So your grant applications were written by AI, your lectures were written by AI, your publications were written by AI, and your students exams were marked by AI? Buddy what were YOU doing?
AI fan or not, that is astoundingly stupid.
I lean towards no, but I routinely call it a tool. I can’t reconcile the two statements.
If you can't use your tools properly (i.e. in this case, have backups) you will hurt yourself. And trying to blame it on tools that have NO guarantee in the first place
> However, my case reveals a fundamental weakness: these tools were not developed with academic standards of reliability and accountability in mind.
is frankly unprofessional.
If we consider it a tool, then why is it not work?
And to be clear I’m not even sure what I think. I’m throwing the question out there because I’m curious about what other devs think out here.
Just the first thing that comes to mind: ChatGPT can act as an enhanced Jupyter notebook where you specify tasks in English. This isn't an analogy; they literally run Jupyter kernels in the backend with chat as the frontend. There's also canvas mode for iterating on actual documents, and the search/retrieval features make it a genuinely useful research tool independent of generation.
And this is me defending OpenAI, which I've stopped using. Other systems are more capable.
It might be my professional deformation, but I never store anything in ChatGPT and Claude for longer than a day or two.
”Dr Flattery always wrong robot” is such a wonderful way to describe ChatGPT and friends when used like this <3
I particularly feel close to the “how do you just admit to this and publish it on nature” feeling.
Are we getting desensitised to the boundary between self and ai?
On the other side of it, if we speak of AI as a tool, does it not count as work to prompt and converse ?
Keep a copy (cloud) and a backup (offline) for all you own data.
1. kernel update on pre-release OS did something weird to the usb driver
2. heavily corrupted disk enters device hardware into lock-out
3. Pull ISO snapshot, and reinstall OS bare bone SSH install in Qemu session
4. verify OS working in VM
5. install new OS USB device in PC, boot once, and watch the kernel bug nuke the drive again
6. Boot from last weeks backup boot disk image, and watch the kernel bug nuke the drive again
7. install old kernel OS, and verify it was not a hardware failure
8. Remember to Backup, FOSS can byte hard when and not if things go sideways.
Best regards =3
hardcopy and offline copy(ies) is the only way, if one is able to maintain it in a disciplined way
GDPR gives the right to data portability.
https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
Any _legitimate_ organisation following the GDPR will allow export of your data; and you shouldn't be stupid enough to trust sensitive or valuable data with some dodgy organisation that doesn't follow the GDPR.
Obviously this doesn't alleviate the need for proper offline backups of your own valuable data!
I think it’s very reasonable to assume cloud services don’t need to be backed up, because many of them are based on extremely reliable technologies.
Obviously mistakes like this can happen, and if they’d had a backup OP would be better off.
But I can’t help but think that there’s a lot of shadenfreude here from people who dislike AI at seeing somebody suffer for having a strong reliance on it.
Even for my daughters’ much simpler school homework, projects, and the usual drawings/sketches, I’ve set up Backups so they don’t cry when their work gets lost. I set up the Macs I handed down to them to be backed up to iCloud, and added a cheap HDD for Time Machine. They think I’m a Magician with Computers when I teach them to use the Time Machine and see the flying timeline of their work. The other thing is the Google Workspace for Schools. I have found that having a local copy always available via a tool (such as InSync) does wonders.
The only sob story now is Games. They sometimes lose points, the game coin thingies, and developer-kids with bugs that reset gameplay earnings. I have no idea how to help them there besides emotional support and how the world works — one step at a time.
How about if ChatGPT/Claude writes a local Markdown copy of each conversation? Won’t that be Nice?
I can definitely see the perspective in clarifying that ChatGPT didn't lose anything, the person did, but that's about it.
1) go ahead and delete everything 2) back up and then go ahead 3) abort and keep things as they are
ChatGPT definitely wants to be the copilot of all your work. Guy didn’t just have chats, he had drafts that his virtual assistant helped formulate and proof read. Give how big and used ChatGPT has become, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone tech savvy that this is being used for serious work outside of vibecoders.
He starts out saying he "disabled data consent". That wording by itself doesn't mean delete the content at all. The content could theoretically live in local storage etc. He says the data was immediately deleted with no warning.
Then OpenAI replies that there is a confirmation prompt, but doesn't say what the prompt says. It could still be an opaque message.
Finally, he admits he "asked them to delete" the data.
