In the what of the observer? Are you accepting that minds exist but consciousness doesn't?

This is rhetorically slippery, and feels like it is restating the thing that I asked to be demonstrated when I asked for example of the opposite. It feels like begging the question.

In either case, the central thing that I was saying is that critiquing an article because it makes a claim about a specific word which also applies to an entire class of words makes that critique feel less informative. What I mean is that if there were an article that said "The Sun is not red" and the response was that redness is a concept of human minds, then I don't know if I would feel informed. If the comment is just limited to point that out, I guess I wanted to point out the limitation.

People are still coming up with definitions of consciousness and then those definitions end up being attacked by others who disagree with the foundation of the definition, which is - if you will recall - also what happened with the meter, over the course of centuries, until it was very recently redefined to be "unambiguous", but arbitrary. This was possible because few people had any particular emotional investment in the definition of a meter, and it is probable that consciousness will be eventually defined to mean that only humans can be conscious, which may be dissatisfying but would be true throughout the universe, like a meter. If the question then becomes "what defines a human" and "why a human", then I ask, why 1/299792458 of a second?

I think that if Wikipedia had no recommendations on good sources for their own articles and did not ever ban sources, companies would not be so sanguine about letting people use Wikipedia. There's an entire internal process associated with evaluating sources, and the expectation when using Wikipedia is that nothing written in an article is going to be sourced from the Daily Mail or Conservapedia, as an example. Also, I do think that there are companies that do have policies against talking to known liars. Given the Wikipedia bans sources and news agencies ban human sources once they've been shown to be unreliable, I don't think it's insane to then have such companies or agencies say that AI shouldn't be used because it's been shown to be unreliable. Obviously there's a balancing act of utility versus accuracy, and Ars has (probably incorrectly) decided that the utility of AI outweighs its inaccuracies.

What is frustrating is that AI cannot have a higher accuracy than the median reporter, given a little more time. AI is trained on all digitizable text, including falsehoods and inaccuracies by laypeople. Humans can look up digitizable text using search engines, too. An AI can't follow up on leads or ask anyone questions. There's no world in which synthesizing available data from digitized sources alone ends up with more accurate data than a human with a search engine and the ability to make a phone call. So allowing LLM use at all is a direct admission that seeking out the "truth" is not an important goal because it could never actually improve accuracy and could only worsen it through hallucinated, probable reporting. It's one thing when companies say that they're committed to truth and then secretly their most important overriding concern is their bottom line - it's quite another thing when a company directly says that the bottom line is their most important concern. Imagine the emperor walking through the parade, nude, saying "So what if I am nude? What are you going to do about it?"

> The students are not confused. They are trapped.

> In this environment, choosing not to use AI is not intellectual integrity. It is self-sabotage.

> Here is where the conversation gets genuinely uncomfortable.

> The culprit was not artificial intelligence. It was standardised testing.

> For them, cognitive offloading is not a convenience. It is a developmental short-circuit.

> This is not merely a problem of laziness or moral failure. It is a predictable consequence (...)

> These investments are not philanthropic gestures. They are strategic plays for long-term market dominance (...)

> These are not neutral actors offering disinterested tools. They are companies with revenue models (...)

> This is not a new insight. It is a well-established finding that anglophone education (...)

> (...) AI is not a threat; it is an upgrade.

> If, however, the purpose of education is to cultivate human beings (...) then the arrival of AI is not the crisis. It is the revelation that the crisis was already here.

> Not more bans. Not more surveillance software. Not more hand-wringing opinion pieces from adults who themselves rely on AI for their professional work.

> But the overreliance they fear is not a new phenomenon introduced by ChatGPT. It is the logical extension of an educational philosophy (...)

The irony here is that the AI generated article gives a full throated endorsement of using LLMs to generate slop; why should we believe that the guy who prompted the LLM to generate slop that says slop generation is good did not himself use the slop generator?