(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



AI's Latest Product: A Spam Generation Machine. Or Writing is Thinking [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2024-06-04  

Perplexity, one of the new AI driven search engines, is offering a product that allows you to create web pages based on prompt inputs. This is marketed as good for teachers and students: “In a blog post, Perplexity says it designed Pages to help educators, researchers, and “hobbyists” share their knowledge.”

Nonsense.

First, you aren’t sharing your knowledge if the work is summarized and found by AI. Claiming otherwise makes you the moral equivalent of celebrities who pretend that the ghostwriters on their books are actual ghosts — invisible to all and not to be found in the material world. Second, these are generative AI products, so a lot of the material is going to be wrong, half-assed, possibly plagiarized, and weirdly off-topic. In fact, the Verge author found that:

The Perplexity-generated page did a passable job of explaining the basics of quantum computing and how AI fits into the technology. But the “research” didn’t go as deep as I could have if I were writing the presentation myself. The more advanced version didn’t even really talk about “the convergence of quantum computing and AI.” It found blog posts talking about quantum inflection points, which is when quantum technologies become more commercially viable and is not at all related to what I asked it to write about. Then, I asked Pages to write a report about myself, mainly because the information there is easily verifiable. But it only took information from my personal website and an article about me on my high school’s website — not from other public, easily accessible sources like my author page on The Verge. It also sometimes elaborated on things that had nothing to do with me. For example, I began my journalism career during the 2008 financial crisis. Instead of talking about the pieces I wrote about mass layoffs, Perplexity explained the beginnings of the financial crisis. (bolding mine)

And of course, it is useless for teacher because it cannot summarize research papers for use in class materials. This really only has two roles: students looking to avoid work and people who want to create authoritative looking link spam.

If you create a web page with this, it can look professional, and it can read professional, especially if you don’t know anything about the topic at hand. This is only going to exacerbate the problem of search results that are garbage for humans but are rewarded by Google’s algorithms because they drive ad revenue. And, of course, it is a disinformation purveyor’s dream. Five bucks says it will produce an authoritative looking web page on the false premise that the 2020 election was stolen or the dangers of vaccines or the fact that the earth is flat.

What is just as scary is what it will do to students. I am not especially worried about cheating — the teacher community seems to have collectively moved from “ChatGPT will make writing superfluous!” to “these things produce crap, so I will just fail it when I see it.” pretty quickly. Writing is not supposed to be about the topic you are writing about. I am sure that any competent student can produce a decent amount of research about any topic they have spent time studying. Writing up the research is about thinking through the research. It is teaching people how to think, how to marshal arguments, how to persuade. Writing helps you learn how to think, not how to write.

When you write about something, you are learning to synthesize your knowledge, learning how to make an argument from that knowledge, learning what is and is not reliable and believable. You are learning to spot the details that matter amidst the fluff that does not, and learning how to convey complex thoughts and opinions to others in a permanent form that they can understand without all of the little clues — body languages, eye contact or lack thereof, etc. — that face-to-face communication provides. It is perhaps the best way to train our minds to live amongst other people. Perplexity’s new tool, and all these supposed writing aids that go beyond spelling and grammar, are destroying the entire purpose of writing.

It is more than a little disturbing that tech barons and other CEOs are so contemptuous of writing that they want to short circuit, replace it with machine generated pap. It very much says to me that these people see no value in thinking carefully, in persuasion, in ambiguity, in detail. Which, given that most of them are hyping a planet destroying plagiarism machine that often tells you that glue and rocks are good to eat, maybe that should not surprise me so. But I don’t have to pretend that their intellectually bankrupt version of life is good.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/6/4/2244300/-AI-s-Latest-Product-A-Spam-Generation-Machine-Or-Writing-is-Thinking?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/