Derek Hunt

Jul 9

"Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentati...Read more

"Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” ^ https://www.newyorker.com/culture/progress-report/what-will-it-take-to-get-ai-out-of-schools

Jun 18

"Elias in the Lighthouse, Again? Diagnosing Low Diversity in LLM Stories. We prompt four models to write 20,000 stories - 88.3% of these stories contain at least one of 11 tokens at rates vastly higher than contemporary English literature" https://arxiv.org/pdf/2605.26492

Jun 9

"agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history." https://nitter.net/eastdakota/status/2062212701414187452 https://radar.cloudflare.com/traffic#bot-vs-human

May 28

"AI Doesn’t Reduce Work—It Intensifies It". AI promised to free up workers’ time. UC Berkeley Haas researchers found the opposite. https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/ai-promised-to-free-up-workers-time-uc-berkeley-haas-researchers-found-the-opposite/

May 19

"AI should make you think more, not less: 4. Andrew Maynard asks whether AI is a cognitive Trojan horse. Maynard’s piece introduced me to the term “epistemic vigilance”, a concept from Dan Sperber and colleagues. It’s our evolved cognitive immune system. We default to trusting what others tell us, ...Read more

"AI should make you think more, not less: 4. Andrew Maynard asks whether AI is a cognitive Trojan horse. Maynard’s piece introduced me to the term “epistemic vigilance”, a concept from Dan Sperber and colleagues. It’s our evolved cognitive immune system. We default to trusting what others tell us, but if something feels “off,” our vigilance kicks in and we evaluate critically. Maynard asks whether AI bypasses these mechanisms. AI is fluent, confident, and responsive (all cues we associate with trustworthiness in human communication). It may slip past the defences we evolved for detecting unreliable information. He calls this an evolutionary mismatch: a new technology disrupting the cognitive abilities we rely on to navigate new technologies. This insight stayed with me. This new alien technology is coming at us faster than we can adapt or evolve. People don’t accept bad AI outputs because they’re lazy. They accept them because the outputs feeltrustworthy in ways that short-circuit normal evaluation." https://daviddiviny.substack.com/p/fff-ai-should-make-you-think-more