Professors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students' Ability to Think
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/professors-ai-destroying-students-thinkingOpen linkView original on slrpnk.net578
Comments171https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/professors-ai-destroying-students-thinkingOpen linkView original on slrpnk.net
It's absolutely terrifying. I am a returning student to uni in my thirties and the only person not using any AI. They literally depend on it.
I just had a classmate the other day turn to me, frustrated, saying "You ever ask chat(gpt) a question and it gives you a whole, like, paragraph you then have to read? like, why can't it simplify it?"
Did I mention I am an electrical/computer engineering double major? So yeah, even reading is too much for these kids. Future workforce is fucking cooked.
Oh yes! We are fucked.
It genuinely feels that way yeah like idk what we do about this problem it's bad, however bad you think it is it's worse
I've seen some videos of Costco brawls between gen z men over Pokemon cards they want to flip. Surely the bar can't get lower then that
I think, unfortunately, we are being lead by grifters creating a society of grifters i.e. the future generation is learning the lesson that the way to get ahead is by grifting.
I know this is gonna sound dramatic but if it keeps going? We're looking at apocalyptic outcomes for the future of civilization.
So basically how it always was?
There's a reason why there are billionaires...
But yeah it's likely getting worse, like an elite and otherwise brain-dead propaganda following society (to exaggerate a little bit...). Initially after reading Adorno years ago, I never thought that the rather negative way he wrote, and something like the third Reich will not happen again, yet here we are repeating mistakes, fueled by accelerating climate-change (and the resulting conflicts)...
We are leaving (or rather have left) the most peaceful era of humanity, back to smashing each others heads without a real reason, leaving a more positive holistic utopian future... Sad.
i think thats a different situation, some people are greedy and think they can make money flipping cards which is pretty mucha problem with TCPi/TCPJ but they have very little incentive to fix that issue, MTG unintentionally remediated that issue by pushing out UB sets multiple times a year more than normal, essentially making older sets useless/or less useful as you have to keep buying the new sets to keep up. this is about people inability to think for themselves.
I have a friend who was frustrated that his programming exam was too hard (Python) and stated " why do I need to learn this? I can just use ai and get the job done ". We're absolutely fugged.
It's honestly disheartening. I understand our education system is not well in that tests aren't actually very condusive to learning, but they treat the idea of learning a skill like it's some obnoxious chore they just want over with so they never have to do it again when its like... bruh civilization/tech grows exponentially, y'all gotta learn your whole lives and it should be something you ENJOY it should give you pride to be good at something or understand a subject thoroughly.
i don't even know what to begin doing about this problem but even if you pretend the environmental impacts are fine/manageable, I can't help but think this shits gotta be destroyed for the future of humanity.
learning isn't fun for the vast majority of people, it's painful and miserable. they want to avoid it as much as possible.
Unsure on the specifics, something for one of those online colleges. Yeah that's exactly why it's a concerning statement. This isn't assembly, just scripting basics
Yep, and I predict that programmers actually understanding code (and especially being able to quickly and thoroughly review code), are becoming increasingly valuable (again?) in the future, when someone really has to guarantee what the AI actually generated (and let me tell you there are still so many stupid things the AI does...).
We're already seeing it a little, I know IBM just had to start massively hiring just in Feb
https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/tech-giant-ibm-tripling-gen-z-entry-level-hiring-according-to-chro-rewriting-jobs-ai-era/
The new age COBOL programmers are anyone who can actually program.
my older bro who is in tech, depends on it for almost every question he has or when he is ask a very simple question. asked him something about laundry last year, he said "use CHATGPT", theres really no hope for these people. and then later on ask what was causing "flies " to appear in the house, he kept using AI eventhough it was pretty giving inaccurate info,
Couldn't imagine having to suffer it with family. Sorry to hear you deal with that, it would drive me insane.
my bro who is in tech refers to chatgpt as a go-to anytime he has a question or is asked a very simple question, yea pretty much screwed, and he think AI slop generated pictures are epitome of some kind of art piece.
It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the "chat" slang was short for ChatGPT.
no, it's for the chat audience in video streams
Ah ok, didn't realize that was the original source. But now I wonder if it'll eventually be supplanted as a reference to ChatGPT.
It depends on the context, it is slang for both. That's why I put the parenthesis. Don't be embarrassed, it's hard to keep up with slang.
not true , young person here
I’m almost 50 doing a doctorate in engineering. ChatGPT is very helpful to do homework but won’t really teach you to do things. That said, I’m very glad to have it because this program would be so much harder without something to check my answers and understanding.
...except that it doesn't really "check your answers and understanding"...
Sure it does. It’s a calculator and can tell me if I did my statistics homework correctly. I can also ask it to summarize a concept I find difficult.
If you want a calculator, try an actual calculator or a website that actually does math like Wolfram alpha.
A chatbot can't actually do math. It can only give you an answer that looks right because it has no fundamental understanding of what "right" actually is.
