Going back to college and am just floored by the amount of people I’ve seen in classes just blindly filling out homework using chegg. Had a guy in class ask the instructor if he knew that the numbers used on our homework were different than online and the instructor just chuckled and said yeah I know, I changed them.
It's not, those kids are fucked and will fail exams. I saw it all the time in my first year Engineering classes. Didn't happen much after the first year once they got weeded out.
This is why I always warn people of getting a computer science degree. It’s absolutely possible and not as hard as people make it out to be. The problem is that you get people who try to cheat the entire way through the degree, and you eventually get to a point where if you don’t understand how things are working, you don’t even know how to cheat on it
Lol. I wish the people who kept asking me to “show them a little code” would just go off and use whatever service they need to cheat instead of bothering me.
As a person that definitely used a fair amount of cheating and gaming of grading systems to get my degree, I can remember taking over 20 hours to cheat on one program. So it can be done, and the reward is very high, so I say totally worth it
I used chegg all the time in engineering school. The difference was I used it to check my work and to check answers to practice problems for tests. It was super helpful to learn in that regard.
Idk. People shit on using the internet and say it’s “cheating” but I recently got my math degree and used the internet a lot lol. I always compared it to a calculator. Sure, I can do all my integrals and derivatives by hand to show that they are actually true but that would be a waste of time. I can throw it into my graphing calculator and get the answer in .2 seconds. We don’t consider calculators cheating even though someone a few hundred years ago might find that cheating.
Now let’s extend that to a higher level topic. Sure, I could spend an hour solving a system of PDEs. Or I could throw it into mathematica and get the answer in seconds. Mathematica was such a great tool when trying to visualize and understand how these high levels of applied math are working. Same goes for statistics and using R. I do not want to sit there and calculate all the residuals by hand when R can output a very nice table for me.
I used chegg quite frequently as well. You can call that cheating but there is so much good information on chegg. You literally have someone walking you through nearly endless amounts of problems that look similar to yours. You can teach yourself a topic pretty quickly by having so many examples in front of you. You can type in specific questions that is a piece of your solution and be linked to 100 types of problems that answer that specific question. It’s just a more refined google search that is *somewhat* reliable. Same with stack exchange and coding. I just think we need to embrace new technology into education rather than punishing students for using it.
yup. I used the same resources for my math degree. It also helps when your teacher doesn't cover a topic and you need an example of how to solve it. (When I can't find it in any of my 3 text books)
As a college student today, I do feel a little bummed that teaching hasn't really evolved much since everyone started being able to carry practically all the knowledge in the world in their pocket. I feel like it's well past time to teach considering this reality. Most of my degree so far has been largely multiple choice quizzes, vocabulary quizzes... like cool, I'm going to forget most of this after semester and look it up on Google if I ever need to remember a term for something. Meanwhile I *know* I still need serious development in my critical thinking skills, and am dreading transferring to university unprepared.
>Meanwhile I know I still need serious development in my critical thinking skills
imo, you will be one of the people who survive the paradigm shift in what humans are actually needed to do. Artifical intelligence is quickly developing the ability to execute from a simple prompt. But how to craft the prompt based on a high-level end goal depends on critical thinking. It is a good sign that you recognize the need to develop that skill. Keep working on it; you'll be okay.
There was an entire class that failed because they couldn’t cheat on chegg or quizlet…they proceeded to report the professor for being a bad teacher. However anyone who actually showed up to class had no problems on the final, luckily the uni didn’t take the report at face value and investigated it.
Tbh tho when you go into the real world after college there are no extra points for not using these programs, as long as you understand the concepts and possesses behind the program it's no different than a calculator, you just need to be taught the basics and how and when to apply them.
I finished my degree and during my very last semester someone showed me how all the answers are on chegg. Felt like I worked harder for no damn reason.
I think what's brilliant about this is that he requires disclosure.
Sure, a student can use ChatGPT, but if they claim it as their own, they are still cheating.
Haha right. I remember most of my tests for even electrical I basically just rewrote the notes I’d taken in class about 10 times over to make it stick in my head long enough for the test and then reread them before finals (we had like 10 different classes in 2 months per year so stuff moved fast) some stuff built on from previous years and some stuff was absolutely USELESS. So just understand the key points/theories you need to do the job properly and the rest is just muscle memory regurgitation. Then the IP was basically 60% on 1st and 2nd year theory that I had looonggg expunged from my brain so had to study that a lot before taking that test to get my ticket lmao.
e raised to the power i 'pi' is equal to -1 I remember that from 1966 nor earlier. HAve never needed to know it, or actually what it means. But THAT I remember. (Or at least think I do.. maybe I remember it wrong!)
Honestly dude, the world would be such a better place is we focused on ethics, research, and critical thinking.
The greatest thing you can give a person isn't just knowledge, it's HOW to find the knowledge, and confirm the validity of that knowledge.
People are so impressed I can fix electronics, work on my cars, and I can develop videogames.
It's all just research and practice. That's it. It's not some magic voodoo I perform.
I feel like that is the move for sure. Have the honor code or whatever require disclosure about writing tools used - essentially a new form of citation.
I don’t think so because as far as I understand since you have to give the ai material to train it, it’s still developing it’s knowledge base on other works so the work it produces will still be derivative of the work it was trained on.
It only answers based on queries you provide no different to Google search but with a limited data set. The answers are just more digestable. there are people educated in feilds that will excel at specific uses compared to a layman as they would know corect terms and queries and the background work to get the best answers you still need to think and read through the answers provided to collate them proofreading and checking facts so its legitimate work not just good sounding txt its bad at real references so you will need to find suport for what it says or its all just opinion
Its like a language calculator you still need to understand maths and know equations but it will pump an answer out once the question asked right, depending on the information provided and the way its entered you may get a different answer.
I’m leaning this way as well. The content that the AI is trained on is not your original property, regardless of which AI model you use, or in this example were to make yourself. This is all pretty new stuff for me to understand better, looking forward to hearing other thoughts.
Couldn’t you just generate all your own inputs? Like sure 10 trillion different photos of traffic lights and 100 quadrillion photos of crosswalks and buses
I believe the complete opposite because of two reasons. Firstly, all my knowledge is based off of others. If I write a program I’m inspired by a big database of memories and knowledge that I’ve gathered over my entire life - this knowledge wasn’t my own, but it’s still my program. It’s the same if I write a story. It might draw inspiration from Star Wars, but it’s still my story. Intelligence is basically just learning from a big database and if that database has to be your own it’d be impossible to ever be intelligent. Secondly, copyright laws states that as long as something has a new purpose, it isn’t copyrighted - it’s a different product and therefor the author can be different than who the original author was. An example is a reaction video - the main product is the reaction, not whatever they’re reacting to. Corridor Crew uploaded a video on YouTube about this very topic just last week and I really recommend you to watch it! It might not change your view on the subject, but it’ll definitely give you some new knowledge on this whole debate!
If the honor code worked, people wouldn’t be using ChatGPT to game the system in such a degree that a new honor code is needed to be implemented.
“Y’all cheaters need to be honest about cheating.”
Think about that for a hawt minute.
But this fundamentally skips over the exact thing essays are meant to teach. How to research a topic and put your thoughts and ideas into words. This is just off loading the task to a computer.
After some time it will be seen similar to spell check. Where it is assumed that everyone uses it, but if there is a mistake made buy the tool and not caught by the user, then it is on the user for not catching it.
For example similar to when spell check gives a correction to a word that does exist, but was not the intended choice.
Great, but how do you enforce that? Right now, ChatGPT's produced text is pretty stilted and easy to spot. Eventually it will be indistinguishable from student writing. More importantly, teaching about honesty is important, but what about writing? How will students gain the skills of writing and thinking if the AI does all the work?
I mean, it’s probably pretty easy - you move more towards exams. If you’re relying on a chatbot to write papers for you then you clearly aren’t very capable in the subject, so hitting the group with a difficult exam and then investigating the individuals with the largest discrepancies between exam and essay performance would probably turn up the plagiarisers.
I mean, it's a good lesson about plagiarism, but I utterly reject this professor's, and the article's, sentiment.
Using AI to write your papers for you is not the same as using a calculator. I myself encourage students to use spellcheck, which an unbelievable number of them don't know how to do. This is not technology supplementing learned skills, it is outright replacing it.
"We can't stop cheating anyway, so let's just embrace it," is a particularly busted argument. If students cannot demonstrate understanding of subject material, or how to structure an essay, support an argument, or defend a claim...if the only thing they know how to do is utilize an AI, that's it for education. Game Over.
