- Chad Nielsen on Adobe Walls and “Slate Sketches”: The Gritty Reality of Building the Salt Lake Temple: “Last Lemming, because the comparison is with standard Monzonite, of course, not granite. Monzonite has <5% quartz, while Quartz Monzonite is 5-20% quartz. (Plus, there's also a Foid-bearing Monzonite.)” Jan 25, 12:30
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “I thought I was the only member that ever read Jay’s Journal ! What a blast from the past.” Jan 25, 11:13
- on Adobe Walls and “Slate Sketches”: The Gritty Reality of Building the Salt Lake Temple: “At the risk of reinforcing Jonathan’s point–if the temple stone contains less quartz than granite, why do we need to acknowledge quartz in the name of the mineral? Just call it monzonite and be accurate enough to forgo the explanatory note.” Jan 25, 09:01
- on Adobe Walls and “Slate Sketches”: The Gritty Reality of Building the Salt Lake Temple: “It’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars.” Jan 25, 08:21
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “AI will cause many of us to lose our humanity and others to fully discover it. In many ways, AI will be able to do things better than most and eventually all of us. But all that truly matters is our lived experience. Fascinating, that is essentially what God sent us here to do!” Jan 24, 21:40
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “You should include as part of the prompt a requirement to note sources the AI refers to come up with its iteration.” Jan 24, 20:17
- on Vigilance is not panic: “That’s a great comment, Jonathan. That’s where I’m trying keep myself–though I know I don’t always have my feet squarely on the line where the truth cuts through all the mucky-muck. But I suppose that will always be a challenge where the line divides a solid waste landfill from sewage treatment facility.” Jan 24, 17:40
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “Our cosmology isn’t very good for horror–our demons are known quantities. There’s a reason we do science fiction and fantasy instead. “…so far I think it’s at the lower tier of what we’d find at, say, Barnes and Noble, but it’s not getting close to the realm of the greats.” Yeah, I don’t know how they move past this. These models need gobs of text for training, and of course most of it is mediocre writing. I see the same thing with AI-generated code: it’s inefficient and inelegant, but so is a lot of human-written code. A new professor reached out to me a couple weeks ago: he’s teaching a course where students do their first statistics using Stata and the TAs told him they’re always overwhelmed, so he wrote a prompt that turns Gemini into a Stata coach and wanted to know how to make it available to the students. (The answer is a Gemini Gem. He didn’t realize my group helps students as well as researchers and now I’m doing a guest lecture for him, and he’s reevaluating whether to actually point the students to AI or not.) The advice it gives is usually okay. It was quite impressive to just give it a graph of a regression diagnostic and have it say, correctly, “See that U shape? That suggests the relationship between this predictor and the outcome is non-linear. Try adding a squared term.” But it’s inconsistent and often mediocre. Still, it was quite a thing to be asked to help set something up that, in theory anyway, could replace me.” Jan 24, 16:20
- on Vigilance is not panic: “Morgan and Hoosier have each in their own way cautioned against getting caught up in a media-fueled spiral of catastrophization and outrage. Everyone should take that caution seriously, especially when so much unverified information circulates so rapidly and it’s so easy to create fake images and video, and no matter who you are, there’s an echo chamber ready to confirm everything you believe. I don’t think that’s what’s going on, but the thing about testable predictions is you eventually get an answer. In the meantime, I would caution people who think this is just media-induced panic not to get caught up in a spiral of normalization. You need to give yourself an off-ramp from defending the indefensible before you go too far down that path.” Jan 24, 14:53
- on The First AI-Written Mormon Horror Novel: “Increasingly high levels of AI slop is not necessarily bad bad thing, of course. In a lot of other contexts, something that’s extremely fast, basically free, and good enough for most purposes means serious productivity gains. It just raises questions about viable career paths and long-term societal stultification that no one has quite figured out yet.” Jan 24, 14:38