Love Wolfram. I believe Stephen is a big proponent of this stuff? Found his blog on it (turns three years old next Monday) and curious for your thoughts on it.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/03/chatgpt-gets-its-wolfram-superpowers/
until it hallucinates
who the fuck wants a calculator that gives out the wring answer every 5th time
With that naivety you are setting yourself up for failure.
We're not in a dick-swinging contest here. At least I am not :) What a dumb way to deflect from the point I am making. If you have any understanding of the matter, you know that LLMs are only statistically accurate, and mathematically, that is useless.
I have a long, successful career. I am doing this program for personal growth and to create a challenge for myself. Please stop projecting your impressions on my life, I am my own person and very confident in what I have accomplished.
Edit: I got downvoted for being confident in my successes. Really?
I am not objecting to you to learn something new. The naivety is what you display assuming you can use LLMs to "check your homework".
This is an echo chamber. Logical and rational thoughts will be downvoted if they go against the narrative. Don't take it personally.
Yeah I didn’t realize just how deeply people were into the projected angst before now. Thank you.
i dont know if you're trolling but you would be making a pretty poor engineer if you are using a something to check your answers that may or may not be right, and not use an actual engineering calculator. how would you know your answers are correct in the forest place if you took them from an LLM. its literally just equivalant to finding the answers on a website and copy and pasting it to your hw, you arnt learning anything, and people who done that have been shown to do very poorly on tests.
No, it actually doesn't. How LLMs work is that it takes in written words and makes a sentence based on the likelihood of what the next word will be based on human readable text. That's literally it.
Hence, there's absolutely no guarantee that ChatGPT's 'review' of your homework will always be 100% correct because it is probable that the answer was written incorrectly in the billions of lines of text it has been fed.
On the other hand, a calculator has been superficially wired for it's purpose to process an input. 1 + 1 will always equal 2.
I'd wager your supervisor will be horrified to learn that you're getting an LLM to learn from rather than your peers. This is why i absolutely hate that it's being used as a substitute what essentially makes us human: art, music, research, learning etc.
It's a tool that needs a licence because you need to know how to use it to complement your existing skills, not supplement it.
We’re allowed to use them. We just have to provide the prompt used and the answer given.
Ah very interesting. Still, it's a shame cutting out the peer to peer discussions to expand one's own learning and understanding.
To do an in person degree I’d have to quit my job. I have been waiting for years for a program like this. That said, doing it in person would be a better experience and I wish I’d had the opportunity to do something like that years ago.
TLDR; should have had my doctorate years ago. I went to Argentina and had to abandon my work when the economy collapsed.
The thing is; you have the experience and knowledge necessary to understand when you are being fed wrong information when it hallucinates. You have come this far not needing a machine to think for you and are not useless without it.
I had a networking lab in which we were faced with using an Aruba layer 3 switch, after learning Cisco all semester. The point was for us to research Aruba commands, and rather than even try to look up any actual references or the information provided by our professor they immediately tried to ask chat, which proceeded to keep giving them CLEARLY Cisco commands. Despite me expaining this they chose to ignore me until a half hour of failed commands later lead then to give up and just wait for me to try and figured it out.
Btw I am, by no means a genius. I actually think I am of average intelligence, and I'm okay with that. But I have become one of the smartest/go to people in most of my classes because once chatgpt cannot figure it out they genuinely don't know what to do. They just don't understand how to think for themselves.
Learned helplessness. There is nothing more shameful then just giving up after the obvious route is exhausted.
It's like this a lot with family, like show me you made an effort to troubleshoot, otherwise you're just demonstrating you think your time is more valuable then mine to do the whole rigamorole
Using AI to help with assignments in education is like using a forklift in the gym. You are taking stats for everyone else and undermining your opportunity to learn and train your brain.
You are paying to get the opportunity to train your brain and educate yourself, a d are squandering the chance by using AI. It's not the best idea.
Do students these days not have study buddies?
Gen Alpha can barely look people in the eyes when they're talking.
Ah yes "looking people in the eyes while talking", famously something actually important and meaningful and not just literally the most well-known neurotypical "if you don't follow the expected social rules you are Wrong" demand...
-- Frost
Yeah dude that's how norms work.
If you're staring off into space and can't talk directly to someone, you need to learn that skill.
Like, this is common sense.
Bold of you to assume "looking someone in the eye" and "talking directly" are the same thing!
Have you MET autistic people?
-- Frost
Not when you’re in an online program and have to do it fully alone. Even when I was in a traditional situation I always had a job and never could do study groups. It’s specifically why I never studied stem previously.
You know you could also just like... Do research, like you're expected to do and is how people actually learn, but I understand that's hard and nobody has time for that. I guess you could also ask the local drunk to proofread your homework and get an answer just as likely to be correct as an AI
Thanks for sharing! Good luck with your doctorate!
Thank you. I appreciate the support among a sea of personal attacks. I didn’t realize that this place had such strong tankie vibes.
Distrusting an unreliable system does not make someone a tankie. Now you're just throwing out insults without even understanding them
You: We attacked you as a group over a period of days because you're stupid and it was wrong of you to say something back. Especially when you point out that we acted towards you just the way those others do.