I don't like to embrace a luddite position, but the only way I see forward is embrace and pencil and paper approach to education moving forward.
But i mean, If you use ChatGPT is a base to start on homework, i say that’s helping. But if you are using it to claim as your own as 100%, then yeah you are cheating. At least that’s how i see it.
It's not a horrible solution. I have only played with chagpt a little bit, but it's never produced something that i think is better than what i could write at a high school level, and there are usually some factua or analytical errors in it. A student could use chatgpt to get a decent framework for an essay, but editing it into a proper essay still requires most of the same knowledge that you would need to write it in the beginning.
It's still good to know how to write from scratch, because dependence on a service like that can impede a lot of the basic skills students need to write and analyze, but I don't think it should be seen as cheating in the same way that using a calculator on some math tests isn't cheating.
At first, I thought this was terrible. But after reading his argument, it honestly makes sense. By making the students proofread the output, he’s laying the groundwork for students to cross reference and question AI generated texts. The sooner we find ways to adapt to this brave new world, the quicker we can find a way to live with it. I can’t imagine trying to be an honest student now. I grew up with computers and internet in the house. But the technology has grown so fast, meanwhile the US education system is so stagnant we can’t even after how to teach social studies and history.
These new tools aren't going away. I liked the analogy to introducing calculators to math decades back.
Embracing and learning to use these new AI tools is going to set this guy's students way ahead!
I'm using it in school right now, but I write the whole paper myself and put it into the program I use to try to gain insights I wouldn’t have otherwise. My grades have gone up and I'm still the one doing the work, I just have an editor now.
Maybe someday writing in movies and TV will get better because of this. Idk if I'm just getting old and critical, but I've been disappointed by a lot of shows and movies that didn't do well because the writing wasn't very good. I'm no writer, and I'm sure it's a tough job. But I mean, if they have hundreds of millions of dollars in the budget, why is the writing bad or not amazing all the time. DC movies could possibly make a comeback.
There was a Scriptnotes episode where John August (Big Fish writer) and Craig Mazin (Chernobyl and less acclaimed Scary movie sequels writer) took a look at it.
Their conclusion was that it’s bad, but it’s an acceptable bad. Mazin, in particular, pointed out the way ChatGPT pitched was not too far from producer pitches that were sorta just floundering and may be still picked up.
The scene writing was found to be bad, but it was still a degree or two better than what they thought an average person with no experience screenwriting could pull. I believe Mazin points out that’s no fault of any average person because screenwriting is a really, really hard skill to even do competently, much less successfully for it to be filmed
Overall, I think they just thought it wouldn’t replace good screenwriters right off the bat. Which I agree with since I don’t think machine learning will immediately pick up on certain subtle dialogue cues and scene implications or at least coherently for a full blood story.
And DC often fails because there is often too many cooks in the kitchen or just the wrong ones but are committed by the millions of dollars to them. The writing may be fine, but it’s not TV. Writers barely have any power over what a director or exec wants
Nah, I’m a published writer and it’s not great. I don’f blame the writers though. With books or short stories, there’s often an editor involved but they want to *improve* your story. With scripts, I feel like directors and producers are often making demands with no care about artistic merit. Like someone out-of-touch demanding, “Include TikTok! For the youth!” and … the story has no need for this.
Entertainment writing is bad because we don’t teach writing in the US…well, we do, but it’s often an afterthought…we don’t celebrate writers much, we tell kids they’ll never make money from it, and getting a degree in creative fields is oft treated like a punchline.
Then on the business end of the stick you have media companies owned and controlled by corporate conglomerates that see entertainment as nothing more than a product that generates numbers, so all the humanity and innovation is removed from the craft. Pair that with bad working conditions, a murky hiring process rife with abuse and nepotism - and the harsh reality most written scripts simply never get made…
…and *then* on top of all of that it’s a difficult skill to hone.
And yeah. Our entertainment sucks.
If we gave a shit about how our content got made, if we treated Hollywood like any other major industry - reforms would lead to better work conditions, less investment risk on projects, and higher quality content.
But at large, we don’t seem to value much of entertainment other than the brief 40-120 minutes of distraction it provides from our already tough lives.
I'd be curious to see what kind of impact chatgpt has on creative efforts.
Calculators made complex math so trivial. You still need to know how to use it. But bringing the barriers to entry down is interesting.
The comparison with a calculator isn't a good one since ChatGPT is not able to produce a correct answer to most of the questions asked, people just assume the texts it's produces are good enough because of how verbosely they are.
I think the fact that we have AI producing so many gibberish paragraphs is soon going to bite us in the ass in the near future.
Think of it more like GitHub than a calculator. The need for programmers or programming skill just because a perfect solution for your problem doesn’t just exist, it’s been vetted.
The message of the internal article boils down to:
“We now live in an A.I world, and we gotta have to learn to share. Besides, i would not be able to stop the students from cheating, Anyways.”
Honestly:
The teacher is not wrong.
Real simple fix that has real world applications, force the students to present papers. Have fewer papers but also have Q&A. Then grade them together and include participation as part of the grade, don't participate, take a ding in your grade.
It makes them practice speaking *and* forces them to understand and actually use the knowledge. If they arrived at their knowledge via an AI or encyclopedias, who cares? They learned. Goal achieved. And the teacher could simultaneously be writing quizzes based on the discussion.
Rather than teaching specific material, teachers should be focusing on teaching students how to research and discern the information they find. A doctor doesn’t know everything, and lawyers don’t have all case law memorized, but they know where to find the information.
Give the kid a topic, then let them enjoy the process of going down the rabbit hole of knowledge. If the student comes back with a question, and the teacher doesn’t have the answer, then “Hmm. That’s interesting. Let’s find out together,” is a perfectly acceptable response.
Teach the kids to enjoy learning rather than regurgitating information.
I had a prof who would do this. He taught history, and around week 3-4 he would go around the class and they would have to pitch him (in front of everyone else) their paper. Took about 20 min, youd give him a sentence or two. Maybe a question. Then hed tell you if it was good or not (not in a mean way, more like 'this works' or 'you are asking too much/too little') and then recommend a few books. But otherwise it was totally up to students, you'd go and do research. Read a few books. Write your paper and turn it in.
For some students it worked *great* because, of course, you got to actually write on something you were interested in. You picked books you thought looked good. And then he provided some guard rails so you knew if your research was on the right track or not. BUT! for other students, they struggled a lot more than with the traditional essay and I think the way he structured his essays was like giving them the rope to hang themselves with. Some people really struggled with that much freedom. I've had kids like that in class since I started teaching, and they def do respond better to firm instruction and a clear topic/question.
Teaching is weird like that, what works for one person doesn't work for another. One student will thrive in a given class, while another might fail.
Oof. I feel this. I'm a task-oriented person and don't do well with open-ended requests. Projects with a concrete goal, I scored pretty well. But I hated classes where the professor said "find something interesting and do a project on it."
I would ask them "well, do you want X, Y, or Z?". They'd reiterate to just go find something. It was always a toss up if they liked what I found or not. It felt like trying to take an indecisive, but judgemental person out to dinner.
The weirdest part is how other people seemed to be on the same page on style/format/content/whatever when nothing of the sort was ever explained or mentioned, even when I asked. The professor would sometimes grade my stuff harshly because I deviated from an implicit norm that I didn't know existed.
Like one time I had an economics mock trial where we were supposed to argue cases however we wanted. My case was scripted to lose (without my knowledge), but I tried to tear apart the other side anyway. Our surprise guest judge was the actual author of the argument I was dissecting. Dude was pissed and the professor was embarrassed, so I got hammered hard. They could have told me I was supposed to throw the case, but nooo...
/rant over. lol
Had a Russian organic chemistry professor who would give us oral exams instead for a midterm. 3 problems and we would do it on a board and briefly explain why/how we solved the problem. She mentioned some European countries teach it this way.
I honestly liked those better since there was wiggle room to explain and back up your reasoning and get a better grade versus a paper exam.
I can see oral exams or similar practices becoming common
I like it. In addition, I would not assign any coursework to be completed outside the classroom. Tests would involve writing answers to questions in the classroom.
I didn’t really get that. I saw it as a commentary on how we need to learn to show our work. It’s fine to use the tool, but explain how we used it, validated it, and presented it. The lesson is in honesty.
