Quietly remembering when teachers would say "don't trust wikipedia it isn't reliable enough".....
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Anyone remember that time during covid where kids couldn't sit exams and the government tried to use a predictive algorithm to approximate their results? It ended up just marking them based on the wealth of the area the school was located in.
WONTFIX: system working as designed.
I recently attended a presentation given by Microsoft to my multi-academy trust which outlined a bunch of flavours of Copilot in the works that they are intending to sell to schools, primarily as a substitute for one-to-one tutoring. As if these bullshitting text prediction models weren't bad enough when poluting web content with nonsense assertions, we are now going to automate misinformation in education? This is, to me, a completely terrifying prospect.
The only bright spot is that the new educational AI model doesn’t exist yet and there’s plenty of time for the whole project to go sideways before launch.
Do you really think that will stop them?
I have faith in the ability of the UK public sector (or rather, the relentlessly incompetent outsources they hire) to catastrophically fuck up delivery of any software project.
For example, capita has already lined up at the trough: https://www.capita.co.uk/news/capita-advances-approach-next-generation-ai-microsoft
If you’re unfamiliar with capita, that’s probably a good thing. I’m not aware that they’ve ever been successful in anything, other than their continued ability to fleece the government. They’re basically too big to fail in the uk, because HMG’s procurement processes mean that they basically can’t stop giving them money.
Is Capita owned by a certain someone?
To my limited knowledge, no, for various values of “someone”. It is just a sort of malign beige juggernaut that’s shitty all by itself without needing external direction.