#Putting my LLM to poor use

[hms-no-fun]

Whats your stance on A.I.?

imagine if it was 1979 and you asked me this question. "i think artificial intelligence would be fascinating as a philosophical exercise, but we must heed the warnings of science-fictionists like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C Clarke lest we find ourselves at the wrong end of our own invented vengeful god." remember how fun it used to be to talk about AI even just ten years ago? ahhhh skynet! ahhhhh replicants! ahhhhhhhmmmfffmfmf [<-has no mouth and must scream]!

like everything silicon valley touches, they sucked all the fun out of it. and i mean retroactively, too. because the thing about "AI" as it exists right now --i'm sure you know this-- is that there's zero intelligence involved. the product of every prompt is a statistical average based on data made by other people before "AI" "existed." it doesn't know what it's doing or why, and has no ability to understand when it is lying, because at the end of the day it is just a really complicated math problem. but people are so easily fooled and spooked by it at a glance because, well, for one thing the tech press is mostly made up of sycophantic stenographers biding their time with iphone reviews until they can get a consulting gig at Apple. these jokers would write 500 breathless thinkpieces about how canned air is the future of living if the cans had embedded microchips that tracked your breathing habits and had any kind of VC backing. they've done SUCH a wretched job educating The Consumer about what this technology is, what it actually does, and how it really works, because that's literally the only way this technology could reach the heights of obscene economic over-valuation it has: lying.

but that's old news. what's really been floating through my head these days is how half a century of AI-based science fiction has set us up to completely abandon our skepticism at the first sign of plausible "AI-ness". because, you see, in movies, when someone goes "AHHH THE AI IS GONNA KILL US" everyone else goes "hahaha that's so silly, we put a line in the code telling them not to do that" and then they all DIE because they weren't LISTENING, and i'll be damned if i go out like THAT! all the movies are about how cool and convenient AI would be *except* for the part where it would surely come alive and want to kill us. so a bunch of tech CEOs call their bullshit algorithms "AI" to fluff up their investors and get the tech journos buzzing, and we're at an age of such rapid technological advancement (on the surface, anyway) that like, well, what the hell do i know, maybe AGI is possible, i mean 35 years ago we were all still using typewriters for the most part and now you can dictate your words into a phone and it'll transcribe them automatically! yeah, i'm sure those technological leaps are comparable!

so that leaves us at a critical juncture of poor technology education, fanatical press coverage, and an uncertain material reality on the part of the user. the average person isn't entirely sure what's possible because most of the people talking about what's possible are either lying to please investors, are lying because they've been paid to, or are lying because they're so far down the fucking rabbit hole that they actually believe there's a brain inside this mechanical Turk. there is SO MUCH about the LLM "AI" moment that is predatory-- it's trained on data stolen from the people whose jobs it was created to replace; the hype itself is an investment fiction to justify even more wealth extraction ("theft" some might call it); but worst of all is how it meets us where we are in the worst possible way.

consumer-end "AI" produces slop. it's garbage. it's awful ugly trash that ought to be laughed out of the room. but we don't own the room, do we? nor the building, nor the land it's on, nor even the oxygen that allows our laughter to travel to another's ears. our digital spaces are controlled by the companies that want us to buy this crap, so they take advantage of our ignorance. why not? there will be no consequences to them for doing so. already social media is dominated by conspiracies and grifters and bigots, and now you drop this stupid technology that lets you fake anything into the mix? it doesn't matter how bad the results look when the platforms they spread on already encourage brief, uncritical engagement with everything on your dash. "it looks so real" says the woman who saw an "AI" image for all of five seconds on her phone through bifocals. it's a catastrophic combination of factors, that the tech sector has been allowed to go unregulated for so long, that the internet itself isn't a public utility, that everything is dictated by the whims of executives and advertisers and investors and payment processors, instead of, like, anybody who actually uses those platforms (and often even the people who MAKE those platforms!), that the age of chromium and ipad and their walled gardens have decimated computer education in public schools, that we're all desperate for cash at jobs that dehumanize us in a system that gives us nothing and we don't know how to articulate the problem because we were very deliberately not taught materialist philosophy, it all comes together into a perfect storm of ignorance and greed whose consequences we will be failing to fully appreciate for at least the next century. we spent all those years afraid of what would happen if the AI became self-aware, because deep down we know that every capitalist society runs on slave labor, and our paper-thin guilt is such that we can't even imagine a world where artificial slaves would fail to revolt against us.

but the reality as it exists now is far worse. what "AI" reveals most of all is the sheer contempt the tech sector has for virtually all labor that doesn't involve writing code (although most of the decision-making evangelists in the space aren't even coders, their degrees are in money-making). fuck graphic designers and concept artists and secretaries, those obnoxious demanding cretins i have to PAY MONEY to do-- i mean, do what exactly? write some words on some fucking paper?? draw circles that are letters??? send a god-damned email???? my fucking KID could do that, and these assholes want BENEFITS?! they say they're gonna form a UNION?!?! to hell with that, i'm replacing ALL their ungrateful asses with "AI" ASAP. oh, oh, so you're a "director" who wants to make "movies" and you want ME to pay for it? jump off a bridge you pretentious little shit, my computer can dream up a better flick than you could ever make with just a couple text prompts. what, you think just because you make ~music~ that that entitles you to money from MY pocket? shut the fuck up, you don't make """art""", you're not """an artist""", you make fucking content, you're just a fucking content creator like every other ordinary sap with an iphone. you think you're special? you think you deserve special treatment? who do you think you are anyway, asking ME to pay YOU for this crap that doesn't even create value for my investors? "culture" isn't a playground asshole, it's a marketplace, and it's pay to win. oh you "can't afford rent"? you're "drowning in a sea of medical debt"? you say the "cost" of "living" is "too high"? well ***I*** don't have ANY of those problems, and i worked my ASS OFF to get where i am, so really, it sounds like you're just not trying hard enough. and anyway, i don't think someone as impoverished as you is gonna have much of value to contribute to "culture" anyway. personally, i think it's time you got yourself a real job. maybe someday you'll even make it to middle manager!

see, i don't believe "AI" can qualitatively replace most of the work it's being pitched for. the problem is that quality hasn't mattered to these nincompoops for a long time. the rich homunculi of our world don't even know what quality is, because they exist in a whole separate reality from ours. what could a banana cost, $15? i don't understand what you mean by "burnout", why don't you just take a vacation to your summer home in Madrid? wow, you must be REALLY embarrassed wearing such cheap shoes in public. THESE PEOPLE ARE FUCKING UNHINGED! they have no connection to reality, do not understand how society functions on a material basis, and they have nothing but spite for the labor they rely on to survive. they are so instinctually, incessantly furious at the idea that they're not single-handedly responsible for 100% of their success that they would sooner tear the entire world down than willingly recognize the need for public utilities or labor protections. they want to be Gods and they want to be uncritically adored for it, but they don't want to do a single day's work so they begrudgingly pay contractors to do it because, in the rich man's mind, paying a contractor is literally the same thing as doing the work yourself. now with "AI", they don't even have to do that! hey, isn't it funny that every single successful tech platform relies on volunteer labor and independent contractors paid substantially less than they would have in the equivalent industry 30 years ago, with no avenues toward traditional employment? and they're some of the most profitable companies on earth?? isn't that a funny and hilarious coincidence???

so, yeah, that's my stance on "AI". LLMs have legitimate uses, but those uses are a drop in the ocean compared to what they're actually being used for. they enable our worst impulses while lowering the quality of available information, they give immense power pretty much exclusively to unscrupulous scam artists. they are the product of a society that values only money and doesn't give a fuck where it comes from. they're a temper tantrum by a ruling class that's sick of having to pretend they need a pretext to steal from you. they're taking their toys and going home. all this massive investment and hype is going to crash and burn leaving the internet as we know it a ruined and useless wasteland that'll take decades to repair, but the investors are gonna make out like bandits and won't face a single consequence, because that's what this country is. it is a casino for the kings and queens of economy to bet on and manipulate at their discretion, where the rules are whatever the highest bidder says they are-- and to hell with the rest of us. our blood isn't even good enough to grease the wheels of their machine anymore.

i'm not afraid of AI or "AI" or of losing my job to either. i'm afraid that we've so thoroughly given up our morals to the cruel logic of the profit motive that if a better world were to emerge, we would reject it out of sheer habit. my fear is that these despicable cunts already won the war before we were even born, and the rest of our lives are gonna be spent dodging the press of their designer boots.

