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Discussion (68 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
A qualifed researcher would have had their agent perform the talk on their behalf rather than waste everyone's time.
I thought about you wrote and I think you are right. Even though I am partial to author's POV ( despite some obvious, glaring issues ), I can't help feeling of two minds about it all. I don't want to undermine existing ecosystem, but then.. the existing ecosystem in research may need some decent shake up.
The word around all the scientific communities which I’m in contact with (to be honest, not so many) is basically “oh, there is no way to stop it, so we’ll embrace it”. All the conferences which I’m active in (say a handful of them) are just pretending nothing is happening and dealing only with blatant and obvious exaggerated cases. If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.
This in particular I found quite interesting:
"My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. "
As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.
It's like the /s sign. Can some people not, for themselves, realize that this text is meant as a more or less a joke ? And before you ask, yeah, I am aware some of the people are on the spectrum, but still...
Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?
I know real life people who write essays with claims as outlandish as "software engineering is an ableist field" and are dead serious. But that assertion belongs just as well in a satire piece. It can be very hard to tell if you don't have prior context for the author.
* some sincere people with very extreme takes,
* some trolls that masquerade as the above, to bully others over their credulousness and lack of guile, which is distinct from sarcasm,
* some trolls that insincerely speak anything that earns engagement,
* and more and more bots that mimic the above
So sadly, the answer to your question is generally yes.
Yes. There are literally people who believe any thinking done without AI is Luddite and subpar.
These are not, in my experience, people who have done any great thinking in their lives. They do tend to tweet a lot.
At the current time I'm writing this, all other top-level comments are engaging with the article as if it were sincere. So, yes.
When it’s satire I think the main blocker of recognition is if you have an emotional reaction first.
As an example, if you are a diehard AI influencer or something you might miss the joke entirely because of the severity of your initial negative reaction.
Just my two cents. Glad I could contribute to completely beating the humor out of this post :)
(I, too, am autistic)
I was going back and forth on whether it was for far longer than I should have been.
Isn't that a mark of great satire? That the argument sort of works within the zeitgeist, thereby showing the zeitgeist to be corrupted.
Over-the-top satire is funny. But it's clumsy. The fact that some people who are being satirised will agree with the satire is what makes it great.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
Guess that makes it official then. We are all automatons pretending to be flesh :-)
Sometimes somebody else comments "why is this getting downvoted, it's satire", and that stops or reverses the influx of downvotes.
Yes. Humor is very hard to grasp via text, especially sarcastic humor, because in person we use voice and body language to signal that something is meant as a joke.
In fact, is the neurotypicals who struggle getting it because they rely on nonverbal cues (like a sarcastic tone of voice), which is missing in text, to detect humor.
Deadpan, dry humor is generally more amenable to the autistic mind, because it doesn't have what we consider noise.
If someone needs a laugh track to tell that something is a joke, then either it's a bad joke that wouldn't be made any better with a laugh track, or the problem exists between keyboard and chair.
Is it making fun of people relying on ChatGPT, or is it just an exaggerated description of how she actually does research, honestly I don't know.
But if you honestly think that someone applying for a postdoc can't explain what their research is about, it's on you.
Don't let this kind of blatant discrimination affect you. The future is bright.
Note: the service is free once you give it access to your bank account.
[0]: https://getproxyai.com/
Edit: downvote from the haters, it's ok this account is managed by my proxy.
I understand we have always conventionally transported goods by horse. Yes, this employee knows nothing about horses, and in fact is rather spooked by them, but we've checked! Their claim to be able to transport goods faster, without a horse, somehow seems to hold up.
Maybe, just maybe, we should take this whole "truck" concept seriously?
Humans can only usefully steer LLMs if they have some understanding or context the LLMs do not.
Scientist as prompter? Yes it seems fairly likely. But to what extent and how quickly will it happen? Surely scientists will still be able to at least give an outline of "their" work even in the future? Maybe?
Otherwise maybe we it will be a sort of inversion of control, where the language model is the supervisor, and the humans in the loop are more like research assistants doing the dirty work? Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton? But this can only be a temporary state of affairs as we won't be needed for that forever.
A scientific project without human involvement? If a paper is published in a journal and no human wrote it and no human read it, is it really science? Does it really advance knowledge. Probably?
remember this the next time you encounter a request to donate your body.
What I'm curious about is this: in the end, experts are the ones who are best at distinguishing hallucinations. If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough? I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.
I have ADHD, and when I get nervous, I tend to forget what I was going to say, so it's even more true for me.
If you're asking it questions, yes. It's like search but with a simulation of understanding and information synthesis far faster than a human can perform it.
If you're having it write your code, no. It's like a junior developer who has no awareness of the bigger picture, of incompatibilities, of understanding that hasn't been contained and can't be derived from the codebase.
> If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough?
The situation the satire is describing is an individual who is unable to tell the difference. The way the scenario is laid out, everything she's 'accomplished' has been to prompt ChatGPT and publish its answers with some degree of editing; it's clear that she, as an individual, is not an expert, does not understand the thing she is presenting, and does not know any of what she has purported to know. This is also a sadly common refrain these days.
> I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.
It's not about memorizing thousands of lines of text; it's about demonstrating to the panel that you have an understanding of the thing you're claiming to have an understanding of.
I work with a lot of software and infrastructure at work. I can tell you how it all (or most of it) works together and interacts. I could not reproduce the configurations of any of the software from memory, nor recite any of the code, but I have an understanding of the system, how it works, what it was designed for, and what choices were made and why.
The professor in this article does not have any of that understanding. It would be as if I had Claude deploy a cluster of X, Y, Z components, configure them, and get them online, and then put on my resume that I had done it. It was accomplished as result of me, but if I don't understand the system then there's no difference between me doing it and the CEO doing it, or my son, or someone from Taskrabbit.
So yeah, it's not about memorization, it's about understanding.
So, plagiarism. Daily.
Reading the title: I hope this is a joke.
First paragraph in: Oh, good, it is a joke.
75% through: Ok, this is a great bit of satire, but this reads uncomfortably like many of the non-joke discussions I've seen around software development over the past year.
I don't get how you can possibly call it plagiarism if it produce a novel breakthrough - by definition, the existing knowledge base doesn't contain the new ideas generated in this process.
And we've proven it can handle complex, novel thinking when it solved a significant Erdos problem back in May: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...
I also acknowledge, when doing so, how I use it.
But, literally typing in a prompt and then massaging its output and then claiming ownership of its plan? Yeah, no.
It doesn't matter if the original article is supposed to be satire. I've been using AI to do some coding, I've been using it to help me plan a much larger project. It's a tool, and it's useful; but I am in control of the project, not letting the AI control me.
Meanwhile in my day job, I've had multiple coworkers pump shit into AI and regurgitate the answer without critical thought. They are letting it make decisions for them without validating it first even.
It's not really satire if we're already dealing with this attitude.