Many of the people pushing today for AI to be used in all organisations, particularly of the ChatGPT/LLM persuasion, were pushing NFTs and, before that, cryptocurrencies. And the blockchain, of course. How many meetings we had in our organisations (including universities) asking us to think of blockchain applications for research projects or teaching? A few.
Before all that, 2012 was the year of the MOOC (Massive open online course), when Coursera, Udacity and edX were going to disrupt and break universities. Everyone had to spend, sorry, invest on developing online courses because of the fear of missing out (FOMO). MOOCs are popular, but did not affect university attendance at the predicted scale and universities didn’t make money with most courses.
Now “prompt engineers” insist that we are missing out the LLM revolution, that our students are falling behind, as we do not allow our students to use ChatGPT in assignments. The same ChatGPT that uses fake citations (hallucinations, my bad) to inexistent journal articles to write the requested introduction. What are we supposed to teach? How do we infuse critical thinking, ethical dilemmas, discussion, etc in a probabilistic parrot trained violating the copyright of half of the internet?
Can there be real experts on a technology that appeared year and a half ago? If I look at what I do for work, how long did it take me to achieve my current level of understanding? Way more than 1.5 years.
You could think of this text as a rant; yes, I am tired of people pushing AI. There are piles of money being burnt by large companies right now, a field full of grifters, huge environmental issues as these things use as much power as a small country, and plenty of other distractions. Everyone wants to make money before the whole thing collapses.
Now, if you want to read someone much more tired than me, a scathing post, then I Will [expletive] Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again is a great piece.
PS. I crossposted this text in LinkedIn and my WordPress blog. Both of them offered AI to write my post. Sigh. Featured Image: Existential Comics 15