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If a dumb robot can write your college essay for you, maybe we shouldn't be wasting time writing essays.
by lampshades 4y ago
If a dumb robot can write your college essay for you, maybe we shouldn't be wasting time writing essays.
- jvm___ 4y agoIt's like having wood sawing as a woodworking exam, when power saws have just been invented.
- Spooky23 4y agoSounds like you’re missing the point. A saw is a tool. A power saw is a faster tool. It doesn’t change the skill of the wielder, but may make certain actions more or less cost effective. An essay is a demonstration of your ability to understand and analyze. Lowering the cost of cheating like this is ultimately worse for everyone. Forget about school, there’s someone with a real job typing random bullshit into of ChatGPT and using it having no idea wtf he is talking about.
- fooker 4y agoThis is easy to say once you already understand how to write essays.
- lampshades 4y agoIf someone wants to learn how to write an essay they can more easily look it up on the most vast interconnected knowledge base that has ever existed. I don’t understand the continued need for knowledge/educational gatekeepers.
- fooker 4y agoYou can look up anything on the internet. The issue is figuring out what you want to look up. You are not going to suddenly realize that writing essays might teach you about presenting an argument in an organized manner if you have never had to write an essay.
- spacemadness 4y agoThis reminds me of the terminally online person who told me they never need to travel as everything about the place is online already. Or libraries exist so we should stop going to school altogether. You seem ready to die on that same hill.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- blahblah1234567 4y agoMeh... if a dumb robot can do <X> for you, maybe we shouldn't have <X>. <-- This logic doesn't get us far. Robots do many things for people in industrialized societies. I for one, think training students on how to write is very important. It trains them how to think critically, how to present solid arguments, how to persuade, etc. I certainly don't want my society to have fewer educated people.
- lampshades 4y agoI don’t believe we should force students to do busy work that they will forget by the time they graduate because they have zero interests in it and don’t plan to ever use it again in their life.
- spacemadness 4y agoYou’re right. We should cancel all math classes immediately. We’re way past due since we should have done it with calculators.
- hndc 4y agoThis completely misapprehends the point of writing essays.
- lampshades 4y agoYeah, the point of writing essays is to fatten some college administrators paycheck.
- thundergolfer 4y agoEssay writing as a form of cultural and intellectual interchange predates college administrators by at least a couple of centuries. Everyday here you'll find quality essays written by competent essay writers, those essays not being written for the benefit of a college administrator.
- lampshades 4y agoMy thoughts would probably be different towards this if we weren’t sending kids to school with predatory lending practices. (hence the administrator comment)
- yalogin 4y agoI don’t get this, that dumb robot got trained and so is doing the job. There are some fundamental building blocks that every human needs to be trained in. We can question what these building blocks are but never apply a blanket statement that “if a robot can do it we don’t need to learn it”. We will end up with severely challenged humans and that would be the manifestation of robots taking over not because the AI became sentient but because we humans gave up learning.
- smt88 4y agoThis is like saying that phones can play songs, so maybe we should stop learning how to play musical instruments. The robots can write shitty essays because they were trained on billions of other people's sentences. They can regurgitate human effort, not replace it entirely. And we don't write essays so that the world is full of essays. We write them so that we understand and consider new concepts.
- pupppet 4y agoUnless we plan to make the movie Idiocracy a documentary, we need to continue to learn how to learn.
- misnome 4y agoComputers can dictate words now, maybe we shouldn't waste time teaching toddlers to read.
- lampshades 4y agoI’m sure there will come a day where we won’t.
- CPLX 4y agoWhat should we do if a dumb robot can keep us suspended in a nutrient rich gel and create a detailed set of mental experiences for us?