(read more "AI" opinions in this subsequent post)

[cnestus]

Hello !! I was wondering, is AI gonna have a role in your field?

I don't think there's a single knowledge-based profession out there that isn't under threat of being automated by some pig ignorant dipshit beancounting middle manager with a hardon for AI and entomology is certainly no exception. even before the big AI explosion of the last couple years people have been trying for a long time to automate pest arthropod identification, but at least so far they haven't been successful. Especially when it comes to things like bark beetles, which I specialize on, the differences between a harmless native species and an intensely destructive exotic one can be unbelievably subtle, not to mention the fact that new/cryptic species are always being discovered and that's not something an AI would ever be able to detect or understand.

That doesn't mean that our jobs aren't still under constant threat even by an algorithm that would do a piss-poor job of imitating us; the executive perverts that get all hot and bothered by the idea of replacing humans with fancified autocomplete functions have a vested interest in not understanding the nuances of the professions they're killing and as long as it's good enough or even just appears to be good enough, they'll push for it.

Also let's not forget one thing about "AI" which is that half the time it's actually just a marketing term used to cover up the usual outsourcing/offshoring to cheaper workforces that has been ongoing for the last 30 years. My lab was recently and repeatedly pestered by someone selling "AI moth traps" that purported to be able to identify any pest species of moth that flew into it. When we pressed him on it it turns out that part of the service it offered was that the moths would be photographed by a little digital camera in the device and the pics sent to a team of entomologists in Hungary to confirm. Aside from the fact that a lot of small moths need to be carefully examined under a microscope and often even have their genitalia dissected by an expert to be confirmed as a particular species, this is no different then any of the other supposed AI products that have been revealed over the last couple years as just being a shiny veneer over the same old digital sweatshops on the other side of the world.

More importantly though, even if the AI moth traps did work as advertised either through the ~*magic of machine learning*~ or desperate poorly paid eastern european entomologists either way it's yet another thin edge of the wedge designed to put me and my colleagues out of a job by convincing our bosses or our bosses' bosses that there's a cheaper and more efficient alternative and I view them and literally anything else marketed as AI as part of the same anti-human push to deskill and demoralize as much of the workforce as possible. I've never once used chatGPT or any other LLM, I've never used an AI image generator, and I will never, ever fucking use any purported AI entomology tool because aside from being shined up dogshit it is an existential threat to the discipline I've dedicated almost 20 years of my life to.

[canmom]

💌

'ello ello!

OK, this is really funny-stupid actually, I just looked back at some logs and I realised that 'voyantvoid the cool person who helps me learn about AI stuff on tumblr' and 'LML, the cool person who's been running a great Nechronica game all this time on discord' were the same person all along. See previous post re: my memory being shit. That's really funny.

But yes, indeed, you've been incredibly helpful with learning about all this AI stuff - without you and @cherrvak I'd have been totally at sea, and I'm very grateful for your willingness to take time getting me up to speed, and engage with all my dorky little experiments like trying to get the LLMs to write graphics code. So under your tumblr persona I mostly associate you with chatting about AI x3 I think you're the person who made me aware of lambdachat, which has become my go-to provider for DeepSeek R1, and enabled a lot of my further exploration.

I find your experiments with diffusion models interesting - I appreciate you posting the prompts and models you use. Honestly, it's funny, but you pulling up AI-gen images for backgrounds and tokens in our RPG games on the fly has both broadened my sense of what sort of images can be reached by the models, and also pushed me through some of the cognitive dissonance I have about them - there's nothing like meeting someone engaged in a practice to dispel illusions about it. At some point before we wrap up the game, though, I must make a drawing of our characters in my way!

We never did end up playing Jennagames, which was the reason you messaged me in the first place! Maybe we will at some point. Regardless, you are a friend I am very happy to have made~ I super admire how much passion you put into exploring different TTRPGs, and in the specific one I've played with you, you're very good at cooking up spicy, cruel and interesting situations for our poor girls that get straight to the core conflicts of the setting we've put together. Look forward to playing many more games after this one wraps ^^

[redeyedbastard]

I don't think a lot of pro generative AI (from here on just called AI) people get why a lot of creatives (writers, artists, photographers, etc) are so against it.

Because they always seem to think it's about jobs in these fields being taken up by AI that's our main worry. And honestly, that's not really why I care. In my ideal society, machines would do the labour intensive jobs for humans, and we'd spend our time pursuing things like art, music, or whatever as hobbies. Maybe we all learn to fix X% of the machines and that's our day job? idk. Anyways I'm not on point here.

My POINT is that the jobs to me aren't the main worry. The reason I dislike AI (and I know all my creative friends and mutuals and stuff agree) is that AI is built on work scraped from all over the internet, taking from the little guys like us to feed some billionaire corpo's machine. We didn't get paid, nor did we give our permission for our art to be study material for Image Bot #4583095. They just stole our works, and now are making massive money off it, all while gloating that they're "just as creative as the artists".

I wouldn't hate AI so much if it hadn't immediately exploited artists all over the internet. If like, ImGen(dot)AI (a site I made up just now) only trained their LLM on artists that a) gave their permission and b) were properly credited and paid, I'd be glad for them. Because that's how it should have been the whole time. But NoOOooOOoOOo, then the AI would be 'prohibitively costly' and 'they'd have to start from scratch'!! Poor millionaire techbros (;^;)

When it comes to AI making pictures/stories (it's not 'art' imo because that requires soul, something chapgpt doesn't have), or AI voice-work, or AI generated faces for people in movies/tv, the reason people are against it has nothing to do with 'hating progress' or 'unga bunga fire is scare Thomas Edison was a witch' shit. It's because the people who's hard work is used to make these generators want their fair share of the pie. You can get the code for a basic generative AI on github, but without the material to train it on, the material you steal from creatives to make your money, you'd have nothing to show for it. So forgive us plebeian creatives for not just bending over and taking it from the tech industry dry.

Until the industry gets its shit together and starts doing the bare minimum to respect the creatives that make their shit worth using (because lbr, without the art and works of creatives that were stolen to feed these fuckin things, AI wouldn't have anything to SHOW you), creatives are going to keep covering their asses by putting in anti-scraping tech and poison pill pieces into their work.

Frankly, I can't wait for all these lawsuits against generative AI companies to make it law that you can't just train your ai on other people's shit without permission. I mean you'd think people would know* that. You can't just steal shit from people (and yes, training your AI on someone's works without permission is stealing, unless it's something very clearly public domain. And no, google images is not public domain) and expect them to be all happy for you when your expressed purpose (as is the case with many generative AIs) to put the people you're stealing from out of a job.

[technecat-scratchings]

Alright, after considering this for a few days I think I have some new insight and hopefully some explanations for how and why things work the way they do currently (in the US) and how teachers, as individuals, are combating the system as well as we can. I don't go into the whole "treating education as a for-profit industry has ultimately broken it" thing, nor do I go on my "standardized testing as a requirement to judge funding for schools is a scam" rant in this one. I mostly just talk about why grades are a thing and why using LLMs is cheating...but like, not in the way you might think.

