https://www.boston25news.com/news/l...ai-school-project/FLHKVXSQPRDLZD7TTMWCRNI54I/
Parents of Hingham student sue school district after son disciplined for using AI on school project

HINGHAM, Mass. — The parents of a Hingham High School senior disciplined by school officials for using artificial intelligence on his social studies project are now suing the school district claiming that the boy’s civil rights were violated.

Dale and Jennifer Harris of Hingham claim in their lawsuit that their son, identified only as “RNH” in court paperwork, “will suffer irreparable harm that is imminent” after his teachers disciplined him and another classmate for using AI on their school project.

“He’s been accused of cheating and it wasn’t cheating, there was no rule in the handbook against AI,” said Jennifer Harris, the student’s mother.


The couple is also asking the court to order school officials to change their son’s final grade from a “D” to a “B,” to “cease and desist” from barring him from being inducted into the National Honor Society, and “to cease and desist from characterizing the use of artificial intelligence” by their son as “cheating,” the lawsuit states.

It's called cheating.... I think there's a rule about that in the handbook.

A "D" was generous.

 

 

 

While my concerns over the abuse of AI and LLM are pretty well known, we do need to avoid holding them to an unreasonable bar. Human transcriptionists make errors on a pretty regular basis, to, so we need to be rational in our expectations of what is acceptable in automated transcriptions, whether its AI or something else.

Having said that, the kinds of mistakes that these LLMs make are often of a completely different realm and are so far beyond the kinds of mistakes that a human transcriptionist makes, which are usually misspelled words or mischosen words which usually stand out as errors and the correct content can usually inferred with quite some confidence. But these LLMs make up stuff that is not obviously a transcription error as it flows well and is grammatically correct.

Once again, it's not sufficient for the makers of these tools to say that they shouldn't be used for this or that -- the simple fact is that they WILL be used for anything that they CAN be used for. When you have lawyers and doctors blatantly misusing these tools, it is completely unreasonable not to expect just about everyone to abuse them on a routine basis.

 

While my concerns over the abuse of AI and LLM are pretty well known, we do need to avoid holding them to an unreasonable bar. Human transcriptionists make errors on a pretty regular basis, to, so we need to be rational in our expectations of what is acceptable in automated transcriptions, whether its AI or something else.

Having said that, the kinds of mistakes that these LLMs make are often of a completely different realm and are so far beyond the kinds of mistakes that a human transcriptionist makes, which are usually misspelled words or mischosen words which usually stand out as errors and the correct content can usually inferred with quite some confidence. But these LLMs make up stuff that is not obviously a transcription error as it flows well and is grammatically correct.

Once again, it's not sufficient for the makers of these tools to say that they shouldn't be used for this or that -- the simple fact is that they WILL be used for anything that they CAN be used for. When you have lawyers and doctors blatantly misusing these tools, it is completely unreasonable not to expect just about everyone to abuse them on a routine basis.

I had a doctor (a surgeon working on my knees) recently ask if he could record our visit for transcription. I said sure but only on the condition that the original audio recording be preserved as I was pretty sure it was for some sort of AI service. He looked at me and said, that's OK, I'll just take notes.

 

I had a doctor (a surgeon working on my knees) recently ask if he could record our visit for transcription. I said sure but only on the condition that the original audio recording be preserved as I was pretty sure it was for some sort of AI service. He looked at me and said, that's OK, I'll just take notes.

I'm gonna have to remember to do that same thing from now on. Either that, or I'll just say that it's not okay.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/com...bills-rise-for-everyday-customers/ar-AA1tk8tQ
As data centers for AI strain the power grid, bills rise for everyday customers

