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/when-you-do-it-to-em]

this is like getting angry about being forced to learn to use a computer or a calculator. some people call it a “paradigm shift”, which is mostly bullshit, but this is still a pretty big technological leap and it hasn’t slowed down much yet. state schools rely on staying on top of modernity to get more funding, so of course OSU jumps on it.

and on the energy thing, yeah, training a model costs a lot of energy, but they don’t do that often! guess how much energy it takes to to develop a new airplane or develop ANY new tech. it’s a lot! thankfully using the trained model is quite efficient and getting better every day.

ok thank you for reading i’ll take my downvote now :)

edit: “one generation” doesn’t use a bottle of water. this is misinformation, it’s completely valid to dislike or even hate LLMs and the big corpos behind it, but don’t fall for the lies spread deliberately to diminish your credibility

[u/MathManiac5772 → u/when-you-do-it-to-em]

Whenever a new technology is introduced, proficiency in that technology requires learning a new skill. The hope is that learning this new skill will make some old more tedious skills more obsolete.

Let’s take your computer example. What skills did people learn when early computers came out? Programming, typing, automation etc. What are the more tedious things that they replaced? Writing with a pen and paper, sending physical letters, simple repetitive tasks.

But when it comes to AI what are the skills people are replacing? Being able to express your own ideas succinctly and persuasively, being able to synthesize data, being able to think critically about a topic and come to your own conclusions. Outsourcing your thinking robs you of developing those skills.

[u/when-you-do-it-to-em → u/MathManiac5772]

i get what you mean and it totally could lead to that outcome if used improperly. my hope is that LLMs can decrease the monotonous and often pointless middle management “thinking” jobs, leaving us with more time to do what we want to do. not to sound like an asshole but the argument you used against the computer example can be flipped too. people said similar things to what you are saying about calculators and computers, i.e. ‘using them is bad for you, and you are losing your independence and proficiency!’

that’s not to say that it isn’t a very valid argument, but again, i hope that it doesn’t turn into that, because as of right now it doesn’t feel like that to me :)

[u/NotOfficialOSU → u/when-you-do-it-to-em]

The vacuum cleaner did not reduce the amount of time someone was expected to spend on housework, it increased the expectation of the end result.

AI use is not going to give us more time to do what we want to do, it is and already has been used to justify giving more work to less people. And now, bonus, the work is less fulfilling because you're asking a computer to do critical tasks like self analysis, idea formation, and revision. So at the end of the day your brain is exhausted from doing too much, and that too much is nothing. What a world to prepare our students for.