5 ms·

The definition of "cheating" will change... because those students are, in fact, learning. They are learning how to accomplish a lot more, a lot faster, with A

by cs702 1y ago

The definition of "cheating" will change... because those students are, in fact, learning. They are learning how to accomplish a lot more, a lot faster, with AI. That's a valuable skill -- one of the most valuable skills that students can learn today. It's not the only valuable skill they should learn, but it's certainly one of the most valuable. Educators will have to adapt.

fzeroracer 1y ago
Now what will said cheaters do when they don't have access to AI? Like if the internet goes down, or if they work in an environment where they can't access it? Or if the company says no, because it's a security risk?
- bluecheese452 1y ago
  Wait until the internet comes back up? Work at a different company?
  - fzeroracer 1y ago
    'Sorry boss, I can't work because I don't have internet and don't have access to my AI crutch' isn't exactly a stellar argument. That's someone I would immediately regret hiring.
    - bluecheese452 1y ago
      If your internet is going down regularly enough for this to be an issue you have bigger problems.
    - jameshart 1y ago
      Wait til they argue it’s a mandated disability accommodation.
    - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
      If you have an architecture office and the power goes out, do you have your workers give up on using AutoCAD and go to the drafting boards and slide rulers till the power comes back up? What's the point of going backwards with technology? You'll be outcompeted by those who embrace modern technology. I'm not aware of any modern engineering profession that doesn't use electronic crutches regularly. Nobody knows absolutely everything in their heads. We're paid for critical thinking , not to have everything memorized just in case the internet is out. Even before the internet, SW devs had stacks of books on their desks they'd reffer to often. Remember when IBM wanted to pay devs per line of code written? Yeah, exactly. I see the skills being problem solving, not writing code.
      - bluecheese452 1y ago
        What if your pencils break? Won’t hire a dev unless they can manufacture their own writing utensils.
    - dagw 1y ago
      'Sorry boss, I can't work because I don't have internet and don't have access to GitHub/CI/license server/email/any of our Saas tools/any of my files' happens every time the internet goes down and bosses are quite understanding.
- jameshart 1y ago
  “You won’t always have a calculator” never convinced kids in school who didn’t want to learn math.
madphilosopher 1y ago
Maybe some college degrees could have an endorsement at the bottom: "Earned without AI."
FourierEnvy 1y ago
Right, until dependency on the tools makes them unable to solve problems that the tools can't solve for them.
jasperry 1y ago
Yes, prompting an LLM is a kind of skill. But relying on it has been shown to hinder development of the most important skill of all--critical, independent thinking. And ultimately that's the only "accomplishment" that matters when it comes to education. Completed homework assignments are not a product, they're a process for making someone think, and that's what's being avoided with LLM usage.
bartvk 1y ago
Educators are already adapting. I teach CS and we do verbal assessments of students their code. According to my students, a certain percentage slip through but all in all, it's nowhere the problem that this article makes it out to be (at my college).
jameshart 1y ago
For some definition of ‘accomplish’ that has nothing to do with what studying is for.
gwern 1y ago
Wishful thinking if you read the article. Most of these kids aren't learning anything about how to use AI. They aren't like a Simon Willison or Janus or anything. They're not learning about confabulations, they're not learning about scaling laws or tokenization, they're not learning to use the API, they're not running multiple models to get a feel for how they think differently, they ain't doing none of that shit you wishfully think they are - because they're cheating to minimize effort so they can go do something else like watch Tiktok. (Even Lee, who is by far the most successful and sophisticated user profiled in OP, is just dumping out stuff as fast as he can to try to make a buck.) They are copy-pasting the assignment from Blackboard to ChatGPT and vice-versa. As the article points out, they usually aren't even reading the outputs to check that the essay doesn't suddenly start bloviating about Aristotle. And no one needs to pay a college wage premium, or any wage, for that: > He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.
- cs702 1y ago
  I read the article. Those kids are definitely learning how to think, just not in the way educators wish. One of the girls quoted said she loves writing, but finds it helpful to get structure and initial content from generative AI. The kid at Columbia has already launched two startups. Clever kids always figure out how to leverage the tools they have at hand. With the advent of new technology, humanity has no choice but to move up the value chain -- in this case, from executing tasks to judging, supervising, and curating AI work.
  - gwern 1y ago
    > One of the girls quoted said she loves writing, but finds it helpful to get structure and initial content from generative AI. Which shows she's not learning from the AI or even improving on it. All she's doing is filling out the 'structure and initial content' - oh, is that all??? > The kid at Columbia has already launched two startups. Which doesn't require learning anything much from the LLMs, as he did that on his own before them (note the Leetcode). Also, considering that the second one is fraudulent and if it works, exists largely to abet fraud, this is not a ringing endorsement. > With the advent of new technology, humanity has no choice but to move up the value chain -- in this case, from executing tasks to judging, supervising, and curating AI work. ChatGPT couldn't written that ending any better. (I will charitably assume it did not, unless you took the trouble to replace that emdash with a double hyphen just to be cute.) It could have written it about 1000x cheaper, however.
throwaway0123_5 1y ago
Maybe they're "learning" how to use AI [1], but in at least some cases they're not learning what they're supposed to be learning from the class they're enrolled in [2]. The point of the assignments was never to produce the the answers as fast as possible by any means necessary [3], but to build strong foundations so that you can later do much more challenging/useful things. If your assignment is "program X in assembly," and you just copy/paste the prompt into ChatGPT, you aren't learning assembly, you aren't learning important concepts relevant for low-level performance optimization, etc. etc. That was the point, not to produce X. What would be useful is specific classes with assignments that are designed to be worked on with the assistance of AI. "AI-enabled SWE" etc. Lessons on how to effectively utilize it for research and learning. But those things aren't replacing learning the fundamentals, and probably can't unless AGI is achieved and actual knowledge is just economically irrelevant. [1]: For a lot of undergrad assignments you can probably just copy/paste the description into ChatGPT, which I don't think qualifies as being difficult enough to merit "learning" how to do). [2]: I guess this is "fine" if you're in the "AI will imminently replace all white-collar work" camp, but then its just dumb to be enrolled in college in the first place, unless maybe you're going for free. [3]: In some sense, fully outsourcing your thinking to AI is the same as just paying someone to do your homework, which has always been possible but less accessible.
GeoAtreides 1y ago
why is it always the high karma users with the... weirdest takes?

