The AI World to Come

This is about an article in Inside Higher Ed from November of ’23. I just saw a reference to it on Gelman’s statistics blog. It’s titled ‘Study Uses AI to Review Admissions Essays’

and the first sentence is –

“A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Pennsylvania have created AI tools to help admissions officers by analyzing students’ application essays.”

What a great idea, eh?

Another quote:

“Humans have limitations,” Benjamin Lira, a doctoral student in psychology at Penn and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “You’re not going to read the first essay of the day in the same [way] you read the last one before lunch.”

It’s a good thing AI has no limitations, isn’t it? And, AI can do things like this

“If I say, ‘I donated clothing to a homeless shelter,’ the AI will tell me that it has a 99.8 percent probability of showing prosocial purpose,” Lira said. “But if I say something like ‘I like cheese,’ that drops to less than 1 percent.”

Is that brilliant, or what? No human can match that, surely.

Then –

“The researchers did caution that as students—particularly higher-income students—become more savvy with technologies such as ChatGPT, they could alter their essays to fit what they believe will bring the best results.”

Indeed, I’m sure that until ChatGPT came along, students – particularly higher income students – never tried to match what they wrote in their essays to what they thought the university readers were looking for.

Oh, and about those human ‘limitations’? Well…..

“The AI algorithm can also make mistakes. For example, in the study, if a student were to say they donated heroin to the children’s shelter, it brought a very high score in the “prosocial purpose” category.”

Ah, a mere glitch. I’m sure they’ll clean that up in the Beta version.

It is clear where this is going, and Gelman pretty much says it. In no time we will be at the point where students use AI on their computer to write the essay, and the university uses the AI on their computer to read and evaluate it. No need whatsoever for any human involvement, and Bingo! You’re in university. Or not.

There are so many analogous possibilities. One day AI can write movies which are then reviewed by AI and used by other AI as input to write more movies. Same for e-books.

My favourite though, is this, for which I quote Gelman directly….

“Same thing with internet advertising. The AI writes the ad and conducts the bidding to put the ad online. The ad is then read by various bots so that the company that sells the ad gets to say they have traffic. We human users fight through the muck to find actual content.”

I can hardly wait.