[bachmeier]

I can kind of see the author's point, though I don't agree with it. AI is what made the problems obvious. Students didn't start cheating with the appearance of AI chatbots.

My view is that university classes should be taught in such a way that students can use AI as much or as little as they desire in order to learn the material. Evaluation should primarily be done in the classroom without access to AI. 90% of the grade in my undergraduate course comes from in-person exams. I don't care how they learned the material. This can be a problem for composition classes, for instance, but the problem existed long before the chatbots.

> AI is actually a giant material infrastructure with huge demands for energy, water and concrete, while the supply chain for specialised computer chips is entangled with geopolitical conflict. It also means that the AI industry will beg, borrow and steal, or basically just steal, all the text, images and audio that it can get its spidery hands on.

Sure. We don't know yet how the economics will play out. We don't know the actual cost of LLM and other AI services, we only know what companies are currently charging for them, but they're competing for mindshare so the prices are most definitely being held low. To a large extent, the whole thing has demonstrated what can be done in the short-term in the absence of copyright restrictions, and now we have to see the long-term effects of the removal of copyright restrictions.

I agree with many of the points in the article but don't understand how that turns into a recommendation to "resist".

[ToucanLoucan]

> Evaluation should primarily be done in the classroom without access to AI.

I grant that I have no evidence for this claim but: I don't see how it's reasonable to teach a subject with access to such a powerful tool and then to remove that tool to assess what the student has learned. My primary uses for LLM, limited as they may be, are explicitly about things I do not care to know, and I find it difficult to hold in my head how ChatGPT is going to help me learn anything in such a way where my understanding of it and use of that knowledge is not hinging directly on continuing to have access to it. And, more broadly, there's reason to suspect that the student will have access to it after that class ends, so it runs up against that old axiom of school meaning to prepare you for working life.

My math classes never interested me, I did the work on calculators whenever possible, and sure I have decent mental math skills, but I still pull out a calculator (app) for everything because... my meat brain just isn't as good at this task as this silicon one, and not only does every smartphone in existence have one, if you really don't want a touchscreen version, they can be had at any retailer in America for like $5-10.

[PollardsRho]

Students shouldn't be treating class material as something they "do not care to know."

AI can be used in ways that lead to deeper understanding. If a student wants AI to give them practice problems, or essay feedback, or a different explanation of something that they struggle with, all of those methods of learning should translate to actual knowledge that can be the foundation of future learning or work and can be evaluated without access to AI.

That actual knowledge is really important. Literacy and numeracy are not the same thing as mental arithmetic. Someone who can't read literature in their field (whether that's a Nature paper or a business proposal or a marketing tweet) shouldn't rely on AI to think for them, and certainly universities shouldn't be encouraging that and endorsing it through a degree.

I think the most important thing about that kind of deeper knowledge is that it's "frictional", as the original essay says. The highest-rated professors aren't necessarily the ones I've learned the most from, because deep learning is hard and exhausting. Students, by definition, don't know what's important and what isn't. If someone has done that intellectual labor and then finds AI works well enough, great. But that's a far cry from being reliant on AI output and incapable of understanding its limitations.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Students shouldn't be treating class material as something they "do not care to know."

> AI can be used in ways that lead to deeper understanding.

> all of those methods of learning should translate

Shouldn't be, can be, should. How can we assess if a student has used AI "correctly" to further their understanding vs. used it to bypass a course they don't believe adds value to their education?

> Someone who can't read literature in their field (whether that's a Nature paper or a business proposal or a marketing tweet) shouldn't rely on AI to think for them

That's exactly what tons of pro-AI people are doing. There's an argument to be made that that's the intended purpose for the tool. Artificial Intelligence, sold on the basis to augment your own mental acuity with that of a machine. Well, what if you're a person whom doesn't have much acuity to augment? Like it's mean but those people exist.

[pebbly_bread]

The difficulty comes when you don't know to google, or to ask the LLM because you don't realise that a particular challenge requires addressing. I can build a completely functional webapp that has absolutely no security, and there may be no clear "I should google how to do this" point that would steer me towards tools that would save me from this mistake.

[kevinventullo]

I don't see how it's reasonable to teach a subject with access to such a powerful tool and then to remove that tool to assess what the student has learned

Isn’t this basically the paradigm of a closed-book exam? I personally use LLM’s for learning by treating them like a textbook or Wikipedia article I can ask follow-up questions to.

Though to be clear, I am disappointed with the experience about 50% of the time.

[_feus]

I absolutely agree with you. In the right hands, LLM is a teaching tool, and the calls to resist it are as dumbfounded as the calls to resist the chalkboard would be.

One of my favourite uses of LLM is the reverse-dictionary, for example:

Give me one Saxon and one Romance word meaning "to write".

Saxon (Germanic origin): scratch — Old English scrætan, linked to marking or incising.

Romance (Latin origin): inscribe — from Latin inscribere, "to write on/in."

Genius!

[coffeefirst]

I have this idea, and I think you're landing on something similar, that LLMs can either be a bicycle for the mind (like your reverse dictionary) or an opiate for the mind (write my entire letter for me).

This isn't all that new, given that's a play on a Jobs quote about computers. And it's regular old software that can both unleash creativity and created social media brainrot.

