this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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I don't get how so many people carry their computer illiteracy as a badge of honor.
Chatgpt is useful.
Is it as useful as Tech Evangelists praise it to be? No. Not yet - and perhaps never will be.
But I sure do love to let it write my mails to people who I don't care for, but who I don't want to anger by sending my default 3 word replies.
It's a tool to save time. Use it or pay with your time if you willfully ignore it.
Tech illiteracy. Strong words.
I'm a sysadmin at the IT faculty of a university. I have a front row seat to witness the pervasive mental decline that is the result of chatbots. I have remote access to all lab computers. I see students copy-paste the exercise questions into a chatbot and the output back. Some are unwilling to write a single line of code by themselves. One of the network/cybersecurity teachers is a friend, he's seen attendance drop to half when he revealed he'd block access to chatbots during exams. Even the dean, who was elected because of his progressive views on machine learning, laments new students' unwillingness to learn. It's actual tech illiteracy.
I've sworn off all things AI because I strongly believe that its current state is a detriment to society at large. If a person, especially a kid, is not forced to learn and think, and is allowed to defer to the output of a black box of bias and bad data, it will damage them irreversibly. I will learn every skill that I need, without depending on AI. If you think that makes me an old man yelling at clouds, I have no kind words in response.
x 1000. Between the time I started and finished grad school, Chat GPT had just come out. The difference in students I TA'd at the beginning and end of my career is mind melting. Some of this has to do with COVID losses, though.
But we shouldn't just call out the students. There are professors who are writing fucking grants and papers with it. Can it be done well? Yes. But the number of games talking about Vegetative Electron Microscopy, or introductions whose first sentence reads "As a language model, I do not have opinions about the history of particle models," or completely non sensical graphics generated by spicy photoshop, is baffling.
Some days it held like LLMs are going to burn down the world. I have a hard time being optimistic about them, but even the ancient Greeks complained about writing. It just feels different this time, ya know?
ETA: Just as much of the onus is on grant reviewers and journal editors for uncritically accepting slop into their publications and awarding money to poorly written grants.