A few days ago, my wife confronted me with something like this : Don’t you feel ashamed to spend so much time with AIs, given that you think they’ll likely put an end to humanity ? How can you justify that morally? Your behaviour is inconsistent with your beliefs. You’re encouraging AI, if not with your money, then with your time and attention. It’s like a drug slowly poisoning our entire society. Kids ask ChatGPT to do their homework, everyone asks AIs everything, you first among them. Data centers are draining all available energy and accelerating global warming more than ever, while nobody pays attention anymore. The doom scenario has already begun. You should just stop !
I told her that, while I am pessimistic, uncertainty remains high and I may still be wrong. There is always hope, always a chance of a happy ending, however unlikely it seems. Besides, to identify and fight an enemy, you must understand it. To identify and prevent risks, you must gather information. It is precisely because I have read so much on the subject that I became pessimistic. Ignorance is never an advantage.
So I keep using AI in boring and not boring ways. But deep down, the guilt lingers. I wonder whether I might simply be wrong. Is this collaborationism ?
Don’t you feel ashamed to spend so much time with AIs, given that you think they’ll likely put an end to humanity ? How can you justify that morally? Your behaviour is inconsistent with your beliefs. You’re encouraging AI, if not with your money, then with your time and attention.
AGI labs are currently compute constrained, not funding constrained, so your use of AI by itself will neither speed up nor slow down the end of humanity. There are cases which I would consider positive uses of AI (e.g. speeding up alignment research), and negative uses (e.g. cheating on homework), but I think it very much depends on specifics.
Data centers are draining all available energy and accelerating global warming more than ever, while nobody pays attention anymore. The doom scenario has already begun. You should just stop !
Epoch AI estimates that datacenters will account for about 5% of US energy demand by 2030. Personally this is not the doom scenario I’m worriedabout.
Kids mostly get homework nonconsensually and plenty of homework is not structured in a way that’s very helpful for the child. Maybe, learning to prompt AI well is a better use for a kid. What’s wrong about “cheating” here?
This is a very good question. I think where I see the most issue in cheating on homework, especially for a child, Is that ultimately it becomes a crutch and hinders the growth of critical reasoning skills. Even as a college student I see people who are entirely dependent on AI to complete their homework. Then when finals and midterms come around, they struggle to learn concepts by themselves. I can imagine this would have even larger effects on a child, where their early years in school are the most vital to developing their reasoning skills. Despite the fact that a kid may not receive the homework consensually or it may not be structured well for their learning, I still think that it is important that they learn how to deal with those type of situations with their own reasoning ability to learn and improve.
I think where I see the most issue in cheating on homework, especially for a child, Is that ultimately it becomes a crutch and hinders the growth of critical reasoning skills. [...] I can imagine this would have even larger effects on a child, where their early years in school are the most vital to developing their reasoning skills.
How do you know that the homework creates the growth of critical reasoning skills? Teachers like to believe that but generally don’t do critical reasoning here and try to see whether there’s clear evidence.
Quite often homework does not boil down to actual critical reasoning but to guess the teachers password. Students who actually engage in critical reasoning are quite often getting get marks for disagreeing with the teacher.
Outside of the teaching context good reasoning is about convincing another person, like for example reasoning that homework is good enough for a student that the student sees that it makes sense to do the homework. This is different with homework that’s usually not going to convince anyone of anything. This dynamic trains bad writing habits as Larry McEnerney describes.
As far as learning for the finals and midterm, a teacher could communicate: “I don’t think you will pass the finals and midterms if you don’t do the homework.” and then fail people accordingly for doing poorly on those tests. If that would be the key effect of cheating, you wouldn’t have to try to ban LLM use just like there no ban on not studying for tests.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here. Homework that takes the form of guessing the teachers password is not at all beneficial to the growth of reasoning skills. It only furthers the bad habit of repeating what you’ve heard because you know it’s right without actually learning what that word or phrase means. However, I don’t think that this framework applies to upper level coursework (roughly 9-12).
