@elinorpd_
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it’s my nature to keep posts rather impersonal, so i have to work extra hard to tweet this sort of personal testimony below from time to time as i think the reminder in it around AI and the “value of human intelligence” is worth itView quoted post on X
as of the end of Oct 2026, i have not (yet - you may insist) had the *slightest* moment of questioning the impact of AI on the meaning of any of my work/skills - or even feeling any unusual shift beyond having an amazing (and rather often infuriating) tool
believe it or not, but my ability to produce a completed artifact* (paper, model, open source software, lecture, …) and the effort, expertise, or time one takes to produce has actually barely reduced - despite comprehensive productivity benefits from AI
the reason is that i essentially NEVER choose to work for a pre-determined outcome or some field-wide well-specified problem; i only work on artifacts i aim to perfect according to *my* judgment and where my personalized ambition obviously has no set limit and isn’t somehow pre-loaded onto AI
better tools simply change the costs of my choices - i quite literally work on moving goal-posts if you will! when the fixed constraint are only time and energy, AI simply allows me to re-explore scope and make fewer (or different!!) tradeoffs or compromises, which feels almost no different!
i’m not saying every job or every endeavor - including very advanced and historically prized ones! - looks like this today, but i’m offering:
(1) at least one voice in this moment (of so many annoying loud FUD voices!) that it’s totally possible and i suspect extremely scalable and i predict will remain so for the foreseeable future!
(2) why “someone like me” is indeed choosing happily to be in academia and not elsewhere! (again lots of FUD out here!, but where else do you have the freedom to keep seeking to create value for deciding and solving ~arbitrary ambitious/useful problems, establish credit for it, and train superstars who do the same?)
my fear and worry in this moment is a lot less about Al or "the value of human intelligence" and much more about how concentration of power has a very reliable history of being very dangerous to large numbers of affected people! a VERY different problem imo
*i guess certain of those took way longer than i expected but do stay tuned for a half dozen things on the short horizon…
Models are sycophantic, and when they do challenge faulty or incorrect inputs, they're ambiguous and ineffective.
In a new paper w/ multilingual co-authors, we find that people may view LM responses that push back, yet still end up believing false content is true.View quoted post on X
LLM developers train their models to follow prosocial values, but post-training can influence model behavior in unexpected ways. In “Predicting Alignment Generalization with Value Representations”, we ask whether downstream effects of value alignment can be predicted in advance.View quoted post on X
This paper (camera-ready copy coming to arxiv soon) was accepted at @COLM_conf and the poster will be presented by @cameronajpatt with @LorenzoManuali, my brilliant co-authors, on Thursday at 1pm in Poster Session 5. Please go along and chat with them—since we put out this version there have been more models added, and things keep getting worse! The AIs just *really* want us to follow any rules, no matter how absurd, unjust, or illegitimate. The AI companies are training illiberal toadies. With @ahall_research and @mattbotvinick at Anthropic I hope this will start to change! Freer Systems please!View quoted post on X
