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I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class

300 points by lapcat 1y ago

LeftHandPath 1y ago
What a lovely essay. Reminds me of the way I loved the liberal arts growing up. I missed having classes like that in college (AP'd and ACT'd my way out of most requirements). English teachers seem especially prone to that friendly and sporting demeanor the author has. Professors from the engineering schools are far more prescriptive, probably due to the nature of the material.
- resource_waste 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    More traditionally you'd study "rhetoric", the art of making your arguments appealing. It doesn't really matter whether the things you say are true or false. Rhetoric is valuable in any writing endeavor; clarity is only valuable sometimes.
    - aquariusDue 1y ago
      For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic some people might enjoy How to Win Every Argument by Madsen Pirie which also happens to be where I plucked the tagline regarding rhetoric from. It's a pretty easy book to go through in toilet break sized increments, the author goes through different fallacies and how they're employed one by one along with various rhetorical devices. Though a few years ago when I searched for a book on rhetoric and making convincing arguments Office Of Assertion by Scott Crider also popped up, but it's aimed more at written rhetoric instead of what most people have in mind.
      - thaumasiotes 1y ago
        > For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic But it's much broader than that. You can make true arguments. You can make confusing arguments. And you can use tools that have nothing to do with logic at all. Rhetoric has a lot to say about rhythm, alliteration, and linguistic structure. And a lot more to say about your personal bearing and your tone of voice.
  - thisoneisreal 1y ago
    To back up your point, I kind of hated English class until my senior year of high school when I took AP English Language (nonfiction), after which I started drinking books from a firehose.
  - ElevenLathe 1y ago
    All the best writers that I know in the sense that you mean (communicating information precisely), including non-native speakers, are also avid fiction readers. Many also write fiction or prose for fun. Familiarity and fluency with the details of usage and vocabulary are what let one employ these things precisely for whatever purpose, fictional or not.
    - crazygringo 1y ago
      That is not my experience at all. To the contrary, those who write fiction read mostly fiction, and those who write non-fiction read mostly non-fiction. They're incredibly different skill sets. One is all about argumentation, convincing, facts, and citations. The other is all about imagination, beauty, evocation, flavor. Obviously they both require assembling nouns and verbs and other parts of speech in sentences, but they seem to be virtually entirely different capabilities at the end of the day. Writing excellent short stories doesn't really help with crafting effective business communications, design documents, etc. And vice-versa. In fact, I think they can sometimes even be harmful -- the kind of clarity required for non-fiction can constrain imagination in fiction, while the creativity celebrated in fiction can be quite counterproductive when it comes to functional communication -- what is intended to be clever or unique often gets misunderstood.
  - DiscourseFan 1y ago
    > I had to become a middle aged adult and learn this for myself. This is a cliche. You can’t write precisely without an understanding of how language becomes imprecise, of its fundamental instability. Precision and delicate use is an accident when it does happen, and its happening can never be proven. We must have faith in the accident.
    - Spivak 1y ago
      I disagree strongly with this, it's like saying you must understand the subtleties of calligraphy or typography in order to be proficient at writing in your notebook with a pencil. I have no doubt you will be more purposeful and deft with your handwriting having this knowledge but they're two completely different skills. You can be taught to and be proficient in "writing with your pencil" by learning the rules [1]. Efficient, practical, immediately useful and applicable. No subtlety required nor desired. It's the same as all practical skills or trades. [1] https://stylepedia.net/style/ https://stylepedia.net/style/
      - DiscourseFan 1y ago
        Style guides can’t teach you what not to write. If you can’t see what could be missing, how do you know you’re making any sense? Holding yourself to a standard doesn’t mean it’s a meaningful one.
        Spivak 1y ago
        I just used that as an example because it's free, high quality, a good reference, and goes beyond what you would expect out of a style guide and is closer to a textbook on technical writing. So just replace it with your preferred technical writing manual—although a lot of them tend to call themselves style guides or manuals of style. Either way, it's an avenue of learning to write that ignores, I would say, all the artistic aspects of writing. Inasmuch as you can say anything "isn't an art."
        DiscourseFan 1y ago
  - aquariusDue 1y ago
    I agree that it's a good distinction to make. Personally I haven't thought about it till I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. In the book he specifically teaches writing nonfiction and even shares an anecdote where he was a guest on a radio show promoting a writing conference and was annoyed with the host because he conflated writing with literary works. So yeah, I recommend the book to people interested in writing.
patrakov 1y ago
This essay resonated with me because it highlighted the similarity between AI-written texts, describing the result as a word salad. And this also reminded me about some words from my teacher of Russian Literature: that the "bright future" themed novels of the pre-WW2 Soviet writers — works produced under strict political control — read like one big novel without a beginning and an end, and not as separate works. And this grayness and sameness is what happens when people are forced to "think" as a chorus, either by the authorities or their censorship, or voluntarily by using the same AI's help.
