At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

I always figured that people who genuinely believed their employers were likely to kill literally everybody in the near future might burn down a bit more than that, but so far it's mostly been tweets

Having to poke through an about: page and find the thing to toggle to turn off this specific AI feature but not that one, and knowing they'd change it on you a couple of releases later, never filled me with confidence.

One switch in a readily discoverable location in the settings menu and it's all gone? Just the job, killed it now on the laptop and the mobile both.

This is why they're so keen on robots. They want guards whose loyalty they can really count on when the mob shows up with a guillotine.

That one might surrender and meekly accept their likely death at the hands of the machine, I can believe. But all of them? This isn't the first such claim we've heard about AI danger.

I believe that Yudkowsky believes what he says he believes, for example. He says shut them all down worldwide, immediately, and if there are rogue nations who don't go along with it then launch air strikes on their data centres - even against a nuclear state. He said that three years ago. That's the thinking of a man who believes it's genuinely likely that the machines will kill us all in the near future.

And this is still considered extremist lunacy. That tells me the rest of them don't believe what he does.

The general public should care because there's apparently a good chance these machines are going to kill them all, very soon.

They don't care because they don't believe that.

When some AI agent of theirs, trying to meet a developer's benchmark test, eventually hacks the power grid or the water supply to a metropolis to help itself to a way around a sandbox environment, then the general public will care. And when that happens they may well drag AI industry CEOs and researchers out of their beds to the nearest lamp-post.

> approximately eight hundred billion ... oops, that's eight hundred million, of course. Ten percent probability, times the current population of the Earth. The expected consequences of allowing the AI industry to continue their work, according to people who are oddly calm about the prospect.