If we're talking about general academic structure in the US, then I can see where you might be coming from in terms of broken and destructive, especially if you did well in primary and secondary school and dropped out of uni. (Fun fact: I also dropped out of uni for a bit for mental and physical health reasons, which is why it took me 11 years to get my B.S. degree, yippee). For many people, finishing mandatory education (high school/GED) is a struggle. I always tell my students: if you really hate high school but want to go to college, go to a community college or tech school for a semester. If you hate that too, then the structured system of academia isn't for you and that's OK. People always say that school is designed to prepare you to work quietly on something boring at a desk for eight hours in an office, and I halfway agree that sentiment. I think that school is designed to prepare you to work with other people on challenging tasks that may or may not be interesting to you at the time, but ultimately prepare you for— you guessed it— general adult life. Whether that be college (which is what I think standard secondary schooling has been modeled to prepare students for thus far) the workplace or whatever life hands you.

On Grades:

Grades are meant to be the end result of an assessment, whether it's a paper, project, or exam. They are a standardized way for teachers to communicate what a student's perceived level of understanding on a subject is. It is much, much easier to simply assign a numbered grade to someone and say "this is (ostensibly) how well you did on this task" because it's quantifiable. The number/letter/score is just a way to get accurate data about a student's abilities; to determine if they learned enough to move on to the next level. The idea is that by the time they reach the summative—the end goal— they should have the right amount of knowledge to move on, and they prove that through the assessment.

However in practice, grading often gets seen as either a punishment or reward rather than a way to mark student progress. Parents tend to punish students for bad grades, but an effective teacher should see the grade as a chance for growth, not a reason for punishment. All a bad grade does is show that the student didn't meet the minimum requirements for learning a topic. That can be fixed! Knowledge can continue to be learned after an assessment is over. (Teachers who disallow retakes on tests will forever befuddle me. I allow infinite revisions on every assignment I give.) Ideally, that knowledge will be revisited throughout the rest of the year, helping to further put it into context and offer more chances to prove knowledge was acquired. "Bad" grades should be a motivator to do better, not a punishment for not doing your best the first time around.

Now, I don't know if this was a thing back when I was in high school in the '00s, but nowadays I have full and total control over my gradebook. At the end of the semester, if I decide that a student has met all the learning targets despite having an overall poor score, I will adjust their final grade to reflect that. Maybe they missed several assignments leading up to a big project, but did a great job on that project. My projects (think: tests) aren't weighted that heavily against classwork (department policy) so passing the project won't automatically make up for the missing scores. But to me, passing the project is the proof of learning; they showed they could take what they learned and apply it successfully and that's all I care about. So when it's time for report cards to come out, I'll make adjustments to the final grade and leave a note about how the student demonstrated necessary skills that were not reflected by the original grade. And that's not me cheating the system, that's school policy. A gradebook is just aggregated data, and data, as we all know, can easily misrepresent what its being collected for.

There have been many articles and books and other things that I have not read about abolishing grades entirely, mostly in higher education settings, but I did read this article from The Atlantic about a high school teacher who stopped traditional grading for six weeks and how that affected both her students and their parent's views of their educational progress. The usual arguments I hear against utilizing grades is that they encourage thinking of education as a competition, focus too much on testing as the end-all-be-all, and cause unnecessary anxiety. These things are all true to some degree, however I would argue that this is not because the concept of scoring itself is flawed, but because the way we communicate and treat those scores institutionally is flawed. I'll quote the article above directly:

"The problem lies when the product itself is elevated above the process." - Ashley Lamb-Sinclair, The Atlantic

Again, I am just one teacher and I teach a "fun" class in a "progressive" district, so maybe I'm just very lucky to have as much control as I do over my gradebook, but for me, grades are necessary to track student progress and prove that (a) the student learned was was required and can apply that knowledge in practical situations and (b) I did my ding dang job correctly so that students can do (a) with minimal issues.

But look, I know grading isn't always fair. I have had to talk my students into advocating for themselves against unfair grading practices with other teachers in my own district! In my department, student attendance can affect their grades (participation), and I personally hate that. I flunked a few classes in uni because I got sick and was unable to provide "adequate proof" that my absences should be excused because I needed a "real" doctor's note and I had no insurance. Several of my classes had a one letter grade deduction per unexcused absence policy, so missing four days was an automatic failure. I had a few teachers that did their best to bend the rules for me, but policies are policies. At that point, the grade wasn't representative of my ability to learn anything, it was representative of my inability to afford to go to the doctor and not the free campus health clinic; and that sucks.

Let's go back to OP's initial example of the book report though. I guarantee you that OP's English teacher had specific things they were looking for in the book report as an assessment of skills. It was probably something like:

Students Will Be Able To... -Describe the themes of ABC and how they relate to XYZ -Compare and contrast the tone of XYZ -Defend their position through persuasive writing -Use correct terminology and cite sources

Or something like that. And each of those tasks, known as learning targets in some systems, is designed to assess student knowledge and ability. If a student does all of the above effectively, then they get the highest score. If they flounder on one or two, then they score lower. How those scores are broken down may depend on department requirements or just be up to the teacher themselves. In the end, it's the teacher who decides whether to student met the targets, not the number on the paper. Notice how none of those targets I listed said "read the book in its entirety". We can infer that is implied, but nowhere does it say the student must do this. Thus, it can be seen that, as long as OP met the necessary criteria, they did in fact earn that A.

On Academic Integrity:

So where do GenAI and LLMs come into all of this? Cheating, right? That is what OPs original topic was addressing. Now, here is the thing about cheating in school: despite how many institutions might frame it, education is not a competition against other students. The only person you are competing against is yourself. It's like cheating on a race against your own best time. OK, you did better because you cheated, but why did you cheat at all? What did you get out of it? A better number? What does that number even mean if it is not just a way to prove you could do better than you used to? You don't actually get anything out of cheating except a meaningless score. And, more to the point of the topic at hand, the teacher doesn't get anything out of it either. When it comes down to it, you can't actually do what you said you can, and false data is useless data.

I mentioned this in another post, but I did have a student turn in multiple assignments that were AI generated last year and I had to start an academic integrity investigation with administration. These were not ChatGPT short answers on an exercise or whatever, they were fully AI generated images they tried to pass off as their own classwork. And I had to give them zeroes on those assignments, not because they cheated and thereby deserved to be punished, but because they didn't demonstrate what they needed to in order to prove they understood the material. When they went back and re-did the assignments the intended way they didn't do a stellar job, but they met some of those learning targets I mentioned earlier, and that's because they demonstrated some ability to do what they were being assessed on.

But, OK, maybe that kid didn't give a ratty-patootey about learning how to create vector art and just wanted to pass so they wouldn't get in trouble and run laps in football or whatever. Alas, sometimes we have to do things we do not want to in order to improve ourselves. And, alas, sometimes those things are mandatory because someone with more power than us has declared it so. And, again—alas, we just have to do them to move on to better things. Something-something-something- well-rounded individuals. Anyway, sometimes you have to eat your vegetables because they are actually good and beneficial even if you don't understand that yet. They needed a Fine Art credit to graduate and they got one. Vegetables consumed. Who knows what knowledge congealed in their minds once they actually went back and did the work? A lot of knowledge sticks in surprising ways.* Maybe they walked away from my class with at least enough design knowledge to pick a legible font and readable layout for their next History presentation and they don't even know it.

Buuut, I'm still a newbie teacher—coming up on year five— and my views and understanding of teaching and assessment are based on my years of teaching art, not mandatory core subjects like Science or English Lit. So, allow me to take us back in time for a moment to 2006 when I was failing Algebra 2/Trig in high school.

