Also, there's plenty of neuroscience that is produced by very serious researchers that have no problems making comparisons between human brain function and statistical models.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_approaches_to_brain_f...
They're bases for studying the human brain - something which we are very much in our infancy of understanding.
I’d be wary of confidently claiming what AI can and can’t do, at the risk of looking foolish in a decade, or a year, or at the pace things are moving, even a month.
With respect to what the future brings, we do try to address a bit of that in Lesson 16: https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fal...
I think that’s entirely the problem. You’re making linear predictions of the capabilities of non-linear processes. Eventually the predictions and the reality will diverge.
We heard alllllll the same hype about how revolutionary the blockchain was going to be and look how that turned out.
It's a virtue to point out the emperor has no clothes. It's not a virtue to insist clothes tech is close to being revolutionary and if you just understand it harder, you'd see the space where the clothes go.
First, thank you for the link about CoT misrepresentation. I've written a fair bit about this on Bluesky etc but I don't think much if any of that made it into the course yet. We should add this to lesson 6, "They're Not Doing That!"
Your point about humanities courses is just right and encapsulates what we are trying to do. If someone takes the course and engages in the dialectical process and decides we are much too skeptical, great! If they decide we aren't skeptical enough, also great. As we say in the instructor guide:
"We view this as a course in the humanities, because it is a course about what it means to be human in a world where LLMs are becoming ubiquitous, and it is a course about how to live and thrive in such a world. This is not a how-to course for using generative AI. It's a when-to course, and perhaps more importantly a why-not-to course.
"We think that the way to teach these lessons is through a dialectical approach.
"Students have a first-hand appreciation for the power of AI chatbots; they use them daily.
"Students also carry a lot of anxiety. Many students feel conflicted about using AI in their schoolwork. Their teachers have probably scolded them about doing so, or prohibited it entirely. Some students have an intuition that these machines don't have the integrity of human writers.
"Our aim is to provide a framework in which students can explore the benefits and the harms of ChatGPT and other LLM assistants. We want to help them grapple with the contradictions inherent in this new technology, and allow them to forge their own understanding of what it means to be a student, a thinker, and a scholar in a generative AI world."