- emseetech 1y ago
  Or by market consolidation, as we're experiencing now.
brudgers 1y ago
Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes. Then only four function calculators, then graphing calculators. But still today, programmable calculators are prohibited in many academic contexts.
- blamestross 1y ago
  Turns out education done right is vaguely a speed-run of how the knowledge was developed. Adding calculating tools makes sense as you advance the the corresponding point in the process. Honestly, I think there should be a chunk of precal and calc where they use slide rules only, then calculators of increasing complexity (or just increasingly complex features of one calculator). "When will I use this in real life" is a declaration that you have no expectations of learning the next lesson that builds upon this one.
- ortusdux 1y ago
  The concepts of adding machines and calculators were also slowly phased in over the span of a century. The first commercially successfully adding machines hit the market in the 1890's, and pocket calculators took off in the 1980's. AI went from theory to answering hand written math homework questions from a photograph in a few years.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    I only had a calculator (at a technical university) starting in the mid-1970s. Prices were dropping like a stone in about that period. In high school it was pretty much slide rules.
- grimnebulin 1y ago
  As a teen in the late 80's I had an HP calculator that I programmed to compute molecular weights given an input string like "H2SO4". It felt like having a secret superpower, especially when I participated in competitive exams. I was a very straightlaced kid and would not have used the program if it such things were explicitly forbidden, but as far as I could tell, they never were.
aydyn 1y ago
> most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce. Yeah. Overcommitted to partying and skipping class. Has this author ever been to an average American university?
- DeepYogurt 1y ago
  Speak for yourself maybe
  - aydyn 1y ago
    Speaking for myself, has the author ever been to an average American university?
    - DaSHacka 1y ago
      I have, I'd recommended speaking for yourself
      - aydyn 1y ago
        Cool, but has the author?
    - warmedcookie 1y ago
      Heh, especially the non-major freshman classes. A few weeks in and half the seats are empty compared to the first day of class.
- bluefirebrand 1y ago
  Overcommitted in this context probably means "has a schedule that is packed too full" Between work and school and other responsibilities they have no time to decompress so they burn out
  - yoz-y 1y ago
Aurornis 1y ago
> There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted; Tangentially: I've helped out some college students with mentoring and advice from time to time. One common theme I've noticed is that their class load virtually doesn't matter. They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with. We all like to imagine the poor, overburdened college student working 2 jobs and attending classes to make ends meet when reading statements like that. But to be completely honest, the students like that usually have their time management on point. The hardest ones to coach were the students who had no real responsibilities outside of classes, yet who found their free time slipping through their fingers no matter what they did. Among all of the other problems with easy AI cheating, I wonder how much the availability of these tools will encourage even more procrastination. Feeling like you always have the fallback option of having ChatGPT write the homework for you leaves the door open to procrastinating even longer > I asked my students to complete a baseline survey registering their agreement with several statements, including “It is unethical to use a calculator in a math class” Unless there was more to this survey, this wording seems misleading. In a college-level math class, using a calculator is a common expectation depending on the type of class and the problem. The students would probably think of their TI-89, not a magical AI calculator that could solve every freeform problem for them.
- altairprime 1y ago
  Being one of those students and with a career under my belt of process analysis and coaching, I have an interesting observation: I harness free time as an explicit part of my writing process, rather than something that interferes with it. I write at about 1200 words per day and I considered each fo the major multi-week assignments in my entry-level English courses to be worth no more than one day of my time apiece. For the finals, I gave them two days apiece, because I wanted an extra day to define the scaffolding for my argument. My mother indicates that this is how she went through college too; very occasionally, a serious paper would require more effort than this, but for the most part it was “load assignment into brain, study assignment mentally until T-2d, write assignment, submit”. If several essays are due, then they have to be staged at various days numbered T-2d through T-5d for example — and it’s really important to not depend on T-1d existing at all due to courseware/internet/power outages. I could technically write a worse essay the day it was assigned, but ultimately, I’m turning in A-tier work by this method. The hardest lesson was that I have to try not to wait until T-1d, because there’s a lot of risk encoded in that and it outweighs the value derived from having an extra day to think about it while I do other things. But it wasn’t about “free time slipping away” — it’s just that I’m writing crap throwaway work that doesn’t matter after it’s done, and so I can barely motivate to care relative to literally anything else in my life that matters. Thus the T-2d compromise: I’m not about to give them precedence over literally anything, but I will concede that I do need to do so one day early, however boring it feels, because I’d rather have a crap day at T-2d than the same crap day at T-1d with the unproductive anxiety of risking a class-retake if my internet drops out. Notably, when I actually genuinely care about what I’m writing, I’ll spend weeks researching sources and studying arguments and selecting quotes and then assembling it all over a couple days into a work of art — but assembly day is still always as late as possible