On the implications of an All Things to All People Device.
Category: Artificial Intelligence
What is creativity, and can chatbots have it?
Creativity requires a new take on something. An original perspective. Something no one else has thought of. LLMs, by definition, produce the kinds of things they have already seen. The kinds of things that already exist. The kinds of things that reinforce the status quo, entrench bias, and emphasise the mundane.
Hallucinations all the way down
The thing is, it's not reasoning. It's not a reasoning machine. It's not even trying to give you correct answers. It's trying to give you statistically plausible text. The fact that the plausible text is occasionally correct is the surprise. The fact that regularly gets things wrong is exactly how these systems work.
Schrödinger’s AI
Pushing back against AI hype sometimes feels futile, but every person you reach matters. So how do we fight back?
Ethical uses of AI
There is no ethical way to use AI. At least not the Large Language Models (LLMs) we’re mostly talking about these days when we talk about AI. I’m going to unpack that in a moment, but first let me stress that I am not, for a moment, calling teachers who use AI unethical. The ethical responsibility here does not lie with users of LLMs. It lies firmly with the industry that has created and promoted the use of these machines in wholly unethical ways.