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by lordswork 582 days ago
Not to take away from the main story, but the student was clearly cheating on their homework with Gemini, directly pasting all of the questions.
5 comments

The link seems to be the obvious cut and paste cheating coupled with how many forums respond negatively to overt cheating with a dose of perspective from the llm as the responder to said flagrant cheating
Yeah and in these forums people tend to say:

“This is only for you, human”

It’s one thing to come up with an explanation that makes sense. It’s another to try to scaffold an explanation to adjust reality into the way you want it to be. Stop lying to yourself, human.

The best answer we have right now is we don’t understand what’s going on in these models.

Looks to me like they seeded the distinction several messages earlier. If you expand the messages, one of them has a very large block of text and this in the middle:

> I cannot have personal experiences, but I can imagine how this theory might manifest in human behavior.

And ends with:

> put in paragraph form in laymen terms

Cheating themselves, maybe. Graded homework is obvious nonsense because incentives don't align and there's no reliable way to make them align and ensure fairness.
I graduated college a decade ago, but I have to admit, if I were still in school it would have been incredibly hard to resist using LLMs to do my homework for me if they existed back then.
Especially in classes that grade on a curve, you're now competing with students who do cheat using LLMs, so you have almost no choice.
Hard to resist?

Why on earth would you lol.

It’s not significantly different from googling each question.

It's absolutely significantly different, especially for certain types of classes and problems.

> Why on earth would you lol.

Because school is hard, I was a kid, homework takes a ton of time, and I would rather be playing video games. Of course the temptation to cheat would be there.

> It's absolutely significantly different, especially for certain types of classes and problems.

How is it different?

A flathead screwdriver isn’t good for the class of screws that have a hex head, but both flathead and hex screwdrivers are still screwdrivers.

Looking things up on Google was considered cheating in the early 2000s

> Because school is hard, I was a kid, homework takes a ton of time, and I would rather be playing video games

This is a reason to NOT resist. I was asking “why on earth would you resist the temptation”

Maybe it depends on why you're taking classes in the first place.

If you just want the degree to unlock certain jobs or prestige, and aren't morally opposed to cheating, I can see how it would seem rational.

That’s probably the most common reason for anyone to be in school.
I thought the most common reason is to learn things. Maybe not 90% common but at least 60% common at a decent college.
Why not bring a forklift into the gym?
If your goal is just to raise some weight above an arbitrary height, why wouldn’t you?
Because that's not your goal, just like your goal in school isn't to complete assignments or even graduate.
I find this absolutely hilarious. If you’re a gerontology lecturer in Michigan, look out!
We don't know that. The student might have been curious about how Gemini would answer after already doing their on work.