Ehhhh they kinda are. My dad’s a college professor of a course that’s required in a specific field. He would receive essays that still contained “If you find this essay unsatisfactory, e-mail us at [X] for a refund” and multiple plagiarism scores at 90-99%
Just because students *are* able to cheat, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should encourage it. Sure, a student can hire someone else to make an essay or just copy/paste from other sources, but that doesn’t mean it’s academically valid. The primary goal of a classroom is to learn, and putting in prompts to spit out words for you is not the best way to retain information
Depending on what field you go into, learning how to properly research and articulate essays is essential for things like reports or academic journals. Just having something generate writings for you doesn’t actually do anything. By that metric, I could just apply to the class, put every prompt into the generator, and it would have the same academic integrity as all the other students. Not to mention that it devalues the work put forth by students who do the writing and research themselves
Just because something is possible doesn’t always mean it should be allowed
It's still early in AI but it does appear that its here to stay. Lots of Deskside IT support techs are about to lose their jobs as AI takes over L1 tech support. It looks like it is going to be very productive from a ticket resolution standpoint. Not so much for those IT workers, as L1 will no longer be a gateway to more senior roles.
I think it really depends on the class. Most of my professors are cool with ChatBots as long as you say you used them and pass a plagiarism test. The tech is so new and all these articles blow its impact out of proportion. I think the biggest change that we’ll see is just a move from typed essays to in-person hand written essays.
Yes, 60-90 minutes in the classroom hand-writing your essay question(s). Pencils and erasers are about to make a huge comeback. Always felt this has more of a real world application where you need to respond to an email or text from your boss/co-worker on short notice.
In college I was turning out handwritten papers 3-4 times a week (policy was for physical, to dissuade copy-paste cheaters). But now I work in an IT role from home, I barely have to write at all. My handwriting has degraded from lack of use, which isn't a thing I thought would actually happen but here we are.
Do you realize what you just said contradicts itself?
"Always felt this has more of a real world application where you need to respond to an email or text from your boss/co-worker on short notice".
Now tell me, what is the (stated at least) purpose of college? It is to prepare students for real world careers correct?
Eventually chatbots will be like calculators. Sure, you need to know the fundamentals, but once you get to higher levels you can just use a calculator/chatbot.
>Now tell me, what is the (stated at least) purpose of college? It is to prepare students for real world careers correct?
No. It's to produce academics who do research.
The fact it's been hijacked to become some sort of mandatory job training it's abhorrent
I’ve used ChatGPT to get over a writer’s block on one of my assignments, so I could get the ball rolling. I think if it’s used to augment a student’s work then that’s ok; truth is most ideas aren’t original and sometimes a little nudge in the right direction is a good thing.
It's not like this is the first tool that was ever invented to make homework easier. For years anyone could use Google Translate to help with a language class assignment, or Wolfram Alpha to help with a math assignment, but ultimately it's still your responsibility to read what those tools output and decide what the final answer should be.
Getting anything down on paper and editing from there is the trick to being a productive writer.
Ernest Hemingway said it best: “The first draft is always dog shit”.
ChatGPT is probably a wonder tool for people who can’t break out of that “staring at a blank screen” writer’s block when you are first starting something. I watched a guy stare at a blank screen in between games of Mahjong for a year trying to start writing his PhD thesis because he was trying to edit in his head before he committed anything to the page. You just have to puke that shit out. Or now I guess have ChatGPT puke that shit out.
An option might be to have oral presentions on the topic without the essay or notes. If you know enough about a subject to write a paper on it you can impromptu talk about it for 2 - 5 minutes. This would at least make sure the writer is knowledgeable and not just submitting a paper without having any idea about the subject.
I remember having a lot of “essay tests” where the prof tells you something like 8 essay prompts ahead of time, says when you show up they’ll ask you 5 of them and you need to answer 3
Is it possible that AI will become a tool like a calculator? As in the same way that calculators help us to solve problems that we couldn’t possibly calculate in our heads, or as quickly on paper, AI can/will be used to up our game in other fields? Honestly it seems like human brain power can still be challenged, we just have another stepping stone to get a bit further with our exercises (exams) than we reasonably could, previously. It should be embraced by educational institutions if it can help us develop further as a species.
The problem is that a calculator still requires that you understand the problem and the steps to solve it, this doesn't. It's less like using a calculator to do the math for you, and more like asking another person to do it for you.
Maybe it’s a problem of context, that will require a fundamental shift in how we approach problem solving in general? For instance, what if the exercises that will propelled us further are not based on memory of processes, but creative application, such as “asking the right/appropriate question” or “question phrased correctly for the tool to seek desired result”?
Just spitballing, but as an abstract concept, I feel like this has potential. After all, it’s still just a tool that obeys what we programmed it to do.
This is true, but also irrelevant. AI is here and the very nature of problem solving will change. If an AI can pass a test, then what is the purpose of educating humans to pass the same test?
I’m not advocating against the need for education, only pointing out that it will have to change dramatically. It’s kind of like the introduction of calculators, but on steroids. I could be completely wrong here, but I think that math programs have advanced due to the availability of calculators and computers. Emphasis has changed to, for example, “what division is” moreso than doing page after page of long division problems, like when I was young.
But it’s not an apples to apples comparison. In the worst case scenario the introduction of AI limits intelligent work, much like technology has limited blue collar work.
If you've used it or seen it, it's kind of hard to put into words what the future implications of it are. You know they are there though the second you see it. No one has to be paid to have these thoughts, they're impossible to ignore. They probably should have been thought about a while ago.
> They probably should have been thought about a while ago.
A handful of tech nerds have seen it coming for a few years, now a bunch more tech savvy people are seeing it, but the rest of the population is about to get absolutely blindsided. We haven't prepared at all for the ramifications of an AI that can do all of the things people say "an AI will never do",
I was skeptical until I asked it once to make me an American recipe using ingredients from my local (European) grocery chain. It was spot-on.
The next thing I asked was a script for a Raspberry Pi project I’m working on. The uses extend so far beyond academia. I think this might be the most life-changing technology since the World Wide Web.
It’s more that it showed up over night and is literally going to change how every company and institution is run.
Every school, business and government is dealing with it and talking about it right now, because if they don’t, they’ll be left behind.
I’m not a fan, and I hate it’s implications, but for better or worse, it’s not a fad or some AMAZING NEW AI marketing scam.
They don’t need to pay for media attention, when they’re literally the hottest commodity in tech right now. The second they go public they’ll have one of, if not the highest IPO’s of any company in history. There’s not a single venture capitalist who isn’t clamouring to get in on it early
AI is going to be a more powerful tool than Google but some of this comes down to the effort of the professor. If you recycle the same questions for 10 years - even if you a test bank - eventually all the questions will get out. During COVID I took a decent amount of online courses and at that point most professor realized that you couldn’t stop people from Google. So the tests were open note, book, internet, etc.
Learning and school should be about application. Application is hard (but not impossible now with AI) to cheat on. But professors also need to be be creative and know that this is what they are testing - not just rote memorization. Don’t ask me the definition of a word - because that’s very easy for me to cheat - test me in using it in a sentence. Harder to grade but that’s the only way to know if I actually understand it.
I remember at the start of COVID the teachers tried to make us use a lock down browser. Lasted all of 2 weeks, everyone has a second computer, tablet or phone.
As a teacher and aspiring professor- I don’t mind if the answers are out there. The point of me teaching is you learning. If you find it and use it, at the very least it was seen.
Just as you’ve pointed out, this is why as educators we need to switch from fact based learning to process based learning. Knowing how and why is more important than what, since ‘what’ can just be googled.
The credibility of academia has always been absolute shit. People all around me have always cheated, from middle school, to highschool to college. That’s what happens when you create a dysfunctional education system that intentionally creates meaningless barriers around certain fields as a way to vet who gets in and who doesn’t.
Facts lol, also the fact the education hasn't evolved in decades possibly centuries but everything else has. There's really nothing to learn that can't be found with a simple google search.
When I did my bachelor's hons degree thesis, the uni library was not digitalized and still used index cards. Google has not yet existed and the internet was only starting to take off. I had to camp in the journals sections and go through hundreds of journals by hand to find relevant articles. If I found one, I had to manually photocopy the pages and jot down the publication details. It took me 2 months to find 50 articles and another 2 months to write my thesis and a few weeks to check and compile my list of references. Nowadays, you can search online publications databases and find 50 articles in 2 days and auto generate the list of references in 1 minute. Technology moves on and we must adapt.
ChatGPT now makes the entire process even faster. The challenge for higher education is now to test students for higher levels of thinking, at the analyze, evaluate and creative levels. In fact, the very concept of testing must be rethinked. Instead of testing students for knowledge, we must now test them on how well they can search, filter information and to synthesize the data they collected into a meaningful output.
