May 24, 2024 [Tech]

I received a very nice email today from someone who found my page Resources for 6th grade teachers on coding and programming useful, and wanted to suggest another link for me to add, about AI resources.

I’m sure it’s a useful and useful link, but I don’t feel able to add it. Here’s the email I wrote explaining why:

O,

Thank you for your email, and I’m so glad you found the resources on my website useful.

I’m very skeptical of AI, and very careful about recommending resources about AI. Of course, I think it’s important for students to learn the techniques involved and their potential benefits and harms to our society, but before I can link to resources, I need to do a lot of research to make sure I can back up what is being said.

If you’re surprised to hear that I feel quite negative about AI, my concerns are in three different areas:

• taking someone else’s work and passing it off as your own – systems like ChatGPT and DALL-E consume large amounts of copyrighted material and produce output derived from that material without any reward for the person who created it.
• false results, dangerous behavior and bias – many companies promote AI assistants and even AI “friends”, making bold claims about their reliability, despite numerous examples of bots being “tricked” into saying dangerous things (e.g. encouraging suicide) or simply acting in a biased way (e.g. Amazon recruiting an AI that is biased against women). Machine learning models are characterized by the fact that we do not know how they work, so we cannot make supportable claims about how the model will behave.
• environmental impact – training these models requires a lot of energy and water. These costs are currently hidden by large amounts of money being invested in the hope of large gains in value. I don’t think much value has been generated so far…

Of course, I believe we will eventually integrate AI into our society, and hopefully in a responsible way (though I doubt it) but right now I see it as a huge hype cycle, like cryptocurrency and the “cloud” before it.

Sorry, I can’t provide links to support my argument, but I ran into the same problem: I didn’t have time to properly check my sources so I could be sure I was sending reliable information. I encourage you to research further!

So, sorry to not be able to help (and to have written the essay for you!) but I can’t add the link you so kindly suggested.

Good luck in your project,

Andy