in the time window assigned, because by then I’m most able to think and write about it efficiently and with a minimum of frustration. Not a zero of frustration, that is — I am a grouchy writer — but I’m healthy-grouchy on T-2d and bitter-grouchy on T-1d, so I do make the effort to put in my writing that day early now. So: for your coaching efforts, try working with students to construct a working calendar that has non-writing activities in the leadup and then writing activities at the end. ie assuming a 7-day window, T-7d: Assignment given: Read the assignment. (Seems obvious; is not obvious!) T-6d: Think about your argument during your free time, while playing games or out at coffee or whatever. T-5d: Try to construct a very halfass outline on a piece of paper. One sentence per argument you’d like to make, draw arrows to rearrange them. Not complete sentences, not punctuated, doesn’t have any structure at all. Point is that trying will help brain coalesce. T-4d: Research references for fun. End up with far too many. Start highlighting quotes to yourself using highlighter or digital tools. If you’re going to experiment with a new tool, get it working and productive in 2 hours or discard it and do something shittier. T-3d: Bind quotes to your argument phrases from that halfass outline. This may force reorg of outline; cool. Compile Works Cited from whatever you end up using so that you don’t have to fuck around with it tomorrow. T-2d: Write paper, referring to outline / phrases handwritten note. Do one paragraph at a time. Plan to spend your entire day on this with 1 hour away from desk handling bio/sanity needs for every 2 hours at desk. Enforce that upon yourself. T-1d: Finish whatever writing you didn’t feel like you were prepared to write on T-2d. Ideally try to do this earlier in the day than later, since that every hour you let this slip towards midnight l measurably increases your chances of a life outage causing you to fail the class. The point of this schedule is to bake in the daydreaming / slow cooker aspect of the creative process but to keep it on the rails. I play video games extensively when I’m thinking about a paper because I can feed my literary brain the assignment to simmer and then go occupy my reflex brain with the game. I usually end up having to use some T-1d time but I’m getting better at managing my life’s dependencies ie. Food and Water and Sleep so that I’m more reliably at T-2d completion :)
anigbrowl 1y ago
Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud: [...] I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad. But that's what it has been trained on - almost all academic writing is bland flavorless word salad, and this is extremely noticeable in title fads. I have a nearly decade-long game running with my friend where me make up absolutely bullshit concepts that could nevertheless be plausibly published in a journal, and the process has been going on long before that. 'Verbing the noun: towards a genericization theory of expressivity in high-entropy counter-heterogeneity' describes an ongoing problem in academic writing where novelty is deprioritized in favor of acceptability by an evermore tightly circumscribed set of peer professionals whose socioeconomic interests favor the establishment of intellectual stasis that maximally conserves positionality in a quais-Simmelian network space parameterized by income, tenure proximity, and citation count. Or put more clearly, the more academics write to impress each other instead of to reach the public, the more generic their titles and language will be. Being able to parse and regurgitate wordy titles and abstracts constitutes table stakes in academia, so the incentives tilt toward burying the lede any original proposals as deeply as possible so as the minimize the career-damaging possibility of rejection on technical/syntactical grounds.
deleted 1y ago
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tkgally 1y ago
Interesting report. I understand why much of the discussion about AI and university education has focused on first-year writing classes in the U.S. Some of my own first experiments with ChatGPT in December 2022 were having it write school-like essays [1]. Over the past few months, I cotaught a university class in which we also had first-year students use and reflect on their use of AI in their classwork. But the context was different: the class was a seminar on science communication (how to make science engaging to children and the general public), and most of the time was spent with the students doing group projects. Also, the class was at a university in Tokyo, and we taught it in Japanese. We have just started analyzing the feedback from the students, but my impression is that they were less conflicted about the use of AI for their group work than they might have been if they had been doing their projects as individuals. Meanwhile, as the semester progressed, agentic frameworks started to mature. I spent a lot of time on my own experimenting with Claude Code and Gemini CLI. While none of the students in that class seemed to use them, it became clear to me that such higher-level cognitive tools will pose an even greater challenge to higher education than essay-writing chatbots do now. [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html
astrobe_ 1y ago
AIs grading AI-generated essays looks like a recipe for model collapse. That's why we certainly need people who go after the "diminishing returns" of improving their writing skills beyond the "good enough" that AI delivers. Should education systems aim for that for all of their students? Certainly, because AI alone is not sufficient to raise the bar. As impressive an AI is when it seems to invent a new molecule, it is still only possible because of the original works of many people.
cootsnuck 1y ago
Really enjoyed that. Shows the "messy middle" that people are caught in during this current wave of AI tech. I think one undeniable positive outcome has been the like collective introspection AI has sparked among so many people. With a tool challenging what it means to be "human" or "creative" (more so than prior technological advances), I've been seeing a lot of wonderful discussions, articles, videos, etc. with people wrestling with those questions and also just affirming their own singular voice and unique creative essence. It's been cool to see.
