At some point the ‘build it and they will come’ model runs into a wall of reality, because people don’t do things just because you really hope they will, but because it makes sense for them.

Take digital cameras as an example. They enjoyed a massive boom about 20 years ago as the technology developed. Then the technology became good enough, and phones became more convenient, and now cameras are returning to being a relatively niche and expensive product. Funnily enough, phones are running into the same problem, which is that they are good enough, and people are more reluctant to run out and buy the latest product now.

All of which is to say, I think AI will eventually settle into a market niche, offering useful tools for data analysis, multimedia editing, and coding, to say nothing of other fields I haven’t thought of. I also think that market niche will not be sufficient to sustain the enormous resources being dedicated to the AI industry at present, simply because they’re wildly overestimating AI’s appeal to the public.

Embarrassing for BMW.

Yes — I think if I were to teach a large undergraduate class tomorrow I would go with a combination of handwritten exams and, for homework assignments, critical analyses of the most obscure examples of whatever is being studied possible so that AI has no idea what you’re even on about (in my field, ask it to analyse music; it’s hopeless). Multiple choice is fine for stuff that can be rote learned.

The gold standard would be to make each student do an oral defense of their work. Hand-written exams are good too. Both of these approaches are time-consuming to mark, though.

Assessment design can require students to perform analysis of rare and obscure source material, so that there are no published materials for AI to draw on (which can make it struggle). Similarly, asking for a good bibliography that lists the sources used in the text and formats it correctly would show up the hallucinatory tendencies of AI, I think — though I haven’t tried the latest models.

I can’t be the only one who actively tries to reduce the number of subscriptions I have. It’s terrible for the monthly budget. Gamepass lasted only a few months for me before I decided that I didn’t get sufficient value out of it. Something about paying monthly to retain access to a game that I can otherwise buy rubbed me the wrong way.

I haven’t posted on Reddit since they killed third-party apps. Funny thing is, I was a paid subscriber for years before they did that.

Here to be the change I want to see in the world. Go Lemmy.