We'll see how I feel in the morning, but for now i seem to have convinced myself to actually read that fuckin anthropic paper

@jenniferplusplus No it is not. That kind of thing is left to the realm of "self-publishing". Was this thing peer reviewed?

"AI" is not actually a technology, in the way people would commonly understand that term.

If you're feeling extremely generous, you could say that AI is a marketing term for a loose and shifting bundle of technologies that have specific useful applications.

I am not feeling so generous.

AI is a technocratic political project for the purpose of industrializing knowledge work. The details of how it works are a distant secondary concern to the effect it has, which is to enclose and capture all knowledge work and make it dependent on capital.

@seanwbruno It is not. https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

@jenniferplusplus

@jenniferplusplus You have entirely more stamina than I have. I just read the first sentence of the abstract and emitted a guffaw and exclaimed, out loud for the spouse to hear, "Citation needed!".

So, back to the paper.

"How AI Impacts Skill Formation"
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20245

The very first sentence of the abstract:

> AI assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers.

1. The evidence for this is mixed, and the effect is small.
2. That's not even the purpose of this study. The design of the study doesn't support drawing conclusions in this area.

Of course, the authors will repeat this claim frequently. Which brings us back to MY priors, which is that this is largely a political document.

@jenniferplusplus How about not just capital, but also permission?

Imagine a world in which "AI" is actually successful: it is widely, maybe even largely universally, adopted, and it actually works to deliver on its promises. (I *said* "imagine"! Bear with me.) In such a world, what happens to someone (person, company, country, whatever slicing you want to look at) who is *denied access to* this technology for whatever reason?

The power held by those in control of allowing access to that tech…

@mkj Yeah, same thing. You can't use industrial machines without the permission of the owner.

@jenniferplusplus I like the fact that their own research doesn't fit their lazy claim you reference, and they spend a lot of time trying to work out how the claim can be true, even though their own evidence is against it (and more in line with the mixed evidence in the literature, as you say).

@seanwbruno @jenniferplusplus
Will "is peer reviewed" change validity/or-lack of the paper?
Should it?

@jenniferplusplus True, but I think it's safe to say that it's very possible to go through a whole life without personally touching or needing to use any industrial machinery.

(To be clear: I'm not arguing against you here.)

@mikalai @jenniferplusplus IMO, yes. However, reading the first sentence is enough for me to move on to spend my time on other things for the day.

@jenniferplusplus it reminds me a bit of the famous thing with the Flat Earth Society people who spent $20k on an expensive laser gyroscope to "prove" that the Earth was not a rotating sphere... and then spent a lot of time being very confused and upset when, of course, it measured precisely what you'd expect from a rotating spherical Earth.

And now for a short break

@seanwbruno @jenniferplusplus
I must apologize for focusing on peer review, abstracting from article itself.
But, this "force-fed GenAI and slop" moment is to ask ourselves, about how we assess statements, ideas, words.
If an article is in area with only 50 persons in it from the whole globe, "review" should be, 5 upvotes, 7 downvotes, at moment x, and then you decide to, spend time to comprehend article, or to wait. When this is more explicit, then we have better chances, as civilization, imho

@mikalai @seanwbruno @jenniferplusplus the thing that is a positive signal is that it *survived* peer review, which implies that there are multiple, knowledgeable, independent scientists in the area of study of the paper that read it and came to the conclusion, "the conclusions stated by this paper are supported by the data and arguments presented in the paper".

This paper would not survive peer review.

It is a flawed system but it is not worthless.

@jenniferplusplus no, usually academic studies have a null hypothesis of "the effect we're trying to study does not exist" and are required to provide evidence sufficient to reject that hypothesis

@jenniferplusplus

#regulateai

I have eaten. I may be _slightly_ less cranky.

Ok! The results section! For the paper "How AI Impacts Skill Formation"

> we design a coding task and evaluation around a relatively new asynchronous Python library and conduct randomized experiments to understand the impact
of AI assistance on task completion time and skill development

...

Task completion time. Right. So, unless the difference is large enough that it could change whether or not people can learn things at all in a given practice or instructional period, I don't know why we're concerned with task completion time.

Well, I mean, I have a theory. It's because "AI makes you more productive" is the central justification behind the political project, and this is largely a political document.

> We find that using AI assistance to complete
tasks that involve this new library resulted in a reduction in the evaluation score by 17% or two grade
points (Cohen’s d = 0.738, p = 0.010). Meanwhile, we did not find a statistically significant acceleration in
completion time with AI assistance.

I mean, that's an enormous effect. I'm very interested in the methods section, now.

> Through an in-depth qualitative analysis where we watch the screen recordings of every participant in our
main study, we explain the lack of AI productivity improvement through the additional time some participants
invested in interacting with the AI assistant.

...

Is this about learning, or is it about productivity!? God.

> We attribute the gains in skill development of the control group to the process of encountering and subsequently resolving errors independently

Hm. Learning with instruction is generally more effective than learning through struggle. A surface level read would suggest that the stochastic chatbot actually has a counter-instructional effect. But again, we'll see what the methods actually are.