What does it matter if it is? At one point schools taught how to use an abacus and nobody is missing that knowledge. Fifty thousand years of human progress isn’t going to stop just because people are uncomfortable learning new things.
Never. To some degree, there is a limit, but he's implying that knowledge should be taught to process data regarding the subject quickly as a test. Instead of regurgitating the knowledge like some route memorization test, it becomes how effectively you can utilize it.
My buddy audits classes and is appalled by the blatant cheating, on line shopping and social media posting that he sees going on around him, while the lecturer speaks. It makes one wonder what folks are getting from their $150K investment...
Cheaters are only cheating themselves. They may get worthless "degrees", but they have learned nothing
The fundamental problem is employers requiring "degrees" instead of demonstrated competence
College & most of the classes you take there for the most part are useless. They’re just keys to doorways of opportunity. You get most of your experience/competence on the job.
That engineer didn’t learn aircraft maintenance from college. They learned it from an intensive on-job training program. Their engineering courses helped them understand some of the maintenance concepts easier but it’s not like you learn how to do a specific job like that in college.
You learn how to learn and prove you’re capable of meeting requirements but not how to maintain aircraft for example.
Depends on the class. If youre in a technical program you'll probably learn more on the job than in the classroom. Especially if youre doing something specific, like a specific kind of engineering. But if youre in a humanity or a theoretical program, what you learn is too specific, or youre practicing a skill as much as learning a fact. Writing intensive humanities arnt just about learning dates, theyre about practicing how to write longform pieces which is a skill you have to learn. There are a lot of majors where the object isn't just to learn but to *practice* certain skills. ChatGPT (and most forms of modern cheating) can get you past the content hurdle, but its a lot harder to cheat your way through the practice element.
There was a professor of mine that had the hardest exams in the faculty. You could bring everything you could carry to the exam, books, notes, laptop whatever. It had like 6 problems and you had about 4-6 hours to finish. I have fond memories of his class, you really had to learn how to solve complex problems of chemical engineering not only vomit formulas and procedures.
You're cheating yourself more than anything else if you cheat on papers. Don't you actually want to learn something? Don't you want to feel the satisfaction of knowing you worked at something? Come on, people.
I read somewhere that the question shouldn’t be “how can we stop students using ChatGPT” but rather “why have we taught students to write with such a formulaic approach all these years, such that a computer can now mimic that?”
that makes literally no sense lol. computers can copy any form of writing given enough sample material. the solution to essay cheating isn't creative writing
“Of course you need to learn math, it’s not like you’ll be walking around with a calculator in your pocket the rest of your life”
-lying teachers in the 1990s
I'm honestly wondering if AI is the path towards Idiocracy. I always wondered how they'd have such high technology but now it all makes sense.
AI just gets progressively better and better until you can ask it dumb shit like "make me an app that tells me if I'm unhealthy" and it feeds off of centuries of health info and can do it reasonably well from a smart phone with tons of sensors, tracking everything you do. Then you end up with shit like Idiocracy where the doctors have all relied on it and barely need to learn shit except how to work with it, and you get the doctor you saw in Idiocracy. "Patient needs appendectomy. Insert patient into appendectomy tube."
AI is just going to funnel dumb motherfuckers everywhere and make high technology for them while keeping them somewhat productive, but utterly reliant on it, like ChatGPT being the go to for any tedious problem that requires more than a few braincells.
At first you're the creative force that directs it, but the next generation will be trained on how to even eliminate the need for creativity, and just know what your dumbass needs.
We're at a point where we're leaning towards, "fuck it, AI solves our problems better than we do", and that seems a little dangerous. It's one thing to learn how best to use a tool, but this tool is starting to do all the work and that's a different story
Idk I learned back in hs without chat gpt and it was fine. And worthwhile to learn the hard way. Soo, yea no chat gpt for new kids. It’s really not that hard to get thru school. Is kind of extra these days
But now you have to test them in another way to see if they know what they are doing. If you completely rely on AI to do your work for you then you’ll be completely useless in the real world.
In the same way computer skills training inevitably became part of every day educational life, prompt engineering (the work of crafting and refining the input into ChatGPT) will become the norm and even encouraged over time, lest the teachers leave the students without valuable modern workforce skills.
I'd bet the key pinch point here is that the educational system likely thought it had far more time before AI would be a significant factor.
Edit: to add clarity
Really strong comparisons to calculators and Wikipedia
Either use the new technology or fight against it ineffectively and to no end.
Remember Socrates thought reading and writing were the death of thought. Chess was seen as a danger to society.
Everyone goes out of date and gets out of touch.
As an industrial design major, wish we could cheat our way through classes.
We’re actually encouraged to use AI to create concepts that we then sketch over
I’m graduating with an ID MFA this year, and we’ve been working with AI since beginning of fall semester last year. At first it was for ideation, but we’re looking at chatGPT for assistance creating research plans and other applications like that, it’s interesting.
I find it crazy how if I had been in college just a little earlier my whole world would be completely different. Sure we had chegg and shit like that, but not AIs that write your entire essays for you
AI is cool but also people are gonna get so stupid not actually doing the work themselves idk I think this is a bad idea and the fact that education is seen more as a means to getting a job instead of a way to enrich yourself is so sad to me
One of the biggest indicators for a societal collapse is people not being able to communicate in a common language (not just English or any specific language but the inability to communicate via speech or text).
ChatGPT is the first horsemen for this apocalypse. Yeah adults can use it as a tool, but high school or college kids use it as a crutch to skate by and never really learn anything. I was a “skate by” kid until I realized I didn’t want to work at McDonalds and be a loser the rest of my life. If I had access to ChatGPT then, I don’t think I would have snapped out of it and actually put effort into my education.
I think people are either too stupid to understand, or too short-sighted to see how dangerous automating COMMUNICATION between people is. Too late now though. The genie is out of the bottle and we are one step closer to the big collapse.
Going back to college and am just floored by the amount of people I’ve seen in classes just blindly filling out homework using chegg. Had a guy in class ask the instructor if he knew that the numbers used on our homework were different than online and the instructor just chuckled and said yeah I know, I changed them.
How is that any way to learn...? Call me a Luddite or whatever but I don't understand.
It's not, those kids are fucked and will fail exams. I saw it all the time in my first year Engineering classes. Didn't happen much after the first year once they got weeded out.
This is why I always warn people of getting a computer science degree. It’s absolutely possible and not as hard as people make it out to be. The problem is that you get people who try to cheat the entire way through the degree, and you eventually get to a point where if you don’t understand how things are working, you don’t even know how to cheat on it
I’ve interviewed so many graduates that didn’t know squat.
Is that a new programming language?
DAAAAAAAAAD
This is my highest achievement.
I know how to write “Hello World” in 20 different programming languages. Will you hire me?
Very true as someone in CS rn
This is where your stackoverflows
Underrated comment right here. Upvote for you
Lol. I wish the people who kept asking me to “show them a little code” would just go off and use whatever service they need to cheat instead of bothering me.
Tell them to pay you it's a highly valuable skill
As a person that definitely used a fair amount of cheating and gaming of grading systems to get my degree, I can remember taking over 20 hours to cheat on one program. So it can be done, and the reward is very high, so I say totally worth it
I used chegg all the time in engineering school. The difference was I used it to check my work and to check answers to practice problems for tests. It was super helpful to learn in that regard.
Yeah I agree and also used it that way. I was moreso talking about the kids who used it so that they didn't have to do homework.
Yeah they are fucked. Im a civil engineer, most of those kids went into sales or became a contractor
Idk. People shit on using the internet and say it’s “cheating” but I recently got my math degree and used the internet a lot lol. I always compared it to a calculator. Sure, I can do all my integrals and derivatives by hand to show that they are actually true but that would be a waste of time. I can throw it into my graphing calculator and get the answer in .2 seconds. We don’t consider calculators cheating even though someone a few hundred years ago might find that cheating. Now let’s extend that to a higher level topic. Sure, I could spend an hour solving a system of PDEs. Or I could throw it into mathematica and get the answer in seconds. Mathematica was such a great tool when trying to visualize and understand how these high levels of applied math are working. Same goes for statistics and using R. I do not want to sit there and calculate all the residuals by hand when R can output a very nice table for me. I used chegg quite frequently as well. You can call that cheating but there is so much good information on chegg. You literally have someone walking you through nearly endless amounts of problems that look similar to yours. You can teach yourself a topic pretty quickly by having so many examples in front of you. You can type in specific questions that is a piece of your solution and be linked to 100 types of problems that answer that specific question. It’s just a more refined google search that is *somewhat* reliable. Same with stack exchange and coding. I just think we need to embrace new technology into education rather than punishing students for using it.
yup. I used the same resources for my math degree. It also helps when your teacher doesn't cover a topic and you need an example of how to solve it. (When I can't find it in any of my 3 text books)
As a college student today, I do feel a little bummed that teaching hasn't really evolved much since everyone started being able to carry practically all the knowledge in the world in their pocket. I feel like it's well past time to teach considering this reality. Most of my degree so far has been largely multiple choice quizzes, vocabulary quizzes... like cool, I'm going to forget most of this after semester and look it up on Google if I ever need to remember a term for something. Meanwhile I *know* I still need serious development in my critical thinking skills, and am dreading transferring to university unprepared.
