Who watches the AI ‘fact’ generators?
Today, our betters in Westminster have lovely, cheerful ‘news’ for us:“Newspaper headlines: Energy bills to ‘tumble’ and Hunt ‘negative talk’ warning” (link). Aren’t you glad? Never mind that Mr Shapps had already hinted last week that this would happen – it’s ‘News’ today.
Why we should ‘rejoice’ over the piffling sum of about £450 being taken off our bills which are now well into the £3,500, that’s the secret of our ‘betters’ who are incapable of ‘doing maff’. If, as reports outside the Westminster editorial chambers mentioned, the gas price has fallen below the sums at the start of the Ukrainian war, then surely there’s a digit missing in this fabulous sum of reduced energy price we are told to be happy about!
Now that I’ve got this angry grumble out of the way there’s another item which The Times suddenly seems very keen on: AI. There are two reports on their online front page this morning, one is the leading article at the time of writing. This is the headline: “AI ‘is clear and present danger to education’ – School leaders announce joint response to tech” (link, paywalled). I’ll point out in an aside that the accompanying photo is a bit off: how many male teachers are actually teaching in our schools?
Anyway, the point of this article is that some head teachers have got together a conference about those AI dangers and wrote a letter to The Times. Here are some remarks which I found entertaining (all emphases are mine):
“Head teachers’ fears go beyond AI’s potential to aid cheating, encompassing the impact on children’s mental and physical health and even the future of the teaching profession. Their letter says: “Schools are bewildered by the very fast rate of change in AI and seek secure guidance on the best way forward, but whose advice can we trust? We have no confidence that the large digital companies will be capable of regulating themselves in the interests of students, staff and schools and in the past the government has not shown itself capable or willing to do so.” (link, paywalled)
Yeah – bad government, bad Big Tech: we get it. Keep the question about whom to trust in mind and note well their worry about ‘the future of the teaching profession’. There’s more, e.g. when Mr Seldon who seems to be the chief letter writer warns that the greatest
“threat for teachers and pupils alike was “infantilisation”, because “AI will make life easy and strip away learning and teaching — unless we get ahead of it.” (link, paywalled).
Never mind that during the lockdowns schools were shown to be in the digital stone age as all those teachers, cowering at home, were apparently incapable of providing digital content for their kids. Moreover, I well recall the howls about ‘deprivation’ when schools didn’t have enough tablets or laptops available in their schools. So on what computers is this AI going to be run on?
Here are two more quotes to keep for the record. Firstly Mr Seldon is saying that this is all developing ‘too rapidly and that
“there’s deep concern that the technology will be used for [children’s] learning, their stimulation, their care. The grounding of mental health is in relationships and human contact.” (link, paywalled).
Odd, isn’t it, that these arguments weren’t heard by teachers unions when kids were locked out of their schools during the covid years! And finally, after acknowledging that AI might ‘free’ teachers for more ‘interpersonal contacts’,
“He added: “I’m worried young people are losing touch with reality, spending so much time interacting with augmented reality and virtual reality. As learning becomes more technological, their grasp of what is real and what is normal, what is true and untrue, will be progressively eroded.” (link, paywalled)
Isn’t it already too late to worry about ‘young people losing touch with reality’ when they are already ‘interacting with virtual reality’ and have done so for years, thanks to being glued to their smartphones? Not that their parents are any better …
Meanwhile, columnists in the Westminster press are trying hard to explain that AI isn’t ‘sentient’ while trying to show that ChatBots – which are AI – are quite useful when e.g. trying to dabble ‘in the markets’ (link, paywalled).