by cs702 1y ago

fzeroracer 1y ago

Now what will said cheaters do when they don't have access to AI? Like if the internet goes down, or if they work in an environment where they can't access it? Or if the company says no, because it's a security risk?

bluecheese452 1y ago
Wait until the internet comes back up? Work at a different company?
- fzeroracer 1y ago
  'Sorry boss, I can't work because I don't have internet and don't have access to my AI crutch' isn't exactly a stellar argument. That's someone I would immediately regret hiring.
  - bluecheese452 1y ago
    If your internet is going down regularly enough for this to be an issue you have bigger problems.
  - jameshart 1y ago
    Wait til they argue it’s a mandated disability accommodation.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    If you have an architecture office and the power goes out, do you have your workers give up on using AutoCAD and go to the drafting boards and slide rulers till the power comes back up? What's the point of going backwards with technology? You'll be outcompeted by those who embrace modern technology. I'm not aware of any modern engineering profession that doesn't use electronic crutches regularly. Nobody knows absolutely everything in their heads. We're paid for critical thinking , not to have everything memorized just in case the internet is out. Even before the internet, SW devs had stacks of books on their desks they'd reffer to often. Remember when IBM wanted to pay devs per line of code written? Yeah, exactly. I see the skills being problem solving, not writing code.
    - bluecheese452 1y ago
      What if your pencils break? Won’t hire a dev unless they can manufacture their own writing utensils.
  - dagw 1y ago
    'Sorry boss, I can't work because I don't have internet and don't have access to GitHub/CI/license server/email/any of our Saas tools/any of my files' happens every time the internet goes down and bosses are quite understanding.
jameshart 1y ago
“You won’t always have a calculator” never convinced kids in school who didn’t want to learn math.

madphilosopher 1y ago

Maybe some college degrees could have an endorsement at the bottom: "Earned without AI."

