[suddenlybananas]

>Policy students have to read reams of documents weekly. Our hypotheses was that our student teams could use AI to ingest and summarize content, identify key themes and concepts across the content, provide an in-depth analysis of critical content sections, and then synthesize and structure their key insights and apply their key insights to solve their specific policy problem.

Yeah who cares about actually reading and properly understanding anything at all. Given the policy world is filled with so much BS, no wonder they like a BS machine.

[alephnerd]

Enhanced information retrieval is a good tool to have - at some point close reading does become difficult to scale out.

Building experience on how to use tools to automated expected drudgery like making PPT slides or wordsmithing an NSC memo is a good skill to build.

There is a lot of low hanging fruit in professional tooling that can and should be automated where possible, and some class similar to the "Missing Semester" at MIT except oriented towards productivity tools would be helpful.

[FuriouslyAdrift]

Synthesis and summarization is literally the main job of an analyst. Frequently the real information is hidden in the tone, tenor, and syntax, not necessarily in the broader content (aka reading between the lines).

[neilv]

Reading between the lines is also a skill in general human communication.

Which is why, when someone sends me an AI-generated message that previously would've been written by them, it's like they're jamming one of my skills.

Not only are they not giving me some information I had before (e.g., that the person thought of this aspect to mention, that they expressed it this way, that they invested this effort into this message to me, etc.), but, (if I don't know it's AI-generated) the message is giving me wrong information about all those things I read into it.

(I'm reasonably OK at reading between the lines, for someone with only basic schooling. Though sometimes I'm reminded that some of my humanities major friends are obviously much better at interpreting and expressing. Maybe they're going to be taking the AI-slop apocalypse even worse than I do.)

[vouaobrasil]

I don't think it is when the students are random variables, because enhanced information retrieval will increase the proportion of the lazy in the class.