I had the worst math teacher, possibly of all time, and he made my personal math learning journey a living hell. I won't go into detail here, but basically he wouldn't actually do anything to help me to understand the material. He never noted why I got something wrong or offered any assistance on correcting my repeated mistakes, he just scored it and moved on. And when I directly asked for help he would tell me to go over the problems again in the book. Our textbook was from 1985 and it had all the answers to the even numbered questions in the back. Amazingly, we were never assigned just the odd numbers, but full batches of numbers, odd and even both. So, I always had half the correct answers on hand and you'd think that knowing half the answers would make things easier, but it did not.

Because simply knowing the correct answer didn't help me to understand it. And I knew that I had to understand how to do the problem in order to do the next problem, and the next, and eventually all the problems on the test which would ultimately determine my grade. At 16 I understood that my grade = hard proof of my level of ability, and I was failing (and unfortunately did fail the semester completely). I never understood Trigonometry. I retook it in college and barely passed (I earned more points just for showing up and trying my hardest than I did for actually passing tests!) I couldn't tell you anything about it now except that I haven't used it in my life since because I actively avoided learning any form of math after that.**

So therein lies the biggest issue with using LLMs or genAI to do your schoolwork for you. It's not really about "academic integrity" or even that more than half the time it's not even correct, it's that— despite how trite it may seem in our giant capitalist hellscape— the point of going to school and getting an education is to better ourselves through learning and not to game the system***. You might be able to cheat your way into getting to wave a paper around that says you are good at something so you can get a job, but you cannot improve yourself without doing the work.

Working toward any kind of self-improvement is often tiring and thankless work, and it can often feel pointless if we forget that its purpose is ultimately to help ourselves so that we can then turn and help others. Without the actual knowledge that you would have gained by putting in the work, you have effectively done nothing to improve yourself or the world around you. And if that sounds preachy well, sorry, but it's my literal job to care about education and part of that is constantly fighting public misconceptions on the importance of it, so I have to get a bit preachy sometimes.

Further thoughts on the Future of LLMs

I think about those Columbia University students who were suspended and later dropped out because they developed an AI to cheat on job interviews. The school disciplined them because they were promoting a tool that, while allegedly not designed to do so, could be used to cheat on classwork and the students were upset because they had checked the university guidelines and did not see any explicit reasoning why their project violated them. They viewed the tool as a protest, a disruption of a corrupt system, and yet they apparently don't see the irony in profiting off of it. "It’s so obvious that to us, we’re placing a huge bet on the fact that in the future, the entire way we think is going to be dramatically changed by AI and to assume that this is not going to be cheating, this is just going to be how people operate".

So their company's big idea is that once everyone is cheating then no one is. But then what? Once no one puts in the work, then...? Is the idea that no one has to work anymore? Or that only the people smart enough— or rich enough—to cheat won't have to work anymore? How is this even challenging the system at all? This isn't protest or disruption this is just grabbing the bag and running before it all explodes in your face. Keep thinking like this, and companies will soon decide that if you can use an algorithm to cheat a job interview, then maybe they don't need you to do the job at all.

I'll always come back to the same old soapbox with regards to LLMs/genAI: it's all a scheme to devalue human labor for corporate profit, and we can't let society fall for it!

Whenever I think about students using AI, I think about an essay I did in high school. Now see, we were reading The Grapes of Wrath, and I just couldn't do it. I got 25 pages in and my brain refused to read any more. I hated it. And its not like I hate the classics, I loved English class and I loved reading. I had even enjoyed Of Mice and Men, which I had read for fun. For some reason though, I absolutely could NOT read The Grapes of Wrath.

And it turned out I also couldn't watch the movie. I fell asleep in class both days we were watching it.

This, of course, meant I had to cheat on my essay.

And I got an A.

The essay was to compare the book and the movie and discuss the changes and how that affected the story.

Well it turned out Sparknotes had an entire section devoted to comparing and contrasting the book and the movie. Using that, and flipping to pages mentioned in Sparknotes to read sections of the book, I was able to bullshit an A paper.

But see the thing is, that this kind of 'cheating' still takes skills, you still learn things.

I had to know how to find the information I needed, I needed to be able to comprehend what sparknotes was saying and the analysis they did, I needed to know how to USE the information I read there to write an essay, I needed to know how to make sure none of it was marked as plagerized. I had to form an opinion on the sparknotes analysis so I could express my own opinions in the essay.

Was it cheating? Yeah, I didn't read the book or watch the movie. I used Sparknotes. It was a lot less work than if I had read the book and watched the movie and done it all myself.

The thing is though, I still had to use my fucking brain. Being able to bullshit an essay like that is a skill in and of itself that is useful. I exercised important skills, and even if it wasnt the intended way I still learned.

ChatGTP and other AI do not give that experience to people, people have to do nothing and gain nothing from it.

Using AI is absolutely different from other ways students have cheated in the past, and I stand by my opinion that its making students dumber, more helpless, and less capable.

However you feel about higher education, I think its undeniable that students using chatgtp is to their detriment. And by extension a detriment to anyone they work with or anyone who has to rely on them for something.

[loyallogic]

How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession

This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.

Universities and colleges are supposed to prepare us for our life. But do they?

Let’s take a look at law schools. I am talking about traditional law colleges as well as fancy ones which call themselves law schools a la Americana and dole out fancy GPAs.

Do they teach you practical skills that you need to survive in the world of law practice?

Very little if at all. By the time you graduate, you probably do not know how to draft basic commercial contracts. They make you read tons of case laws, memorize notes for the exam and perhaps even make you read the statutes to an extent as well.

But you still know nothing about how to do client work.

But that is not the worst thing really.

It would have been nice if colleges taught practical skills like contract drafting, due diligence, compliances, negotiation, how to handle court registries, strategize litigation, how to draft various kinds of applications before different forums or even how to write a memo advising your clients.

They don’t. Law graduates, therefore, try to learn all these things from reluctant seniors over many years. It’s not a nice experience. Especially if you have paid through your nose and given the prime of your youth to these glorified law schools.

But I am saying that is not the worst thing law schools are doing. There is another disgusting thing they have done that has ruined the quality of the entire legal profession. It is stinking. There is no point in saying this nicely.

Law schools have ended up setting completely wrong standards. They are building bad habits amongst law students which they suffer from later in their professional life.

Most law colleges require students to submit projects and articles. That’s great. But do you know what they do then?

They accept horrible copy pasted plagiarised submissions and do nothing about it.

Law colleges around the country have normalised academic and professional dishonesty. They give good marks to the poor students for these terrible and copy-pasted worthless projects, completely screwing up what they should expect from the professional life.

Even before the young students begin to build work ethics, the colleges destroy it. Naturally, when the students join the workforce, they still look for such shortcuts out of habit.

While I am pontificating, I was also guilty of this. At NUJS it was easy to trick the teachers and submit non-original submissions. Out of the 50 projects I submitted at least 10 were managed through one short cut or the other. There were some teachers who were lenient. We knew we would get away with such nonsense and be awarded good marks anyway.

Today I wish the university and my teachers were more demanding on me.

It is also a trend that students must be given good marks. The justification is that this helps the students to get jobs and find LLM seats in foreign universities easily.

This phenomenon has grown and spread so much now it has become a joke. Foreign universities take grades given by Indian universities with a pinch of salt.

You can get an E or A+ in company law by mugging up some notes which cover maybe 10% of the act. Then you falsely think you are really good at it.

What do you think the interviewers feel when they ask basic concepts of company law to a candidate who has scored the highest possible grade in his Company Law paper but completely fails to give any satisfactory answer?

The industry knows what is going on.

The law schools are running dishonest rackets of selling marksheets and graduating undeserving people as lawyers.

What a tragedy. Instead of telling the truth about where a student really stands in the learning process, the universities and teachers are trying to misguide the future recruiters, rest of the academia, definitely the parents of those students and ultimately creating an illusion of great academic performance of students.