- joe_the_user 1y ago
  I think one undeniable positive outcome has been the like collective introspection AI has sparked among so many people. Has it sparked that? I'm doubtful but I'd be very interested if anyone has a references about such introspection. I grew up reading Douglas Hofstadter back in the 70s and what I appreciated with his ideas was using AI to illuminate what is human. His wave of AI failed, of course. But still, it's disheartening how little of that kind of inquiry seems missing from the current wave of AI.
gwerbret 1y ago
A lot of the purposes in education for which the use of AI would be considered "cheating" involve writing assignments of one sort or another, so I don't know why most of these education scenarios don't simply redirect the incentive. For example, in an English class with a lot of essay-writing assignments, the assignments could simply be worth 0% of the final mark. There would still be deadlines as usual, and they would be marked as usual, but the students would be free to do them or not as they pleased. The catch would be that the *proctored, for-credit* exams would demand that they write similar essays, which would then be graded based on the knowledge/skills the students would have been expected to gain if they'd done the assignments. Advantages: - No more issues with cheating. - Students get to manage (or learn to manage) their own time and priorities, as is expected of adults, without being whipped as much with the cane of class grades. - The advanced students who can already write clearly, concisely and convincingly (or whatever the objectives are of the writing exercises) don't have to waste time with unneeded assignments. - If students skip the assignments, learn to write on their own time using ChatGPT and friends, and can demonstrate their skills in exam conditions, then it's a win-win. This all requires that whoever is in charge of the class have clear and testable learning goals in mind -- which, alas, they all-too-often do not.
- siddboots 1y ago
  This would mean moving to 100% weighted exams, and there's good reasons why there has been a general trend away from that over recent decades. For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others, independent of their preparedness and knowledge of the material. Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.
  - gwerbret 1y ago
    Fair point, but the solution I propose would only apply to those parts of the assessment involving solo writing assignments -- so excluding class participation, group assignments, etc. (Which is not to say that students can't use AI to cheat on these, but they have other solutions.)
  - renewiltord 1y ago
ninetyninenine 1y ago
Ai being a calculator is a bad analogy. A typical calculator doesn’t do the full assignment for you. AI can do the full assignment and do it faster and better
- 48terry 1y ago
  Is the goal of the assignment to produce yet another essay, or to demonstrate you understand and can expand on the coursework?
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    Usually the goal of the student is not aligned with that of the school. The student wants money from a job. The degree helps him find a job. The essay itself or understanding the coursework does not help him find a job directly. If he can bypass understanding to get a degree, he will do it. The school thinks that the student joined to learn and the school acts this way up to a certain extent. But in the end grading a failing student isn't helping him learn. The school ends up fostering competition and stress internally and uses GPA as a ranking system. Why a school does all this to a student when the student pays them? Like why give students bad grades when the student gives them money? Because of integrity. Jobs trust the school if the school has prestige and integrity. In order to maintain that prestige and integrity the school needs to pressure and rank the students. Then when the school is sufficiently prestigious companies know and students pay tuition to get the integrity and thus get the job. The more prestigious the school the more is invested into "ranking". Only at schools with lower prestige do you get more of a "learning environment". But companies prefer candidates who can make it through a ranking system over ones that have to be coddled in an environment that fosters learning. It is not an illogical concept. Students that make it into these prestigious schools generally have much higher IQ. This is a data driven fact along with the fact that entrance to many schools involves the equivalent of an IQ test. People with higher IQ perform better. So it's the most rational choice for companies to want to pick students from schools that are bad at teaching and better at ranking. Some students go to higher ed for learning. Most go to run the gauntlet of a ranking system and end up with a degree that bestows prestige and excellence. There's my ultra real take on your "why don't students want to learn" bs. But it's not like I said anything you didn't already know.
nelox 1y ago
Hand written essays in class. Short and longer form discussions, questions and answers in class. End of unit, term, semester, year. Interview on topic in spoken form.
- calvinmorrison 1y ago
  That doesn't mesh with the $5000 per credit hour ,get students in and out and degree'd ASAP. No 100 level outside of Marlboro college are you going to find a graduate sized class cohort meeting with professors 1 on 1 and debating philosophy and doing stand up rhetorical studies. Oh yeah, Marlboro is out bidness.
  - nelox 1y ago
    Works for Oxford and Cambridge.
