Is this the Beginning of the End?
So I was walking to class one day and I saw this bulletin board. And it said AI is taking over. Initially that this was quite alarmist thinking. Then just 3 days ago I was reading the New York Times. It announced a statement by a 350 people of authority within the AI industry. The entire statement was 22 words, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
Now this is a genuine threat. We got the atom bomb we got the plague and now we have Killer Robots. Is this alarmist?
I decided to get a historical perspective so I went, and talked with Mr. Macloed, the AP European history teacher. His initial reaction wasn’t very comforting: “I think the potential applications are terrifying.”
One of his main concerns is how AI will affect students: “It’s going to make students dumber because they’ll just get used Chat GPT to write their papers for them. Yeah. Like right now is detectable because there’s certain tells that AI has right now. But every time it gets us, it gets better. So tells you harder to detect.”
I also wondered if Mr. Macleod would use this Tech if he were a student today. He said,“I was a pretty honest student, and I happen to go to schools where plagiarism was dealt with pretty severely. So it was like, okay, not going to go down that road. I’m not sure schools have such a strict level of plagiarism nowadays. So you know, it’s official policy.” I believe many students would take a similar course of action because they would prefer to learn. You don’t learn as much when you steal an idea.
The current situation with AI is more wild than the old internet which was slightly less wild than the old west. Mr McLeod thinks there’s only one solution: “This needs to be regulated. There needs to be guidelines set up for how this is used, what it’s allowed to be used for. I think that is something that is going to be absolutely essential.”
After all that, I think you need full disclosure. I did use AI in part to write this article.