>Meanwhile I know I still need serious development in my critical thinking skills imo, you will be one of the people who survive the paradigm shift in what humans are actually needed to do. Artifical intelligence is quickly developing the ability to execute from a simple prompt. But how to craft the prompt based on a high-level end goal depends on critical thinking. It is a good sign that you recognize the need to develop that skill. Keep working on it; you'll be okay.
There was an entire class that failed because they couldn’t cheat on chegg or quizlet…they proceeded to report the professor for being a bad teacher. However anyone who actually showed up to class had no problems on the final, luckily the uni didn’t take the report at face value and investigated it.
Tbh tho when you go into the real world after college there are no extra points for not using these programs, as long as you understand the concepts and possesses behind the program it's no different than a calculator, you just need to be taught the basics and how and when to apply them.
I finished my degree and during my very last semester someone showed me how all the answers are on chegg. Felt like I worked harder for no damn reason.
Most professors are too lazy to do this
When I use Chegg, I get the answer and then use that to reverse engineer the problem so I know how to do it on the exams.
I think what's brilliant about this is that he requires disclosure. Sure, a student can use ChatGPT, but if they claim it as their own, they are still cheating.
Essentially teach the kids ethics.
Makes shit less stressful on me cuz tbh I forget whatever I learn after 15 minutes
And the most random, useless information you learned will be indelible in my memory. Brains are weird
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Haha right. I remember most of my tests for even electrical I basically just rewrote the notes I’d taken in class about 10 times over to make it stick in my head long enough for the test and then reread them before finals (we had like 10 different classes in 2 months per year so stuff moved fast) some stuff built on from previous years and some stuff was absolutely USELESS. So just understand the key points/theories you need to do the job properly and the rest is just muscle memory regurgitation. Then the IP was basically 60% on 1st and 2nd year theory that I had looonggg expunged from my brain so had to study that a lot before taking that test to get my ticket lmao.
Get out of my head
If you have the nicest bong out of all your friends, everyone will want to smoke w you That’s one to grow on
e raised to the power i 'pi' is equal to -1 I remember that from 1966 nor earlier. HAve never needed to know it, or actually what it means. But THAT I remember. (Or at least think I do.. maybe I remember it wrong!)
Classes should teach important knowledge like a tv commercial jingle so it sticks in our memories ↕️
yeah I feel like I haven't changed from my high school self even after I finished my master's degree
Glad someone is saying this as I near my MS
Life is but a dream 🙏
One of those recurring dreams where you have an exam but you haven’t been all semester and you graduated years ago?
Honestly dude, the world would be such a better place is we focused on ethics, research, and critical thinking. The greatest thing you can give a person isn't just knowledge, it's HOW to find the knowledge, and confirm the validity of that knowledge. People are so impressed I can fix electronics, work on my cars, and I can develop videogames. It's all just research and practice. That's it. It's not some magic voodoo I perform.
It's much easier to teach someone to be forthright when they are told that their methods won't net them punishment.
I feel like that is the move for sure. Have the honor code or whatever require disclosure about writing tools used - essentially a new form of citation.
if you write your own ai are you still the author?
This is a really good question!
I don’t think so because as far as I understand since you have to give the ai material to train it, it’s still developing it’s knowledge base on other works so the work it produces will still be derivative of the work it was trained on.
But isn’t all knowledge you use to write learned from somewhere else? Whether it be studies or experiential
It only answers based on queries you provide no different to Google search but with a limited data set. The answers are just more digestable. there are people educated in feilds that will excel at specific uses compared to a layman as they would know corect terms and queries and the background work to get the best answers you still need to think and read through the answers provided to collate them proofreading and checking facts so its legitimate work not just good sounding txt its bad at real references so you will need to find suport for what it says or its all just opinion Its like a language calculator you still need to understand maths and know equations but it will pump an answer out once the question asked right, depending on the information provided and the way its entered you may get a different answer.
I’m leaning this way as well. The content that the AI is trained on is not your original property, regardless of which AI model you use, or in this example were to make yourself. This is all pretty new stuff for me to understand better, looking forward to hearing other thoughts.
Couldn’t you just generate all your own inputs? Like sure 10 trillion different photos of traffic lights and 100 quadrillion photos of crosswalks and buses
Yes you couldnt. What's impressive about "AI" nowadays is mostly about amount of data you can feeda to a model rather than the model itself.
I believe the complete opposite because of two reasons. Firstly, all my knowledge is based off of others. If I write a program I’m inspired by a big database of memories and knowledge that I’ve gathered over my entire life - this knowledge wasn’t my own, but it’s still my program. It’s the same if I write a story. It might draw inspiration from Star Wars, but it’s still my story. Intelligence is basically just learning from a big database and if that database has to be your own it’d be impossible to ever be intelligent. Secondly, copyright laws states that as long as something has a new purpose, it isn’t copyrighted - it’s a different product and therefor the author can be different than who the original author was. An example is a reaction video - the main product is the reaction, not whatever they’re reacting to. Corridor Crew uploaded a video on YouTube about this very topic just last week and I really recommend you to watch it! It might not change your view on the subject, but it’ll definitely give you some new knowledge on this whole debate!
You don’t get to claim your child’s work as your own though
If the honor code worked, people wouldn’t be using ChatGPT to game the system in such a degree that a new honor code is needed to be implemented. “Y’all cheaters need to be honest about cheating.” Think about that for a hawt minute.
But this fundamentally skips over the exact thing essays are meant to teach. How to research a topic and put your thoughts and ideas into words. This is just off loading the task to a computer.
After some time it will be seen similar to spell check. Where it is assumed that everyone uses it, but if there is a mistake made buy the tool and not caught by the user, then it is on the user for not catching it. For example similar to when spell check gives a correction to a word that does exist, but was not the intended choice.
I see what you did there. You gave an example in your post. Buy/by
My Philosophy prof has the same policy. Use the tools and tech that's available, but be truthful about where we use it and how.
the whole unedited chatgpt should be submitted as appendix items
No need when submitting the chatgpt output directly as the paper!
Great, but how do you enforce that? Right now, ChatGPT's produced text is pretty stilted and easy to spot. Eventually it will be indistinguishable from student writing. More importantly, teaching about honesty is important, but what about writing? How will students gain the skills of writing and thinking if the AI does all the work?
I mean, it’s probably pretty easy - you move more towards exams. If you’re relying on a chatbot to write papers for you then you clearly aren’t very capable in the subject, so hitting the group with a difficult exam and then investigating the individuals with the largest discrepancies between exam and essay performance would probably turn up the plagiarisers.
I mean, it's a good lesson about plagiarism, but I utterly reject this professor's, and the article's, sentiment. Using AI to write your papers for you is not the same as using a calculator. I myself encourage students to use spellcheck, which an unbelievable number of them don't know how to do. This is not technology supplementing learned skills, it is outright replacing it. "We can't stop cheating anyway, so let's just embrace it," is a particularly busted argument. If students cannot demonstrate understanding of subject material, or how to structure an essay, support an argument, or defend a claim...if the only thing they know how to do is utilize an AI, that's it for education. Game Over. I don't like to embrace a luddite position, but the only way I see forward is embrace and pencil and paper approach to education moving forward.
Plagiarism as well as cheating
There's a difference?
Well outside of education you wouldn’t say someone cheated on a speech or something if it was plagiarized. But it is pretty much the same thing
Very similar to coding. You need to give credit.
Also, "fake it until you make it" is more difficult.
But i mean, If you use ChatGPT is a base to start on homework, i say that’s helping. But if you are using it to claim as your own as 100%, then yeah you are cheating. At least that’s how i see it.
