{"id":176106,"date":"2020-09-04T18:06:00","date_gmt":"2020-09-04T23:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/09\/04\/artificial-stupidity\/"},"modified":"2020-09-04T18:06:00","modified_gmt":"2020-09-04T23:06:00","slug":"artificial-stupidity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2020\/09\/04\/artificial-stupidity\/","title":{"rendered":"Artificial Stupidity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Students have been given online short essay exams, and the kids have discovered that they are graded by artificial intelligence, and you can ace the test with two sentences and a word salad<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The problem here is not AI. The problem here is the tech bros trying to sell crap AI as gold:<\/p>\n

On Monday, Dana Simmons came downstairs to find her 12-year-old son, Lazare, in tears. He\u2019d completed the first assignment for his seventh-grade history class on Edgenuity, an online platform for virtual learning. He\u2019d received a 50 out of 100. That wasn\u2019t on a practice test \u2014 it was his real grade. <\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>At first, Simmons tried to console her son. \u201cI was like well, you know, some teachers grade really harshly at the beginning,\u201d said Simmons, who is a history professor herself. Then, Lazare clarified that he\u2019d received his grade less than a second after submitting his answers. A teacher couldn\u2019t have read his response in that time, Simmons knew \u2014 her son was being graded by an algorithm.<\/span>

<\/span>Simmons watched Lazare complete more assignments. She looked at the correct answers, which Edgenuity revealed at the end. She surmised that Edgenuity\u2019s AI was scanning for specific keywords that it expected to see in students\u2019 answers. And she decided to game it. <\/span>

<\/span><\/a><\/span>

<\/span>Now, for every short-answer question, Lazare writes two long sentences followed by a disjointed list of keywords \u2014 anything that seems relevant to the question. \u201cThe questions are things like… \u2018What was the advantage of Constantinople\u2019s location for the power of the Byzantine empire,\u2019\u201d Simmons says. \u201cSo you go through, okay, what are the possible keywords that are associated with this? Wealth, caravan, ship, India, China, Middle East, he just threw all of those words in.\u201d <\/span>

<\/span>\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>

<\/span>Apparently, that \u201cword salad\u201d is enough to get a perfect grade on any short-answer question in an Edgenuity test. <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Algorithm update. He cracked it: Two full sentences, followed by a word salad of all possibly applicable keywords. 100% on every assignment. Students on @EdgenuityInc<\/a>, there's your ticket. He went from an F to an A+ without learning a thing.<\/p>\n

— Dana Simmons (@DanaJSimmons) September 2, 2020<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is typical of what we are getting from tech these days.<\/p>\n

It seems that it’s all the late David Graeber’s “Bullsh%$ Jobs<\/i>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Students have been given online short essay exams, and the kids have discovered that they are graded by artificial intelligence, and you can ace the test with two sentences and a word salad. The problem here is not AI. The problem here is the tech bros trying to sell crap AI as gold: On Monday, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[618,397,588,533],"class_list":["post-176106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-education","tag-fail","tag-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176106"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176106\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}