6 ms·

> I'm going out on a limb here, but if this is the viewpoint of the people who raised him, then I'm not surprised he cheated. At my child's elementary school a

by jjav 2y ago

> I'm going out on a limb here, but if this is the viewpoint of the people who raised him, then I'm not surprised he cheated. At my child's elementary school and now middle school the teachers openly ecourage using AI chat for schoolwork, to help the kids understand the usefulness and the uselessness of it. I think that's great. AI isn't going away, so pretending students won't be using it at all times, both now and in their lives, is pretty naive and hopeless. Better to embrace it and teach them what it can and can't do. From the article: > the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application, including citations to nonexistent books (i.e., AI hallucinations). They should not be punished for using AI. They should, however, just get a very bad grade for "including citations to nonexistent books". Which would also be a good lesson in why AI is useful but you can't trust it at all without validation.

Suppafly 2y ago
>They should not be punished for using AI. They should, however, just get a very bad grade for "including citations to nonexistent books". This. We should apply this sort of logic in most situations, penalize for the actual 'crime', worrying about the meaningless details outside of that is just a distraction that confuses the issue.
dartos 2y ago
It was considered cheating to copy and paste my paper from Wikipedia. Why is it any different in this case?
tartoran 2y ago
>AI isn't going away, so pretending students won't be using it at all times, both now and in their lives, is pretty naive and hopeless. Better to embrace it and teach them what it can and can't do. I agree with that but school should focus on fundamentals. The temptation and the ability of AI to do the school work for students so they don't need to put into any effort is a real problem; learning should require some effort and AI could solve that part for students. On the other hand AI could be used for some type of education, but then people tend to throw the baby with the bathwater and declare AI as the principal tool for learning, further diminishing the role of professors and mentors.
filoleg 2y ago
> They should not be punished for using AI. They should, however, just get a very bad grade for "including citations to nonexistent books". As far as I am aware, they weren’t punished for using AI specifically, they were punished for straight up copypasting AI output thus violating cheating policies (in addition to hallucinating non-existent citations). Whether it was copypasted from AI or from another real person is irrelevant, the AI part just made it easier to prove in this particular case. The school even affirmed in their statement that AI was allowed to be used for brainstorming topics or identifying topics (quote directly from the article): “Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application”
- Mr_Bees69 2y ago
  the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world, and in the real world, there's quite the delta between copying off ai and plagiarism, copying off ai may annoy some people, but there's no law against it (at least right now)
  - filoleg 2y ago
    > copying off ai may annoy some people, but there is no law against it There is no law against plagiarizing on assignments by copying off a real human either, what’s your point? If AI generated an assignment paper for me, and I simply copypasted it and turned it in as my own, I don’t see it being materially different from the same being done with a paper written by another human (rather than AI). > the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world The purpose of each individual class is to teach students the skills that the class is supposed to teach. If the class in the OP was on proper usage of AI, that would be a different story, but it wasn’t. Similarly, you wouldn’t write your own memory allocator in the real world, you would use an existing library for that. That doesn’t mean you will get away with just simply importing an existing memory allocator library in your assignment code and calling it a day.
JohnFen 2y ago
> > the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application If that's what they were doing, then I agree that the real problem wasn't the use of AI as such. The real problem was that this is clearly plagiarism. Punishing it the same as any other plagiarism sounds appropriate.
- mckirk 2y ago
  Is it clearly plagiarism? I wouldn't say it is that clear-cut, since in a sense the output of an LLM to a prompt you give it could still be seen as something you produced -- albeit with the help of a magical matmul genie.
  - result2vino 2y ago
    Yes. It’s clearly plagiarism. Your reply is clearly grasping at the furthest of straws in an attempt to be contrarian and add another “stochastic parrot hehe!” comment to the already overflowing pile. Line up 100 people and the only ones agreeing with you are other wannabe contrarians.
    - mckirk 2y ago
      I truly don't understand the tone of your comment. I'm not grasping at the furthest of straws, I see a distinction between 'verbatim copying someone else's work' and 'verbatim copying the results of a tool that produces text'.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        the tool actually produces text… of someone else’s work… that you then copy… verbatim… :)
        mckirk 2y ago
        But the text itself is not someone else's work verbatim. A translation tool like DeepL is presumably trained on a huge amount of 'other people's work'. Is copying its result verbatim into your own work also plagiarism then?