The AI algorithms aren't the problem, it's how they're primed, marketed, and used.

There's absolutely nothing stopping us from releasing a bot that's great at looking stuff up and citing sources, but when asked to write an essay or make a decision for you, declines because that's not its job.

[lawlessone]

>I have this idea, and I think you're landing on something similar, that LLMs can either be a bicycle for the mind

The Just Eat of the mind ;)

[lawlessone]

You could literally google that question before LLMS.

[_feus]

Maybe for simple cases sure yes, but for complicated sentences ability to map approximate/fuzzy meaning <-> words is super helpful, especially for ornamentation and ESL scenarios.

And LLM doesn't completely remove the "burden" of reading the dictionary to make sure the meaning is indeed fitting, but shortcuts the discovery by a lot. Also helps to learn new words, lol. I see it as a supercharged thesaurus.

IMHO this applies to all general research, one needs to be an utter monkey to copy LLM generated references without checking them first, so if anything, it trains critical thinking for free.

[lawlessone]

fair reply. As long as you're confirming it all.

[zo1]

Yes, and get bombarded with 20 ads, go through a few blog-spam articles about "10 of the coolest old-Saxon words you never heard before but use every day", open the website and get old-school popups in the form of GDPR spam, an unecessary Google account sign-in popup, and promptly close 6 ads before giving. But you're insistent and repeat it by adding Reddit to your search term, and maybe you get some sort of Old English-focused sub-reddit and find something, else you maybe maybe maybe go through and find a decent 2010's website that has the thing you want.

Or you just ask the damn AI that has gone through the useless corpus of the ad-ridden web that was infested and prompted by VC's, and somehow magically, through a lot of effort, math, and 150Gigakilowatts of electricity, and extracted the piece of info you want, and simply gives it to you with a bit of annoying fluff.

My time is precious, and I want to see the useless web burn.

[lawlessone]

>My time is precious, and I want to see the useless web burn

i'm guessing from your two paragraph reverse Unabomber manifesto above your time is not that precious.

[add-sub-mul-div]

> Yes, and get bombarded with 20 ads

It's wild that people don't see that LLMs are following the same playbook as streaming etc. and in time will predatorily monetize in every way possible. If you think people are trapped as customers because they can't do without tv shows, imagine five years from now when it's general thinking that people have become dependent on the tech giants for.

[brailsafe]

> 90% of the grade in my undergraduate course comes from in-person exams

Tangent: I've never thought exams should be anything but in-person, but I've also never thought they should be so heavily weighted towards like one or two lucky days, not that that's necessarily what you're suggesting. I recall failing my data structures and algos mid-term that largely consisted of writing syntactically correct java by hand mostly because exams don't really provoke a sense of panic in me, the 3 hours in the evening that the course was didn't turn out to be prime productivity time, so I just kind of got bored and zoned out since I knew it just didn't really matter outside the scope of grades. I think I ended up with a C or something after getting a second shot at the final.

I'd later learn I have ADHD, but there were numerous courses where my profs told me they were straight up disappointed I failed so hard, since I evidently stood out as the most engaged in the classroom, handling the course material and assignments just fine, and being a revisitor to the classroom after being a paid developer for years, then in my late twenties. I have no idea how Doctors that clearly have a similar type of attention do it through med school, maybe it's just sufficiently more difficult, enough to stay engaged.

There's nothing I can do to provoke a sufficient stress response in an exam environment, and I've basically let it be a thing of the past that comes down to a dice roll whether it's engaging enough, or I get a good sleep the night before, or any number of other uncontrollable variables work out in my favor. Ironically, a persuasive essay in a history class turned out to be perfect.

In some sense it does scare me a bit, this prospect of more heavily weighted analog exams, but I don't really see much of a way around it, as long as we continue accepting that the concept of grades and academic performance is a sufficient measure of something worth measuring, rather than the somewhat arbitrary filtering mechanism it became. If my career in software fails, I might have to re-enter into a system that's even more stacked against me than it was, unless it's a hands-on trade presumably.

[bachmeier]

> so heavily weighted towards like one or two lucky days

Yeah. I took some of those classes (they were more common back then) and didn't feel they were a great measure of how much I knew. I give four exams. The students will have seen related questions on the homework and in the lecture prior to taking the exams. Anyone that's been actually learning the material will find the exams easy and those that use AI, get the answers from someone else, or whatever method to get the homework points, will be lost on the exam. At least that's my goal. Teaching is definitely an imperfect art.

[trod1234]

Wouldn't we be just in the first phase of the long-term effects of the removal of copyright restrictions?

The second phase being copyright claimed on the model itself, and its derivative works thus further expanding copyright paradoxically to things which couldn't be before the blackbox, and only allowing use by those who own the models?

Initially things are always rosy, then they are reduced to make profit and create moats.

[thanatropism]

> new pandemic is killing millions

> yes, but viruses existed long before it

[nitwit005]

I had a freshmen class where 11 people in a class of 113 got caught directly copying journals you were supposed to maintain over the course of the semester. That's a minimum cheating rate of about 10%.

You can find old surveys asking university students how often they cheat. Let's say they don't paint a positive impression.

[kibibu]

It's very feasible for markers to detect that through even cursory review.

[nitwit005]

They did. That was the whole story.