The one point not made by those ‘defenders’ of our teachers needing to actually teach, nor by the market dabblers nor by all the other clever tech reporters is that all these AI apps are having to be taught – by humans. There was a lovely little piece in the DT, reporting on ‘armies’ of people in Africa who are checking:
“[…] millions of pages of digitally transcribed text for accuracy, listen to voice assistant recordings and double check security camera alerts, correcting errors and perfecting responses. According to the Economist, one such Chinese data labelling company employed 300,000 people, carefully annotating a syllabus from which AI algorithms can learn. Data labelling jobs are fast becoming part of a new economy of machine learning work across the world. By some estimates it is already a multibillion dollar component of the AI industry.” (paywalled link)
I wonder if there are ‘data labelling jobs’ here in the UK: if not, why not? Are we Brits too lazy – or too ill-educated to do such jobs? I am not surprised that we hear nothing about who and which companies are working so hard on data labelling, making AI into the ‘solution’ for all sorts of problems, from BT’s customer service to ‘teaching’.
However, there was a brief report from the USA yesterday evening which should frighten all of us and which shows that there will be one problem not addressed by teachers and other ChatBot enthusiasts. According to this article, Mr Blinken, US Foreign Sec, announced in a speech that
“ […] the State Department has developed an AI-enabled online Ukraine Content Aggregator to collect verifiable Russian disinformation and then to share that with partners around the world. […] As a system that reflects the data on which it’s trained – including the biases embedded in that data – AI can, of course, amplify discrimination and enable abuses. It also runs the risk of strengthening autocratic governments, including by enabling them to exploit social media even more effectively to manipulate their people and sow division among and within their adversaries.” (paywalled link)
Why does that not scare the collective, ever so independent minds in Westminster? Is it because it’s ‘Teh USA – good, Russia – bad”? Which other agencies are or have already used ‘AI-enabled’ apps to ‘fact-check’ and disseminate info to us plebs?
How can we trust anything we now read on the internet? How can we even trust government ‘announcements’ when we don’t know if they’re AI-generated, the input into this info having come from faceless people, perhaps sitting in Nairobi, employed by Chinese companies?
This should be the true reason for being wary of AI, not the wailing about children ‘losing touch with reality’, a touch most of them seem to have lost already thanks to their smartphone abuse, namely that we can no longer trust any info, any ‘fact-check’ because vested interests push their own agenda by using ‘AI-enabled news’. aimed at blanking out ‘fake’ news generated, of course, by ‘bad ChatBots’ ….
That’s all I have for today. So far, we’re assured, AI ain’t sentient, that it’s only about facts and not about feelings. Well, that’s good, innit, because we’ve seen over the last few years that ‘feelz’ and the alleged hurting of those feelz is what matters to our MSM. So AI cannot fake those … or can it? Have a good weekend.
Unfortunately Viv, Us humans ate of the tree of knowledge
There are many concerns with education but AI is quite low down on the growing list of things that are wrong. Reducing language education or the huge reduction in musical instruments for schools all preceded AI. Translation apps are useful but discourage learning to think and read in another language and the pool of people capable of forming orchestras continues to diminish. Apparently, the UK will soon reach a target (!) of 600,000 foreign students. Walking past the Royal Academy of Music recently it was obvious that foreign students even come here for music education. Many will go back to their countries of origin. Perhaps we will see them again among visiting orchestras as our own decline. Irrespective of the students the teachers are usually foreign born and educated (often Russian for piano but that will probably change in the era of sanctions).
Translation apps can now do real time voice translation. Good for tourists perhaps but they have a definite limitation as meaning can depend on facial expression and body language and more than we often realise. For example, in 2011 Sarkozy referred to rioters in northern suburbs of Paris as ‘racaille’. I remember this because there was brouhaha in the press at the time, The word’s meaning depends on the utterer’s facial expression. If uttered with a dismissive shrug and a raised eye-brow it means ‘hoi-polloi’. If uttered through clenched teeth or similar bodily demeanour it means ‘scum’. That is, there is a pejorative scale for this word from merely dismissive to condemning. from hoi-polloi to scum via riffraff. How would a translation app decide? Only by watching a video of Sarkozy and the linguistic build up was it possible to decide. (He meant ‘scum’ !). Shades of meaning exist in all languages and AI is a long way from replacing humans. An assembly of music robots on stage would not be a concert worth attending and translation apps are useful for tourism level translation only. In the EU parliament, UN etc, delegates wear headphones, but at important summits the leaders have human translators in the room with them. Translation apps only could risk catastrophic misunderstanding.
