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Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”

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Brian Eno: “The biggest problem about AI is not intrinsic to AI. It’s to do with the fact that it’s owned by the same few people”
14 comments

  • Id say that is the primary issue. But even so, AI is basically making education a shitshow. I know people go on about it's utility, but it's only added misery to the parts of my life I care about most. Billionaires aren't making my students cheat at the end of the day.

    • I agree. I never doubted my career choices more than when LLMs became mainstream and I saw the harm they do in classrooms. People need to drop this techno-solutionism and stop pretending that certain technologies can't be inherently harmful.

      • I don't doubt it can be harmful, but I can't help wondering if the problem in education is the LLMs themselves or the educational system being broken in general. I never had LLMs when I was in college/university to begin with, but also, the only time I can remember even being tempted in the general direction of cheating was an online statistics class (one of the few times I did fully online class) that I had trouble focusing on or understanding much at all (at the time, I didn't understand that I probably struggled more with some classes than others because of ADHD/executive functioning focus problems). And I still didn't ideate about actual cheating itself, I just had some test where I tried to guess answers with intuition as an experiment; unsurprisingly, that went badly and I had to study harder going forward in that class to make it up.

        Maybe I was just too goody two shoes to ever consider it seriously, I don't know. But it wasn't really something I even considered as an option. Notably, I also genuinely enjoyed learning if it was a subject that interested me and I usually more liked classes that had projects I could do, rather than rote memorization or long research papers.

        I don't have data on it off-hand, so maybe I'm talking out of my backside, but it seems to me that if people are focused on assignments as meeting metrics and expectations rather than the learning itself, they're more likely to look for ways to game the system, whether for an edge, to get approval, to avoid rejection, etc. So although I can easily believe AI is making it worse in the short-term, I have to wonder why people would go for it in the first place and what can be done at the root at cheating motivations.

    • I think that colleges will respond to this crisis by focusing entirely on exams, and reducing the weighting of practical assignments, which would be a huge loss.

    • Honestly, I would argue that education is a shit show by itself rather than AI in particular making education a shit show. That's why a student would be incentivized to use AI to cheat and solve all of their homework for them. It reminds me of all my math classes where my teachers would emphasize showing your work on paper and solving it without a calculator because that labor built an actual understanding of the work involved. The problem was: I, along with many other kids at the time, felt alienated from the work -- it didn't seem absolutely necessary to know this work through and through due to how it would translate to your career path later, which if you don't have any idea what you wanted to do after school or no use for math above basic arithmetic, most people were fine just using a calculator and I know many people today who still can't do basic calculations on the fly like counting their money or tipping percentages. So that makes me dubious of the idea that "billionaires aren't making my students cheat" when they are exactly the ones who create mass amounts of alienation from our labor and create a job market highly specialized for a select few of people who can make it through this very narrow idea of systemic education, where the rest of the economy is a bunch of service jobs that don't require a person to need deep understanding of topics they went over in school for a grade -- it doesn't help much when it comes to stocking a shelf or handing someone their food. If we existed in a mode of production that didn't brutally wipe a majority of the population's involvement in their own education, you would have way less cheating and a heavily reduced reliance on LLMs doing all the heavy lifting. Furthermore, under this different mode of production, technological advancements like AI would be used for the advancement of humanity rather than fattening the pockets of said billionaires who market it as the quick fix to everything, further alienating people. Individualizing this phenomenon completely obscures all of the systemic things at play in the wider society but especially in education. Western education systems are exclusionary as hell so of course that would drive unscrupulous behaviors in students. But viewing the students who use AI in any capacity as the problem only exacerbates the main issue and lets billionaires get away with murder of the mind (mentacide).

      • AI would be used for the advancement of humanity

        I think this is a bit overplayed. It's the same argument as focusing on its potential utility over how it's actually used. Sure under absolutely perfect conditions, the details of which are unknown yet assumed, AI could become more useful. So what? Such conditions will never arise from "progress." We already had the kind of education that is most effective and most grounded long before anyone gave a damn about progress.

        Further, idk why people treat education as some monolith. I suspect it is because of the School as a technology being so effective at determining and managing "correct" epistemologies and so the medium is the message or something. Certainly there are problems, but the truth is many educaters and academics already know all of this. They know the problems at schools and universities and many even have some practices that bare fruit regardless. No one knows these issues better. We must dispel this notion of teachers as fools lost in their own ass and students as infallible and lacking any responsibility for their education. We paint students as incompetent children when we blame anything and everything but somehow exempt the decisions they make. Sure there is very important context to this, but in any education system students have to put in the work and they have to meet teachers expectations just as teachers must meet students needs. Regardless of class context, "I cheated because capitalism" still makes you a failure with useless ethics and a worthless education. Every breath I take is tyranized by capital. So what? Is this the attitude a union or party should have about education? That expecting it's members to take responsibility for their education is "idividualizing" the problem? My job is to make students successful and awaken them to understanding themselves as scholars and intellectuals that can see how power impacts their lives and shapes their identity, not give in to every excuse to justify our collective failures and justify AI use.

        The problem was: I, along with many other kids at the time, felt alienated from the work – it didn’t seem absolutely necessary to know this work through and through due to how it would translate to your career path later, which if you don’t have any idea what you wanted to do after school or no use for math above basic arithmetic, most people were fine just using a calculator and I know many people today who still can’t do basic calculations on the fly like counting their money or tipping percentages.

        Yes solving math problems is masterbatory and can feel ungrounded in anything you do. So is practicing a musical instrument, or any other number of things that very well may be worth doing. But also there is just a lack of perspective among students due to lacking guidance through metacognition. It's not impossible to teach in a way that highlights how and why what you teach is needed or important. Students often have to be broken out of their neoliberal assumptions that if something won't guarantee them a career that education has no value and can't be grounded in anything. The whole world is seemingly against ethic studies and paints it as useless, and of course students often believe it before their first thoughts on the matter.

        But what does this have to do with anything? Using AI doesn't fill the gap, it doesn't ground students, it does not add any meaning or practically to your studies. It only intensifies these things.

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