by jjav 2y ago

Suppafly 2y ago

>They should not be punished for using AI. They should, however, just get a very bad grade for "including citations to nonexistent books". This. We should apply this sort of logic in most situations, penalize for the actual 'crime', worrying about the meaningless details outside of that is just a distraction that confuses the issue.

dartos 2y ago

It was considered cheating to copy and paste my paper from Wikipedia. Why is it any different in this case?

tartoran 2y ago

>AI isn't going away, so pretending students won't be using it at all times, both now and in their lives, is pretty naive and hopeless. Better to embrace it and teach them what it can and can't do. I agree with that but school should focus on fundamentals. The temptation and the ability of AI to do the school work for students so they don't need to put into any effort is a real problem; learning should require some effort and AI could solve that part for students. On the other hand AI could be used for some type of education, but then people tend to throw the baby with the bathwater and declare AI as the principal tool for learning, further diminishing the role of professors and mentors.

filoleg 2y ago

> They should not be punished for using AI. They should, however, just get a very bad grade for "including citations to nonexistent books". As far as I am aware, they weren’t punished for using AI specifically, they were punished for straight up copypasting AI output thus violating cheating policies (in addition to hallucinating non-existent citations). Whether it was copypasted from AI or from another real person is irrelevant, the AI part just made it easier to prove in this particular case. The school even affirmed in their statement that AI was allowed to be used for brainstorming topics or identifying topics (quote directly from the article): “Although students were permitted to use AI to brainstorm topics and identify sources, in this instance the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application”

Mr_Bees69 2y ago
the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world, and in the real world, there's quite the delta between copying off ai and plagiarism, copying off ai may annoy some people, but there's no law against it (at least right now)
- filoleg 2y ago
  > copying off ai may annoy some people, but there is no law against it There is no law against plagiarizing on assignments by copying off a real human either, what’s your point? If AI generated an assignment paper for me, and I simply copypasted it and turned it in as my own, I don’t see it being materially different from the same being done with a paper written by another human (rather than AI). > the purpose of school is to prepare students for the real world The purpose of each individual class is to teach students the skills that the class is supposed to teach. If the class in the OP was on proper usage of AI, that would be a different story, but it wasn’t. Similarly, you wouldn’t write your own memory allocator in the real world, you would use an existing library for that. That doesn’t mean you will get away with just simply importing an existing memory allocator library in your assignment code and calling it a day.

JohnFen 2y ago

> > the students had indiscriminately copied and pasted text from the AI application If that's what they were doing, then I agree that the real problem wasn't the use of AI as such. The real problem was that this is clearly plagiarism. Punishing it the same as any other plagiarism sounds appropriate.

mckirk 2y ago
Is it clearly plagiarism? I wouldn't say it is that clear-cut, since in a sense the output of an LLM to a prompt you give it could still be seen as something you produced -- albeit with the help of a magical matmul genie.
- result2vino 2y ago
  Yes. It’s clearly plagiarism. Your reply is clearly grasping at the furthest of straws in an attempt to be contrarian and add another “stochastic parrot hehe!” comment to the already overflowing pile. Line up 100 people and the only ones agreeing with you are other wannabe contrarians.
  - mckirk 2y ago
    I truly don't understand the tone of your comment. I'm not grasping at the furthest of straws, I see a distinction between 'verbatim copying someone else's work' and 'verbatim copying the results of a tool that produces text'.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      the tool actually produces text… of someone else’s work… that you then copy… verbatim… :)
      - mckirk 2y ago
        But the text itself is not someone else's work verbatim. A translation tool like DeepL is presumably trained on a huge amount of 'other people's work'. Is copying its result verbatim into your own work also plagiarism then?