Proof that the slop dispenser has ruined your critical thinking skills. All I said was that you don't understand what a tankie is, you're just saying words you've heard that have a negative context without knowing what the word actually means. Not criticizing you talking back
No, you decided long before making a comment that I was worthy of your discrimination and anything I could say would just be evidence of that. You're stuck in the circlejerk, my friend. It is time for you to learn to be kind instead of cruel.
So much ai slop in the professional world too
I got my first obviously AI email from a boss recently. The tone didn't match his normal cadence of writing, it was sterile, repetitive, and could have really been summed up as, "Do you have additional information about item X that can help explain this to our customer?"
It was three paragraphs long.
So, I was wondering, will you reply efficiently with your own words or, in order for them to learn to respect your time, will you use AI to reply?
I walked into his office and answered verbally, lol.
That's even more efficient =)
yea i heard research papers are plagued with them, and it already adds into the slop that is being produced otherwise by professors prior to AI, low quality slop just to get thier CV looking more robust for employers, and now with AI its even worst. back in the 2010s, a college oral talk, one of the presenters to the PHD person doing the talk think it is so "successful " that you have to write dozens of papers just to get hired a research company/university(40+ papers), how much of those 40+ are just slop/fluff pieces and not something new.
No shit. LLMs are the anti-thesis of education. The basis of which is hands on practice. Using a glorified autocomplete-my-assignments should be barred from education without exception.
This is the tip of the iceberg. The world is facing a critical collapse of profession. We're nearing a point that was foretold ins sci-fi where humans no longer understand how the machine works.Just that they can use it and it works.
Except sci-fi was too optimistic. Science fiction has actual AGI. We have glorified autocomplete. A non-intelligence.
it's the equivalent of trying become a marathon running while you sit on your ass on the couch and and flying FPV drone for your 'training' and saying it's the same thing.
This is worse than that too, we're already at a point where most people don't understand how the machine works... But overuse of AI is going to make it so that most people don't know how to do simple tasks that everybody used to know. They'll be non-functional without an internet connection.
I've heard much of the same from my friends who teach middle and high schoolers: most alarmingly that they can put information up on the board, ask a question about it, and the students don't even connect that the answer is already in front of their eyes.
And sadly, a very common question they get is: "If AI can do this for me, why do I need to learn it in the first place?"
The worst part is that, in the short-term, the only recourse people have is suing social media and LLM companies, who are awash in cash and happy to settle, or throw their weight behind age verification, which in its various forms poses a security risk. Parents, clearly, are parking their kids in front of screens and unwilling to parent, so that's not something you can depend upon.
I'm just glad I never procreated, but this problem is going to affect us all when these kids try to enter the work force and can't actually do anything.
Reminds me a lot of teachers lying that we wouldn't have calculators with us at all times.
Valid point: One needs to know how arithmetic works in order to get a computer/calculator to do it for you. This is fair; I use CAD software to design furniture, I do it parametrically, I have to solve problems like "if the overall width of the table top is 24 inches, the top overhangs by two inches all the way around, and the legs are an inch and a half wide, how long does the apron board between the legs need to be? And how long do I cut the board to add 3/4" long tenons?" I have to keep order of operations in mind there. But I write the expression and allow the computer to solve it.
Also valid point: I haven't once done long division since middle school, because guess what? I have machines for that. I have had use for the concept of quotients and remainders...but I had to learn for myself how to get computers to calculate them using modulo operators. 5 / 2 = 2, 5 % 2 = 1. five divided by two is two remainder one. The algorithm of drawing the sideways L and putting one number under it and the other number to the left of it and then doing long division is not something I needed an entire semester of practice doing. You can't convince me that was designed for my benefit, that was designed to keep me quiet.
Modern school is framed largely as a series of assignments one needs to get good grades in in order to be allowed to do something. A high school diploma is required to...practically be a citizen. "You have to get a good grade on this essay because it's required for you to pass this class, which is required for you to graduate and get your diploma that we are legally required to force you to get."
Children aren't stupid, they know what bullshit is and they don't like having their time wasted anymore than adults do. Children as a demographic have dozens of millennia of experience growing up into adults, they've been playing house and playing job since the invention of houses and jobs, they played cave and played hunt before that. They can feel when school isn't like house or job and won't help them do house or job. And it's gotten to the point where that describes most of school, because they focus more on the difficulty of a class or test or curriculum than its usefulness.
There's a lot more to life than house and job and learning how to learn is the most important thing you can get from grade school.
Explain to me how a decade of busywork teaches children how to learn.
It doesn't.
It's a consequence of government departments and school administration lacking knowledge of pedagogy forcing underpaid and overworked educators to teach their pupils how to pass standardized tests. It's a consequence of a cultural and societal de-prioritization and outright disdain for critical thinking.
It's a consequence of shifting the focus away from learning how to learn and towards learning how to work, a focus that has clearly impacted your view of education. You were failed by a system that was designed to fail you.
It clearly teaches children how to learn in a way that serves the ruling class: uncuriously, only on command, and not beyond specifications.
