Knowing the Limits of AI

There is something like panic going on about AI in some circles. All the jobs that will be lost, student fraud on papers and tests, the inability to distinguish real photos and videos from fakes, the use of AI to plan mass murders as in this recent Florida case.

Of these, only student fraud seems a serious hazard to me. We can fix this for exams by going back to Blue Books.  (Remember those?) Of course, we thwn need to teach cursive. 

What I am doing for research papers in my U S. History class  is scheduling a 10 minute Zoom oral defense at the end of the term. If you cannot answer questions about your paper off the top of your head, it suggests you did not even read the paper you turned in. 

This reminds me of a funny story. English Composition at USC. The terribly nervous, chain-smoking (this tells you how this took place in a galaxy far, far away, and long, long ago) grad student teaching the class asked one of the football players to read an especially good essay that he had turned in. As he read it, it became obvious, at least to me, that he had never seen this essay before.

Anyway, job loss: AI has no idea what the task is. You need to give it prompts of some sort that tells it what you need. AI makes the task simpler, much like a word processor makes writing essays much easier. (For that English Composition class, I typed my essays on a Royal Ultronic.) Compared to the manual Underwood on which I learned to type, this was an unfair advantage.

Fake pictures and videos. PhotoShop already crossed this boundary with the picture of Boy George in the Oval Office with President Reagan. Hollywood has long had the ability to create films so good at bending reality that this is also not a new issue. AI can do it cheaper and faster is all.

Mass murder planning? Americans have been doing this just fine by themselves for more than a century. This new paper by me demonstrates that there has actually been a very slight decline in high fatality (6 or more dead) mass shootings in America since 1890.

I have become a big fan of SuperGrok (the subscription version of Grok with more capacity). It is more useful for technical problems than CoPilot or CHATGPT. It is still not a perfect solution. Recently I have used it for two problems: my Losmandy G811G mount has some slop in the declination axis; and my mill's X axis motor stopped moving as it should while making a horrible grinding noise. 

For the G811G, it attempted to talk me through a fix, but it clearly did not fully understand the mechanism even with pictures. It also misstated the size of screw that I needed to replace a lost motor mount screw. (It claimed it was 4-40 x 1/2". The actual screw was 6-32 x 1/2".)

For rhe mill SuperGrok was very useful, but as an advisor. It watched the video of the problem and correctly identified the cause. It mostly gave good directions for disassembly and repair of the X leadscrew assembly. In a few places, I substituted my knowledge about the mechanism and observations that it did not think about which to ask.

As an aide, it was very helpful and allowed me to fix the problem without sending it to Sherline for repair. If given control of hand tools, it would have ruined a repairable part.

AI is a useful tool, but no substitute for human intelligence.