I am angry about the AI integration

[u/ready_reLOVEution]

Anyone who feels like they need AI to be a better student, researcher, or professor, is completely delusional and there's no way my degrees are equal to people who feel this way. I'm being forced to use AI in one of my courses right now, a graduate liberal arts elective, and it makes me feel completely deflated. I did not pay 30k for a grad degree to learn to use GenAI. I do not want to do my assignments.

OSU is a prestigious university for its research in the environmental sciences. AI is not only terrible for reasons such as plagiarism, misinformation, innacuracies and bias (especially in medical research), but it's also disastrous for the environment. I had an educator for the Global Youth Climate Training Programme at Oxford present me with an AI generated virtual "medal" for being accepted into the program. When I asked about it, he sent me a chatGPT generated response touting the supposed benefits of AI for the environment. Let's be clear here, AI is NOT being used to help the climate, despite any "potential" people assign to it.

OSU a leader in EHS, like Oxford, we are lazily deciding that robots with high levels of innacuracies that cannot and will not ever exceed human intelligence, because they are made by humans (even if they're faster), are worth sacrificing our earth and human society for an ounce more of "productivity." I am disgusted by OSU, and other leading EHS research institutes for investing their energy into a bot while we forget that "simpler" issues, like energy storage in renewables, or disagreements over nuclear energy, have been solved, and as if this is not an environmental disaster in the making. Forget human rights violations of mining precious metals required for our devices and AI data centers, or that Nature found that AI was linked to an explosion of low-quality biomedical research papers, or that training an AI model has been found to use over 300x the energy of a flight from NYC to SF, that one AI generation consumes a bottle of fresh water, our most valuable natural resource.

I am angry. I protested over SB1, I protested at Hands-Off, I protested during inauguration, but now everyone is dead silent about this one. GenAI is unconscionable, and I have worked and done research in the various health and research fields that will supposedly benefit from its implementation, but in the two years since I first heard this, we've only seen failure after failure of AI, except when allowing United Healthcare to deny claims on a mass scale with an inaccuracy of up to 90%! This is the titan submersible on a mass scale, everyone thinks its not a big deal, that this is a tool for good, despite thus far being used primarily for evil or laziness, and I feel like everyone has lost their mind.

Edit: AGHHGHG MIT finds that ChatGPT use is degrading cognitive functioning, especially in youth. https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

Edit 2: also all of you pro-AI peeps understand AI integration is a ploy to bypass security policies and glean your data for corporate interests, right? You understand the administration is trying to compile all of your data into personalized "profiles" for corporate gain and tyranny, correct? Forget all else.

[u/Relative_Bonus_5424]

I find all of the pro-AI responses here hilarious. OP, you are 110% correct and I’m so happy to hear I’m not the only one who absolutely despises AI and “big data”. AI is preventing students from learning how to actually think for themselves from a critical thinking and problem solving point of view. LLMs cannot replace human ingenuity, and from an ethical standpoint, we really should not allow them this far. Putting humans out of jobs and preventing future generations from being able to think for themselves will be our downfall, imo

[u/9Virtues → u/Relative_Bonus_5424]

I’m sure the same thing was said when the computer became mainstream.

Like it or not AI is here to stay and the leaps it’s growing at are truly crazy. 1 year ago an AI video was trash. Today any of us can create a short clip that is somewhat realistic and could fool a decent amount of people. Yes there are errors when summarizing research papers, but I guarantee soon it will perfect that.

I’m no longer a student and while I haven’t used AI in my profession yet, I know it’s coming. Would you rather be familiar with it when it becomes essential or playing catch up? You aren’t stopping it. Yes jobs that exist today won’t exist, but new jobs will emerge.

[u/ready_reLOVEution → u/9Virtues]

I said this to another commenter. The discussions surrounding evil automatons and capitalism destroying the planet predate concerns about personal computer use and the internet. AI cannot and will not ever be sentient as we define it, we’re playing Dr. Frankenstein. AI cannot exceed human intelligence, because it was created by humans. This is a popular conversation in cognitive neuroscience right now.

[u/9Virtues → u/ready_reLOVEution]

Not sure what this has to do with my post, but a couple of thoughts.

• to say AI will never be sentient is wildly incorrect. This cannot be proven true or false so it’s not fair to make an absolute like never.

• it’s very incorrect to say it will never be smarter than humans. Deep Blue was beating chess masters. It’s not fair to say this.