It teaches them to be good employees.
So, I don't want to reach but, are you saying education should be a function of the usefulness of the knowledge in a given everyday job?
Yes; and for K-12 education that "job" should be "being a citizen."
Ask an elementary school teacher what the point of school is, they'll say it's to prepare the child for their adult life. Throughout school, ask that question: How does this lesson prepare students to live in the world? Elementary school teachers give pretty good answers: we're teaching them to read so they can glean knowledge from anything from road signs to research papers, it's probably the most powerful skill that can be taught. We're teaching them to add and subtract because that's how basically everything works. A question you'll ask or be asked millions of times in your life is "how many?"
No ask a middle school teacher why we're spending so much time on graphing functions. You know why? Because Texas Instruments lobbied to have their own products legislated into curricula.
I don't think we are from the same country. I find very strange the notion of recognizing the importance of reading, but not the importance of writing, which implies some analysis. The very same source of so-called AI are precisely written knowledge and maths. Wasn't that the spark of this conversation?
What worries me is the idea of being educated as a function of usefulness for an everyday job. That notion just assumes that people must comply at being a part in the production machinery, without free will of the very same people. Personally, I'd kill myself before having to spend 48 hours a week assembling cars, for example. Preparing for adult's life should also consider being completely out of what the State was expecting from you as a citizen, and from the world they projected for their future adults.
I'm not against the teaching of writing skills. I think it's currently done badly and I hope AI becomes such a problem that they change how it's done.
From high school up until I dropped out of college for the second time, scholarly writing was approached in a really stupid way: Assign a topic the student doesn't care about and have them "do a paper" on it. The boundary conditions of the paper are given in word, sentence, paragraph and/or page numbers. The alleged purpose for this exercise is to develop research skills; constructing arguments, supporting those arguments with vetted sources, drawing logical conclusions. In practice, the skills being built are padding with non-statements, use of MS Word's rich text features and paying for an MLA handbook. The teacher doesn't grade the paper based on the validity of sources or the quality of the arguments, it's graded on the correctness of grammar, punctuation, spelling and formatting. Because to actually grade student papers based on the merit of their ideas is a monumental task; you're asking a high school teacher to peer review 60 to 120 essays a month. So it doesn't happen; you get students throwing inappropriate sentences in the middle of essays to see if the professor notices and often they don't.
Have you ever heard the phrase "practice makes perfect?" It's referring to Thorndike's principle of exercise. A behavior is most strongly established through frequent stimulus and response. It's why actors rehearse and athletes practice. But! "Practice" requires a feedback mechanism to correct wayward behaviors, you need a director or coach to correct anything wrong. When I was in 7th grade, I was handed half a page of sheet music for all-county band tryouts and told to take it home and practice it. I had 14 months of trumpet playing experience at this point, I wasn't perfect at sight reading, so I took it home and learned to play it wrong. I showed up to the audition, confidently played a piece of music that only vaguely resembled what was on the page and did not make all-county band that year.
Of all the students currently in writing classes whose essays won't be graded or even read by their teachers...how many of them are learning how to research wrong?
I'm most of the way toward convinced that long essays are required specifically to be a massive opportunity cost for the students. The cult of academia reveres the shut-in scholar who eschews personal life in favor of work and research, so they force all students to cosplay as this arch-saint by assigning pointless tasks that look like what a scholar does. If AI can unceremoniously kill the entrenched ritual so that actual education can resume, so much the better.
What's the problem with using AI to write a research paper? The problem schools have with AI is it makes completing the assignment too fast and too easy. My problem is AI blatantly makes shit up, it's an outright bad tool.
I've got a better idea: decrease the importance of writing research papers from scratch, and start them out reviewing the research of others. Hand them a paper and have them follow up the sources and see if it's bullshit or not. Peer review is a massive part of science, right? So why don't they ever teach students to do it?
It seems like a huge pervasive part of modern culture is that success and fortune equal never having to get your hands dirty, never worry about the details, and never learning to figure shit out because you can just pay somebody else to do it (or ask the "AI" to).
Obviously some amount of specialization and delegation is good. That's how you get a society.
But to just exist passively is something else. It's bad for us, and I don't mean that as a moral judgment. Nobody needs certain skills to justify their existence. I mean it in the clinical sense, like that you can be sedentary with more than just your physical body.
The kids who were 12 when the pandemic happened are now 18 and will be having their own kids soon.
Fuck im old.
that's a stretch. iirc people have kids at 32 these days
Classify it as a cheating tool.
Works in theory, but not in practice, as there are no tools that can tell 100% reliably if something was written by AI. Best way IMO to test students is via oral exams. Let them explain certain things and topics they allegedly wrote about in their thesis; that way you can quickly see who actually bothered to learn and understand and not only let their thesis write by AI.
There was this cool initiative by a professor who is a friend of mine. He would give a pretty standard homework, but then the additional instructions were to complete said homework using an LLM. Then, the students would have to write, by hand, an analysis of all that the LLM got wrong, or could've done better. They then proceeded to discuss their analysis in class. Participating in the discussion with actual meaningful arguments was half of the points, the other half being the quality of the handwritten analysis.
