Guillaume Cabanac Last week, an environmental journal published a paper on the use of renewable energy in cleaning up contaminated land. To read it, you would have to pay 40 euros. But you still wo…
I’ve heard many papers are published to never be read by humans. It only makes sense that some portion of those papers aren’t written by humans either.
I wonder what the overlap is between AI assisted papers and papers with few to no readers.
One important thing is that you have potential. ChatGDP will write something alright-ish, but it’s literally impossible for it to move beyond that. It doesn’t have the power of creativity.
Writing is painful, but it also helps us think clearer about our work and contribution. I think it’s an important part of the process of doing science, no matter which field. And one gets better at it with training.
a test for creativity seriously that work? also after scraping the entire of internet of course someone could think that, ask any programmer and they gonna explain that the IA don’t create anything, it can’t even do basic msth because it don’t gave logic in that,maybe one day, but not with chatgpt of today
Yes, a test for creativity. If you’re going to say something “doesn’t have the power of creativity” then it behooves you to accept the notion that creativity is measurable.
This is the key - it does not create, it can only copy. Which is good enough to fool us - there’s enough stuff to copy out there that you can spend your whole life copying other people and nobody will ever notice you’re not actually creating anything new. What’s more, you’ll probably come across as pretty clever. But you’re not creating anything new.
For me, this poses an existential threat to academia. It might halt development in the field without researchers even noticing: Their words look fine, as if they had thought it through, and they of course read it to make sure it’s logically consistent. However, the creative force is gone. Nothing new will come under the sun - the kind of new thoughts that can only be made by creative humans thinking new thoughts that have never been put on paper before.
If we give up that, what’s even the point of doing science in the first place.
Using ChatGPT to help write parts of the text in the same way you’d use a grammar- or spell-checker (e.g. if English isn’t your first language) after you’ve finished the experiments
Using ChatGPT to write a paper without even doing any experiments
Clearly the second is academic misconduct. The first one is a lot more defensible.
Yes, absolutely. But I still think it has its dangers.
Using it to write the introduction doesn’t change the substance of the paper, yet it does provide the framework for how the reader interprets it, and also often decides whether it’ll be read at all.
Maybe worse, I find that it’s oftem in the painful writing and rewriting of the introduction and conclusion that I truly understand my own contribution - I’ve done the analysis and all that, but in forcing myself to think about the relevance for the field and the reader I also bring myself to better understand what the paper means in a deeper sense. I believe this kind of deep thinking at the end of the process is incredibly valuable, and it’s what I’m afraid we might be losing with AI.
@Vilian@FaceDeer I agree. I’m no programmer but do a fair bit of Linux/powershell/bash scripting. Virtually all the code that ChatGPT gives me is wrong. You tell it the errors, and it gives you a modified script with errors, point out those errors and it’s go back to its first answer. The only thing it is useful for is writing lots of basic code, really quickly. I can just copy/paste then start debugging.
I am a programmer and I’ve found ChatGPT to be able to produce plenty of good, useful code. I haven’t encountered the problems you’re describing in correcting its errors, perhaps you’re not prompting it well.
@FaceDeer@floofloof@henfredemars@PoisonedPrisonPanda@sab@Vilian nah, it was trained in 2021 and parrots 10 year old stack overflow pages. That may have worked a decade ago, but stuff has moved on since then. It still spits out code using AzureAD cmdlets as it doesn’t know MSGraph replace a lot of it in last couple of years. I guess it could be ok if you’re on a legacy tech stack though.
So you’re telling me that the code it generated for me wasn’t good and useful, and that when I told it to correct errors it actually did introduce new errors and restore old ones, contrary to what I just said? Guess all that stuff I got done using its help didn’t actually get done after all and I’m descending ever deeper into a world of delusion, thinking my projects are finished and working when in fact they aren’t.
Obviously if you’re trying to get it to use APIs from after 2021 that’s not going to work. It also won’t bake you a cake if you ask it to. Use tools for the tasks they’re good for, don’t use them for things you know they can’t do.
It’s interesting that you write this because the last place I worked focused on unspecializing by having almost everyone do every job.
In fact, they relocated across the country to save on building costs, and instead of hiring actual technical writers and office staff, they pushed the extra work down on their engineers because it’s more profitable to bill for the engineering time.
I spent much of my job editing papers and I’m not even good at it while getting paid to do embedded design. It was weird. It was basically fraud but walking the fine line of technically legal.
I observed this happening multiple times throughout my career. Sometimes, inefficiency is the point in this case driven by capitalists and market forces.
I’ve heard many papers are published to never be read by humans. It only makes sense that some portion of those papers aren’t written by humans either.
I wonder what the overlap is between AI assisted papers and papers with few to no readers.