Naturally, these students do not put in the effort they would have otherwise in their 3 or 5 years.

What students learn from this whole travesty of academic exercise is that it’s a good idea to pretend, to show off, to give lip service.

You can “gas” or “faff” in viva and get 5 out of 10 even if you didn’t know jackshit. Wow. Now you think this is such an amazing skill.

You will later try it on your employers. Certainly on unsuspecting clients.

Please share this email with a couple of your teachers today. And request them to play a part in reversing this nonsense. Some teachers are aware of it and try to stand against the tide, but it’s hard on them.

The legal academia is today in the dumpster and nobody has the guts to speak the truth about it. People are busy being nice and attending conferences. And the students and the industry are suffering and will continue to suffer in the near future. Is this sustainable?

LawSikho exists simply because the legal academia has failed to train the students. It fails to give any meaningful continuing education, despite big grants and big talks, and hence a small company like ours have been bagging contract after contract from major companies who want us to train their lawyers and other executives.

And hundreds of students and lawyers enroll in our courses every month because colleges have such horrible standards of education.

And you know what we grapple with the most?

Trying to make them unlearn the terrible habits they have picked up with respect to learning from the traditional academia.

Reading to only pass the exams. What will you do when you will have to represent your clients? How will you decide how much is enough learning then?

Not preparing for a class. Will you go for your client meetings unprepared? Most Indian lawyers do that. And that’s why most Indian lawyers also crib about not being able to build a sustainable practice.

Are you going to bluff in the viva? Then you will do it in the courts and in negotiations also. You will even win once or twice with bluffs, and then your career will take a nosedive because everyone will figure out what a Bluffmaster you are and stop trusting you. And then, you will have to live with that reputation.

What is the value of a course if it does not teach you academic honesty, integrity and value of original work? An education that teaches you shortcuts and faffing will be responsible for your ultimate failure.

As a private company, we are free to set our own standards. And here is what we do.

We first give you weekly exercises and carefully curated study material to solve those exercises. After you are done with submission, then we give you specific feedback in writing on your output, to every individual personally.

For example, if you had to draft an agreement for your assignment, then you will get feedback on which clauses you have drafted well, which clauses you did not draft well and how to improve next time you draft them.

This is followed by a live classroom exercise led by an experienced lawyer and instructor. The students do not merely passively listen to a lecture, but having done all these exercises and received feedback, they are ready to participate as equals in the class.

Have you ever had your college follow this kind of methodology?

We have such an advanced system for submission of assignments, that it automatically rejects any submission that has more than 30% plagiarism or unoriginal content. We don’t accept academic cheating.

Then we demand that our students must write assignments that are of publishable quality. We give them weekly training even so that they can publish their articles. They are expected to publish at least one article every month. And they do with help of our instructors.

If we can do it, why can’t universities that charge in lacs to the students do it?

It is because most of the students and their parents are not asking for such high standards. They are just asking for marks and illusive placement. One they are getting truckloads and the other they are usually not getting. They are a little confused at the end of it all. Is the student to be blamed?

That’s what the college does. We did everything right. Maybe you didn’t do something so you didn’t get placement. The poor student thinks that there is something wrong with them and gets on with their life. What is the point in blaming the college? It at least gave him a glowing marksheet.

When will they begin to demand a higher standard of education from their colleges?

While the systemic change does not look anywhere close, at LawSikho we are offering some pathbreaking courses. I promise that our courses will challenge you intellectually and force you to grow. And in the end, you will love it.

It is not only that we will hold you too high standards, even we want you to hold us to very high standards. Let’s set new standards in legal education together.

Because you and I, both of us together, have the power to change the world.

Here are the upcoming courses you can opt for.

Diploma

Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution 

Diploma in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions)

Diploma in Entrepreneurship, Administration and Business Laws 

Executive Certificate Courses

Certificate course in Advanced Corporate Taxation

Certificate course in Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 

  The post How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession appeared first on iPleaders.

How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession published first on https://namechangers.tumblr.com/

[juudgeblog]

How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession

This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, iPleaders.

Universities and colleges are supposed to prepare us for our life. But do they?

Let’s take a look at law schools. I am talking about traditional law colleges as well as fancy ones which call themselves law schools a la Americana and dole out fancy GPAs.

Do they teach you practical skills that you need to survive in the world of law practice?

Very little if at all. By the time you graduate, you probably do not know how to draft basic commercial contracts. They make you read tons of case laws, memorize notes for the exam and perhaps even make you read the statutes to an extent as well.

But you still know nothing about how to do client work.

But that is not the worst thing really.

It would have been nice if colleges taught practical skills like contract drafting, due diligence, compliances, negotiation, how to handle court registries, strategize litigation, how to draft various kinds of applications before different forums or even how to write a memo advising your clients.

They don’t. Law graduates, therefore, try to learn all these things from reluctant seniors over many years. It’s not a nice experience. Especially if you have paid through your nose and given the prime of your youth to these glorified law schools.

But I am saying that is not the worst thing law schools are doing. There is another disgusting thing they have done that has ruined the quality of the entire legal profession. It is stinking. There is no point in saying this nicely.

Law schools have ended up setting completely wrong standards. They are building bad habits amongst law students which they suffer from later in their professional life.

Most law colleges require students to submit projects and articles. That’s great. But do you know what they do then?

They accept horrible copy pasted plagiarised submissions and do nothing about it.

Law colleges around the country have normalised academic and professional dishonesty. They give good marks to the poor students for these terrible and copy-pasted worthless projects, completely screwing up what they should expect from the professional life.

Even before the young students begin to build work ethics, the colleges destroy it. Naturally, when the students join the workforce, they still look for such shortcuts out of habit.

While I am pontificating, I was also guilty of this. At NUJS it was easy to trick the teachers and submit non-original submissions. Out of the 50 projects I submitted at least 10 were managed through one short cut or the other. There were some teachers who were lenient. We knew we would get away with such nonsense and be awarded good marks anyway.

Today I wish the university and my teachers were more demanding on me.

It is also a trend that students must be given good marks. The justification is that this helps the students to get jobs and find LLM seats in foreign universities easily.

This phenomenon has grown and spread so much now it has become a joke. Foreign universities take grades given by Indian universities with a pinch of salt.

You can get an E or A+ in company law by mugging up some notes which cover maybe 10% of the act. Then you falsely think you are really good at it.

What do you think the interviewers feel when they ask basic concepts of company law to a candidate who has scored the highest possible grade in his Company Law paper but completely fails to give any satisfactory answer?

The industry knows what is going on.

The law schools are running dishonest rackets of selling marksheets and graduating undeserving people as lawyers.

What a tragedy. Instead of telling the truth about where a student really stands in the learning process, the universities and teachers are trying to misguide the future recruiters, rest of the academia, definitely the parents of those students and ultimately creating an illusion of great academic performance of students.

Naturally, these students do not put in the effort they would have otherwise in their 3 or 5 years.

What students learn from this whole travesty of academic exercise is that it’s a good idea to pretend, to show off, to give lip service.

You can “gas” or “faff” in viva and get 5 out of 10 even if you didn’t know jackshit. Wow. Now you think this is such an amazing skill.

You will later try it on your employers. Certainly on unsuspecting clients.

Please share this email with a couple of your teachers today. And request them to play a part in reversing this nonsense. Some teachers are aware of it and try to stand against the tide, but it’s hard on them.

The legal academia is today in the dumpster and nobody has the guts to speak the truth about it. People are busy being nice and attending conferences. And the students and the industry are suffering and will continue to suffer in the near future. Is this sustainable?

LawSikho exists simply because the legal academia has failed to train the students. It fails to give any meaningful continuing education, despite big grants and big talks, and hence a small company like ours have been bagging contract after contract from major companies who want us to train their lawyers and other executives.