It was more work, but at least the fuckers quickly appreciated that the machine was actually shit at doing their homework, and even if it could pass, it would be with the bare minimum. It also pruned the students who actually wanted to learn from the slackers who were just wasting their parent's money.
I was with you up to the writing by hand part.
They should bring back oral exams and blue books.
This is it. Stop it with these take-home test. Homework was always bullshit.
But then professors and teachers would have to think themselves instead of regurgitating the same lesson plan and worksheets from two decades ago
Hot take incoming: good public school teachers are criminally underpaid. Most teachers are paid exactly what they're worth.
oh but some professors and even TA have thier own things to do, like research, research papers. when i was in university last decade one of professors was doing STEM research outside of class on the side, which took most of his attention away from the class the whole semester, the TA wasnt any better she had her own MS thesis/research to do at the same time. basically dint learn anything with animal/bio physiology. he even went to another country for that research during the semester. the only DRs/phds that do have times are the ones in city colleges that tends to have classes as tough as ivy league universities, since they dont do any research at all.
and then biochem 1 teacher had so many bad reviews on rmf, she evens said herself that her "research lab takes priority" paraphrased so she does minimal court lectures, and convoluted tests.
It's also important for parents to genuinly take an interest in their children's education. Help them understand why we don't use AI for school-work. And be there for them when they need help so they don't have to resort to AI when it feels hopeless.
I remember a study we all read when I was working as a sub teacher. Ages 7 - 12. How much time does an average parent spend talking to their child on an average day. Giving commands is not talking for the purpose of the study.
5 minutes. It was 5-6 minutes. It explains a lot doesn't it.
There are plenty of negligent parents out there, but also plenty who don't have the time because they gotta pay those bills that crept up on them, especially in this economy.
They are fine with cheating as long as you are using microsoft peoducts.
My uni gives everyone multiple chatbot accounts. (Paid by our tuition money no doubt)
Also all programming general events since I became a student have been "Make app for X purposes but with AI in it."
I seen a TA open up their grok history when I asked why my answer to an exam question was wrong.
Universities don't actually give shit about "academic integrity," they simply want to buy bunch of microsoft products and call it a day.
Related Rant:
Recently had one professor try a "group exam" and worked with people requiring chatgpt to do "that one recursive fibonacci assignment."
I think I have changed as a person.
they only care about the cash cow, aka freshmans who are coming in every semesters, everyone else is on thier own, especially with career track development very underuitilized in state schools.
The bubble needs to pop yesterday
If this happens, a new great depression will come.
It's coming anyway, thanks to the demented orange fascist attacking Iran.
I agree.
Then fail them. Oh, that would look bad? The "system "won't allow it? Remind me, what's your fucking job again?
BINGO!
A huge part is the tools they're using to "detect" AI use. My sister in law fought with Grammarly, which she was required to pay for and use by the school, to prove her paper wasn't written by AI.
She spent twenty hours trying to "de-ai" a paper that wasn't written by AI. The only things that worked were using bad grammar and poor sentence structure. The class was pass/fail, and probably for that reason.
This is a consequence that the Epstein class will welcome and invest more heavily in. And the rest of us will have to deal with literal idiots for the rest of our lives.
On Thursday there was a guy in my history class who was using ChatGPT the entire time.
We were watching a documentary and supposed to take notes on a physical sheet of paper. Some of the boxes on that sheet of paper only needed like 4 or 5 words to get the gist of it.
It's not really surprising, and there are already quite a few studies on cognitive decline related to AI usage out there. I guess the wide scale effects will only be visible in a few decades, but I suspect it will look a lot like Idiocracy.
Having to add AI to the products I work on is destroying my ability to think.
in India, it's common to pay someone to take exams. congratulations Doctor
During a conversation with my sister about going back to school to finish her electrical engineering degree she basically said this:
(She went back to school to finish her degree)
She also mentioned that a lot of professors are kind of trying to walk the thin line between failing students (who will then go to places like "ratemyprofessor.com and leave what essentially amount to bad reviews which can threaten their employment), and passing students who aren't actually grasping the basics and I think social media is just compounding the problem because of that.
Imagine working in fast food and already getting complaints all the time and then having to worry about someone putting you on a rate my server website where they trash talk you and you have no recourse to have that information taken down.
At least with yelp it's not first and last names and it's the business that takes the flak.
So, it's all going to plan then?
I would like to think if I were a student, that I would use AI to explain things to me that I had too much anxiety to ask. I'd probably to use it to do my homework but to mainly check that I did it right? I'd "like" to think that but I wonder how the temptation would get me to just shortcut it ...?
I'm in software and we have to use it for work. There's some toxic positivity going around with it and everyone is just saying how they don't write code any more and how proud they are of that. They even turn their nose at me because I don't use it as much because I'm lower on the Cursor dashboards than them. I like using AI to explain things to me but I'm mainly a senior so I don't write as much code, I actually spend more time reading and it's far more arduous. We actually have juniors turning into prompt monkeys were they just put everything into AI and if you ask them why, they just put your question into AI and giving it back to you. To be clear, that's been happening to other seniors that work with them. If it was me, I'd rip them apart and tell them I can find a quick way to cut cost in the company if they don't wanna learn anything.
