If you're admitting students to Berkeley who can't figure out how to independently close gaps in their own knowledge quickly (formal or otherwise), you have bigger problems.
I self-taught a bunch of remedial math when I went back to University after many years out. Khan Academy exists. Math tutors exist. They don't just exist, they're amazing.
If I can self-teach basic sequences and series or polynomial factorization or whatever at the age of 30 while juggling a full time job and a full computer science syllabus, an unemployed Berkeley freshman shouldn't struggle with it unless they have a legitimate disability or something.
I experience most bot interactions as sludge. That's not entirely rational on my part, but it does accurately describe my reactions.
Almost never in my life - maybe not even once? - has being directed to an automated service made my life better. It almost always ends up with me on the line with a human, more irritated and poorer for time and patience than I began.
I do not trust commercial GenAI and have had almost uniformly negative and frustrating experiences with it.
The only exception to this has been working with Jira. Jira's user experience is SO bad, and the features they support SO impoverished, I regularly use GenAI to synthesize Jira information into reports. Which I then have to manually verify anyway if the underlying report has consequences for anyone (if it might inform a negative perform assessment, for example), but it does save me that work.
It does not help that I understand the underlying algorithms and have been in or around this space for 20 years now. I've been mildly impressed but fundamentally disappointed by ML/AI since... forever. But now here we are, being directed to a useless support bot whose only real function is to have read and not understood the documentation I already read and understood, and then babble it back to me in the politely useless tones of a chronically underperforming employee who has been skirting termination for years.
It makes people vulnerable to laziness and stupidity lazier and stupider, and it does not appreciably speed me up unless what I need is a very expensive search engine / document summarizer / note taker.
Which is sometimes what I need, and it's good at that.
Everything else just feels like having someone rub their dirty socks on the back of my head. It feels intrusive and gross and subtracts value from my lived experience.
Most people will experience it as sludge, if they experience it at all. Countries that do not aggressively regulate AI out will see our already profoundly eroded customer service ecosystem disintegrate completely. The already opaque and awful systems that determine things like access to credit or access to healthcare will become even more opaque and inscrutable and produce measurably worse outcomes for actual humans.
This is kinda obvious to most people, who are already experiencing an enormous amount of sludge in their daily life.
Tech-bro optimism in the face of GenAI is so painfully decoupled from lived reality it's frightening. Tech has not made the world a better place for most people over the last fifteen years, and it is poised to make things much, much worse.
particularly academic writing... said having worked as an editor at an academic journal long before ChatGPT was a thing, and having corrected many hyphens to m-dashes.
If by "much faster" you mean ~10% faster, then sure. Having actually measured gains across a few teams, I haven't found anything faster than that. And that's making no effort to amortize across the slowdowns introduced by shipping more bugs (which I also measurable, but is not necessarily damning. Yes, I'm well aware of the knee-jerk "then you need to use GenAI to write better tests!" - which, I will add, is more undiscovered, non-free work).
Writing "80% of the code" is not saving "80% of the time". Code is usually trivial and writes itself when other problems are solved.
> When these models fail, the community will often enforce the model and censor the opposing facts. I have encountered several such conflicts.
Censoring opposing fact to enforce the wrong model is religious dogma. Or maybe just dogma. Religious or scientific.
At any rate, it's the antithesis of what the scientific method is. The reality is that scientists in general pay lip service to the scientific method, without forgetting where their paychecks come from (government, military or corporations).
I self-taught a bunch of remedial math when I went back to University after many years out. Khan Academy exists. Math tutors exist. They don't just exist, they're amazing.
If I can self-teach basic sequences and series or polynomial factorization or whatever at the age of 30 while juggling a full time job and a full computer science syllabus, an unemployed Berkeley freshman shouldn't struggle with it unless they have a legitimate disability or something.
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