It's a joke.

<< << My own words? I haven’t used my own words since 2022. I’m not even sure I have my own words anymore.

I thought about you wrote and I think you are right. Even though I am partial to author's POV ( despite some obvious, glaring issues ), I can't help feeling of two minds about it all. I don't want to undermine existing ecosystem, but then.. the existing ecosystem in research may need some decent shake up.

The "not really" aspect is so significant that it's barely a joke. It's more serious and thought provoking than a simple joke. I guess that's how good satire works.

This in particular I found quite interesting:

"My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. "

As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.

Sounds like you should feed the article into ChatGPT to find out whether it is satire.

The TAM for ProxyAI is even bigger than SpaceX's. Hopefully they IPO soon.

I don't think the argument is necessarily against the use of the tools entirely. My interpretation is that it's against delegating to them all understanding.

Humans can only usefully steer LLMs if they have some understanding or context the LLMs do not.

>>Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton<<

remember this the next time you encounter a request to donate your body.

> Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability?

If you're asking it questions, yes. It's like search but with a simulation of understanding and information synthesis far faster than a human can perform it.

If you're having it write your code, no. It's like a junior developer who has no awareness of the bigger picture, of incompatibilities, of understanding that hasn't been contained and can't be derived from the codebase.

> If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough?

The situation the satire is describing is an individual who is unable to tell the difference. The way the scenario is laid out, everything she's 'accomplished' has been to prompt ChatGPT and publish its answers with some degree of editing; it's clear that she, as an individual, is not an expert, does not understand the thing she is presenting, and does not know any of what she has purported to know. This is also a sadly common refrain these days.

> I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.

It's not about memorizing thousands of lines of text; it's about demonstrating to the panel that you have an understanding of the thing you're claiming to have an understanding of.

I work with a lot of software and infrastructure at work. I can tell you how it all (or most of it) works together and interacts. I could not reproduce the configurations of any of the software from memory, nor recite any of the code, but I have an understanding of the system, how it works, what it was designed for, and what choices were made and why.

The professor in this article does not have any of that understanding. It would be as if I had Claude deploy a cluster of X, Y, Z components, configure them, and get them online, and then put on my resume that I had done it. It was accomplished as result of me, but if I don't understand the system then there's no difference between me doing it and the CEO doing it, or my son, or someone from Taskrabbit.

So yeah, it's not about memorization, it's about understanding.

You can bring notes to a chalk talk.

This is satire

What’s going on with social queues today where so many people here are not immediately understanding this is clearly satire?

But when humans do it suddenly it's "standing on the shoulders of giants"

I don't get how you can possibly call it plagiarism if it produce a novel breakthrough - by definition, the existing knowledge base doesn't contain the new ideas generated in this process.

And we've proven it can handle complex, novel thinking when it solved a significant Erdos problem back in May: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...

Yes, it does need to be said. Many people will read this article and miss the satire, which is, in part, the intent of sophisticated satire. The point is that it is outlandish and foolish and ridiculous and yet still resembles some serious discourse that real people engage in. So much so that some onlookers can't tell the difference. That proves the satirist's thesis: the real world is full of ridiculous people making ridiculous arguments and they can't even see themselves or their arguments for what they are.

I know real life people who write essays with claims as outlandish as "software engineering is an ableist field" and are dead serious. But that assertion belongs just as well in a satire piece. It can be very hard to tell if you don't have prior context for the author.

Among others, the voices on the internet include:

* some sincere people with very extreme takes,

* some trolls that masquerade as the above, to bully others over their credulousness and lack of guile, which is distinct from sarcasm,

* some trolls that insincerely speak anything that earns engagement,

* and more and more bots that mimic the above

So sadly, the answer to your question is generally yes.

> Honest question : does it need to be said ?

Yes. There are literally people who believe any thinking done without AI is Luddite and subpar.

These are not, in my experience, people who have done any great thinking in their lives. They do tend to tweet a lot.

When I started reading it I thought for far too long that this person is actually stupi^H^H^H^H^H serious. So writing that it is satire is useful for people that do not read enough of the text, and just jump into the comments :) Also, this type of behavior has little to do with the neurodivergent spectrum, if anything it touches personality types, maybe maybe some trauma or addiction, unlikely to be caused by anything in the affective space (episodes would be too short) or psychosis space.

> Honest question : does it need to be said ?

At the current time I'm writing this, all other top-level comments are engaging with the article as if it were sincere. So, yes.

I think sometimes it is but only if the humor relies on a tone.

When it’s satire I think the main blocker of recognition is if you have an emotional reaction first.

As an example, if you are a diehard AI influencer or something you might miss the joke entirely because of the severity of your initial negative reaction.

Just my two cents. Glad I could contribute to completely beating the humor out of this post :)

It does, but unfortunately, this is in-crowd communication -- it's too high brow to hit anyone that needs to read it. But I enjoyed it, and I'm sure it was cathartic to write

When it's this poorly executed, yes it needs to be said.

I was going back and forth on whether it was for far longer than I should have been.

Yes because Poe’s Law has never been more true than the current era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

I regularly get reddit comments downvoted by people who don't recognize it's obviously satire.

Sometimes somebody else comments "why is this getting downvoted, it's satire", and that stops or reverses the influx of downvotes.

Humor died few years ago after series of increasingly more improbable events happening. "USA voted pedophile that bankrupted 3 casinos into second term" was stuff out of Onion decade ago, so some researcher walking into job interview with ChatGPT doesn't even move a needle on satire scale.

do LLMs dream of electric shhhheeep

> Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?

Yes. Humor is very hard to grasp via text, especially sarcastic humor, because in person we use voice and body language to signal that something is meant as a joke.

On this site? Yes it does, and even then we have people missing the point in the comments.

As someone on the spectrum, I can assure you that being on the spectrum is not an obstacle for understanding this kind of humor.

In fact, is the neurotypicals who struggle getting it because they rely on nonverbal cues (like a sarcastic tone of voice), which is missing in text, to detect humor.

Deadpan, dry humor is generally more amenable to the autistic mind, because it doesn't have what we consider noise.

If someone needs a laugh track to tell that something is a joke, then either it's a bad joke that wouldn't be made any better with a laugh track, or the problem exists between keyboard and chair.

That’s what makes it good satire.

That's what makes it good satire.

But if you honestly think that someone applying for a postdoc can't explain what their research is about, it's on you.