This must be what it's like for your planet to be taken over by an alien hive mind.
I refuse to believe that the Pluribus series from Vince Gilligan is not actually about AI. There are so many scenes in it that could be adopted to people overusing LLMs.
That's how I felt watching it too... especially with how obsequious all of the 'hive mind' people are. They sound like AI.
This is where I’ve found it useful. Or I’ll say to not give me the answer but to show me the method I should follow for a problem I don’t know how to solve.
The problem is that this doesn't work if you don't know the subject matter already. You can't tell the facts from the inevitable hallucinations.
A possible mitigation might be to ask the same question in different phrasings multiple times, and ideally ask different models, to distill the truth that way. But I'm not sure you still save any time, that might actually take longer than just learning the old-fashioned way. Plus you don't learn how to learn, so it's a net negative.
When I've tried that, I often get different answers.
Or when I try testing the answer with followup questions etc, it eventually devolves to nonsense.
That's why I called it a mitigation, not a solution. Also n may need to be rather big for this approach to work and it might only have a chance of succeeding if the context up to that point is as similar as you can make it.
What if you are not capable of learning the material on your own? Then it’s just tough luck.
If you're incapable of learning you have bigger problems and parroting a chat bot won't solve them.
But self study isn't the only option. You can always get a teacher. You know, a human one.
You’re giving off real “just learn to code, bro” vibes.
I’d say that social media platforms opened that door a long time a go. A bunch of people telling others what’s cool, what “truth” is being hidden from you, click here for the “fact” you won’t believe, how to do anything but actually think critically about what you’re presented with. People search social media for answers before they look at wikipedia, forget considering a summary from actual scientific sites.
Coupled with algorithms pushing tailored engagement bait over boring facts and AI just wraps it all up in a top search result shoehorned above 10 “Sponsored” links and SEO garbage, there’s no room for boring old critical thought and truth anymore.
This is the peak of civilization, get ready for regress.
But their ability to make Terminator-Robocop porn in under an hour is unmatched
trig test day, surprise!. 'no calculators'. gaah, after all that time spent keying identities into my ti-83. still passed with my broken memory
Me, cooking, fucked up my Tofu and my wife always uses ChatGPT for everything: hey ChatGPT, how can I fix the tofu that curdled into the smallest flakes possible? ChatGPT: vinegar and heat.
The one time I used ChatGPT for more than "I have this tax law and want my grandma to understand it, say the same using easy words" content I ruined a whole pot of tofu and nutmilk.
If you don’t know what you want it to say, it is wrong.
Of course. If you stop thinking about complicated things, what do you except to happen after some time?
maybe you shouldnt have discredited students, by using AI accusing them of cheating with AI on essays.
the dumb ones stay dumb. at least read the $100 book
I'm sympathetic to the use of generative AIs insofar as I want society to advance to something very close to Federation society in Star Trek.
Three or four centuries from now, humanity has faced several brutal wars and has come together finally to establish a utopia. The society is moneyless and classless, and the state as much as it exists is a mechanism for mutual aid to other aligned planets. I won't go into too much lore but this is allowed because the matter replicator eliminates scarcity; almost any material good including food can be created out of essentially nothing.
What that means for society is that, as a member of the Federation, you can do literally anything you want with your life. Want to study art and become a sculptor? Excellent, you don't need to pay rent or buy food so you can do that to your heart's content. You don't even need to be good at it. Want to be a farmer on a vineyard in France and make excellent wine? Great. Want to be a farmer on a vineyard that grows grapes to make raisins? Again, you do you. Run a Cajun restaurant in New Orleans if you want; you don't have to buy ingredients and your customers don't have to pay, so the only people that do anything are the people who actually want to be there.
Back to the real world. Almost everyone in university is there because they need a job to receive money in order to pay for the things they need to survive, and the job requirements say "this degree is required". Plenty of people become engineers, for example, because they know the pay will be good, not because they have an intrinsic desire to be engineers. Plenty of people who get engineering degrees stay in engineering roles they hate (or who would do other things if the pay was as good) for the same reason, even though plenty of engineering jobs might only require 2% of what was learned during the course of the degree, if that. The degree is a bureaucratic requirement for survival in a capitalist system and not an actual measure of ability, skill, or desire. That same capitalist system will discard them the minute they stop being useful. This doesn't exactly breed contentment and a willingness to contribute to the greater good of humanity like we see in Star Trek.
Using AI to pass these arbitrary requirements needed to exist in an arbitrary society I find to be understandable. If we want people to go to school for the sake of learning, to better themselves as human beings, that would be a different situation altogether, but that is no where near the system we have actually set up.
man, that's a whole lot of fantasy wrapped up around a tool that's propping up fascist oligarchs that are driving the world into a forced plutocracy where we're all enslaved to work for "the company".
