I've gotten so many interesting comments and emails from my personal blog. And sometimes just little ego-boosts, like someone saying some random post helped them years after I'd made published it purely for myself, not really expecting anyone to find it.
I've had someone approve my PRs within a minute of me opening them, and likewise expect immediate approvals on his own PRs. When asked questions about parts of the code sometimes the answer would be along the lines of "Claude did it this way", or verbose AI-generated responses to the question.
I didn't get the impression that the man here was looking at LLMs as some fantastical threat. It seems like his concern was about offloading his thinking and decision making to AI, which seems pretty non-fantastical.
Can't that be done without a performative "religious exemption"? You don't need that to say "yeah, I'm not using this stuff." I imagine in practice all this will accomplish is pissing people off who are already stressed about AI.
I think I understand what you mean, but to me the exemption doesn't seem performative. It seems like the equivalent of him talking to his employer and having them agree to not force him to use tech he is concerned about, he just used a particular legal avenue to justify it as part of that discussion. It may be performative in the sense that it also got attention (e.g., in the form of this article), but in this case even that part of it seems like it could be a useful precedent for others who may be considering a similar route.
Then again, maybe even seeing it as _slightly_ performative, potentially, is overly pessimistic. It may seem performative simply because it's novel, but if he legitimately considers this part of his religious beliefs and his employer (seemingly) agrees, what is performative about exercising his rights like many other people of other religions do?
Right, but does a business/company owe you the right to never require usage of AI to do your job (and by extension, owe you that job under those terms)?
I did not take that position. You asked if US citizens could refuse AI without religious exemption, possibly suggesting the dramatics are unnecessary, and I answered that I could not.
Was he being forced or compelled to offload his thinking to a machine?
I probably don’t share his sentiments, but that’s no different from being compelled to think in certain mandated ways (offloading being just a particular case of it), which is certainly a bad idea. If that was the case, I find it weird that he used a religious exemption mechanism, but glad he can act and think freely, the way he desires.
However, he may not have a choice of tool use or peers, and be compelled to send work to, or process results done by a non-human system, if that’s a part of his organization system (external to him with regards to duties and responsibilities). To grant him an exemption would be to discriminate upon others, no different how he can’t refuse to work with, say, a Satanist. Or a cyborg transhumanist. If that’s the case and he just refuses to feed his thinking (his part of the job) to an AI (not his part of the job), then that’s him being a zealot pushing his religious views on others. In such a case, I can quite clearly see why he went for a religious exemption, huh.
His own part of the job, his responsibilities - yes, of course he can’t be compelled on how he does it. Anything outside of that - nope, his religious beliefs end there, not his thinking - not for him to say how to do it, or refuse to interact.
I've felt this sense of intensity myself in things I really cared about and pursued, and have usually succeeded in those things. But it is difficult to manufacture. I have seen what has seemed to be an attempt to manufacture/enforce intensity among employees in a startup environment. I believe the strategy caused more harm than good to both the employees and the product.
I'm taking a year-long sabbatical to study a language at university right now and they're changing their assignment processes to curtail AI use. We have two versions of written assignments - the first to be written by hand in class with just a Swedish-Swedish word book available, and the second version to be typed at home implementing the professor's corrections from v1.
At least in this course students seem to be taking their strict 'no AI' policy quite seriously. Then again this is also the kind of course you do when you want to actually learn the material. It provides a qualification for further higher education in Swedish, so if we don't legitimately learn the stuff there's just no point as we won't manage in future courses.
Recently it has been reported that many Chinese students in Moscow are no longer learning Russian during their years at the university (to the dismay of Russian officials who hoped this would be a form of soft power): even for in-person lectures their Bluetooth earbuds will just translate the lecturer's Russian into Chinese in real time. So, perhaps people around the world will start feeling that, thanks to technology, exams testing language skills are a mere formality and can be safely cheated on.
Russia is a bad example due to its current international reputation. On your second point, would an example of this be an oral exam where the student has tiny hidden earbuds? Outrageous but you're probably right it's going to get worse.
Actually, language is no longer the barrier it once was, it wouldn’t surprise me if some universities start opening enrollment up beyond the native language of the university accordingly.
In this case it sounds like AI may be more of a scapegoat. The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact. Though the primary issue seems more one of people carelessly offloading this type of work to AI in the first place (or being pressured to do so?)
> The incident of US almost boarding a Chinese ship due to an AI-assisted intelligent report claiming it was transporting nuclear weapons components[0] was more compelling for me in terms of direct AI usage impact.
To be fair, there was a rather similar incident in the 1990s, so that sort of thing can happen without any AI at all:
Surely that is just the US asserting themselves to be more belligerent than they are? Just a bluff?
Imagine if China seized a US ship carrying nuclear weapons components. It'd be war immediately, and the US of course knows that the same is true of China.
There's also no basis under international law. China is of course a nuclear weapons state and numerous nuclear weapons states have transported nuclear weapons around the world, with nuclear weapons sharing being a something old and accepted.
One special reason that one would expect China to respond to such an operation by actually going to war immediately is that, if it were a nuclear weapon, with all the details and delivery systems etc., it could be analyzed to see how it reacts to missile defence stuff, which might reveal some unknown weakness that would allow MAD to be ended. So somebody getting themselves access to the core reentry, MIRV and maneuvering stuff would be a reason to attack him right away.
Something about seeing "gregarious nature" used to describe a non-human animal feels so... whimsical? I like it. Likewise with "intimate embrace" and other descriptions that follow.
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