[SxC97]

Students aren’t writing because they’re “motivated”, they are writing because they have to. It’s a grade.

Motivated people will still write (perhaps in conjunction with GPT) and think for themselves.

School papers and professional communication falls under the umbrella of “necessary writing”. This genre will be the first to be automated.

Critical and creative writing is safe from replacement, at least for now.

[Sol-]

> Students aren’t writing because they’re “motivated”, they are writing because they have to. It’s a grade.

So what? That argument doesn't really make sense to me. An educated populace is generally considered to be a good thing and teenagers for instance aren't always sufficiently self-motivated to learn how to write and think. Exercising your thinking and writing muscle for the sake of getting a grade is not necessarily a bad thing.

I suppose your claim seems to be that mandatory homework and grades are generally useless. And perhaps you are okay with a future where - when most cognitively demanding jobs have been automated - much of of humanity as been reduced to mentally incompetent beings dependent on AI. Does not seem so desirable to me, however.

[SxC97]

> And perhaps you are okay with a future where - when most cognitively demanding jobs have been automated - much of of humanity as been reduced to mentally incompetent beings dependent on AI.

This is an understandable reading of my position. But I would probably phrase it differently.

I think we should make a delineation between work that we have to do and work that we want to do. AI will probably automate away much of the work we have to do, freeing us up to do more of the work we want to do.

We can optimize society such that every person should work towards some hypothetical motivated, curious, and educated ideal, or we can optimize society so that people are just happy in whatever way happiness can be defined for them.

If people aren’t interested in learning more about themselves and about the world around them, so be it. It certainly wouldn’t effect my motivation.

Think of it like working out. Nobody needs to exercise, but people do it because they want to. Either because it’s fun, or it makes them feel better about themselves, or for the skill acquisition aspect, or even the community aspect.

[bawolff]

Bad students have always been able to hire ghostwriters to do their homework for them. Suddenly the service just got a lot cheaper and accessible.

People who want to learn will still learn. People who are forced to learn were always bad students.

[thot_experiment]

it's insanely patronizing to view kids this way, I'm glad I'll never have to spend time writing a business email ever again, promoting the AI effectively is a way more useful life skill for kids to learn than writing essays

we simply need to adapt the curriculum to reflect the tasks that aren't rendered effectively worthless by LLMs and let kids prompt to their hearts content, much like they will do in the real world

if your work can be done by chatgpt, do (or have the students do) more interesting work

and for the record, homework is the most fucking awful thing ever invented and I still hold a burning malice toward it to this day

[zekrioca]

The cognitive demand shift to other tasks, and probably increase, rather than disappearing.

[saurik]

I am one of the people vehemently defending the position that many of us will not be replaced by AI in the near future, as we will have other "better" things to do.

It isn't clear to me, though, that any of those things will be possible unless we have a solid background in logic and thought, which we humans improve on by doing symbol manipulation (writing, math, coding, etc.).

Which has the unfortunate effect that, even if we aren't forced to go away, the world could devolve quite quickly if we surrender it by simply deciding that kids doing stuff computers can already do is pointless, even as a training exercise.

FWIW, I want to also not be too concerned about this issue with essay writing, as we already have had this problem for a while now in math with first calculators and then stuff like Mathematica, and somehow we keep learning math?...

...Though, I'm honestly not quite so sure we have been learning math as well in the past 10 years or so, so maybe I'm wrong; and, since I also am unsure how you are right in my stead (I'd need an explanation of what children will do to prepare themselves for the future other than learn to write), maybe we're doomed :(.

[jstop107]

They comment made an observation about the underlying psychology(motivation)and didn’t make the claim you suggested.

[mrdatawolf]

Being "educated" doesn't require you to be able to write without the assistance of a person or tool.

[graphe]

What is the benefit of thinking and writing in school? Forcing the populace to do these tasks doesn't seem to have a beneficial effect. English degrees are out of jobs and my courses in English I'd call absolutely useless. I remember doing all the work for a group project because it was easier for everyone who would just copy and paste wikipedia to me.

I'd have to see the value of these essays if there are any. I have yet to see any evidence they do anything except occasionally put people's heads in the clouds.

[readertime]

> What is the benefit of thinking and writing in school?

Cogito ergo sum.

Practicing thinking makes you a better thinker. Thinking is what makes us… us.

(To be clear though I think LLMs / AI generally can be a tool for thought.)

[mc32]

You know, I think we have to decide whether we're going to be curious and educated people who think and analyze or do we want to devolve to forever teenagery. Automation + AI may afford us to forgo the rigors and the work of learning -but at what cost to self? One could ask, what is the cost of a dog or a monkey not attaining human intelligence --to them it means nothing. To a human not being leaned but instead a base individual, basically illiterate and innumerate but full or emotions not understood seems to be a wrong turn.