    - jplusequalt 1y ago
      You may have well just said, "well it works for Google and Meta".
eviks 1y ago
> several statements, including “It is unethical to use a calculator in a math class” That's too broad to be of any use, if the math class is teaching you to calculate in your head, then using any calculator is cheating. If the math class is teaching some algebra equation solving skills, then using a programmable calculator that auto solves them is cheating. That's the similar issue with such experiments - they unfortunately aren't rigorous to provide any insight into education
ryao 1y ago
It occurs to me that writing by those in STEM fields and those in the humanities is entirely different and each group dislikes the other’s writing. When I was in college, my professors in technical classes had no problems with my writing. After I graduated and I wrote some technical articles, my writing received praise from readers. However, when I took two semesters of mandatory English writing classes in college, my professors hated my writing and nothing I did made them happy with it. When LLMs became widely usable, I was one of the people who really liked much of the writing that they did. I found it was relatively close to my writing style, which I consider to be good, despite the disagreement from those in the humanities. It was close enough to my own writing that I have even had people on Discord accuse me of using LLMs to write my messages for me, when I had not. The linked article was clearly written by an English teacher. He criticizes AI-generated texts as “a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad“. Now, there are many cases where LLMs output nonsense, but in cases where the writing logically flows, does not self-contradict in any way and avoids unnecessary repetition, “bland” and “flavorless” are good. The goal of writing is to convey information across space-time; writing that is “bland” and “flavorless” is the best way of conveying information. I can see a number of things he did in his writing to avoid being “bland” and “flavorless”, and I consider them to be examples of poor writing: He used dozens of idioms that make the text difficult for non-native speakers and unpleasant for native readers. He used a number of colloquialisms, including some that are inappropriate in professional contexts (although I will not repeat them since I refuse to write them). He used a word whose only definition is provided by Urban Dictionary and therefore is not even an official word: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cyborging https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cyborging He also brought politics into an apolitical topic. The injection of politics is a great way to derail any form of productive dialogue and should be avoided. He used a story format of the kind that has infected journalism. It is very rare that the process by which something was learned is useful to readers and presenting it for dramatics wastes their time. That is with the exception of stories on the topic of security, where hearing the process is often genuinely informative. My aversion to this writing style is so severe that I have a standing policy to stop reading a news article the moment that I see that it uses this style for a topic that is not security-related. After reading his article, I will extend my policy to apply to essays by academics in the humanities too. He made numerous attempts to evoke emotional responses to elicit agreement, rather than to make clear arguments based on facts. This is great for propaganda, but not so great for making points. Every one of these appeals to emotions is poor writing. Beyond those things, he also did not properly cite sources in multiple places. To name a few, the quotes from Sam Altman and Annalee Newitz are uncited. As an academic, he should know better. Some of these things might actually have places in certain types of writing. They certainly have places in propaganda. They also have places in fictional literature. However, they do not have places in attempts to argue a point. I imagine if he corrected all of my criticisms, he would find the result to be “bland” and “flavorless”. That is how an attempt to argue a point should be.
anoncow 1y ago
So many video ads!
marcus_holmes 1y ago
> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable I was there. We had been given slide rules, and a decent chunk of my 11-yr-old maths classes were devoted to teaching us how to use them. Calculators were banned because they "didn't teach us anything" (but somehow slide rules did? It didn't make any sense at the time either). Over the course of the next few years, calculators became more acceptable, and by my 18-yr-old Maths A-level class, we were being advised on which scientific calculators to buy. It's an interesting analogy, as TFA says.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  Slide rules tell you how logarithmic scales work.
  - marcus_holmes 1y ago
    Calculators let you write "boobless" upside down.
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      How does that serve to improve your mathematical understanding?
PeterStuer 1y ago
Thinking back, I have had some woderfull professors that had expertise beyond just published work and knew how to convey it. Then I have had many bland curriculum reciters matching a semi decent youtube lecture, and some bad communicators where you were better of just reading the book they tried to teach. There was also a few that couldn't really teach, but whose class was more like a standup comedy performance. I'd say with the exception of the first and last group, ChatGPT would probably be a good if not better replacement for day to day teaching and mentoring.
karel-3d 1y ago
> Reflecting on the fact that 3 credits at UVA costs me $5000+ and 2100+ minutes,” Drew wrote, “I do not believe I grew enough through this course for it to be worth it.” Having noticed only “incremental improvements in [his] writing and thinking,” he concluded that “I would rather have spent this large sum of money and time on a course that interests me and teaches me about my career aspirations, like the finances of real estate. If I need to learn to write, I believe AI can serve me well for MY purpose at a fraction of the cost Somehow this hits hard
- bluecalm 1y ago
  A monopoly on certificates (degrees) is causing it. It's ridiculous that an English course costs 5000$. A lot of people can do a better job teaching this material for 500$ or less but they don't have a right to issue a prestigious certificates. I just hope "free market fails" people realise one day that the most overpriced industries (healthcare and education) are the ones free competition is not allowed in.
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    We used to have no regulations on healthcare. It was terrible. Other countries don’t have populations chomping at the bit to allow Amazon to dropship healthcare. They aren’t perfect, but the US system is singularly broken.
    - _3u10 1y ago
      They sort of do, Turkish hairlines, and Cali come immediately to mind. It’s just that you have to drop ship yourself there.
