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Notes -
Critical Social Justice in the Era of Large Language Models
https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/critical-social-justice-in-the-era
Many anticipate that AI will have the ability to engage in novel and complex philosophical reasoning or contribute to scientific progress. While AI has yet to achieve this level of sophistication, models like ChatGPT demonstrates an impressive ability to generate meaningful text. I am skeptical about the usefulness and meaningfulness of articles from certain disciplines falling under the banner of Critical Social Justice. Finding connections between abstractions or interpreting text through a postmodern critical lense isn't particularly difficult. Nor does it lend itself to error or falsification. I think traits that allow CSJ scholarship to be hoaxed will put it at risk of domination by AI-generated articles. Scholars in the future will be highly prolific, but all their work will be generated trough computers. This will become a sort of open secret. All this scholarship produced will not advance humankind because CSJ scholarship is, at best, rather useless, and, at worst, socially harmful. In other disciplines more tethered to reality, AI generating acceptable papers would mean genuine progress.
Many? That seems like a stretch. I think there is a big distinction between AI automating some tasks vs. AI developing actual reasoning ability comparable to a science researcher. I think it shows really how faulty or useless peer review is, especially for the humanities. People are not even reading these papers...total nonsense can slip through, or the distinction between what is nonsense or not is undefined, as the Sokal and other hoxes showed.
Many among rationalists at least. I agree with you otherwise, at least peer review for these specific disciplines.
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