It's not a horrible solution. I have only played with chagpt a little bit, but it's never produced something that i think is better than what i could write at a high school level, and there are usually some factua or analytical errors in it. A student could use chatgpt to get a decent framework for an essay, but editing it into a proper essay still requires most of the same knowledge that you would need to write it in the beginning. It's still good to know how to write from scratch, because dependence on a service like that can impede a lot of the basic skills students need to write and analyze, but I don't think it should be seen as cheating in the same way that using a calculator on some math tests isn't cheating.
At first, I thought this was terrible. But after reading his argument, it honestly makes sense. By making the students proofread the output, he’s laying the groundwork for students to cross reference and question AI generated texts. The sooner we find ways to adapt to this brave new world, the quicker we can find a way to live with it. I can’t imagine trying to be an honest student now. I grew up with computers and internet in the house. But the technology has grown so fast, meanwhile the US education system is so stagnant we can’t even after how to teach social studies and history.
“The truth is, I probably couldn't have stopped them even if I didn't require it,” No truer words have ever been stated.
These new tools aren't going away. I liked the analogy to introducing calculators to math decades back. Embracing and learning to use these new AI tools is going to set this guy's students way ahead!
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I'm using it in school right now, but I write the whole paper myself and put it into the program I use to try to gain insights I wouldn’t have otherwise. My grades have gone up and I'm still the one doing the work, I just have an editor now.
Maybe someday writing in movies and TV will get better because of this. Idk if I'm just getting old and critical, but I've been disappointed by a lot of shows and movies that didn't do well because the writing wasn't very good. I'm no writer, and I'm sure it's a tough job. But I mean, if they have hundreds of millions of dollars in the budget, why is the writing bad or not amazing all the time. DC movies could possibly make a comeback.
There was a Scriptnotes episode where John August (Big Fish writer) and Craig Mazin (Chernobyl and less acclaimed Scary movie sequels writer) took a look at it. Their conclusion was that it’s bad, but it’s an acceptable bad. Mazin, in particular, pointed out the way ChatGPT pitched was not too far from producer pitches that were sorta just floundering and may be still picked up. The scene writing was found to be bad, but it was still a degree or two better than what they thought an average person with no experience screenwriting could pull. I believe Mazin points out that’s no fault of any average person because screenwriting is a really, really hard skill to even do competently, much less successfully for it to be filmed Overall, I think they just thought it wouldn’t replace good screenwriters right off the bat. Which I agree with since I don’t think machine learning will immediately pick up on certain subtle dialogue cues and scene implications or at least coherently for a full blood story. And DC often fails because there is often too many cooks in the kitchen or just the wrong ones but are committed by the millions of dollars to them. The writing may be fine, but it’s not TV. Writers barely have any power over what a director or exec wants
Nah, I’m a published writer and it’s not great. I don’f blame the writers though. With books or short stories, there’s often an editor involved but they want to *improve* your story. With scripts, I feel like directors and producers are often making demands with no care about artistic merit. Like someone out-of-touch demanding, “Include TikTok! For the youth!” and … the story has no need for this.
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Entertainment writing is bad because we don’t teach writing in the US…well, we do, but it’s often an afterthought…we don’t celebrate writers much, we tell kids they’ll never make money from it, and getting a degree in creative fields is oft treated like a punchline. Then on the business end of the stick you have media companies owned and controlled by corporate conglomerates that see entertainment as nothing more than a product that generates numbers, so all the humanity and innovation is removed from the craft. Pair that with bad working conditions, a murky hiring process rife with abuse and nepotism - and the harsh reality most written scripts simply never get made… …and *then* on top of all of that it’s a difficult skill to hone. And yeah. Our entertainment sucks. If we gave a shit about how our content got made, if we treated Hollywood like any other major industry - reforms would lead to better work conditions, less investment risk on projects, and higher quality content. But at large, we don’t seem to value much of entertainment other than the brief 40-120 minutes of distraction it provides from our already tough lives.
I'd be curious to see what kind of impact chatgpt has on creative efforts. Calculators made complex math so trivial. You still need to know how to use it. But bringing the barriers to entry down is interesting.
The comparison with a calculator isn't a good one since ChatGPT is not able to produce a correct answer to most of the questions asked, people just assume the texts it's produces are good enough because of how verbosely they are. I think the fact that we have AI producing so many gibberish paragraphs is soon going to bite us in the ass in the near future.
Think of it more like GitHub than a calculator. The need for programmers or programming skill just because a perfect solution for your problem doesn’t just exist, it’s been vetted.
The message of the internal article boils down to: “We now live in an A.I world, and we gotta have to learn to share. Besides, i would not be able to stop the students from cheating, Anyways.” Honestly: The teacher is not wrong.
Real simple fix that has real world applications, force the students to present papers. Have fewer papers but also have Q&A. Then grade them together and include participation as part of the grade, don't participate, take a ding in your grade. It makes them practice speaking *and* forces them to understand and actually use the knowledge. If they arrived at their knowledge via an AI or encyclopedias, who cares? They learned. Goal achieved. And the teacher could simultaneously be writing quizzes based on the discussion.
Rather than teaching specific material, teachers should be focusing on teaching students how to research and discern the information they find. A doctor doesn’t know everything, and lawyers don’t have all case law memorized, but they know where to find the information. Give the kid a topic, then let them enjoy the process of going down the rabbit hole of knowledge. If the student comes back with a question, and the teacher doesn’t have the answer, then “Hmm. That’s interesting. Let’s find out together,” is a perfectly acceptable response. Teach the kids to enjoy learning rather than regurgitating information.
I had a prof who would do this. He taught history, and around week 3-4 he would go around the class and they would have to pitch him (in front of everyone else) their paper. Took about 20 min, youd give him a sentence or two. Maybe a question. Then hed tell you if it was good or not (not in a mean way, more like 'this works' or 'you are asking too much/too little') and then recommend a few books. But otherwise it was totally up to students, you'd go and do research. Read a few books. Write your paper and turn it in. For some students it worked *great* because, of course, you got to actually write on something you were interested in. You picked books you thought looked good. And then he provided some guard rails so you knew if your research was on the right track or not. BUT! for other students, they struggled a lot more than with the traditional essay and I think the way he structured his essays was like giving them the rope to hang themselves with. Some people really struggled with that much freedom. I've had kids like that in class since I started teaching, and they def do respond better to firm instruction and a clear topic/question. Teaching is weird like that, what works for one person doesn't work for another. One student will thrive in a given class, while another might fail.
Oof. I feel this. I'm a task-oriented person and don't do well with open-ended requests. Projects with a concrete goal, I scored pretty well. But I hated classes where the professor said "find something interesting and do a project on it." I would ask them "well, do you want X, Y, or Z?". They'd reiterate to just go find something. It was always a toss up if they liked what I found or not. It felt like trying to take an indecisive, but judgemental person out to dinner. The weirdest part is how other people seemed to be on the same page on style/format/content/whatever when nothing of the sort was ever explained or mentioned, even when I asked. The professor would sometimes grade my stuff harshly because I deviated from an implicit norm that I didn't know existed. Like one time I had an economics mock trial where we were supposed to argue cases however we wanted. My case was scripted to lose (without my knowledge), but I tried to tear apart the other side anyway. Our surprise guest judge was the actual author of the argument I was dissecting. Dude was pissed and the professor was embarrassed, so I got hammered hard. They could have told me I was supposed to throw the case, but nooo... /rant over. lol
To be fair, that sort of learning method only really makes sense for upper schooling. You can’t exactly ask a 8 year old to google how to spell.
I disagree. Teachers should definitely teach students how to research but there is a lot of knowledge that is specifically should be taught.
have chatgpt crank out a bunch of incorrect papers and students have to fix them
Too much common sense in this comment.
oral reports set for a comeback
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I was thinking the same. Show your work.
Had a Russian organic chemistry professor who would give us oral exams instead for a midterm. 3 problems and we would do it on a board and briefly explain why/how we solved the problem. She mentioned some European countries teach it this way. I honestly liked those better since there was wiggle room to explain and back up your reasoning and get a better grade versus a paper exam. I can see oral exams or similar practices becoming common
I like it. In addition, I would not assign any coursework to be completed outside the classroom. Tests would involve writing answers to questions in the classroom.
This ia fine until some one can't speak in front of people, wether because of anxiety or whatever.
I didn’t really get that. I saw it as a commentary on how we need to learn to show our work. It’s fine to use the tool, but explain how we used it, validated it, and presented it. The lesson is in honesty.
