6 ms·
Is this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there, in your word processor, and yo
by tapoxi 2y ago
Is this the absolute death of the high school essay? Even if you didn't want to cheat by avoiding ChatGPT, AI is now right there, in your word processor, and you have no way of turning it off.
- fullshark 2y agoWe will solve the cheating problem with more AI, all essays will need to be written in 3 hour time windows in web portals with key-logging + copilot off and children on webcam the entire time. An AI will assess all the data and tell you if the child cheated or not. Of course no one will care if you're good at writing essays in the future, and having that skill just means you're working a low paying training data creation job, but we will carry on pretending otherwise for a few years.
- graypegg 2y agoThat sounds dystopian… Essay writing is not a task intended to make you specifically better at writing more essays. It’s supposed to train your ability to explain your point of view clearly and with sound reasoning.
- dimator 2y agoNo one has ever cared of you're good at writing essays in the future, that was true 50 years ago. The point of writing an essay was to (imo) get good at writing (actually assembling words cogently), thinking about a cohesive viewpoint/argument, and understanding the source material (book, novel, historical event, political concept, whatever). I'm
- cocoa19 2y agoThe human ran out of tokens writing this response
- xigency 2y agoPlease scan your can of participating Mountain Dew or Starbucks to unlock the next 150 key presses on your keyboard. (Yes Thank You) (Remind Me Later)
- MathMonkeyMan 2y agoI tend to think of any substantial writing we do at work as an essay. Proposal, summary, RFC, employee evaluation, whatever. You can tell who writes well, and who is copy/pasting plausibly relevant text into an unedited draft that they then pass off as the final result. Not AI, just sloppy writing. I don't have numbers to back it, but I think that the good writing gets more done in less time. So, people care if you're good at writing essays. Then there's the whole "clear writing is clear thinking" angle, but I suspect that people who write poorly do so out of laziness rather than any deficiency.
- redwall_hp 2y agoI want to work with people who can communicate thoughts effectively and will write some damn documentation. People who whine about writing being difficult or unimportant are going to be deficient in both.
- pylua 2y agoJust for their essays to fed into an llm at the end of the day owned by mega corp.
- numpad0 2y ago> with key-logging + copilot off That assumes Microsoft allowing you to do so.
- brewdad 2y agoI sort of had that in my HS English classes more than 30 years ago. Every paper we ever wrote for my final two years was in class for one hour. Occasionally we would get a second class period to work on our papers but the teacher held them until the next class period. I got really good at getting my thoughts down quickly and efficiently. My freshman English course in college nearly broke me however since we were required to revise our papers at least twice after getting feedback, even if the feedback as overwhelmingly positive. It was a skill I had never developed.
- smt88 2y agoI think it's the death of essays and also of reading. Why read a book when AI can read it for you? Teachers I know have already seen this happening.
- drdaeman 2y ago> Why read a book when AI can read it for you? When I was a kid I used short summaries and others' essays for composing my "own" essays on the books I did not want to read (for any reasons). I'm sure generations before me did the same thing, maybe just had it less accessible. If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway (if you're required to do something with it short summary, you'll naturally read the short summary - that was a thing way before the "AI" hype). Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else. If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place.
- smt88 2y ago> maybe just had it less accessible Yes. That's the whole point. The old way of avoiding the work was: - find someone else's essay, maybe buy a Cliff's Notes or search the internet - read the summary - write your paper It would still take you hours. Now, you can avoid the work by just typing a two-sentence prompt into ChatGPT. It's free and fast, and it does the actual writing exercise (or your homework questions) too. You don't need to take my word for it that things have changed. There is a huge amount of empirical evidence that kids are doing less of their own reading and homework because of AI. > If you are interested you're gonna read that book, most likely no matter how many alternatives you may have. If you're not interested it's not like you're gonna do it anyway This is absolutely untrue and discounts the entire concept of education. There are lots of things that people end up being interested in, but they someone has to force them to try it. You're basically suggesting that you can leave a kid in a library and they'll end up reading every book that appeals to them, and we know that isn't true. > Text transforming language models only make accessing short summaries easier to access (with a caveat of being potentially less reliable), but they don't change anything else. You're underselling how much easier the access is. > If limited scale was only thing that was holding the whole system working - well, that wasn't reliable, fair or meaningful system in a first place. Just because some new efficiency allows cheaters to break a system doesn't mean it was a bad system. This is just a nonsensical concept. A perfect example is online gaming. Now there are incredibly sophisticated aimbots and other ways to cheat that are almost impossible to scrub out of the system. Does that mean online gaming was never fun, valuable, or entertaining when it was just humans playing against each other? Of course not.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoHopefully its just a return to the in class bluebook essay. That is like a force multiplier in learning imo due to how much you need to prep to feel confident going into them.
- alexashka 2y agoThe death of the high school essay will be when people realize best learning is done on the job and we get rid of highschools altogether.
- tapoxi 2y agoWe had child labor and it was horrible, if you only learn to work, and only learn through work then it leaves you vulnerable to exploitation by others. And an employer is highly motivated by capital to exploit you as much as possible.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- alexashka 2y agoTake 2 minutes to realize how having highschools solves none of the problems you describe.
- esafak 2y agoThey won't get that far because the kids with more education will get the job.
- xdennis 2y agoI'm a bit of an AI doomer, but I don't think AI will have such a bad impact on school tests. They'll just have to move back to oral exams. I remember reading that Socrates was against writing. His argument was that books don't hold real knowledge because you can't interrogate team. Real knowledge exists only in a man's mind because he can make use of it and answer questions about. I don't quite agree but I do see some merit to the idea. For example, NASA couldn't fly to the moon again by building a Saturn V because even though they still have all the documentation, most of the people who knew how to make use of that documentation are dead or retired.
- Clubber 2y agoKids have to write essays with pencil and paper now. Of course they have to write in print because they stopped teaching cursive a decade ago. No I'm not joking.