>Policy students have to read reams of documents weekly. Our hypotheses was that our student teams could use AI to ingest and summarize content, identify key themes and concepts across the content, provide an in-depth analysis of critical content sections, and then synthesize and structure their key insights and apply their key insights to solve their specific policy problem.

Yeah who cares about actually reading and properly understanding anything at all. Given the policy world is filled with so much BS, no wonder they like a BS machine.

At one point this states:

> Claude was also able to create a list of leaders with the Department of Energy Title17 credit programs, Exim DFC, and other federal credit programs that the team should interview. In addition, it created a list of leaders within Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget that would be able to provide insights. See the demo here:

and then there is a video of them "doing" this. But the video basically has Claude just responding saying "I'm sorry I can't do that, please look at their website/etc".

Am I missing something here?

This article says "the students did X", without providing any metrics to compare the result on. It's frustrating to again and again get articles saying "AI is great and speeds learning" without actually evaluating that learning process.

What's missing from this is the "before and after" - how this quarter's class experience was different from previous quarters without the AI tool emphasis.

It feels like the tools are used as a shortcut to not read documents, and then have the tools produce output from the shortcut taken. What did they accentually learn that they will retain afterwards?

I find it perplexing how people are so open to just dumping personal effort onto these tools and believing the tools work accurately.

Just read Mearsheimer and the think tank policy papers if you want to know what is actually going on. Go to the Stanford Hoover Institute if you want to sell what is actually going on to the American public.

Why would LLMs help, unless trained on classified information for which you could also use an internal search engine? In the end it comes down to how much military, economic and propaganda power you have and how much you are willing to deploy it.

The whole interaction with LLMs, which focuses on clicking, wrestling with a stupid and recalcitrant dialogue partner distracts from thinking. Better read original information yourself and take a long walk to organize it in your own mind.

Someone apparently is taking the old war college joke about "it's only a lot of reading if you do it" a little too seriously . . .

National Security and AI -

Two domains which are rife with hype, and self-serving self-nominated experts, and are both put to use for manipulating the public for questionable purposes.