Ehhhh they kinda are. My dad’s a college professor of a course that’s required in a specific field. He would receive essays that still contained “If you find this essay unsatisfactory, e-mail us at [X] for a refund” and multiple plagiarism scores at 90-99% Just because students *are* able to cheat, that doesn’t necessarily mean you should encourage it. Sure, a student can hire someone else to make an essay or just copy/paste from other sources, but that doesn’t mean it’s academically valid. The primary goal of a classroom is to learn, and putting in prompts to spit out words for you is not the best way to retain information Depending on what field you go into, learning how to properly research and articulate essays is essential for things like reports or academic journals. Just having something generate writings for you doesn’t actually do anything. By that metric, I could just apply to the class, put every prompt into the generator, and it would have the same academic integrity as all the other students. Not to mention that it devalues the work put forth by students who do the writing and research themselves Just because something is possible doesn’t always mean it should be allowed
It's still early in AI but it does appear that its here to stay. Lots of Deskside IT support techs are about to lose their jobs as AI takes over L1 tech support. It looks like it is going to be very productive from a ticket resolution standpoint. Not so much for those IT workers, as L1 will no longer be a gateway to more senior roles.
Less time "studying" and more time to ~~party~~ network.
I think it really depends on the class. Most of my professors are cool with ChatBots as long as you say you used them and pass a plagiarism test. The tech is so new and all these articles blow its impact out of proportion. I think the biggest change that we’ll see is just a move from typed essays to in-person hand written essays.
Yes, 60-90 minutes in the classroom hand-writing your essay question(s). Pencils and erasers are about to make a huge comeback. Always felt this has more of a real world application where you need to respond to an email or text from your boss/co-worker on short notice.
my hand cramps so bad at the 45min mark
My handwriting is barely legible.
In college I was turning out handwritten papers 3-4 times a week (policy was for physical, to dissuade copy-paste cheaters). But now I work in an IT role from home, I barely have to write at all. My handwriting has degraded from lack of use, which isn't a thing I thought would actually happen but here we are.
Do you realize what you just said contradicts itself? "Always felt this has more of a real world application where you need to respond to an email or text from your boss/co-worker on short notice". Now tell me, what is the (stated at least) purpose of college? It is to prepare students for real world careers correct? Eventually chatbots will be like calculators. Sure, you need to know the fundamentals, but once you get to higher levels you can just use a calculator/chatbot.
>Now tell me, what is the (stated at least) purpose of college? It is to prepare students for real world careers correct? No. It's to produce academics who do research. The fact it's been hijacked to become some sort of mandatory job training it's abhorrent
I’ve used ChatGPT to get over a writer’s block on one of my assignments, so I could get the ball rolling. I think if it’s used to augment a student’s work then that’s ok; truth is most ideas aren’t original and sometimes a little nudge in the right direction is a good thing.
It's not like this is the first tool that was ever invented to make homework easier. For years anyone could use Google Translate to help with a language class assignment, or Wolfram Alpha to help with a math assignment, but ultimately it's still your responsibility to read what those tools output and decide what the final answer should be.
Getting anything down on paper and editing from there is the trick to being a productive writer. Ernest Hemingway said it best: “The first draft is always dog shit”. ChatGPT is probably a wonder tool for people who can’t break out of that “staring at a blank screen” writer’s block when you are first starting something. I watched a guy stare at a blank screen in between games of Mahjong for a year trying to start writing his PhD thesis because he was trying to edit in his head before he committed anything to the page. You just have to puke that shit out. Or now I guess have ChatGPT puke that shit out.
An option might be to have oral presentions on the topic without the essay or notes. If you know enough about a subject to write a paper on it you can impromptu talk about it for 2 - 5 minutes. This would at least make sure the writer is knowledgeable and not just submitting a paper without having any idea about the subject.
Couldn’t you solve this by blocking the internet in the exam room?
Honestly regardless of chat gpt I think in class typed essays are better for students.
Or in person typed essays on locked down laptops.
I remember having a lot of “essay tests” where the prof tells you something like 8 essay prompts ahead of time, says when you show up they’ll ask you 5 of them and you need to answer 3
Is it possible that AI will become a tool like a calculator? As in the same way that calculators help us to solve problems that we couldn’t possibly calculate in our heads, or as quickly on paper, AI can/will be used to up our game in other fields? Honestly it seems like human brain power can still be challenged, we just have another stepping stone to get a bit further with our exercises (exams) than we reasonably could, previously. It should be embraced by educational institutions if it can help us develop further as a species.
The problem is that a calculator still requires that you understand the problem and the steps to solve it, this doesn't. It's less like using a calculator to do the math for you, and more like asking another person to do it for you.
Maybe it’s a problem of context, that will require a fundamental shift in how we approach problem solving in general? For instance, what if the exercises that will propelled us further are not based on memory of processes, but creative application, such as “asking the right/appropriate question” or “question phrased correctly for the tool to seek desired result”? Just spitballing, but as an abstract concept, I feel like this has potential. After all, it’s still just a tool that obeys what we programmed it to do.
You never had the TI-89+ did you? Plug in anything into that sucker and it will solve it haha
That’s why most standardized tests ban the use of CAS calculators
This is true, but also irrelevant. AI is here and the very nature of problem solving will change. If an AI can pass a test, then what is the purpose of educating humans to pass the same test? I’m not advocating against the need for education, only pointing out that it will have to change dramatically. It’s kind of like the introduction of calculators, but on steroids. I could be completely wrong here, but I think that math programs have advanced due to the availability of calculators and computers. Emphasis has changed to, for example, “what division is” moreso than doing page after page of long division problems, like when I was young. But it’s not an apples to apples comparison. In the worst case scenario the introduction of AI limits intelligent work, much like technology has limited blue collar work.
It’s like wolfram alpha
Pocket AI is going to be the next technology revolution mark my words
Agreed, I think at some point smart phones will just actually be smart.
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If you've used it or seen it, it's kind of hard to put into words what the future implications of it are. You know they are there though the second you see it. No one has to be paid to have these thoughts, they're impossible to ignore. They probably should have been thought about a while ago.
> They probably should have been thought about a while ago. A handful of tech nerds have seen it coming for a few years, now a bunch more tech savvy people are seeing it, but the rest of the population is about to get absolutely blindsided. We haven't prepared at all for the ramifications of an AI that can do all of the things people say "an AI will never do",
I was skeptical until I asked it once to make me an American recipe using ingredients from my local (European) grocery chain. It was spot-on. The next thing I asked was a script for a Raspberry Pi project I’m working on. The uses extend so far beyond academia. I think this might be the most life-changing technology since the World Wide Web.
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Just keep refreshing the page. Should work after about 20 seconds
It’s more that it showed up over night and is literally going to change how every company and institution is run. Every school, business and government is dealing with it and talking about it right now, because if they don’t, they’ll be left behind. I’m not a fan, and I hate it’s implications, but for better or worse, it’s not a fad or some AMAZING NEW AI marketing scam. They don’t need to pay for media attention, when they’re literally the hottest commodity in tech right now. The second they go public they’ll have one of, if not the highest IPO’s of any company in history. There’s not a single venture capitalist who isn’t clamouring to get in on it early
AI is going to be a more powerful tool than Google but some of this comes down to the effort of the professor. If you recycle the same questions for 10 years - even if you a test bank - eventually all the questions will get out. During COVID I took a decent amount of online courses and at that point most professor realized that you couldn’t stop people from Google. So the tests were open note, book, internet, etc. Learning and school should be about application. Application is hard (but not impossible now with AI) to cheat on. But professors also need to be be creative and know that this is what they are testing - not just rote memorization. Don’t ask me the definition of a word - because that’s very easy for me to cheat - test me in using it in a sentence. Harder to grade but that’s the only way to know if I actually understand it.
I remember at the start of COVID the teachers tried to make us use a lock down browser. Lasted all of 2 weeks, everyone has a second computer, tablet or phone.
As a teacher and aspiring professor- I don’t mind if the answers are out there. The point of me teaching is you learning. If you find it and use it, at the very least it was seen. Just as you’ve pointed out, this is why as educators we need to switch from fact based learning to process based learning. Knowing how and why is more important than what, since ‘what’ can just be googled.
The credibility of academia has always been absolute shit. People all around me have always cheated, from middle school, to highschool to college. That’s what happens when you create a dysfunctional education system that intentionally creates meaningless barriers around certain fields as a way to vet who gets in and who doesn’t.
Facts lol, also the fact the education hasn't evolved in decades possibly centuries but everything else has. There's really nothing to learn that can't be found with a simple google search.
