118: "Hell, You don't need me anymore, AI has all you need"

This is a quote from my EE335 professor, who is literally older than computers, and definitely doesn't understand how LLMs work. The leadup to the quote was him telling us to put a complex electromagnetics integral into ChatGPT.

I feel like I'm getting gaslit every time people talk about AI and how useful it is. Like sure, if you hate writing and independent thought, it's great at doing your homework for you (shoutout my lab-mate in one of my classes, who literally uses it for EVERY SINGLE PART OF THE LAB, INCLUDING THE MATH, WHICH IT THEN DOES CONFIDENTLY AND WRONG). I hate it here. I'm going to send my lab professor an email about it actually, because it's the kind of thing that he definitely won't listen to me about, but we've been getting kinda bad grades on our lab reports (passing, but genuinely like barely), and I don't really care about that, I just have to pass the class (sorry mom), but if I can get her to tell us that it's because of the rampant AI slop that's all over our reports (though not my sections, to be perfectly clear), maybe he'll get his head out of his own ass and use his brain for once. He's a nice guy, he just genuinely puts every single possible task into ChatGPT, and it's pissing me off.

AI cannot do math. AI is actually worse at math than Wolfram Alpha (website/program that does math, for WAY LESS RESOURCES than just asking ChatGPT), which is remarkable, because math is kind of the thing that computers are really good at. AI does frequently get close, and it might even be right sometimes, but in complex situations, it uses language patterns, not math, to actually answer the question.

My theory about people who hype up AI is that they either fully don't understand how it works, and believe it to be "intelligent" (great marketing work, bad product), OR, they are personally invested in it, and so want to sell it or some derivative product to you, OR they're literally just so lazy that they submit whatever the infinite resource sucking sound puts out, without any thoughts whatsoever.

I can understand being lazy, I get it, but there is no world in which AI is the right answer, to just about anything. Writing? Plagiarism. Art? Stealing work from real artists, and also plagiarism. Videos? Frighteningly accurate, going to be a massive misinformation problem, also massively plagiarized.

It also, as per every research and analysis article I've seen and read, has no real gains or use case. I read that something like 95% of companies that went all-in on AI in their workflows have seen no increase in productivity, but I'm willing to bet they've seen a massive spike in their resource usage (if you include OpenAI's servers, which I do), and an increase in the amount of double-checking that their work requires.

There is exactly one AI project that I'm a fan of, and that's Google's AlphaFold, which is a model trained on the folding of complex proteins (like in your cells), and did actually make significant advances in the field, because protein folding is incredibly complicated. That's it. No other AI tool or program is interesting to me, especially not as pseudo-cheating in class and on lab reports.