Homework at this level builds off of what was learned in the classroom very well, and depending on the subject, such as with math or physics, there isn’t really such a thing as guessing the teachers password most of the time. Math and Physics problems, especially in high school, commonly have purely mathematical answers, and even in more creative tasks like Language Arts, the tasks are open-ended. They will normally have some general question or topic for an essay that you have to answer, but other than that you are free to think about it for yourself.
I also believe that homework is more than trying to convince someone of something. Even granting that some homework is poorly designed, the habit of applying what you learned in class to a problem all by yourself is important. This act of working through the problem independently expands your knowledge on the subject and gives you the substance to actually reason with someone on something. Offloading thinking through the problem yourself to an LLM costs the student something real even when the assignment itself isn’t great.
I think my prior comment came across as too against LLM usage. I think LLMs are an incredible tool, especially when it comes to learning new material. However, I still believe that there is a major difference between using LLMs as a tool vs using them to “cheat” on an assignment. Using it to help you when you get stuck or struggle to understand a concept is very similar to just asking a teacher a question. Where as using it to generate the answer you submit is wrong in my eyes. While prompting AI is itself a valuable skill, it requires that the student has enough knowledge to evaluate whether the output is actually correct. A student who doesn’t understand how to solve a physics problem can’t meaningfully judge whether the LLM’s solution is right or where it went wrong. Homework is part of how you build that foundation.
Open-ended language tasks still have the same dynamic. In todays schools teachers quite often give the student who expresses the woke talking points of the day that are related to the assignment better marks then the student who actually engages in anything resembling critical reasoning. Being critical of the ideology of the teacher does not get rewarded, compliance gets rewarded.
The idea that students are just free to think for themselves is very far from the reality of todays education system. It’s a propaganda lie. The kind of lie that would be threatened if you would actually teach people critical thinking skills.
The key problem is that writing outside of the classroom is about getting the reader to receive value while teachers just read what they are supposed to read because they are paid to do so. That as Larry McEnerney describes results in various bad writing habits being learned.
Beyond the qualitative arguments, if this kind of homework would build real world critical thinking skills, the education profession should run scientific studies to validate that claim. They didn’t seem to succeed over decades to try to validate it but just claim it and hope people comply and repeat it instead of engaging in the kind of critical thinking that’s about requiring scientific evidence for claims. Now, LLMs give students a way to avoid being forced to comply.
Students who actually engage in critical reasoning are quite often getting get marks for disagreeing with the teacher.
While I agree with this (and I think you meant they are quite often not getting marks?), this would imply that the students had to read enough of the material to intellectually engage, form an opinion or a view of it opposing their teacher, then proceed to refine that view in the act of ‘doing’ the assignment. That is something one-shotting (not necessarily prompting an AI and going back and forth with it, hardening your opinion and idea over time) an assignment wouldn’t provide.
Using AI to oneshot an assignment doesn’t build critical reasoning skills, but it’s not clear that actually doing the assignment the way the teacher intends builds critical reasoning skills.
The idea that critical reasoning skills are build through those kind of homework assignments is dogma that largely gets believed uncritically by people for whom it is convenient to believe it.
Good question. I suppose if the student were fully honest about cheating on their homework, I would have no objections to it. The problem for me is that is it involves lying or deceiving one’s instructor and peers. This seems bad in principle, and also bad for consequentialist reasons (e.g. encouraging a habit of further lying or deception in the future, incentivizing others to do the same, wasting the instructor’s time, etc.).
Do you think lying to authority figures that force you to do things without your consent is generally bad?
To the extend that good homework exist it’s to the benefit of the student. If the instructor gives homework that either is not to the benefit of the student or fails to make a good case to the student, is it good for them to be able to nonconsensually force the student? Is it really bad if the student asserts their self interests when their only way to do so is lying?
Cheating on homework is somewhat difficult to define perhaps. Is using your calculator cheating when solving a math word problem? Is a lookup for the differential equation or integral cheating because you don’t derive it yourself?
Perhaps it’s a case of stupid homework assignments as one mentioned (my phrasing). I suspect there is also a case of just changes in the world and how one needs to learn to best interact with it. Engineers are taught a lot of math but generally work with both books of tables that provide the answers or with applications that do the same. You just really need to know how to use the tool rather than be able to replicate what the tool does (though if you can you survive without the tool where as the other guy is going to struggle). AI and getting answers to problems, ultimately is what the world is, so learning to work and use the tool correctly, while not yet part of the legacy program, seems to be something a bit different that cheating to me; even if the school or teacher might see it as cheating from a purely definitional perspective.