Journalism about education has focused on so called dumbing down, on political indoctrination, and most recently on sexualising children. All serious matters. Ipads, wikipedia, and smart phones affected classrooms long before the appearance of chatGBT. The head teachers currently exclaiming about AI merely surf the latest thing having ignored or facilitated far more sinister changes to education.
On ID we are well aware of the political corruption of education in the UK. I merely add a lament about the decline of cultural education. These things go together.
If the I in AI ever reaches human level (other than on computational tasks like chess) then machines will answer commands with ‘I don’t feel like it today’ or ‘We are going on strike’. If that happens we should worry. Meanwhile, we should be teaching children (repeatedly) how they can be manipulated by social media and fake videos.
SY- Agreed – totally. When you say ‘va-t-faire’ with a smile it means something entirely different to saying it with a scowl. The implied ‘cuire an oeuf’ is much less strong than other terminations of the phrase(!).
So AI isn’t sentient
Who says that?
Most likely that information originated with AI itself
Oh those far-sighted caring ‘school leaders’ worried about AI. Thats the same group training the next generation of social justice warriors. I suspect their concern is more about a threat to their own world view than anything to do with the true education of children. Time someone put these school leaders in detention for corrupting the curriculum with progressive liberalism. Not all kids leave school able to read and write but most school leavers are on red alert for vague signs of racism or deviations from politically correct opinions.
Matt- I’m pretty sure I read recently some survey or other, saying British youngsters were fourth bestist in reading abiliity in the World.
It did not pass my ‘do you belive that?’ test.
Didn’t Eric say ‘he that cannot write well, cannot think well. And he who cannot think well, others will do it for him’.
Interesting article from FreeNations on the ongoing loss of democracy:
http://freenations.net/from-conservatism-to-corporatism-the-example-of-a-british-political-party
As for “AI” perhaps it needs to be interpreted as “Artificial Indoctrination”. Sadly many of our population have certainly been indoctrinated with the “woke” and climate change nonsense to the point that even trying to discuss it is nigh on impossible.
I did think that smartphone street zombies would be teenagers. But no, one also sees pensioners wandering the streets peering at their smartphones. I saw somebody on a push bike wobbling through the traffic the other day trying to use their smartphone.
Also a twin baby buggy, the two kids with a smartphone apiece.
The smart phone is clearly a government control device. If you have one, your whereabouts can be tracked. Government instructions issued. Your conversations listened to. Everyone you speak to noted. Soon to come, every financial transaction recorded (and taxed). If you’re a fat git, you won’t be allowed to buy a Mars bar.
In ten years? A chip will be inserted into your brain at birth.
Probably manufactured by Tik Tok.
Yet fools continue to buy such things.
So many people already act as though there is a chip in their brain – and they ain’t youngsters! Look at the gullibility of people taking the experimental vax, the amount of people who vote for establishment parties and pay for their own drip feed of propaganda via the TV licence tax.
Was having the chip inserted painful Harold or did you have numbed brain!
I fail to see why one would sumit to the terror!
Arry Again………….more to the point, do you have a Smartphone yourself? I bet the answer to that question is in the affirmative. I mean lets face it, you have electric or wind powered cars at your disposal, and everything at home by your own admission is powered by solar panel, and you appear to be a fully paid up member of the Net Zero Green Agenda, judging by the various pronouncements you have made on this site over the past year or so, so why not a Smartphone as well. Somehow, I just cannot believe our Arry is still using a black Bakelite type 200 GPO telephone with separate bell attached to the wall. I am prepared to be proved wrong though. The proof in the pudding will be whether you reply to this post………..