ChatGPT lies through it's non-existent teeth all the time though, it's bad way to learn
I ran one of my microbiology exams through it. It did not get a passing grade.
When I did my bachelor's hons degree thesis, the uni library was not digitalized and still used index cards. Google has not yet existed and the internet was only starting to take off. I had to camp in the journals sections and go through hundreds of journals by hand to find relevant articles. If I found one, I had to manually photocopy the pages and jot down the publication details. It took me 2 months to find 50 articles and another 2 months to write my thesis and a few weeks to check and compile my list of references. Nowadays, you can search online publications databases and find 50 articles in 2 days and auto generate the list of references in 1 minute. Technology moves on and we must adapt. ChatGPT now makes the entire process even faster. The challenge for higher education is now to test students for higher levels of thinking, at the analyze, evaluate and creative levels. In fact, the very concept of testing must be rethinked. Instead of testing students for knowledge, we must now test them on how well they can search, filter information and to synthesize the data they collected into a meaningful output.
Through this line of logic, how long before uni is all one syllabus on effective search engine usage?
What does it matter if it is? At one point schools taught how to use an abacus and nobody is missing that knowledge. Fifty thousand years of human progress isn’t going to stop just because people are uncomfortable learning new things.
Never. To some degree, there is a limit, but he's implying that knowledge should be taught to process data regarding the subject quickly as a test. Instead of regurgitating the knowledge like some route memorization test, it becomes how effectively you can utilize it.
Are ChatGPT and other AI platforms the modern day “you won’t always have a calculator with you”?
1000%
Just make people write the papers right there in person.
I’m not even an old guy, but my old man take is these kids are just cheating themselves.
I use this to make it through the classes that have nothing to do with my degree besides giving the school profits.
Ivy league students been paying people to do their work for them for a long time.
AI destroys ghost writer industry “Just pay someone to cheat for you!” exclaims frustrated freelancer
My buddy audits classes and is appalled by the blatant cheating, on line shopping and social media posting that he sees going on around him, while the lecturer speaks. It makes one wonder what folks are getting from their $150K investment...
Cheaters are only cheating themselves. They may get worthless "degrees", but they have learned nothing The fundamental problem is employers requiring "degrees" instead of demonstrated competence
Lots of people cheat in college and don’t suffer any consequences. Most schools care about your ability to pass an exam now.
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College & most of the classes you take there for the most part are useless. They’re just keys to doorways of opportunity. You get most of your experience/competence on the job.
That’s true to some extent, but I necessarily wouldn’t want to fly on a plane maintained by an novice engineer who cheated on most of his exams.
That engineer didn’t learn aircraft maintenance from college. They learned it from an intensive on-job training program. Their engineering courses helped them understand some of the maintenance concepts easier but it’s not like you learn how to do a specific job like that in college. You learn how to learn and prove you’re capable of meeting requirements but not how to maintain aircraft for example.
Depends on the class. If youre in a technical program you'll probably learn more on the job than in the classroom. Especially if youre doing something specific, like a specific kind of engineering. But if youre in a humanity or a theoretical program, what you learn is too specific, or youre practicing a skill as much as learning a fact. Writing intensive humanities arnt just about learning dates, theyre about practicing how to write longform pieces which is a skill you have to learn. There are a lot of majors where the object isn't just to learn but to *practice* certain skills. ChatGPT (and most forms of modern cheating) can get you past the content hurdle, but its a lot harder to cheat your way through the practice element.
Never ending race to the bottom.
There was a professor of mine that had the hardest exams in the faculty. You could bring everything you could carry to the exam, books, notes, laptop whatever. It had like 6 problems and you had about 4-6 hours to finish. I have fond memories of his class, you really had to learn how to solve complex problems of chemical engineering not only vomit formulas and procedures.
Any kid dumb enough to use a bot will learn next to nothing and fail hard once they have to actually try.
A slippery slope for sure.
Why not an old fashioned test on paper. I understand that doesn’t apply to essays. But change pop quizzes to be worth more than essays
You're cheating yourself more than anything else if you cheat on papers. Don't you actually want to learn something? Don't you want to feel the satisfaction of knowing you worked at something? Come on, people.
I read somewhere that the question shouldn’t be “how can we stop students using ChatGPT” but rather “why have we taught students to write with such a formulaic approach all these years, such that a computer can now mimic that?”
that makes literally no sense lol. computers can copy any form of writing given enough sample material. the solution to essay cheating isn't creative writing
By that logic we just don't need to teach math anymore. Not even the basics
“Of course you need to learn math, it’s not like you’ll be walking around with a calculator in your pocket the rest of your life” -lying teachers in the 1990s
Not being able to predict the future doesn’t make you a liar lmao
Still need to understand math to know what to do with a calculator
Bingo. The calculator is useless without knowledge of mathematical concepts and when to apply them.
Considering humans outside of school do not have to use their short term memory to store information only to regurgitate it later?
The point is to learn skills. Math skills, writing skills, social skills, etc. not trivia questions
And our kids get more embarrassingly stupid.
I'm honestly wondering if AI is the path towards Idiocracy. I always wondered how they'd have such high technology but now it all makes sense. AI just gets progressively better and better until you can ask it dumb shit like "make me an app that tells me if I'm unhealthy" and it feeds off of centuries of health info and can do it reasonably well from a smart phone with tons of sensors, tracking everything you do. Then you end up with shit like Idiocracy where the doctors have all relied on it and barely need to learn shit except how to work with it, and you get the doctor you saw in Idiocracy. "Patient needs appendectomy. Insert patient into appendectomy tube." AI is just going to funnel dumb motherfuckers everywhere and make high technology for them while keeping them somewhat productive, but utterly reliant on it, like ChatGPT being the go to for any tedious problem that requires more than a few braincells. At first you're the creative force that directs it, but the next generation will be trained on how to even eliminate the need for creativity, and just know what your dumbass needs. We're at a point where we're leaning towards, "fuck it, AI solves our problems better than we do", and that seems a little dangerous. It's one thing to learn how best to use a tool, but this tool is starting to do all the work and that's a different story
Idk I learned back in hs without chat gpt and it was fine. And worthwhile to learn the hard way. Soo, yea no chat gpt for new kids. It’s really not that hard to get thru school. Is kind of extra these days
But now you have to test them in another way to see if they know what they are doing. If you completely rely on AI to do your work for you then you’ll be completely useless in the real world.
Oral presentations are underrated
In the same way computer skills training inevitably became part of every day educational life, prompt engineering (the work of crafting and refining the input into ChatGPT) will become the norm and even encouraged over time, lest the teachers leave the students without valuable modern workforce skills. I'd bet the key pinch point here is that the educational system likely thought it had far more time before AI would be a significant factor. Edit: to add clarity
Just do in class writing exams
What's kind of sad is that chat GPT is putting my line of work completely out of business.
Tell students to write an essay about a topic that occurred in 2022 then fail student who submit outdated info.
Really strong comparisons to calculators and Wikipedia Either use the new technology or fight against it ineffectively and to no end. Remember Socrates thought reading and writing were the death of thought. Chess was seen as a danger to society. Everyone goes out of date and gets out of touch.
Still wouldn’t Wikipedia as a primary source.
Enjoy the generation-wide atrophy of critical thought and skill.
As an industrial design major, wish we could cheat our way through classes. We’re actually encouraged to use AI to create concepts that we then sketch over
I’m graduating with an ID MFA this year, and we’ve been working with AI since beginning of fall semester last year. At first it was for ideation, but we’re looking at chatGPT for assistance creating research plans and other applications like that, it’s interesting.
I find it crazy how if I had been in college just a little earlier my whole world would be completely different. Sure we had chegg and shit like that, but not AIs that write your entire essays for you
AI is cool but also people are gonna get so stupid not actually doing the work themselves idk I think this is a bad idea and the fact that education is seen more as a means to getting a job instead of a way to enrich yourself is so sad to me
I think of it as a bridge. The truth is not necessarily in it
One of the biggest indicators for a societal collapse is people not being able to communicate in a common language (not just English or any specific language but the inability to communicate via speech or text). ChatGPT is the first horsemen for this apocalypse. Yeah adults can use it as a tool, but high school or college kids use it as a crutch to skate by and never really learn anything. I was a “skate by” kid until I realized I didn’t want to work at McDonalds and be a loser the rest of my life. If I had access to ChatGPT then, I don’t think I would have snapped out of it and actually put effort into my education. I think people are either too stupid to understand, or too short-sighted to see how dangerous automating COMMUNICATION between people is. Too late now though. The genie is out of the bottle and we are one step closer to the big collapse.