As a friend of mine back in high school quipped to me one day, being smart is not about what you know, but about knowing where to find what you need to know.
Isn’t that a fully general argument against any boycott / activism? Being vegan doesn’t by itself slow down factory farming either.
I think your revenue does marginally lead to them having higher growth rates, and raising more money and not being “funding constrained” in the next round of funding and researching the next set of capabilities.
I don’t if the right answer is to not use it, but it does seem like a dilemma.
Don’t you feel ashamed to spend so much time with AIs, given that you think they’ll likely put an end to humanity ?
This reads a little like it’s assigning collective guilt to ‘AIs’ as a whole? I think a future misaligned superintelligence probably would want to kill us all, I don’t see any evidence that Claude 4.7 does. If we do rush to superintelligence too quickly, current models probably end up just as dead as the rest of us.
Hmm, being afraid of the race dynamics between countries and AI labs and “likely put[ting] an end to humanity” seems quite separate from whether or not someone uses AI, which itself is quite separate from AI usage by children and the effect this has on their education (which they could also use to learn more, rather than just skip out on homework). For sure, there is some connection between us getting used to the technology, to paying for it and the labs racing, but I imagine that the amount of investment they get dwarfs a single $20 subscription so much, that it’s imperceptible.
So, to me “AI will likely put an end to humanity” and “one should not personally use it” (or “one should not use it all that much”) don’t really follow from one another. (An argument of “the more people use AI, the more normalized it gets, the more integrated it becomes, which might make us want to regulate it less, might make it feel more mundane and less magical/scary, might make us give more power to AI systems, might increase the chances of doom” follows more, but there’s still a disconnect between “AI usage” and “AI usage normalization” in that one could just use AI a lot but not mentioning it outside of AI Safety circles.)
But if they were to, then “a chance of a happy ending” doesn’t feel like a great justification. Like, “smoking doesn’t guarantee cancer” is not a great justification for smoking. But then again, it’d be a collective action problem here, not a personal do-I-accept-my-personal-risk-of-cancer-from-smoking choice and the “everyone should just do their part; not more, not less” and “my individual choice doesn’t matter, if it doesn’t make everyone else (or at least most) others also change” dichotomy would still be there.
A few days ago, my wife confronted me with something like this : Don’t you feel ashamed to spend so much time with AIs, given that you think they’ll likely put an end to humanity ? How can you justify that morally? Your behaviour is inconsistent with your beliefs. You’re encouraging AI, if not with your money, then with your time and attention. It’s like a drug slowly poisoning our entire society. Kids ask ChatGPT to do their homework, everyone asks AIs everything, you first among them. Data centers are draining all available energy and accelerating global warming more than ever, while nobody pays attention anymore. The doom scenario has already begun. You should just stop !
I told her that, while I am pessimistic, uncertainty remains high and I may still be wrong. There is always hope, always a chance of a happy ending, however unlikely it seems. Besides, to identify and fight an enemy, you must understand it. To identify and prevent risks, you must gather information. It is precisely because I have read so much on the subject that I became pessimistic. Ignorance is never an advantage.
So I keep using AI in boring and not boring ways. But deep down, the guilt lingers. I wonder whether I might simply be wrong. Is this collaborationism ?
AGI labs are currently compute constrained, not funding constrained, so your use of AI by itself will neither speed up nor slow down the end of humanity. There are cases which I would consider positive uses of AI (e.g. speeding up alignment research), and negative uses (e.g. cheating on homework), but I think it very much depends on specifics.
Epoch AI estimates that datacenters will account for about 5% of US energy demand by 2030. Personally this is not the doom scenario I’m worried about.
Kids mostly get homework nonconsensually and plenty of homework is not structured in a way that’s very helpful for the child. Maybe, learning to prompt AI well is a better use for a kid. What’s wrong about “cheating” here?
