Comment by Arubis
5 years ago
This may be the case, but "this tool is a potentially massive privacy and security intrusion" is a drastically different conversation than "calculators mean students can't do arithmetic anymore".
5 years ago
This may be the case, but "this tool is a potentially massive privacy and security intrusion" is a drastically different conversation than "calculators mean students can't do arithmetic anymore".
I think "calculators mean students can't do arithmetic anymore" is perhaps an uncharitable take because it ignores that calculators aren't also trying to learn arithmetic from examples of people using them. Eventually grammar correction algorithms will injest text written with them or other grammar correction algorithms as ground truth in their efforts to improve and adapt to new idioms- this may already be the case.
NLP researchers are tearing their hair out about this right now, since people are posting mountains of GPT/etc.-generated text online with no easy way to distinguish whether it's of human or other origin.
Reminds me of a scifi book where the Internet-analogue is so corrupted with junk deliberately injected by filtering services so that they can sell you the filters that it's impossible to use "naked".
I think it's either Neal Stephenson or maybe Stephen Baxter, but I'm not sure which book it was an aside in (it's not Fall, I haven't read that yet, though that appears to have a similar idea).
I guess we're entering a new phase of language evolution, then; whether we want it or not.
Maybe we should create a neural network model that could label arbitrary text as -- nah!
1 reply →
Well... you can read it.
I might be wrong, but so far I think it's been pretty easy to tell if text came from a human or a deep-learning system.
Granted, that probably doesn't scale well.
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This sounds like a case of "garbage in garbage out". Machine learning needs to account for that regardless.
Writing and arithmetic are a lot different. Activities involving math are very rarely done away from a phone, and computers are for all intents and purposes 100% reliable at it.
The best mathematician in the world will probably get the same answer I will on a calculator. At most maybe I'll get an irrelevant rounding error.
If there was only one good way to state any idea, no matter the context or intent, it would be different.
I could choose not to use grammarly if I had something to hide, with little trouble. It doesn't do anything most can't do themselves, or anything a local FOSS checker can't do once browsers start integrating them as they probably will someday.
The real danger would be a world in which I can't legally choose not to use it or for some other reason it is no longer a free choice.
Is journalism not part of how we prevent that?