As a result, costs have already begun going up for customers — or are about to in the near future, according to utility planning documents and energy industry analysts. Some regulators are concerned that the tech companies aren’t paying their fair share, while leaving customers from homeowners to small businesses on the hook.
In Oregon, electric utilities are warning regulators that consumers need protections from rising rates caused by data centers. From Virginia to Ohio and South Carolina, companies are battling over the extent of their responsibility for increases, attempting to fend off anger from customers. In the Mid-Atlantic, the regional power grid’s energy costs shot up dramatically, and data centers are cited as among the root causes of rate increases of up to 20 percent expected in 2025.
...
“The power drain of companies like Google is enormous,” said Buddy Delaney, whose family has been manufacturing and selling custom mattresses in the Columbia, South Carolina, area for 96 years. “We don’t think small businesses like ours should be subsidizing special electricity rates for these companies that have billions of dollars in revenue.”
Google worked out a deal with Dominion Energy, blessed by regulators, to pay 6 cents per kilowatt hour for its power. That is less than half of what residential customers pay, as well as substantially less than is paid by businesses like Best Mattress, the company Delaney’s grandmother founded 96 years ago. The difference amounts to as much as $1,000 on the Best Mattress monthly power bill.

In Portland, Oregon, many people are troubled by their rapidly rising electric bills. After a winter storm this year, a record number of residential customers got shut off for missed payments. Many ratepayers blame the Portland utility’s newly proposed rate hikes on the region’s data center boom. Meanwhile, the state’s second largest utility, PacifiCorp, is asking regulators to approve new fees for data centers and other very large customers.
Change can’t come fast enough for Leslie Oglesby, a former mail carrier from Forest Grove, Oregon, who shared her concerns about rate hikes in a public comment filed with the state’s regulator.
“This increase is not a good solution to seniors living on fixed incomes,” she wrote in an August comment. “They are having to make decisions on heat or cooling. Stop giving discounts to business. Stop the building of these massive data centers.”

 

As data centers for AI strain the power grid governments restrict freedom, bills rise for everyday customers

FIFY.

 

https://news.mit.edu/2024/generative-ai-lacks-coherent-world-understanding-1105
Despite its impressive output, generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world
Researchers show that even the best-performing large language models don’t form a true model of the world and its rules, and can thus fail unexpectedly on similar tasks.

Large language models can do impressive things, like write poetry or generate viable computer programs, even though these models are trained to predict words that come next in a piece of text.

Such surprising capabilities can make it seem like the models are implicitly learning some general truths about the world.

But that isn’t necessarily the case, according to a new study. The researchers found that a popular type of generative AI model can provide turn-by-turn driving directions in New York City with near-perfect accuracy — without having formed an accurate internal map of the city.

Despite the model’s uncanny ability to navigate effectively, when the researchers closed some streets and added detours, its performance plummeted.

When they dug deeper, the researchers found that the New York maps the model implicitly generated had many nonexistent streets curving between the grid and connecting far away intersections.

“Often, we see these models do impressive things and think they must have understood something about the world. I hope we can convince people that this is a question to think very carefully about, and we don’t have to rely on our own intuitions to answer it,” says Rambachan.

 

https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/confirmed-llms-have-indeed-reached

The economics are likely to be grim. Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence. As I have always warned, that’s just a fantasy. There is no principled solution to hallucinations in systems that traffic only in the statistics of language without explicit representation of facts and explicit tools to reason over those facts.

https://www.gspeakers.com/topics/the-upsides-downsides-and-risks-of-using-generative-ai-tools/

Gary Marcus is a leading voice in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. The co-founder of the Center for the Advancement of Trustworthy AI, he is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI (artificial intelligence), anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and has been a leading advocate of neurosymbolic AI for three decades. In outstanding testimony before the U.S. Senate, an energizing TED Talk, an exceptional New York Times Q&A, and on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Marcus has emerged as a prominent voice urging for international AI research and regulation.

Trained by Steven Pinker, he received his PhD from MIT at age of 23 and was a professor at NYU for 20 years before becoming Founder and CEO of Geometric Intelligence, a machine learning company, which was acquired by Uber in 2016.

As Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU, he is also known for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. He is the author of five books, including the bestseller “Guitar Zero” (2012). His 2001 book “The Algebraic Mind” foreshadowed the hallucination problem that plague current AI systems. “Rebooting AI,”(2019), with Ernest Davis, calls for fundamental changes in how we approach artificial intelligence and was one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.