This is a very good question. I think where I see the most issue in cheating on homework, especially for a child, Is that ultimately it becomes a crutch and hinders the growth of critical reasoning skills. Even as a college student I see people who are entirely dependent on AI to complete their homework. Then when finals and midterms come around, they struggle to learn concepts by themselves. I can imagine this would have even larger effects on a child, where their early years in school are the most vital to developing their reasoning skills. Despite the fact that a kid may not receive the homework consensually or it may not be structured well for their learning, I still think that it is important that they learn how to deal with those type of situations with their own reasoning ability to learn and improve.
How do you know that the homework creates the growth of critical reasoning skills? Teachers like to believe that but generally don’t do critical reasoning here and try to see whether there’s clear evidence.
Quite often homework does not boil down to actual critical reasoning but to guess the teachers password. Students who actually engage in critical reasoning are quite often getting get marks for disagreeing with the teacher.
Outside of the teaching context good reasoning is about convincing another person, like for example reasoning that homework is good enough for a student that the student sees that it makes sense to do the homework. This is different with homework that’s usually not going to convince anyone of anything. This dynamic trains bad writing habits as Larry McEnerney describes.
As far as learning for the finals and midterm, a teacher could communicate: “I don’t think you will pass the finals and midterms if you don’t do the homework.” and then fail people accordingly for doing poorly on those tests. If that would be the key effect of cheating, you wouldn’t have to try to ban LLM use just like there no ban on not studying for tests.
I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here. Homework that takes the form of guessing the teachers password is not at all beneficial to the growth of reasoning skills. It only furthers the bad habit of repeating what you’ve heard because you know it’s right without actually learning what that word or phrase means. However, I don’t think that this framework applies to upper level coursework (roughly 9-12).
Homework at this level builds off of what was learned in the classroom very well, and depending on the subject, such as with math or physics, there isn’t really such a thing as guessing the teachers password most of the time. Math and Physics problems, especially in high school, commonly have purely mathematical answers, and even in more creative tasks like Language Arts, the tasks are open-ended. They will normally have some general question or topic for an essay that you have to answer, but other than that you are free to think about it for yourself.
I also believe that homework is more than trying to convince someone of something. Even granting that some homework is poorly designed, the habit of applying what you learned in class to a problem all by yourself is important. This act of working through the problem independently expands your knowledge on the subject and gives you the substance to actually reason with someone on something. Offloading thinking through the problem yourself to an LLM costs the student something real even when the assignment itself isn’t great.
I think my prior comment came across as too against LLM usage. I think LLMs are an incredible tool, especially when it comes to learning new material. However, I still believe that there is a major difference between using LLMs as a tool vs using them to “cheat” on an assignment. Using it to help you when you get stuck or struggle to understand a concept is very similar to just asking a teacher a question. Where as using it to generate the answer you submit is wrong in my eyes. While prompting AI is itself a valuable skill, it requires that the student has enough knowledge to evaluate whether the output is actually correct. A student who doesn’t understand how to solve a physics problem can’t meaningfully judge whether the LLM’s solution is right or where it went wrong. Homework is part of how you build that foundation.
Open-ended language tasks still have the same dynamic. In todays schools teachers quite often give the student who expresses the woke talking points of the day that are related to the assignment better marks then the student who actually engages in anything resembling critical reasoning. Being critical of the ideology of the teacher does not get rewarded, compliance gets rewarded.
The idea that students are just free to think for themselves is very far from the reality of todays education system. It’s a propaganda lie. The kind of lie that would be threatened if you would actually teach people critical thinking skills.
The key problem is that writing outside of the classroom is about getting the reader to receive value while teachers just read what they are supposed to read because they are paid to do so. That as Larry McEnerney describes results in various bad writing habits being learned.
Beyond the qualitative arguments, if this kind of homework would build real world critical thinking skills, the education profession should run scientific studies to validate that claim. They didn’t seem to succeed over decades to try to validate it but just claim it and hope people comply and repeat it instead of engaging in the kind of critical thinking that’s about requiring scientific evidence for claims. Now, LLMs give students a way to avoid being forced to comply.