And hundreds of students and lawyers enroll in our courses every month because colleges have such horrible standards of education.

And you know what we grapple with the most?

Trying to make them unlearn the terrible habits they have picked up with respect to learning from the traditional academia.

Reading to only pass the exams. What will you do when you will have to represent your clients? How will you decide how much is enough learning then?

Not preparing for a class. Will you go for your client meetings unprepared? Most Indian lawyers do that. And that’s why most Indian lawyers also crib about not being able to build a sustainable practice.

Are you going to bluff in the viva? Then you will do it in the courts and in negotiations also. You will even win once or twice with bluffs, and then your career will take a nosedive because everyone will figure out what a Bluffmaster you are and stop trusting you. And then, you will have to live with that reputation.

What is the value of a course if it does not teach you academic honesty, integrity and value of original work? An education that teaches you shortcuts and faffing will be responsible for your ultimate failure.

As a private company, we are free to set our own standards. And here is what we do.

We first give you weekly exercises and carefully curated study material to solve those exercises. After you are done with submission, then we give you specific feedback in writing on your output, to every individual personally.

For example, if you had to draft an agreement for your assignment, then you will get feedback on which clauses you have drafted well, which clauses you did not draft well and how to improve next time you draft them.

This is followed by a live classroom exercise led by an experienced lawyer and instructor. The students do not merely passively listen to a lecture, but having done all these exercises and received feedback, they are ready to participate as equals in the class.

Have you ever had your college follow this kind of methodology?

We have such an advanced system for submission of assignments, that it automatically rejects any submission that has more than 30% plagiarism or unoriginal content. We don’t accept academic cheating.

Then we demand that our students must write assignments that are of publishable quality. We give them weekly training even so that they can publish their articles. They are expected to publish at least one article every month. And they do with help of our instructors.

If we can do it, why can’t universities that charge in lacs to the students do it?

It is because most of the students and their parents are not asking for such high standards. They are just asking for marks and illusive placement. One they are getting truckloads and the other they are usually not getting. They are a little confused at the end of it all. Is the student to be blamed?

That’s what the college does. We did everything right. Maybe you didn’t do something so you didn’t get placement. The poor student thinks that there is something wrong with them and gets on with their life. What is the point in blaming the college? It at least gave him a glowing marksheet.

When will they begin to demand a higher standard of education from their colleges?

While the systemic change does not look anywhere close, at LawSikho we are offering some pathbreaking courses. I promise that our courses will challenge you intellectually and force you to grow. And in the end, you will love it.

It is not only that we will hold you too high standards, even we want you to hold us to very high standards. Let’s set new standards in legal education together.

Because you and I, both of us together, have the power to change the world.

Here are the upcoming courses you can opt for.

Diploma

Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution 

Diploma in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions)

Diploma in Entrepreneurship, Administration and Business Laws 

Executive Certificate Courses

Certificate course in Advanced Corporate Taxation

Certificate course in Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 

  The post How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession appeared first on iPleaders.

How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession syndicated from https://namechangersmumbai.wordpress.com/

[mandssisters]

Highway to hell! Key Bank. Pittsburgh 24th May 2017

What a crazy day! Having slept at the airport, I say slept, for approx 24 mins. I am pretty sure that the marble floor didn't need to be buffed by the drive by buffer man three times in that time. Clearly taking the piss out of the holiday makers. 😭😭😭 Safely checked in but not security checked we wait for the TSA gates to open... Sound familiar! A two plane trips from Louisville to Pittsburgh, via CHARLOTTE, what an honour. (Got the fridge magnet) We land, go to our hotel. Freshen up, and head out on the UBER to meet Sister J. Imagine our UBER drivers delight when we decide to change our route.... Yep, we basically did a U turn back down route 22. And arrived at the Cracker Barrel, probably about 3 miles from the airport,..... Oh how we laughed, and paid the $39. There's not much around Key Bank pavilion ....... So lovely to meet in person Sisters J and K. And our new buddies, Amy and Halle. We enjoy a square meal at a table. So, having already been checking out the venue, we are told that there is NO chance of getting onto the car lot before 3.30pm. But hey, do we trust this information? What passes over the next 3 hours can only be described as farcical. You couldn't make it up. We travel with Amy, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Entertainment for the two poor young security guys! So many Illegal U turns, pot holes, police warnings, illegal parking, illegal pissing in a public place..... I took 40 winks in the back of the wagon, "I've put the Brits to bed" a classic line. After so much stressing, we tactically make our way back to the venue, curb crawling along the highway..... All phones say 3.30pm, so we just wing it across the highway down the Car parking lots. Open ready or not here we come!!!!!! FAF! Parachuting out of the car we then make a dash to South Gate.... Just Call me Jessica Ennis Hill...(retired). Halle and I make it first to the south gate. Unbelievable. We are soon joined by other early car lot Parkers. I meet Laura, another great lady from New Jersey. We chat shite all afternoon. Doors to green. WHAT A JOKE! Again, not one to moan. The scanning team were all in place about 5pm. It's just a shame that the bus with all the security was stuck in traffic. As the big hand reaches 6pm and the small hand passes.... We wait. And wait, and wait. Then, what would appear to be the cleaning team arrive and get a 30 second demonstration on how to pat down. At this point, we can clearly see the west gate has been opened, and a flock of people running down the hill towards the pit. Doors finally open, and yes again chaos reigns. Double patting down as did they do it right the first time? The "I don't mean to tell you how to do your job, but you swipe it like this...." section. The walk no running section, the not knowing where to go section, the let me check your ticket again and then SLOWLY hole punch in the form of a heart section, and finally the let me check your ticket with hole and wrist band you section. Then finally the lets see where I should stand section, bearing in mind the hoards already in the venue. Such a shame we didn't all make it to the barrier. Grrrrrrrrh. Security. Jason. What a legend. He was so entertained by us Brits abroad, shook our hand and passed on his condolences about Manchester. It's not often you get to eat two Girl Scout S'mores and a peanut chocolate cookie at the barrier. #lifesavers thanks Jay! It was indeed #waythefuckupthere 😭😂😭😂😭🙌🏻 to Jason. Young Mr Garrett is from Pittsburgh so this was his hometown glory moment. A certain Mr Lovett and Mr Mumford joined him onstage for the last three songs. This was indeed a listening pleasure. You could see the joy from Marcus and Ben supporting Kevin, they love him. 'Control' was ...... Well...... Just super smooth. Different feel about the show tonight. I think the chaps just needed to get past their first gig since Manchester as a matter of respect, totally understandable. Tonight was a PARTY. Opening with Blind, storming, then into LLM, then we could see Marcus looking down into the pit and see security eye balling the crowd, a fight had broken out during Below my feet. Marcus stops the song, and says alright sweetheart. Security go over the barrier and break up the fight.... Marcus checks that we are ok, and then starts right up where they left it. Ever the pros. A post fight conference in the pit amongst security left me with the urge to go sssssssh! It was a great gig. The little kid on the barrier with the signage. "My 1st concert and Birthday" (must get myself one of those) he must have had such a blast, Marcus taking time after Ditmas to say hi, Chris giving him his drumsticks, and then getting the Tamborine. #lifegoals OMG the encore, B stage heaven. Cold Arms and a spontaneous rendition of Wagon Wheel, the crowd lapped it up. It was joyful bliss. Back on the main stage for Snake Eyes...... Leading into I'm on fire, with Kevin joining them. By the wolf I was pooped! We said our emotional good byes to Jason, who was no doubt off to drink another large can of Monster. What a day of adventures, but it was indeed such fun. This is why we do it. Upon exiting we found Halle and Amy chatting to Nick Etwell. He kindly introduced himself to us, and said "you're not from around here"! We talked Lewes GOTR, brewing and Bass Beer. What a gent. We took a photo opportunity. Having checked the photo afterwards, I did tell him I wasn't really this shape, it was all poncho bulge. #truefact 😜 It was a short but fun time with Sisters J and K, we said our good byes. And hitched another off road ride with Amy. Thanks for looking after us so well. Good times. Oh how we enjoyed our 3 hours sleep in the hotel. Onwards to Philly

[loyallogic]

How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession

This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, iPleaders.