These comments vehemently disagree:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726570
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777039
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777123
> ... (the rest) ...
It's not that I don't see or even agree with concerns around the misuse and defrauding angle to this, it's that it's blatantly clear to me that's not why the many snarky comments are so snarky. It's also not as if I was magically immune to such behavioral reflexes either, it's really just regrettable.
Though I will say, it's also pretty clear to me that many taking issue with the misuse angle do not seem to think that any amount or manner of AI use can be responsible or acceptable, rendering all use of it misuse - that is not something agree with.
A reasonable amount of AI use is certainly acceptable, where "reasonable" depends on the situation, for any academic related job this amount should be close to zero, and no material produced by any student/grad/researcher/professor should be fed to third party LLM models without explicit consent, otherwise what even is the point? Regurgitating slop is not academic work.
If you think considering others to be desperate, senseless, and erroneously reasoning without any good reason improves your understanding of them, and that snarky commentary magically ceases to be or is all-okay because it describes something you find a big truth, that's on you. Gonna have to agree to disagree on that one.
Not that I've ever had the heart to say it to a friend who has shown up with a computer that won't boot and data they must recover. Sometimes it's the same friend a second time.
This guy [1] (in Swedish) was digitizing a municipal archive. 25 years later, the IT department (allegedly) accidentally deleted his entire work. With no backup.
Translated:
> For at least 25 years, work was underway to create a digital, searchable list of what was in the central archive in Åstorp municipality. Then everything was deleted by the IT department.
> “It felt empty and meaningless,” says Rasko Jovanovic.
> He saw his nearly 18 years of work in the archive destroyed. HD was the first to report on it.
> “I was close, so close to taking sick leave. I couldn't cope,” he says. The digital catalog showed what was in the archive, which dates back to the 19th century, and where it could be found.
> "If you ask me something today, I can't find it easily, I have to go down and go through everything.
> “Extremely unfortunate”
> Last fall, the IT department found a system that had no owner or administrator. They shut down the system. After seven months, no one had reported the system missing, so they deleted everything. It was only in September that Åstorp discovered that the archive system was gone.
> “It's obviously very unfortunate,” says Thomas Nilsson, IT manager. Did you make a mistake when you deleted the system?
> “No. In hindsight, it's clear that we should have had different procedures in place, but the technician who did this followed our internal procedures.”
In typical Swedish fashion, there cannot have been a mistake made, because procedures were followed! Or to put it in words that accurately reflect having 25 years of work removed: "Own it, you heartless bastard."
Translated with DeepL.com (free version) [1] https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/helsingborg/rasko-digitali...
One big reason I can think of that would make one want a permanent data purge feature, is that the data is not on their premises but on the service provider's. I think GDPR might even require such a feature under a similar rationale.
So maybe a better formulation would be to force the user to transfer out a copy of their data before allowing deletion? That way, the service provider could well and truly wash their hands of this issue.
One further refinement I can think of is bundling in a deletion code with the export archive, e.g. a UUID. Then they could request the user to put in that code into a confirmation box, thereby "guaranteeing" the user did indeed download the whole thing and that the service provider is free to nuke it.
Wouldn't really be a guarantee in technical actuality, but one really needs to go out of their way to violate it. I guess this does make me a baddie insofar that this is probably how "theaters" are born, rituals that do not / cannot actually carry the certainty they bolster in their effect, just an empirical one if that.
Is anyone familiar with current academic culture in Germany, to comment on how (or if) it warns its members about such risks?
Generation of boilerplate prose for grant applications was the beginning around 2023, which is absolutely understandable. The DFG recently allowed the use of AI for reviewers, too, to read an summarise the AI generated applications.
Researchers using qualitative methods seem (in general) to be more sceptical.
I wish we had an open debate about the implications instead of half assed institutional rules that will and must be widely ignored by researchers.
But I have to say, quite an incredible choice! ChatGPT released in Nov 2022. This scientist was an early adopter and immediately started putting his stuff in there with the assumption that it would live there forever. Wow, quite the appetite for risk.
But I can't call him too many names. I have a similar story of my own: one thing I once did was ETL a bunch of advertising data into a centralized data lake. We did this through the use of a Facebook App that customers would log in to and authorize ads insights access to. One of the things you need to do is certify that you are definitely not going to do bad things with the data. All we were doing was calculating ROAS and stuff like that: aggregate data. We were clean.