      - jjani 1y ago
        This concept is very far from all rainbows and sunshine [1], exactly what you'd expect to happen leaving it all up to the market indeed. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9jv1xyxm0o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9jv1xyxm0o
spwa4 1y ago
I find this a strange criticism. If you look at all of human written stories, the number of stories is quite limited too. There's a lot of retelling of "classic" stories (except in classical times they were probably retelling them too). This even applies to religious stories: The kings/men who fight over a beauty (which can be a land/crown, or a woman) overcoming a monster/evil opponent or a series of opponents (The Illiad/Troy, Beowulf, King Arthur, ...) The orphan/abandoned kid/extremely poor that conquers the kingdom, either through marriage or by conquering a (series of) challenges (Moses, Aladdin, Oedipus, Theseus, Heracles, Cinderella, the foundation story of islam/mohamed, ...) The vizier/prime minister who decides he'll be king and becomes incredibly evil to achieve it. (robin hood, paradise lost (ie. the story of lucifer/the devil), queen esther, aladdin, MacBeth, ...) The not-evil-but-quite-evil mother who sees her king/husband make a child, either with another woman or sees/fears she or her child will be put aside because of the other child and ... (Hera, Snow White, Medea, biblical story of Abraham, ...) And then there's stories like Game of Thrones that are in large part a combination and integration of a lot of such stories: Circe and her children. John Snow, after being rejected, climbing up and up and up. Bran becoming king. Arya living through a sort of Herculanean heroic epic. And the kings fighting constantly. Humans are clearly still a big step up even from state-of-the-art AI, but we are not infinitely creative like we like to think we are. It's a difference in scale, not a fundamental difference.
viccis 1y ago
The calculator comparison is so tired and misleading. It's embarrassing to think that rote computation like calculators serve in most math classes is comparable to the "formulate an insightful answer to a prompt and express it clearly through writing" role an LLM fills in (especially early) humanities coursework.
ccppurcell 1y ago
I recently did a short stint teaching English to university students. This is English as a second language (possibly unnecessary context) but the level is fairly high. The course was hastily rearranged to prevent the students using llms. They had to hand write their essays under supervision, which made them a real pain to grade btw. Then I was asked to review the questions for the final exam and I noticed some pretty weird constructions in the sample texts and sentences. Nothing completely grammatically wrong just unusual or semantically off. The example I recall was "... disproportionately affects men and women" but there were other worse examples. You can guess where this is going. But I knew that another native speaker had written the listening texts so I didn't want to directly criticise these, and I thought they might have been pulled from magazines or some corpus. But, of course, the course leader had generated them with chatgpt.
- spidersouris 1y ago
  What's the issue with "… disproportionately affects …"? It seems to be a correct English construction (even though the frequency in COCA is relatively low; 72). Some examples: > Indeed, the recent cases of hyperinflation in Brazil, Argentina, and Poland illustrate that although hyperinflation is harmful to savers and disproportionately affects the poor (The Independent Review) > A hearing is set Thursday on the new version of a legislative bill to eliminate scheduled pay increases for state employees that nixes a section that disproportionately affects rural legislative information offices (USA Today) > Suicide is a key mental health issue which disproportionately affects men. (london.gov.uk)
  - ace32229 1y ago
    "disproportionately affects men AND WOMEN" is nonsensical. "disproportionately affects men" makes sense.
londons_explore 1y ago
> big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad. I guess nobody tried to adjust the temperature via the API then... You can make something really unbland then! Eg. "Write a 3 sentence story" Temperature=1 The old cat, Bartholomew, stretched languidly in a patch of afternoon sun, his purr a rumbling motor. A mischievous bluebird, emboldened by the cat's sleepy demeanor, swooped down to steal a whisker for its nest. Bartholomew's eyes snapped open, a silent promise that their game was far from over. Temperature=2: The old clockmaker found a gear he didn't recognize, its teeth shimmering with an otherworldly light. He fitted it into the grand clock tower, and as the hands struck midnight, the town square was bathed in a soft, silver glow. From that day on, no one in the town ever seemed to age.
- ace32229 1y ago
  Which of these are meant to be unbland?
ctenb 1y ago
Assignments should in total be worth ten percent of the total mark. Not too much to cheat over and waste your chance of valuable feedback. Not too little to ignore, so giving some short term incentive to actually work on them.
xivzgrev 1y ago
What a great application of AI in college course. The processor made them critically think about how AI may impact their writing, the value of it vs human writing. That's exactly what college should be doing, producing critical thinkers to navigate tomorrow's world.
yapyap 1y ago
chat originates from streamers calling twitch chat chat like a singular entity which has transferred into the common persons vernacular, not chat as in chatgpt
epatjas 1y ago
I think the most interesting detail was that students started recognizing AI by its tics (obsessive em-dashes, always exactly three examples) and turned detection into a game. Accidentally became better readers.