Universities and colleges are supposed to prepare us for our life. But do they?

Let’s take a look at law schools. I am talking about traditional law colleges as well as fancy ones which call themselves law schools a la Americana and dole out fancy GPAs.

Do they teach you practical skills that you need to survive in the world of law practice?

Very little if at all. By the time you graduate, you probably do not know how to draft basic commercial contracts. They make you read tons of case laws, memorize notes for the exam and perhaps even make you read the statutes to an extent as well.

But you still know nothing about how to do client work.

But that is not the worst thing really.

It would have been nice if colleges taught practical skills like contract drafting, due diligence, compliances, negotiation, how to handle court registries, strategize litigation, how to draft various kinds of applications before different forums or even how to write a memo advising your clients.

They don’t. Law graduates, therefore, try to learn all these things from reluctant seniors over many years. It’s not a nice experience. Especially if you have paid through your nose and given the prime of your youth to these glorified law schools.

But I am saying that is not the worst thing law schools are doing. There is another disgusting thing they have done that has ruined the quality of the entire legal profession. It is stinking. There is no point in saying this nicely.

Law schools have ended up setting completely wrong standards. They are building bad habits amongst law students which they suffer from later in their professional life.

Most law colleges require students to submit projects and articles. That’s great. But do you know what they do then?

They accept horrible copy pasted plagiarised submissions and do nothing about it.

Law colleges around the country have normalised academic and professional dishonesty. They give good marks to the poor students for these terrible and copy-pasted worthless projects, completely screwing up what they should expect from the professional life.

Even before the young students begin to build work ethics, the colleges destroy it. Naturally, when the students join the workforce, they still look for such shortcuts out of habit.

While I am pontificating, I was also guilty of this. At NUJS it was easy to trick the teachers and submit non-original submissions. Out of the 50 projects I submitted at least 10 were managed through one short cut or the other. There were some teachers who were lenient. We knew we would get away with such nonsense and be awarded good marks anyway.

Today I wish the university and my teachers were more demanding on me.

It is also a trend that students must be given good marks. The justification is that this helps the students to get jobs and find LLM seats in foreign universities easily.

This phenomenon has grown and spread so much now it has become a joke. Foreign universities take grades given by Indian universities with a pinch of salt.

You can get an E or A+ in company law by mugging up some notes which cover maybe 10% of the act. Then you falsely think you are really good at it.

What do you think the interviewers feel when they ask basic concepts of company law to a candidate who has scored the highest possible grade in his Company Law paper but completely fails to give any satisfactory answer?

The industry knows what is going on.

The law schools are running dishonest rackets of selling marksheets and graduating undeserving people as lawyers.

What a tragedy. Instead of telling the truth about where a student really stands in the learning process, the universities and teachers are trying to misguide the future recruiters, rest of the academia, definitely the parents of those students and ultimately creating an illusion of great academic performance of students.

Naturally, these students do not put in the effort they would have otherwise in their 3 or 5 years.

What students learn from this whole travesty of academic exercise is that it’s a good idea to pretend, to show off, to give lip service.

You can “gas” or “faff” in viva and get 5 out of 10 even if you didn’t know jackshit. Wow. Now you think this is such an amazing skill.

You will later try it on your employers. Certainly on unsuspecting clients.

Please share this email with a couple of your teachers today. And request them to play a part in reversing this nonsense. Some teachers are aware of it and try to stand against the tide, but it’s hard on them.

The legal academia is today in the dumpster and nobody has the guts to speak the truth about it. People are busy being nice and attending conferences. And the students and the industry are suffering and will continue to suffer in the near future. Is this sustainable?

LawSikho exists simply because the legal academia has failed to train the students. It fails to give any meaningful continuing education, despite big grants and big talks, and hence a small company like ours have been bagging contract after contract from major companies who want us to train their lawyers and other executives.

And hundreds of students and lawyers enroll in our courses every month because colleges have such horrible standards of education.

And you know what we grapple with the most?

Trying to make them unlearn the terrible habits they have picked up with respect to learning from the traditional academia.

Reading to only pass the exams. What will you do when you will have to represent your clients? How will you decide how much is enough learning then?

Not preparing for a class. Will you go for your client meetings unprepared? Most Indian lawyers do that. And that’s why most Indian lawyers also crib about not being able to build a sustainable practice.

Are you going to bluff in the viva? Then you will do it in the courts and in negotiations also. You will even win once or twice with bluffs, and then your career will take a nosedive because everyone will figure out what a Bluffmaster you are and stop trusting you. And then, you will have to live with that reputation.

What is the value of a course if it does not teach you academic honesty, integrity and value of original work? An education that teaches you shortcuts and faffing will be responsible for your ultimate failure.

As a private company, we are free to set our own standards. And here is what we do.

We first give you weekly exercises and carefully curated study material to solve those exercises. After you are done with submission, then we give you specific feedback in writing on your output, to every individual personally.

For example, if you had to draft an agreement for your assignment, then you will get feedback on which clauses you have drafted well, which clauses you did not draft well and how to improve next time you draft them.

This is followed by a live classroom exercise led by an experienced lawyer and instructor. The students do not merely passively listen to a lecture, but having done all these exercises and received feedback, they are ready to participate as equals in the class.

Have you ever had your college follow this kind of methodology?

We have such an advanced system for submission of assignments, that it automatically rejects any submission that has more than 30% plagiarism or unoriginal content. We don’t accept academic cheating.

Then we demand that our students must write assignments that are of publishable quality. We give them weekly training even so that they can publish their articles. They are expected to publish at least one article every month. And they do with help of our instructors.

If we can do it, why can’t universities that charge in lacs to the students do it?

It is because most of the students and their parents are not asking for such high standards. They are just asking for marks and illusive placement. One they are getting truckloads and the other they are usually not getting. They are a little confused at the end of it all. Is the student to be blamed?

That’s what the college does. We did everything right. Maybe you didn’t do something so you didn’t get placement. The poor student thinks that there is something wrong with them and gets on with their life. What is the point in blaming the college? It at least gave him a glowing marksheet.

When will they begin to demand a higher standard of education from their colleges?

While the systemic change does not look anywhere close, at LawSikho we are offering some pathbreaking courses. I promise that our courses will challenge you intellectually and force you to grow. And in the end, you will love it.

It is not only that we will hold you too high standards, even we want you to hold us to very high standards. Let’s set new standards in legal education together.

Because you and I, both of us together, have the power to change the world.

Here are the upcoming courses you can opt for.

Diploma

Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution 

Diploma in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions)

Diploma in Entrepreneurship, Administration and Business Laws 

Executive Certificate Courses

Certificate course in Advanced Corporate Taxation

Certificate course in Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code 

  The post How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession appeared first on iPleaders.

How Indian law colleges are killing their students and the legal profession published first on https://namechangers.tumblr.com/

[kirkonline]

REALKTALK ep. 1: An Addendum

After ruminating over this topic (and a half-lucid, rant on facetime with a friend) I decided to look more into AI and specifically WHY it is bad. I found this article which I think puts the danger this kind of wilfull ignorance causes in simple terms. AI IS SCARY !

Basically, AI LLMS are NOT neutral like people tend to think they are - they are inherently biased and come at the risk of the environment. If you care about the planet, listen up - training an AI model requires TONS of computational resources in data centres, which translates to high carbon emissions. If you care about people, you should know that these data centres are often built in marginalized nations, meaning that their environmental consequences disproportionately affect the poor.