But you do have to certify that you are clean if you even go close to user data, which means answer a questionnaire (periodically). I did answer the questionnaire, but for everyone who has used anything near Meta's business and advertising programs (at the control plane, the ad delivery plane must be stupendous) you know they are anything but reliable. The flaky thing popped up an alert the next day that I had to certify again and it wouldn't go away. Okay, fine, I do need the one field but how about I just turn off the permission and try to work without it. I don't want anyone thinking I'm doing shady stuff when I'm not.
Only problem? If you have an outstanding questionnaire and you want to remove a permission you have to switch from Live to Development. That's fine too, normally, it's a 5 second toggle. Works every time. Except if you have an outstanding questionnaire you cannot switch from Development to Live. We were suddenly stuck, no data, nothing and every client is getting this page about app not approved. And there's nothing to be done but to beg Meta Support who will ignore you. I just resubmitted the app and we waited 24 hours and through the love of God it all came back.
But I was oh-so-cavalier clicking that bloody button! The kind of mistake you make once before you treat any Data Privacy Questionnaire like it's the Demon Core.
I frown when people currently trust AI, let alone have been doing so for 2 years already.
> [...] but large parts of my work were lost forever [...]
I wouldn't really say parts of his work were lost. At most the output of an AI agent, nothing more.
If somehow e-mails, course descriptions, lectures, grant applications, exams and other tools, over the period of two years disappeared in an instant, they did not really exist to begin with.
For once, the actual important stuff is the deliverable of these chats, meaning these documents should exist somewhere. If we're being honest everything should be able to be recreated in an instant, given the outputs and if the actual intellectual work was being done by Mr. Bucher.
Does it suck to lose data? Even if just some AI tokens we developed an attachment to? Sure.
Would I have outed myself and my work shamelessly, to the point that clicking a "don't retain my data" option undermines your work like this? Not really.
How can you loose "important work" of multiple years? -- can't be important and how can somebody _expected to become management_ be so incompetent?
"...two years of carefully structured academic work disappeared. No warning appeared. There was no undo option. Just a blank page. Fortunately, I had saved partial copies of some conversations and materials, but large parts of my work were lost forever." -- stupid: that drive could have died, the building could have burned down, the machine could have been stolen, the data could have been accidentally deleted... and all there was: "a partial" backup.
I mean, that isn't even a scenario where he didn't know about the data ("carefully structured") and discovered it wasn't covered by the backup schema (that would be a _real_ problem) Another problem would be of your churn is so high that backing up becomes a real issue (bandwidth, latency, money, ...). None of that applies.
And yet they reserve a spot in "nature" for such whining and incompetence?
If that was the intellectual calibre of the person, I wonder how truly worthwhile the lost work was.
While it absolutely makes sense to keep your important data backed up, I know people who were great academics in their field and yet managed to delete all their PhD work (before services like Dropbox and OneDrive became common).
The user without backups lost their own work.
Simple as that, no argument.
No backups, you the loser.
You might WANT someone else to be responsible but that doesn't change anything.
What the average human needs is laws and enforcement, and trust in both.
Key escrow is a well-known concept in cryptography:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_escrow
It's just that these "master keys" are super-dangerous to handle for obvious reasons.
I like her meta observation, that using ChatGPT for 2 years rots your brain so badly you somehow think it's a good idea to write an article like this, with your real name and professional/academic reputation attached to it, and get it published somewhere as high profile as Nature.
Someone on my Mastodon field commented that if they'd done that "you wouldn't be able to torture it out of me" and that they'd never admit it to anyone.
I feel that makes her point weaker. Because she is apart from that completely right: The work practice admitted to here is horrible. It likely includes leaking private emails to an US company and in every case meant the job of teaching and publishing wasn't don't properly, not even close.
How much are we willing to justify every wrong behaviour possible?
But your comment could equally be about the fact of using chatGPT in the first place for the job, that I wouldn't justify at all.
Or the user really was surprised that deleting all interactions meant deleting all interactions. Then your position is a bit more understandable, but even then - mistakes happen and an undo would still be good.
How dare you not let us steal your data.
The worst thing is all the people looking at this behaviour as normal and totally acceptable, this is where ai-sloppiness is taking us guys. I hope it's just the ai bros talking in the comments, otherwise we are screwed.