While I agree with this (and I think you meant they are quite often not getting marks?), this would imply that the students had to read enough of the material to intellectually engage, form an opinion or a view of it opposing their teacher, then proceed to refine that view in the act of ‘doing’ the assignment. That is something one-shotting (not necessarily prompting an AI and going back and forth with it, hardening your opinion and idea over time) an assignment wouldn’t provide.
I missed “bad” before marks.
Using AI to oneshot an assignment doesn’t build critical reasoning skills, but it’s not clear that actually doing the assignment the way the teacher intends builds critical reasoning skills.
The idea that critical reasoning skills are build through those kind of homework assignments is dogma that largely gets believed uncritically by people for whom it is convenient to believe it.
Good question. I suppose if the student were fully honest about cheating on their homework, I would have no objections to it. The problem for me is that is it involves lying or deceiving one’s instructor and peers. This seems bad in principle, and also bad for consequentialist reasons (e.g. encouraging a habit of further lying or deception in the future, incentivizing others to do the same, wasting the instructor’s time, etc.).
Do you think lying to authority figures that force you to do things without your consent is generally bad?
To the extend that good homework exist it’s to the benefit of the student. If the instructor gives homework that either is not to the benefit of the student or fails to make a good case to the student, is it good for them to be able to nonconsensually force the student? Is it really bad if the student asserts their self interests when their only way to do so is lying?
Cheating on homework is somewhat difficult to define perhaps. Is using your calculator cheating when solving a math word problem? Is a lookup for the differential equation or integral cheating because you don’t derive it yourself?
Perhaps it’s a case of stupid homework assignments as one mentioned (my phrasing). I suspect there is also a case of just changes in the world and how one needs to learn to best interact with it. Engineers are taught a lot of math but generally work with both books of tables that provide the answers or with applications that do the same. You just really need to know how to use the tool rather than be able to replicate what the tool does (though if you can you survive without the tool where as the other guy is going to struggle). AI and getting answers to problems, ultimately is what the world is, so learning to work and use the tool correctly, while not yet part of the legacy program, seems to be something a bit different that cheating to me; even if the school or teacher might see it as cheating from a purely definitional perspective.
As a friend of mine back in high school quipped to me one day, being smart is not about what you know, but about knowing where to find what you need to know.
Isn’t that a fully general argument against any boycott / activism? Being vegan doesn’t by itself slow down factory farming either.
I think your revenue does marginally lead to them having higher growth rates, and raising more money and not being “funding constrained” in the next round of funding and researching the next set of capabilities.
I don’t if the right answer is to not use it, but it does seem like a dilemma.
This reads a little like it’s assigning collective guilt to ‘AIs’ as a whole? I think a future misaligned superintelligence probably would want to kill us all, I don’t see any evidence that Claude 4.7 does. If we do rush to superintelligence too quickly, current models probably end up just as dead as the rest of us.
Hmm, being afraid of the race dynamics between countries and AI labs and “likely put[ting] an end to humanity” seems quite separate from whether or not someone uses AI, which itself is quite separate from AI usage by children and the effect this has on their education (which they could also use to learn more, rather than just skip out on homework). For sure, there is some connection between us getting used to the technology, to paying for it and the labs racing, but I imagine that the amount of investment they get dwarfs a single $20 subscription so much, that it’s imperceptible.
So, to me “AI will likely put an end to humanity” and “one should not personally use it” (or “one should not use it all that much”) don’t really follow from one another. (An argument of “the more people use AI, the more normalized it gets, the more integrated it becomes, which might make us want to regulate it less, might make it feel more mundane and less magical/scary, might make us give more power to AI systems, might increase the chances of doom” follows more, but there’s still a disconnect between “AI usage” and “AI usage normalization” in that one could just use AI a lot but not mentioning it outside of AI Safety circles.)
But if they were to, then “a chance of a happy ending” doesn’t feel like a great justification. Like, “smoking doesn’t guarantee cancer” is not a great justification for smoking. But then again, it’d be a collective action problem here, not a personal do-I-accept-my-personal-risk-of-cancer-from-smoking choice and the “everyone should just do their part; not more, not less” and “my individual choice doesn’t matter, if it doesn’t make everyone else (or at least most) others also change” dichotomy would still be there.