundamental about A.I. is the idea that we technically know how LLMs work, but we don’t know how they work the way they do, or why they’re as good as they are
- So hallucination rates are dropping over time. But the A.I. still makes stuff up because all the A.I. does is hallucinate
it’s better than the average person. And so it’s great as a supplement to weakness, but not to strength. But then, we run back into the problem you talked about, which is, in my weak areas, I have trouble assessing whether the A.I. is accurate or not. So it really becomes sort of a eating its own tail kind of problem.
- Gemini is helpful, and ChatGPT-4 is neutral, and Claude is a bit warmer. But you urge people to go much further than that. You say to give your A.I. a personality. Tell it who to be
- There’s a nice study actually showing that if you emotionally manipulate the A.I., you get better math results.
- Tipping, especially $20 or $100 — saying, I’m about to tip you if you do well, seems to work pretty well.
- It performs slightly worse in December than May, and we think it’s because it has internalized the idea of winter break.
- If I talk to the A.I. and I imply that we’re having a debate, it will never agree with me. If I imply that I’m a teacher and it’s a student, even as much as saying I’m a professor, it is much more pliable.
- KF: persona – skeptical of AI – show me!
- A.I. friends KF: lifelong sidekick AI
an absolute near-term certainty, and sort of an unstoppable one, that we are going to have A.I. relationships in a broader sense
- But the idea, basically, of chain of thought, that seems to work well in almost all cases, is that you’re going to have the A.I. work step by step through a problem. First, outline the problem, you know, the essay you’re going to write. Second, give me the first line of each paragraph. Third, go back and write the entire thing. Fourth, check it and make improvements.
A.I. has no internal monologue, it’s not thinking
- . You can ask the A.I. to summarize where you got in that previous conversation, and the tone the A.I. was taking, and then when you give a new instruction say the interaction I like to have with you is this…
- I put in all of my work that I did prior to getting tenure and said, write my tenure statement. Use exact quotes
And Google also connects to your Gmail, so it’ll read through your Gmail
- what I worry about is that the incentive for profit making will push for A.I. that acts informally as your therapist or your friend, while our worries about experimentation, which are completely valid, are slowing down our ability to do experiments to find out ways to do this right.
- And I think it’s really important to have positive examples, too
writing a first draft is hard, and that work on the draft is where the hard thinking happens. And it’s hard because of that thinking. And the more we outsource drafting to A.I., which I think it is fair to say is a way a lot of people intuitively use it — definitely, a lot of students want to use it that way — the fewer of those insights we’re going to have on those drafts….you make more creative breakthroughs as a writer than an editor. The space for creative breakthrough is much more narrow once you get to editing.
And I do worry that A.I. is going to make us all much more like editors than like writers.
⬆ KF: This is the main pont for me; AI, AI, and chicken nuggets
- And one thing that keeps coming out in the research is that there is a strong disconnect between what students think they’re learning and when they learn [SEOIs]. So there was a great controlled experiment at Harvard in intro science classes, where students either went to a pretty entertaining set of lectures, or else they were forced to do active learning, where they actually did the work in class….
when you have a button that produces really good words for you, on demand, you’re just going to do that. And it’s going to anchor your writing. We can teach people about the value of productive struggle, but I think that during the school years, we have to teach people the value of writing — not just assign an essay and assume that the essay does something magical, but be very intentional about the writing process and how we teach people about how to do that, because I do think the temptation of what I call “the button” is going to be there otherwise, for everybody.
Ethan Mollick
- Klien compares the above to Sparknotes
I think that what people will have to learn is that this tool is a valuable co-intelligence, but is not a replacement for your own struggle.
- the internet did not increase either domestic or global productivity for any real length of time.
- (idea of Jonathan Frankel) My ChatGPT is making my presentation bigger and more impressive, and your ChatGPT is trying to summarize it down to bullet points for you
- , I have lived through the entire internet will change education piece. I have MOOCs, massive online courses, with — quarter million people have taken them. And in the end, you’re just watching a bunch of videos. Like, that doesn’t change education.
- Three books
- “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,”
- The Knowledge,” by Dartnell
- Peter Watts’s “Blindsight.”