AI in Puna

[Durian Fiend]

Durian Fiend - How are you so sure that Hunt uses AI to generate papers?

Tam Hunt's Medium posts have this at the end - "[Claude helped to write this]" and if you spend time reading them you'll find a lot of overstatements and blending of facts that is common to LLMs as they average out the sentences in their training data. It's why it was trivial for everyone to point out errors in his statements on everything from Hawaii's energy sources to Ilagan's donors. If you use "AI", at least take the time to actually fact check the output, unless you want to look like a mindless drone repeating nonsense.

And that's probably the most common impact I've seen here in Puna - people repeating AI slop info because it says something they want to believe, without ever checking for accuracy or sources. The other is the rapid undermining of education as kids get tempted into cut and pasting AI slop and not engaging in the actual effort of the learning process.

Lots of local teachers returning to in-class work and handwritten "blue book" tests so that they can figure out who is actually thinking for themselves and who is always just asking Claude for "help".

So you suspect he's using AI for generating content?   MyManao said, "AI generated, absent any human understanding".  Perhaps, but my assumption would be that he's using it in other ways, namely "cleaning up" his writing.