FourierEnvy 1y ago

Right, until dependency on the tools makes them unable to solve problems that the tools can't solve for them.

jasperry 1y ago

Yes, prompting an LLM is a kind of skill. But relying on it has been shown to hinder development of the most important skill of all--critical, independent thinking. And ultimately that's the only "accomplishment" that matters when it comes to education. Completed homework assignments are not a product, they're a process for making someone think, and that's what's being avoided with LLM usage.

bartvk 1y ago

Educators are already adapting. I teach CS and we do verbal assessments of students their code. According to my students, a certain percentage slip through but all in all, it's nowhere the problem that this article makes it out to be (at my college).

jameshart 1y ago

For some definition of ‘accomplish’ that has nothing to do with what studying is for.

gwern 1y ago

Wishful thinking if you read the article. Most of these kids aren't learning anything about how to use AI. They aren't like a Simon Willison or Janus or anything. They're not learning about confabulations, they're not learning about scaling laws or tokenization, they're not learning to use the API, they're not running multiple models to get a feel for how they think differently, they ain't doing none of that shit you wishfully think they are - because they're cheating to minimize effort so they can go do something else like watch Tiktok. (Even Lee, who is by far the most successful and sophisticated user profiled in OP, is just dumping out stuff as fast as he can to try to make a buck.) They are copy-pasting the assignment from Blackboard to ChatGPT and vice-versa. As the article points out, they usually aren't even reading the outputs to check that the essay doesn't suddenly start bloviating about Aristotle. And no one needs to pay a college wage premium, or any wage, for that: > He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.

cs702 1y ago
I read the article. Those kids are definitely learning how to think, just not in the way educators wish. One of the girls quoted said she loves writing, but finds it helpful to get structure and initial content from generative AI. The kid at Columbia has already launched two startups. Clever kids always figure out how to leverage the tools they have at hand. With the advent of new technology, humanity has no choice but to move up the value chain -- in this case, from executing tasks to judging, supervising, and curating AI work.
- gwern 1y ago
  > One of the girls quoted said she loves writing, but finds it helpful to get structure and initial content from generative AI. Which shows she's not learning from the AI or even improving on it. All she's doing is filling out the 'structure and initial content' - oh, is that all??? > The kid at Columbia has already launched two startups. Which doesn't require learning anything much from the LLMs, as he did that on his own before them (note the Leetcode). Also, considering that the second one is fraudulent and if it works, exists largely to abet fraud, this is not a ringing endorsement. > With the advent of new technology, humanity has no choice but to move up the value chain -- in this case, from executing tasks to judging, supervising, and curating AI work. ChatGPT couldn't written that ending any better. (I will charitably assume it did not, unless you took the trouble to replace that emdash with a double hyphen just to be cute.) It could have written it about 1000x cheaper, however.

throwaway0123_5 1y ago

Maybe they're "learning" how to use AI [1], but in at least some cases they're not learning what they're supposed to be learning from the class they're enrolled in [2]. The point of the assignments was never to produce the the answers as fast as possible by any means necessary [3], but to build strong foundations so that you can later do much more challenging/useful things. If your assignment is "program X in assembly," and you just copy/paste the prompt into ChatGPT, you aren't learning assembly, you aren't learning important concepts relevant for low-level performance optimization, etc. etc. That was the point, not to produce X. What would be useful is specific classes with assignments that are designed to be worked on with the assistance of AI. "AI-enabled SWE" etc. Lessons on how to effectively utilize it for research and learning. But those things aren't replacing learning the fundamentals, and probably can't unless AGI is achieved and actual knowledge is just economically irrelevant. [1]: For a lot of undergrad assignments you can probably just copy/paste the description into ChatGPT, which I don't think qualifies as being difficult enough to merit "learning" how to do). [2]: I guess this is "fine" if you're in the "AI will imminently replace all white-collar work" camp, but then its just dumb to be enrolled in college in the first place, unless maybe you're going for free. [3]: In some sense, fully outsourcing your thinking to AI is the same as just paying someone to do your homework, which has always been possible but less accessible.

GeoAtreides 1y ago

why is it always the high karma users with the... weirdest takes?