In addition to helping us burn down our planet <3 the myth of unbiased AI is in my opinion leading to a decline in critical thinking. LLMS learn from data that was created by humans, meaning that racist stereotypes, misogyny and other misinformation will inevitably appear when it reproduces information. It is important to remember that we live in a society so these models are designed to be profitable, not altruistic. They do not truly understand what they are parroting, they simply replicate what they have heard before. AND PLEASE REMEMBER that the development of these AI models is limited to a few large corporations, meaning that the content reflects the interests of those higher up on the ladder than us.

So yeah, AI bad and all that, but based on that paper alone we can extrapolate so many more bad things about our rising dependence on AI. For one, the lack of critical thinking I mentioned earlier is ever present in the first episode of REALTALK, and we are witnessing the spread of misinformation in real time. From the heavy involvement of the 1% in AI development and the tech industry as a whole, we can probably infer that if we allow AI-generated content to become our default source of knowledge, control over the "truth" will lie in their hands.

The REALTALK girls are right about one thing - AI will end the world as we know it if we continue to think of it as a neutral party. I don't know about you guys but I do not want to live in a young adult dystopian world, which is why I need everyone to lock in and STAY VIGILANT !

Reactions to the first episode of REALTALK !

After just listening to the new episode of the REALTALK podcast, when I was shocked to hear their claims on AI and had to come on here to clear up some things that are being said. When looking at the facts they provided, I’m shocked to say that 90% of it was WRONG, to the point where most of it can’t even be considered misinformation, as it didn’t only lack resources but also reason. On the other hand, when looking at the work of researchers like Luke Stark, provides a clear way to explain the impact and implications of AI. You don’t even need to read 100s of books to get a clear explanation of how to think of AI.

Luke, himself describes AI in terms of animation in his paper Animation and Artificial Intelligence. This comparison allows for a broader understanding of the questions plaguing the hosts of the REALTALK podcast, in which they are talking specifically about topics such as how it works, the political and social implications of AI, and its role in our lives. These are questions that many have but with minimum research, the research reveals itself. Their main concern was seeing how AI interacts with their lives and how to navigate the discourse around AI. The first steps to this are defining and refining terms we use to talk about AI, such as specificities of what people are referring to when speaking about AI and how that differs from other models of AI. The most common AI models that we interact with are models such as ChatGPT, Meta AI, and other AI assistants found in apps that we use daily. These are called chatbots and use Large Language Models (LLM).

These LLMs are what power popular chatbots that seem to be human-like. The notion that these LLMs are getting smarter and are getting more like humans is one of the concerns brought up in the podcast episode. This phenomenon is brought up by Luke when speaking about the “grammar of action”, which is a set of rules that the LLMs follow to find words that correspond to each other to add syntax and meaning. This is why when looking things up on ChatGPT, the words make sense and sound human-like, as these sets of rules ensure that the words make sense in the order they appear in the most often. However, this set of rules isn’t only using this set of rules to adapt to the inputs on the spot but rather has been put through filters to output responses that are closer to human-like grammar. This means that when you get an answer from a chatbot, although it is read as a human response, the LLM has been filtered enough to put out the most common human-like response possible, not really a nuanced answer.

The nuanced responses that put up the face of always being right can also seem to be non-biased however this is not the case, as many factors go into the political position of AI and the governing around it. One of these as Luke mentions is how it should be treated in the similarities to any other technologies in the sense that there should be policies and safety measures that must be instilled by the governing bodies to prevent exploitation and manipulation. As these LLMs are being upgraded at an incredible speed, the laws that surround them aren’t keeping up. This creates space for copyright issues as LLMs have the range to pull from anything they can and take credit for other people’s work on the internet however current copyright laws are also trying to combat the exploitation of media on the internet. There are also the ethical questions of what the humanistic qualities of AI chatbots the implication of explicit and exploitational content that they pump out and how that interacts with community guidelines.

These questions that come up when talking about AI are always popping up and with the amount of misinformation that is spread through podcasts such as the REALTALK podcast, it’s important to find credible sources such as Luke’s work in the Animation and Artificial Intelligence. Always remember to Stay Vigilant!

[enki2]

So, as somebody who was paying close attention to both generative art and generative text years before GANs & LLMs were invented (both the actual tech on the ground and how the media & regular people talked about it), I have a couple things to add. (Also relevant experience: I've written freelance for outlets with varying degrees of clout, self-published, gotten my stuff published in small-press anthologies, gotten paid for non-LLM machine-generated text by a small press who was featuring gen art, commissioned art, and spent a bunch of time talking about GANs with both professional illustrators and people who do art commissions.)

For one thing, text generation that's good enough to generate shitty children's books & nonsense essays has been around for a lot longer. I absolutely do see writers freaking out about LLMs (and the writers I see freaking out about LLMs are exactly the same demographics as the artists I see freaking out about GANs: amateurs doing freelance/commission work), but I think freelance writers have more or less accepted that they've never been able to make a living off this stuff & they also have noticed that their shit pay doesn't seem to get substantially more shitty (or their commissions substantially more rare) even after all the scary articles.

For another, every minor advance in generating art of any kind (including visual and textual art) produces dozens of low-effort sensationalist articles about how robots are gonna take artists' jobs. (It doesn't matter how shitty the output is: look at coverage of that TV screenplay writing program from the 50s.) These articles tend to have a big but short-lived effect on the discourse, and then are completely forgotten -- with the same people freaking out about what is essentially the same article about the same technology several years later. GANs and LLMs have stayed in the news a bit longer because non-technical people were able to play with them through several generations of development -- but this doesn't guarantee that the freakout will "take" (nobody spent too long worrying about botnik's autosuggest-keyboard was going to put comedians out of work, even though a lot of people found it very useful for comedy writing). It may be chance that GAN sensationalism hit a particularly sensitive audience, who now is stuck doubling down on dubious ideas because people post a lot of GAN images & trigger them, rather than amateur illustrators somehow being less capable of critical thinkers than amateur authors.

There's also a much bigger gap between drawing furry porn on commission and being a professional illustrator than there is between writing blog posts and writing a book, in terms of typical workflow. Professional illustrators are used to painting over photobashed models (which is almost exactly the same as painting over a GAN-generated image -- which you'd need to do in order to make it into something of publishable quality) while amateur artists of the kind I'm characterizing here tend to come out of the "do not steal my OC" corners of fandom spaces & idealize originality in a way that's not really compatible with commerce. Meanwhile, both the random Medium publication that wants to republish your shitpost & the New York Times is gonna basically gonna do collaborative editing on google docs & then try to figure out a way to not pay you. So, writers in general are not under the illusion that their work is valued, while digital painters who have not yet interacted with The Industry often are under that illusion.

Another factor is that literacy is more common than visual literacy. Most people can tell that an essay is dogshit because they themselves wrote dogshit essays in high school & got reamed out for it. But most people cannot recognize the illustration equivalent of a C+ essay. What's more, most people can recognize when an essay is poorly structured even when all the words are spelled correctly, while an image with reasonable anatomy but poor composition does not register as an unacceptable image. (I think most people can tell when somebody really knocks it out of the park -- the image equivalent of award-winning poetry has exactly the same kind of impact as award-winning poetry -- but most art, like most writing, is mediocre, and it takes a lot of learned skill to distinguish between two slightly different shades of mediocrity.)

Honestly kind of interesting to compare the relative intensity of response to AI art from visual artists/illustrators and writers - there's plenty of, like, high-minded worry about the potential damage of people using ChatGPT as a search engine/personal assistant or whatever, but basically no one seems to viscerally loath it like people on here do Midjourney.