US Politics Mega-thread - Page 5564

On March 17 2026 09:00 Acrofales wrote:

"Horrific environmental effects" is a bit hyperbolic there. Andrew Ng explained it quite well (link) but even if you reject the premise, you're not replacing the compute with nothing, as you would be for AI-slop TikTok videos, but with some other learning aide. I guarantee humans have a bigger carbon footprint than the compute for a few billion tokens a different human would use for education. Let alone the water used by humans, we're horribly inefficient water users.

Don't get me wrong, everything else you mentioned is fine, but the environmental effects is a ridiculous point.

On March 17 2026 09:17 LightSpectra wrote:


Data centers for AI are projected to use somewhere between 6.7 to 12% of the United States' electricity by 2028: https://www.belfercenter.org/research-analysis/ai-data-centers-us-electric-grid

I somehow doubt non-LLM learning aids are using that much.

On March 17 2026 09:37 Acrofales wrote:

Sure. But that's like saying that a lot of electricity is used in lighting. So schools should not have electric lighting.

In a lot of parts of the world people can be killed by what they say, also in many parts including the 1st world people can go to prison for the wrong opinions etc.

Manning and Assange went through hell and countless others would without anonymity.

On March 15 2026 20:43 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:

Yeah I think that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious if LightSpectra feels similarly.

On March 15 2026 16:53 baal wrote:


The fact that you need sources for such a thing speaks volumes.




https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country



what the hell does that Alabama article have to do with the subject?

On March 15 2026 23:38 LightSpectra wrote:


I do, yes.



You should review the conversation we've had up to this point. I didn't say Cuba didn't have low gun ownership, I'm challenging the notion that IF they had guns they'd definitely overthrow the government because they both want to do that, and no government is capable of defeating a guerilla insurgency of their own citizens.

On March 17 2026 06:50 Dan HH wrote:

I appreciate the time you took to give us a little peek into your work specifically with AI used in learning.

From my own experience, people that were good at googling are good at using AI and vice-versa. The amount of people that are good at googling is low. I'm thinking the percentage of people that are aware search operators exist is a single digit.

With your background, I'm sure you're aware there has been a deluge of studies in the past year comparing depth of learning and cognitive load specifically between groups asked to research a topic using traditional search engines vs LLMs. And the results were invariably that the groups using LLMs used their brains less and retained less information.

Now, we can nitpick methodology, throwing a random subject to someone is one thing, whereas intentionally trying to learn something you're interested in is very different, sure. But we already have the internet itself as a precedent of how people went and used democratized information.

We know the difference between a tool that helps you do the thing and a tool that does the thing for you. Using maps vs GPS is well researched example, GPS makes you not need to look for and memorize landmarks and create a mental map, which hinders your ability to learn to navigate unguided. Not a big deal, unless civilization falls in your lifetime you won't need that ability. Many tasks require skills that you won't need again or that you'll always be assisted with.

But being able to research, interpret and understand and check the veracity of a text are essential skills. And LLMs will hinder them for the average user is my current impression and expectation.

As I said in a previous post, AI isn't inherently bad or sycophantic, there are business decisions making them worse than they need to be. Almost all the ads for AI I've ever seen give banale use cases with some "woah, this thing will think for you" subtext. What's sold to investors is that this thing will do all the science and most of the labor for us and solve climate change and cure cancer, we don't need research grants and education to become more productive, we need hardware farms. What's given to users is compliments and validation and answers that sound confident and authoritative.

To your point that it makes good students better and widening the gap, as we see in the world around us today, it's the median student that decides elections and the future of our species. If the effect of LLMs on the median student is to make them exert their brain less it's a problem. I agree that the solution to that problem isn't to attempt to put the genie back in the box, we're all aware that's not an option and I personally wouldn't take it even if it were an option.

On March 15 2026 17:59 EnDeR_ wrote:


Source for bolded?

On March 17 2026 03:46 EnDeR_ wrote:
take AI summaries as facts without checking, like baal was doing, this, to me, is a serious problem.

On March 17 2026 07:37 Liquid`Drone wrote:


I don't disagree with any of this and I wholeheartedly agree with most of it. The aspect I think I am most worried about with AI is the extension of the GPS example you bring up - we know that our brains actually benefit from doing many of those small, menial tasks we've delegated to our smartphones, and I worry that AI ending up doing more and more of our more creative and rewarding work - not just the small menial tasks - will to a smaller or greater degree rob us of the human experience.

However, I think if you are engaged in the act of discussing a topic and you need some data to prove a point, you're already at a pretty high level of engagement. In that case, I'm not worried about using AI to give a quick data point rather than having to dig around for a reliable and trustworthy source. And as a teacher, the overarching goal of the research team I'm part of is basically to help give teachers around norway the toolbox to help the median student use it wisely.

Also - anecdotally - when ChatGPT was pretty new, I had given a group of students a history test where one of the questions was 'who is considered the father of liberalism'. This question ended up being a fun 'tell' - because the students who had used ChatGPT as their primary tool for preparing for the test all answered John Locke, while the ones who had used our default textbook as their primary tool for preparing answered John Stuart Mill. Either answer is fine (it was a mediocre question, but oh well) - but comparing the rest of the answers, students who went 'John Locke' had generally done a slightly better job overall; without giving me the impression they were harder workers.

This was a class full of good students. Teaching English or civics for vocational students that are going into construction, the overall impression is that AI has been a negative for their learning experience; but even then, I've given assignments that were major hits - that would make students who would normally struggle churning out a single paragraph of their own text over 90 minutes write more than a full page.

On March 17 2026 05:36 Liquid`Drone wrote:


My wife is doing a PhD and for her, AI has been an invaluable asset. In particular for statistical analysis which she herself did not have the skillset to do. Then, she's gotten stuff double and triple-checked by people with those skills, and overwhelmingly, AI has been spot on. She doesn't use it the way your students do - and I agree it's important that students develop the grit and tenacity to actually read academic papers - but if I want to read a PhD paper about a scientific field where I'm not literate, I will get a more accurate understanding from reading an AI summary than I will from reading the actual paper. If it's a field where I know my shit, nope, still gonna trust myself.

For the AI summary part - it's basically like googling something, visiting the first link you get, and using data from that link as your evidence. Can it be wrong? Sure. But it's a) significantly less time consuming and b) not wrong by default especially if you're talking about a non-controversial topic. Like baal himself said, using an AI summary to get an answer to "Does the cuban people hate their government" would be awful - but for 'gun ownership rates for different countries', it's fine.

On March 17 2026 11:38 Billyboy wrote:
I going to really stand behind this thing that is already really bad in reality, because there is a small chance it would help against the absolute worst case senario, which is more likely to happen with the really bad thing in reality.

On March 17 2026 11:50 baal wrote:


Every generation's luddites will have their Encarta, Wikipedia, and now AI moment to make the same mistak

I remember reading an article about it not long ago when book access became popular it was said that it was a lazy way of learning, that its a cheap substitute for lived experience.

On March 17 2026 11:55 baal wrote:


Perhaps to you in particular an authoritarian regime raising to power is an unlikely scenario, for the majority of the world it is not my friend.


The thing is that the perils of gun ownership scale proportionally with a society's civility, meaning that an "uncivil" country like lets say Mauritania gun ownership creates a lot of violence, but at the same time an authoritarian regime raising to power is very likely, compare that to Switzerland, which has very high gun ownership with little negatives effects but also a Tyranny is very unlikely.

So the risk/reward seems pretty linear across the board.

On March 17 2026 15:13 EnDeR_ wrote:


I don't know who that is.