The whole system should get ready for the 21st century.
Most of the scientists arent great writers. It does not make sense to still force them to be a good writer.
Let be fishes be good at swimming instead of climbing trees.
In a modern world where basically EVERYTHING is specialized and no generalist is alive anymore we should make use of language tools.
Hell Chatgpt writes an introduction which is fun to read instead or my overcomplicated bullshit that I would have brought up
One important thing is that you have potential. ChatGDP will write something alright-ish, but it’s literally impossible for it to move beyond that. It doesn’t have the power of creativity.
Writing is painful, but it also helps us think clearer about our work and contribution. I think it’s an important part of the process of doing science, no matter which field. And one gets better at it with training.
You sure about that?
a test for creativity seriously that work? also after scraping the entire of internet of course someone could think that, ask any programmer and they gonna explain that the IA don’t create anything, it can’t even do basic msth because it don’t gave logic in that,maybe one day, but not with chatgpt of today
Yes, a test for creativity. If you’re going to say something “doesn’t have the power of creativity” then it behooves you to accept the notion that creativity is measurable.
This is the key - it does not create, it can only copy. Which is good enough to fool us - there’s enough stuff to copy out there that you can spend your whole life copying other people and nobody will ever notice you’re not actually creating anything new. What’s more, you’ll probably come across as pretty clever. But you’re not creating anything new.
For me, this poses an existential threat to academia. It might halt development in the field without researchers even noticing: Their words look fine, as if they had thought it through, and they of course read it to make sure it’s logically consistent. However, the creative force is gone. Nothing new will come under the sun - the kind of new thoughts that can only be made by creative humans thinking new thoughts that have never been put on paper before.
If we give up that, what’s even the point of doing science in the first place.
There’s a difference between:
Using ChatGPT to help write parts of the text in the same way you’d use a grammar- or spell-checker (e.g. if English isn’t your first language) after you’ve finished the experiments
Using ChatGPT to write a paper without even doing any experiments
Clearly the second is academic misconduct. The first one is a lot more defensible.
Yes, absolutely. But I still think it has its dangers.
Using it to write the introduction doesn’t change the substance of the paper, yet it does provide the framework for how the reader interprets it, and also often decides whether it’ll be read at all.
Maybe worse, I find that it’s oftem in the painful writing and rewriting of the introduction and conclusion that I truly understand my own contribution - I’ve done the analysis and all that, but in forcing myself to think about the relevance for the field and the reader I also bring myself to better understand what the paper means in a deeper sense. I believe this kind of deep thinking at the end of the process is incredibly valuable, and it’s what I’m afraid we might be losing with AI.
@Vilian @FaceDeer I agree. I’m no programmer but do a fair bit of Linux/powershell/bash scripting. Virtually all the code that ChatGPT gives me is wrong. You tell it the errors, and it gives you a modified script with errors, point out those errors and it’s go back to its first answer. The only thing it is useful for is writing lots of basic code, really quickly. I can just copy/paste then start debugging.
I am a programmer and I’ve found ChatGPT to be able to produce plenty of good, useful code. I haven’t encountered the problems you’re describing in correcting its errors, perhaps you’re not prompting it well.
@FaceDeer @floofloof @henfredemars @PoisonedPrisonPanda @sab @Vilian nah, it was trained in 2021 and parrots 10 year old stack overflow pages. That may have worked a decade ago, but stuff has moved on since then. It still spits out code using AzureAD cmdlets as it doesn’t know MSGraph replace a lot of it in last couple of years. I guess it could be ok if you’re on a legacy tech stack though.
So you’re telling me that the code it generated for me wasn’t good and useful, and that when I told it to correct errors it actually did introduce new errors and restore old ones, contrary to what I just said? Guess all that stuff I got done using its help didn’t actually get done after all and I’m descending ever deeper into a world of delusion, thinking my projects are finished and working when in fact they aren’t.
Obviously if you’re trying to get it to use APIs from after 2021 that’s not going to work. It also won’t bake you a cake if you ask it to. Use tools for the tasks they’re good for, don’t use them for things you know they can’t do.
It’s interesting that you write this because the last place I worked focused on unspecializing by having almost everyone do every job.
In fact, they relocated across the country to save on building costs, and instead of hiring actual technical writers and office staff, they pushed the extra work down on their engineers because it’s more profitable to bill for the engineering time.
I spent much of my job editing papers and I’m not even good at it while getting paid to do embedded design. It was weird. It was basically fraud but walking the fine line of technically legal.
I observed this happening multiple times throughout my career. Sometimes, inefficiency is the point in this case driven by capitalists and market forces.
I agree, I have no problem with people guiding chatgpt to help them write something they want and they checked it.
Generating bunch of articles even they didn’t read is something else.