We will happily disempower ourselves: Go edition
From a fantastic post by Ashe Vazquez Nuñez on LessWrong about the use of AI by Go players:
The appealing, exciting archetype of a cheater is one that uses covert, elaborate methods to get outside information and fraudulently obtain prize money or prestigious titles. Instead, we learned from the many examples of cheating and player confessions that idle curiosity and laziness were the dominant reasons for AI use in our school. Our students would often set out to play a normal game of Go, but would get stuck on a particularly difficult or annoying move; eventually, their curious eyes would drift to their second monitor — where they usually had their AI software running anyway — and they would check the answer as one would sheepishly side-eye the solution to an interesting puzzle or homework problem. Another reason people cited for using AI was an emotional investment in preserving or improving their image within the school community. Some wanted to avoid appearing incompetent and would employ strategies such as only playing moves that lost “n” points or less in expected value according to their computer.
…
A central part of every student’s retelling was that despite their AI use, they retained artistic control over their output and could exercise agency to think and improve for themselves. The AI felt to them like a tool that helped them fulfill latent potential or artistic sensibilities.
Never underestimate the attraction of the path of least resistance.
Vazquez Nuñez suggests that players operate under an illusion that they are still learning and could pull out these moves later if required. Reminds me of many of my students.
The population of Go AI users … fire up their computer out of idle curiosity and nod along passively as the truths of the universe float by them. They register the insights not one bit more because they can click the sublime moves. People consistently underestimate just how lost they will be when the solution is no longer right in front of them. …
The illusion of control that AI users have reliably shown interacts in an insidious way with their disempowerment. It contributes to a society of Go players that allow their participation in culture to be automated away. They are moreover so disempowered about it that they have built-in psychological mechanisms to keep them from ever recognising their own obsolescence. This mechanism even works to sabotage the detection of AI use in others. People tend to give overly conservative estimates of the chances a given game involves AI. I think this happens because they usually consult their own AI to check a suspected game. In doing so, they also come around to the machine’s point of view and conclude that playing the correct AI move was the “natural” thing to do anyway in that situation.
As one of the headings in the post states, “AI users never find out they haven’t “got it”.”
I recommend reading the whole post.