I thought the backstory was important to help to cross all my T's and dot all my... lower case J's
I understand what you're saying, but I think this still represents a very cynical view of education.
Think about it this way: in times past, if we wanted to eat an elk, we had to chase it down and catch it. We had to learn to be good hunters as a prerequisite to living comfortable lives.
Today, we have scant few hunters. We might call this a good thing. We no longer need to be hunters to be comfortable, our quality of life has improved vastly. I would naturally agree with this.
However, another consequence is that we can now live very sedentary lives. Food is no longer an incentive to exercise, which means that, as a society, our physical health may actually be worse. And not only that, physical exercise is connected to mental health, too. A lack of exercise can mean that people are more anxious, more frustrated, more cranky, etc.
There are some people who still exercise today, aware that they need it, but for a lot of people, most of them even, the carrot leading them is gone and so they see no reason to bother. It's irritating to bother, actually. I fear the same thing happening to education.
The future Star Trek world that you're looking for requires that people be self-interested in their own development, and motivated enough to follow through on it. And a lot of people would be. But I don't know if a society would be.
Missing the carrot, a lot of people might be content to just remain stupid their entire lives.
So what I'm saying is, getting a degree for a job may or may not be arbitrary, but getting an education, even a forced one, for your society is not. Not as much, anyway.
I'll put forward one other thing. Racists have a harder time devloping in mixed communities. Living around the would-be subjects of ire, seeing what they're actually like, makes it harder for their stupid, racist mythology to take hold. But imagine that somebody said they wanted to live separately anyway, that they didn't care about this arbitrary, interracial education, and that we as a society had to, for some reason, respect this about them.
I obviously don't care about imposing on racists an education that would make them less racist. I think it's important, even.
I also sympathize with the world as it is being unfair to students. But, I don't respect the subversion of learning itself.
I will admit to having a cynical view of education, and of modern society in general. But I do hope for it to improve, which is why I like Star Trek so much. I don't really see anyone tackling the root problems of modern education as essentially a tool for capitalists to generate laborers, though, which is why I'm sympathetic to using AI in these situations.
One of the major problems I have society is the near impossibility of finding meaning or community. Survival takes up so much effort and energy, even for high earners like doctors and engineers, that there's little time for things which are actually important for humans, like building community, gaining education for its own sake, or otherwise bettering oneself outside of a career. My optimistic views of humanity in general lead me to think that, if you take away this problem of survival like Star Trek attempts to show, more people would engage with their communities and it would be easier for them to find meaning or do something they find engaging, so not as many people would be content just sitting around doing nothing. The stereotype of the lazy basement dweller living in their mom's house at 35 or whatever (I'm just drawing imagery out of a hat) is a symptom of modern society in my opinion, and in an idealistic world these people would be much less likely to be content in this situation.
I do agree re: racism though. I did enjoy my time in college as well, but it wasn't because I was learning or getting a degree, it was because I was part of a tight-knit community of my peers in an environment where we had freedom to explore, think, and hang out.
I talk about survivability because it's easy to grasp, but I'm really referring to any kind of incentive structure. Success, for instance, while similar to survival, is not actually the same thing. Prestige can be something that motivates somebody to be a great artist.
The kinds of lazy basement dwellers I'm talking about are more like people with social anxiety refusing to take phone calls in place of texts. Or, people with executive disfunction watching YouTube instead of getting any work done, which I can speak to personally because I hated doing homework and would watch YouTube instead until the anxiety of deadline failure pushed me into finally getting something done. But that homework was useful.
I obviously believe in the human ability to rise above yesterday's achievements. I am an example of such. I used to have the social anxiety that would have prevented me from talking to you now. I overcame that by having a very insisting personality.
But even so, there are people today who could, even through the tiresome hustle of working day to day, learn to play piano and want to but never do. My concern is leaving people like this to their own devices. To a person who willingly shucks all of life's goals, I think that giving them goals is actually better for them.
There is one particular way in which I think a Star Trek utopia might be overly optimistic, putting it in the realm of hopeful fantasy, and it's that it overlooks the very biological urge to hibernate. The principle of least action, at least as far as education goes, would be not to.
Touch grass.
If people believe too much in fantasy and progress, touching the grass is unlikely to help them.
It seems to me that such a world as in Star Trek is either impossible in practice, or sooner or later it will simply collapse.
If the students don't want to learn, then it's better that they don't learn. They shouldn't be forced to learn.
Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or just don't understand how fragile democracies are
democracies are stabilized through the workforce: people work and gain power that way. it's not possible to shit on workers if they're needed. if there's ever a mass unemployment, that's when you can expect democracy to crumble. i believe it has surprisingly little to do with schooling, actually.
I cannot imagine being comfortable with a democracy of dumbasses.
Isn't the whole reason we know global warming is a problem because of academics?
Mandatory education. It is your moral obligation to not be stupid.
The funny thing is, academics did make the world aware that global warming was a problem but all the fearmongering did nothing to actually solve the problem.
