chapotraphouse

i stopped caring about "academic integrity" when i noticed not only were the TAs using LLMs to make assignments, but somehow my homework load went from 10-20 hours a week to 40-60 hours a week because not only the TA did not understood how much work a question takes anymore, but that now every coding assignment was loaded down with mandatory bullshit reports where you have to explain your code line by line and parameter by parameter.

when you tell people for at least a decade that college degrees are useless, grades are useless, the things they teach you are useless and the only thing higher education is good for is networking and social life, don't be surprised when people start focusing on those areas.

Is it bad that I find this somewhat comforting on a personal level?

I'm half-considering continuing my education mostly to get the STEM degree porky wants, but I worry I'm too stupid for it or won't be able to figure everything out before the test so even if I pass I won't be getting the As, the bare minimum to even have my job applications considered. But if so many people are cheating, then I'm not as inferior as I may think.

Something that is very annoying is that AI is being blamed for the problems that education under capitalism has been facing for decades. Poor reading comprehension has been an issue for decades. We have a system that not only teaches people to hate learning, but where everyone is too tired and time poor to learn, or even teach.

Fuck AI, but don't use technology as a scapegoat for systemic problems, it only amplifies what is already there.

my friend described it as a logical endpoint of the commodification of education, which i think i agree with. degree being seen as simply a visa to the corporate world has been a problem since long before AI proliferation. of course students don't care and just want the piece of paper. the great failing of contemporary liberal education is that it totally fails to instil a love of learning (and often actually instils a dislike of it). undergrads are treated so poorly by institutions it's no surprise most of them usually end up in the mindset of "do as little work as possible, fuck this awful system".

I ain't gonna read all that but some quotes are hilarious

When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

Lee explained to me that by showing the world AI could be used to cheat during a remote job interview, he had pushed the tech industry to evolve the same way AI was forcing higher education to evolve.

AI frontiersman pushing the envelope of technology by building the torment nexus

we can’t really imagine living without it.

It's been like a year or 2 of this shit being this accessible. Like common, Wtf.

I have a hypothesis that college can solve this problem by "inversing" lectures and homework.

edit: sounds like a lot of places do this already so that's cool.

Have your students watch lectures and do reading on their own time. Hell, they can ask ChatGPT to summarize it for them if "it's just a tool" and they want to use it! But everything that gets a grade should be done in class. You will write the essay by hand, you will do the math with no more powerful a calculator than a TI-83, you will give a presentation to show that you understand the material. Book is open, accommodations for special needs are available, and the teacher is here to help and give guidance and clarification, but internet connections are banned.

Buuuuut ~~American colleges would never do this because~~ ensuring that your graduates actually learn things was never the point.

Yeah, you can’t give students a done-at-home essay as an assessment any longer, that’s just asking for AI slop and setting the students up for failure. Students can’t be trusted to avoid the temptation of AI, even the good ones from time to time. Over the past couple of years I’ve had to completely rethink every assessment I give. Essays are useless now. In-class tests and exams are ok, but students struggle with these more than they did a few years ago as they are less practiced at thinking through the written word. In-class presentations work pretty well, if you have a few restrictions. Keeping the time limits short so they stay focused and do not use vague and verbose AI writing helps, limiting the amount of text in slides or number or slides or even just banning slides entirely can also help to reduce slop. But most importantly, have a lengthy question and answer period at the end. This is where the students will actually demonstrate their own understanding as they need to actually know the material themselves to get through even very simple questions. If a student only used AI to write a presentation script even “what did you think about the book?” is a tough question for them. Usually one of the students will try using AI but will very visibly crash and burn in front of the whole class during the Q&A. The public shaming that results usually serves as a good warning to the rest.

The actual problem every one of these articles is whinging about is that AI completely destroys the economy of scale of education. Which I frankly do not care about, schooling has been first on the austerity plan since the apex of the US empire. Larger class sizes, teaching how to pass standardized testing, lack of support for disability, lack of funding, hollowed out curricula, reliance on adjunct faculty, reliance on TA's, etc. This has all been a race to the bottom to make education as cheap as possible without a real regard for quality. Governments and administrators extracted as much labor as possible out of educators, they've thinned their ranks. Along comes this stupid little statistical parrot box and now these morons who have been making this system as fragile and shitty as possible while directing as much money to the top heavy administrators can reap what they've sown.

I care for the educators who will be squeezed to "do something about this", but as a society it's time to pony up or fail at social reproduction over and over again. Smaller class ratios more individualized instruction and assessment, higher standards of proof of work. If the outcome is more teachers, higher pay, and better students it will be good that AI killed these cheap, impersonal, mechanized forms of education.

Kids don't enjoy learning because we put them to work on themselves in a high stress educational assembly line. They're alienated from their own development. And who wouldn't be in a system where your entire first 18 years of life are just prepping you for a choice of how you're going to gamble in the job market? Statistically most of their parents haven't accumulated enough information to make a half way decent bet in that casino. Of course this is happening. This system rewards gambling and scamming your way through life.

Exactly, good education should create a willingness to learn and further ones education by its own merits. Not by scolding or “torturing” kids/YA into it. No, this does not mean there should be no discipline or “just doing what the kids want”.

I think it was on this machine kills, but they talked about the rise of AI use is correlated to the fall of computer literacy. Specifically with big tech rise causing less visibility in how the products we use work and more reliance on ease of use. I think they talked about kids not even knowing how file systems work since everything is an app.

This can be solved when we bring back torrents

Sorry to the teachers. But this is what the US deserves. Just an ouroboros of credential-seeking first-worlder faillchildren future-labor-aristocrats shooting their own brains out until every person working in a technical field in the US is a Russian immigrant.

Let the people defunding education reap what they sow. They'll keep their complacent and uncurious population, but it might have side-effects!

A friend of mine had her boyfriend go in and take an important test in her name when she was badly sick. No one cared or even noticed. College has always been fake. Its basically a paper saying you are wealthy and privileged enough to be hired by a Fortune 500. Lie as much as you can, fleece those shithole companies, say you have 50 degrees when you have none

They really did it. They made the world worse.

Gotta wonder what is gonna happen to these people when ChatGPT shuts down after investors pull out to salvage what's left of their principal

critical support to LLMs in the war on pointless bullshit homework

Makes sense, we're an empire in decline. American capital is stripping the copper out of the wires. Child labor is coming back. Slavery is coming back (and never really went away). For what purpose do you need an educated populace as a capitalist. AI being the last possible new market is way more important to them

Wild that Frank Herbert actually nailed the meta commentary of the Butlerian Jihad, the man was actually cooking with that premise

Of course this doesn't actually "unravel the entire academic project" simply unravels the concept of homework and online schooling

I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.

Turns out the Bible was the word of God handed down to man, it’s just that God is the AI bot running our simulation.

This says to me that our leadership is only going to get worse and worse. The meritocracy will be full of people with degrees from the right universities but with zero ability to think dynamically. Thus novel situations will be handled with AI slop only further exacerbating the “constantly trying to fight the last war” problem (metaphorically speaking).

How bad is AI usage and lack of literacy/reading comprehension in the global north? Is it as dire as articles like this make it out to be? I wonder how leftists in these countries will prepare for an increasingly illiterate working class that lacks the attention span to watch videos explaining theory while right-wing memes make their points in a handful of words.