Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Imnimo 360 days ago
>Generative AI's main impact on higher education has been to cause panic about students cheating, a panic that diverts attention from the already immiserated experience of marketised studenthood. It's also caused increasing alarm about staff cheating, via AI marking and feedback, which again diverts attention from their experience of relentless and ongoing precaritisation.

>The hegemonic narrative calls for universities to embrace these tools as a way to revitalise pedagogy, and because students will need AI skills in the world of work. A major flaw with this story is that the tools don't actually work, or at least not as claimed.

>AI summarisation doesn't summarise; it simulates a summary based on the learned parameters of its model. AI research tools don't research; they shove a lot of searched-up docs into the chatbot context in the hope that will trigger relevancy. For their part, so-called reasoning models ramp up inference costs while confabulating a chain of thought to cover up their glaring limitations.

If AI tools do not actually work, how are students able to cheat with them? It seems like that would be a problem that would solve itself - a student would attempt to use AI to cheat, it would fail to complete the assignment, and the student would get a bad grade.

1 comments

>If AI tools do not actually work, how are students able to cheat with them?

Cheating doesn't have to work for it to be cheating.

If you get caught robbing a bank that doesn't un-rob the bank.

But the students would quickly learn not to try to cheat in this way. It would be a non-issue.
>But the students would quickly learn not to try to cheat in this way. It would be a non-issue.

We have police and prisons yet people still commit crimes.

Because until you're caught, crime pays. That wouldn't be the same with AI cheating. If the AI didn't work, your cheating wouldn't pay off even if you don't get caught because you're still failing the assignment. No one cheats by asking to copy the homework of the dumbest kid in the class.
We have lots of students and eternally manufacture more.