What did solve the problem, however, was China subsidizing solar energy for 20 years to make it economically viable and cheap enough for the rest of the world to install it. And i guess they did so not for climate protection reasons, but for reasons such as energy independence, energy security, jobs programs, etc.
But how do you get here without people being intelligent?
I could tell you that incentive structures and power dynamics have to allow a good solution to materialize before it can, but an uneducated person couldn't.
It is absolutely possible to 'shit on workers if they're needed', you do it by reducing their education, and their ability to think critically, until you canmore easily manipulate them into voting and acting against their own interests. For an informative example, look to the USA over the last few decades, and how that's turned out.
From the manipulators point of view, the best part of it is that as people get less and less used to actually critically assessing what they're told, they start to resent those who do, and that turns to anti-intelectualism and rejecting the science they're told to reject, thys reinforcing their own subjegation.
But education is law in countless countries. At least at some level.
My professor said that about "Ren and Stimpy" back in the day.
The professor doesn't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Lead destroyed his ability to think.
Is it though? Like is it really? I have not seen a credible study yet and from at least my personal experience and those around me, it seems like it helps people learn better?
Teacher here. It's not that they can't think, its that they don't want the take the time to think and learn.
Nothing new there.
True, but the resistance to think is more than it was ten years ago when I started teaching.
Have you noticed that while perhaps the majority are learning less due to tech, some are excelling more?
Not as far as I can tell. The curriculum is more rigorous where I am than it was when I was a kid, but the output isn’t better. Maybe on par if they really try.
There is something new, actually: ease of access.
Cannot disagree there, but that accessibility does come with the benefit that you can also choose to learn not just cheat.
Yes, the so-called AI, they even may believe it can think for themselves.
It can think for itself of course, just not to the level most humans can yet but it has for sure been slowly improving. Unsure if it will ever be fully able to really think for itself at the level of most humans but I suspect we will eventually crack it and get very close to that goal.
I don't think we share the definition of "thinking", but that wasn't even the point.
Sure. We can have different definitions of thinking and we can disagree that AI in its current form even thinks at all. It is all very debatable as it for aure gives the illusion of thinking and even has moments that are very convincing, but then later you realize it really does not understand what it thinks up. It just knows the pattern and predictions and not really the content itself which really makes you wonder if it really is thinking at all to your point I suspect. I can see your point if so, but thinking seems like a spectrum of traits and as far as my experience, LLMs showcase some thinking, just not nearly enough. Still very impressive all the same despite the hallucinations and odd errors.
But if I missed your point, could you please rephrase.
Yes, that's more or less my point of view about AI. The message I was trying to convey is the dangerous educational, pedagogical path that kids and teenagers may take allowing "AI" to "think" for themselves, i. e. using different LLMs and even real AIs as a go-to shortcut for any problem or task that needs to be solved. Social digital platforms have already socially and emotionally impaired them as a generation, in my opinion. While I can recognize the generational differences in cohorts, this feels damaging, as smoking was for boomers.
Well, yeah. A degree is the gatekeeper you need to pay so that you can have a good job. They don't care about school, they just don't want to be poor. As degrees get more expensive, and as graduates have a harder and harder time finding good jobs, that social contract is disintegrating. The resentment they feel towards the system they're trapped in is not a good education environment.
There's different ways to use it. If you use it to cheat, yeah, your ability to think will be destroyed because you aren't learning.
It might be more useful if used to explain concepts, so you can do the actual work yourself. I know there's a lot about math that I didn't really learn in class and had to learn from extra lectures I watched outside class in my personal study time, so if someone used it like that it might help. Personally, I'd be too anxious about hallucinations teaching me bad information. The last thing I'd want is to end up like that guy who thought he was inventing new types of math because his chatbot told him he's a genius.
If someone uses it to cheat and not learn, it is not AIs fault they did not learn?
Fault is irrelevant. The question is if students will hurt their education with AI, and they will. Whether they're hurting themselves or being hurt by an unsafe technology is actually a secondary question that doesn't really matter in this instance.
I do not think it is that black and white. Some students may use AI in ways to skip actually learning and “maybe” AI is making that situation worse, but there are for sure other students that are using AI to learn more than they ever have before. Maybe there is a divide developing with those who use to learn and achieve new heights, and those who use it to skip doing things and learning altogether.
What? I said that chatbots can be useful, such as if you used it to explain concepts like how I used to use supplemental lectures. Hardly black-and-white! The danger surrounds students using it as a shortcut to avoid work and to cheat on assignments, and they absolutely will.
Remember, fault is irrelevant. The assumption you seem to have is that a student that uses a chatbot to sabotage their own education deserves it; we should just let this divide emerge between students that ruin their education with chatbots and students that succeed. Basically a sink or swim/survival of the fittest approach to education.
That's a horrible idea. We can't afford to allow students to ruin their education. The vast vast majority of students merely do what is required to get a passing grade, and if getting a passing grade no longer requires learning or understanding anything then they won't bother. That's really bad for them as students, and for society as a whole.
What you're proposing is the collapse of civilization.
We both seem to be reading the replies wrong as I was not proposing. It is just an observation.