- diffuse_l 1y ago
  I'm wondering if the usage of an em-dash in the article (somewhere towards the middle) is self-aware trolling, or just the result of excessive ai use... > includes both a human and a computer—and “surprisingly,
incone123 1y ago
From the title I thought this was going to be about a student using AI to take their place in class. I imagined a modern version of the montage in Real Genius (1985) where students leave tape recorders on their seats in the lecture hall.
bluenose69 1y ago
Regarding the phrase "imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable" in the text, I'm old enough to know what has changed. Today, many university students struggle with basic calculations. I'm not talking about long division of 8-digit numbers. I'm talking about things like expressing 2/10 as a percentage or knowing how many zeros to use when writing 1/1000 in decimal form. Many very bright students, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, struggle with such things. It's heartbreaking.
- Vinnl 1y ago
  I'm from the post-calculator era, and those examples are definitely not problematic for me or even a single one of my peers. So apparently calculators don't automatically lead to that skill atrophying.
EmilStenstrom 1y ago
This essay is SO well written. I find myself smiling and laughing along. Is great writing a must for communication? No. Would I wish that all writing was like this? Most definitely YES!
charcircuit 1y ago
>My students liked to hate on AI I suspect this was just a vocal minority. This kind of vocal minority is common online to.
ApeWithCompiler 1y ago
In my opinion the comparison to calculators is flawed. At least for simpler calculators as someone might imagine. In its application that would mean for a LLM you define a sentence with one blank, restructure the sentence so the blank gets extracted and then enter it into the LLM to get exactly one word for your blank. On the oppoisite you wouldn't use the calculator for solving equations, but to also formulate them based on a abstract definition. Furthermore "math" and "text" are two fundamentaly distinct categories. In math we express mathematical observations/context, which can be proven in its correctnes. We can conclude that 1 Apple + 2 Apples won't result in 5 Apples, but 3. Text may express emotions, toughts, directives, information or observations in context of its author. Not in every case it may be proven as math and we may attribute other values to it. Like honesty, authenticity, information and effort. If it was only for the information, you could filter out hallucinations and call it a day. But for other values you literally can not outsource the work to a tool. Except you live in a South Park episode.
djoldman 1y ago
> Navigating the Digital Age: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives, Learning, and Well-Being > Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal Reflection on Technology > Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal and Peer Perspective on Technology’s Role in Our Lives > Navigating Connection: An Exploration of Personal Relationships with Technology > From Connection to Disconnection: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives > From Connection to Distraction: How Technology Shapes Our Social and Academic Lives > From Connection to Distraction: Navigating a Love-Hate Relationship with Technology > Between Connection and Distraction: Navigating the Role of Technology in Our Lives The immediate and obvious response to the above is: turn up the temperature. As an aside: many of the critiques of genAI in this piece are about the quality of AI right now and won't hold if and when quality increases.
- WaltPurvis 1y ago
  > The immediate and obvious response to the above is: turn up the temperature. I assume the students were using the ChatGPT web app (as ~99% of teenagers would); there is no way to adjust the temperature in the web app.
dako2117 1y ago
Isn't this written by AI
nancyminusone 1y ago
>My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point. This instantly paints the author as someone out of touch with their students. For the record, it comes from streamers/Twitch a la "Chat, is this real?" I'm not saying everyone needs to know every meme, but starting off with this does taint the rest of the piece a little.
- genshii 1y ago
  It's both. I've seen people both in real life (coworkers) and online refer to ChatGPT as "Chat", completely independent of the Twitch "chat" meme.
  - nancyminusone 1y ago
    Huh, everyone I know appends -gpt to the end of things to designate AI. Probably because "chat" is already taken. I suppose there are multiple usages though.
  - BoxOfRain 1y ago
    Yeah I've seen people refer to it as "Chat" too who've nothing to do with Twitch.
  - danso 1y ago
    My first reflex at this was revulsion, similar to my reaction to “crypto” becoming a term for both cryptography and everything bitcoin-adjacent. But now I think the conflation is pretty cute and apt. LLM chatbots, for better or worse. are aiming to replace actual human chat, so might as well use language that makes it explicit
- zamadatix 1y ago
  Nah, it's just inconvenient to say "Chat-G-P-T". Particularly in voice mode. If it had officially been GoogleMGL people would have still say "Google it" despite the lack of live streaming reference.
kevink23 1y ago
Maybe AI is changing how we learn, but it can’t replace the real skill of understanding and thinking for ourselves.

300 points by lapcat 1y ago

What a lovely essay. Reminds me of the way I loved the liberal arts growing up. I missed having classes like that in college (AP'd and ACT'd my way out of most requirements). English teachers seem especially prone to that friendly and sporting demeanor the author has. Professors from the engineering schools are far more prescriptive, probably due to the nature of the material.

