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General consensus in the replies and quotes of this seems to be that the entire concept of "AI skills" is a joke - how hard is typing text into a chatbot, really? I will continue to argue that it's genuinely difficult, and that the challenge in using these tools is widely underestimated

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The first challenge is knowing what kind of problems are appropriate for AI assistance and what aren't - under what circumstances are you likely to see hallucinations? Which AI tools can provide real citations and which will just make them up?

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this is a very important one IME. maintaining (and snooping on) my RAG slackbot for the last couple years has shown me people have a wide range of intuitions for what it “ought” to be able to help with. most expect too much

The issue with this is the same as the issue with my PhD in android security (and why it’s also a joke): iterations on the specific technology would totally obviate the domain expertise to be had here. As models and architectures change, this will change radically.

I would expect that to be the case but I've been finding that it isn't - most of the mental tools I learned working with GPT-4 in early-2023 have turned out to be effective for Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Gemini 1.5 Pro and llama 3.3 70B in late-2024

They're still LLMs with roughly the same capabilities, so the most important lessons about what problems are a good fit for LLMs and what problems aren't tend to hold steady

My thoughts on this: LLMs are not testimonial sources. We split fact-checking responsibilities with testimonial sources: we can't do that here. It's a pattern matcher, and not all real patterns are real things. Appropriate problems are ones where this status is OK. Not an answer, but a start?

Another one is knowing in which domains you can reliably identify errors. There's a level of dispassionate self awareness that's really important when working with them.

How come supposedly the most advanced computer systems we have ever built can't look up facts, can't do long division and can't count the number of Rs in strawberry? (Except when they can, because some of them can consult external databases or run Python or JavaScript code to use as a calculator)

I don't think students should take classes on how ChatGPT Code Interpreter differs from ChatGPT Canvas - that would be like teaching MS Word specific VB macros in "intro to computers" I do think there's a lot of space for helping teach students how to navigate these utterly weird new AI systems

The fundamental challenge here is that there are key skills - reading, writing, thinking - that students urgently need to develop The temptation to outsource those activities to generative AI will clearly harm the acquisition of those skills - they need to be a slog

I do think that generally, the more skillfully one uses GenAI, the more interesting are the artifacts that emerge downstream. And staying on top of what systems & capabilities are available takes some elbow grease. Even if you have an ai doing *that* for you, can’t imagine it being a “set & forget”