His 2022 article “Deep Learning is Hitting a Wall” initially enraged many AI researchers but was ultimately named one of Pocket’s Best Tech Articles of 2022. Its key conclusions –that current AI systems face serious limits in truth, comprehension and reliability—have now been widely accepted even by many of his most prominent critics.

 

https://hbr.org/2024/11/generative-ai-is-still-just-a-prediction-machine
Generative AI Is Still Just a Prediction Machine

Failing to recognize that generative tools are merely prediction machines will lead to strategic missteps. Today’s AIs are built from data and do not provide judgment on when and how AIs should be built and used. Data and judgment are fundamental to the application of generative AI, even if the applications seem beyond mere prediction, like writing text. Thus, successful AI deployments depend on having access to relevant data and on having the business judgment to know which AIs will be most effective.

 

https://hbr.org/2024/11/generative-ai-is-still-just-a-prediction-machine
Generative AI Is Still Just a Prediction Machine

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random...

Just wait.

 

https://www.boston25news.com/news/l...ai-school-project/FLHKVXSQPRDLZD7TTMWCRNI54I/
Parents of Hingham student sue school district after son disciplined for using AI on school project


View attachment 334177

It's called cheating.... I think there's a rule about that in the handbook.

A "D" was generous.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...it-punished-student-for-using-ai-court-rules/
School did nothing wrong when it punished student for using AI, court rules

The Harris' motion for an injunction was rejected in an order issued yesterday from US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. US Magistrate Judge Paul Levenson found that school officials "have the better of the argument on both the facts and the law."

"On the facts, there is nothing in the preliminary factual record to suggest that HHS officials were hasty in concluding that RNH [the Harris' son, referred to by his initials] had cheated," Levenson wrote. "Nor were the consequences Defendants imposed so heavy-handed as to exceed Defendants' considerable discretion in such matters."

"On the evidence currently before the Court, I detect no wrongdoing by Defendants," Levenson also wrote.

Levenson's order described how the students used AI to generate a script for a documentary film:

The evidence reflects that the pair did not simply use AI to help formulate research topics or identify sources to review. Instead, it seems they indiscriminately copied and pasted text that had been generated by Grammarly.com ("Grammarly"), a publicly available AI tool, into their draft script. Evidently, the pair did not even review the "sources" that Grammarly provided before lifting them. The very first footnote in the submission consists of a citation to a nonexistent book: "Lee, Robert. Hoop Dreams: A Century of Basketball. Los Angeles: Courtside Publications, 2018." The third footnote also appears wholly factitious: "Doe, Jane. Muslim Pioneers: The Spiritual Journey of American Icons. Chicago: Windy City Publishers, 2017." Significantly, even though the script contained citations to various sources—some of which were real—there was no citation to Grammarly, and no acknowledgement that AI of any kind had been used.

The students got off easy.

 

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...it-punished-student-for-using-ai-court-rules/
School did nothing wrong when it punished student for using AI, court rules

The students got off easy.

Nice to see that at least one judge still has a shred of common sense.

 

If you don't cheat, you are competing against those who do.

 

View attachment 336462

If you don't cheat, you are competing against those who do.

And, in the end, those that don't cheat will usually come out on top, since they actually learn something while the cheaters just keep digging their holes deeper until the almost-inevitable collapse.

 

And, in the end, those that don't cheat will usually come out on top, since they actually learn something while the cheaters just keep digging their holes deeper until the almost-inevitable collapse.

This assumes the non-cheaters don't fall victim to learned helplessness before they have a chance to apply their knowledge and succeed.

 

View attachment 336462

If you don't cheat, you are competing against those who do.

Their cheating asses will be eating my kids dust.

 

This assumes the non-cheaters don't fall victim to learned helplessness before they have a chance to apply their knowledge and succeed.

These guy were cheating on AP US History, what a joke, nobody will feel hopeless competing in a room with those types of losers.

 

This assumes the non-cheaters don't fall victim to learned helplessness before they have a chance to apply their knowledge and succeed.

Which, at least in my experience, is a pretty good assumption that holds most of the time.

I don't see the threat being from their peers cheating and managing to get some temporary advantage when they get away with it, but from the broader system when it makes cheating the accepted norm via its actions, regardless of its words.