My views on AI

TL, DR: I have reasons for disliking it. Don’t use it. Just don’t.

Four panel cartoon. See the details below for alt text.

#AltText for cartoon

Four-panel cartoon by Twonks (Steve Nelson).

  1. Text - AI Design Logic
  2. Customer, telling waiter “Get me a cheese pizza.”
  3. Waiter delivers pizza to customer.
  4. Customer, smiling, says “Wow, look what I made!” Waiter looks slightly angry.

I have already addressed the subject of AI in the syllabus, but that is a formal statement developed by EVC for inclusion in a course syllabus.

Here is my view of Artificial “Intelligence”. The word “intelligence” is in quote marks because, if there is one thing that Large Language Models are not, they are not intelligent in any meaningful sense. They are very good at producing what appears to be coherent text, but you are basically looking at statistical predictions of what words are most likely to appear next, based on training data.

That being said, unlike you, there are people who will be tempted to use AI tools to generate the answers to the assignments and get through the course sucessfully. It is very difficult and time consuming to detect whether they have used it or not, so I won’t even make the attempt.

To the people who would use AI, I would say that they are no more learning Linux than the person in the cartoon has made the pizza. (Cartoon by Steve Nelson, used with permission.) And if they don’t want to make the effort to learn it for themselves, then what precisely the hell are they even doing in the course? Why are they wasting their tuition money to prompt an AI instead of learning the material?

“Well,” they might ask, “what about using AI to generate summaries and tutorial information or answer questions?” My answer to them is: AI has taken all the Linux tutorials and guides on the web, some of which are of very low quality, thrown them into a probabilistic blender, and delivered the result to your screen. Why rely on that? Go direct to the source material! As for answering questions, they can ask me. I am not available 24/7 like a chatbot, but I am at least guaranteed to be somewhat familiar with the material. Or they can ask other students in class. Or post their questions to one of the many Linux forums already out there. They can take an opportunity to really learn.

OK. I have gone on enough about this, and I think I have made my position on the subject clear.