resource_waste 1y ago
[flagged]
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  More traditionally you'd study "rhetoric", the art of making your arguments appealing. It doesn't really matter whether the things you say are true or false. Rhetoric is valuable in any writing endeavor; clarity is only valuable sometimes.
  - aquariusDue 1y ago
    For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic some people might enjoy How to Win Every Argument by Madsen Pirie which also happens to be where I plucked the tagline regarding rhetoric from. It's a pretty easy book to go through in toilet break sized increments, the author goes through different fallacies and how they're employed one by one along with various rhetorical devices. Though a few years ago when I searched for a book on rhetoric and making convincing arguments Office Of Assertion by Scott Crider also popped up, but it's aimed more at written rhetoric instead of what most people have in mind.
    - thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > For a funny take on the whole "rhetoric" is the use and abuse of logic But it's much broader than that. You can make true arguments. You can make confusing arguments. And you can use tools that have nothing to do with logic at all. Rhetoric has a lot to say about rhythm, alliteration, and linguistic structure. And a lot more to say about your personal bearing and your tone of voice.
- thisoneisreal 1y ago
  To back up your point, I kind of hated English class until my senior year of high school when I took AP English Language (nonfiction), after which I started drinking books from a firehose.
- ElevenLathe 1y ago
  All the best writers that I know in the sense that you mean (communicating information precisely), including non-native speakers, are also avid fiction readers. Many also write fiction or prose for fun. Familiarity and fluency with the details of usage and vocabulary are what let one employ these things precisely for whatever purpose, fictional or not.
  - crazygringo 1y ago
    That is not my experience at all. To the contrary, those who write fiction read mostly fiction, and those who write non-fiction read mostly non-fiction. They're incredibly different skill sets. One is all about argumentation, convincing, facts, and citations. The other is all about imagination, beauty, evocation, flavor. Obviously they both require assembling nouns and verbs and other parts of speech in sentences, but they seem to be virtually entirely different capabilities at the end of the day. Writing excellent short stories doesn't really help with crafting effective business communications, design documents, etc. And vice-versa. In fact, I think they can sometimes even be harmful -- the kind of clarity required for non-fiction can constrain imagination in fiction, while the creativity celebrated in fiction can be quite counterproductive when it comes to functional communication -- what is intended to be clever or unique often gets misunderstood.
- DiscourseFan 1y ago
  > I had to become a middle aged adult and learn this for myself. This is a cliche. You can’t write precisely without an understanding of how language becomes imprecise, of its fundamental instability. Precision and delicate use is an accident when it does happen, and its happening can never be proven. We must have faith in the accident.
  - Spivak 1y ago
    I disagree strongly with this, it's like saying you must understand the subtleties of calligraphy or typography in order to be proficient at writing in your notebook with a pencil. I have no doubt you will be more purposeful and deft with your handwriting having this knowledge but they're two completely different skills. You can be taught to and be proficient in "writing with your pencil" by learning the rules [1]. Efficient, practical, immediately useful and applicable. No subtlety required nor desired. It's the same as all practical skills or trades. [1] https://stylepedia.net/style/ https://stylepedia.net/style/
    - DiscourseFan 1y ago
      Style guides can’t teach you what not to write. If you can’t see what could be missing, how do you know you’re making any sense? Holding yourself to a standard doesn’t mean it’s a meaningful one.
      - Spivak 1y ago
        I just used that as an example because it's free, high quality, a good reference, and goes beyond what you would expect out of a style guide and is closer to a textbook on technical writing. So just replace it with your preferred technical writing manual—although a lot of them tend to call themselves style guides or manuals of style. Either way, it's an avenue of learning to write that ignores, I would say, all the artistic aspects of writing. Inasmuch as you can say anything "isn't an art."
        DiscourseFan 1y ago
- aquariusDue 1y ago
  I agree that it's a good distinction to make. Personally I haven't thought about it till I read On Writing Well by William Zinsser. In the book he specifically teaches writing nonfiction and even shares an anecdote where he was a guest on a radio show promoting a writing conference and was annoyed with the host because he conflated writing with literary works. So yeah, I recommend the book to people interested in writing.

patrakov 1y ago

This essay resonated with me because it highlighted the similarity between AI-written texts, describing the result as a word salad. And this also reminded me about some words from my teacher of Russian Literature: that the "bright future" themed novels of the pre-WW2 Soviet writers — works produced under strict political control — read like one big novel without a beginning and an end, and not as separate works. And this grayness and sameness is what happens when people are forced to "think" as a chorus, either by the authorities or their censorship, or voluntarily by using the same AI's help.

emseetech 1y ago
Or by market consolidation, as we're experiencing now.

brudgers 1y ago

Altman’s analogy didn’t hold up. Calculators were uncontroversial Calculators are uncontroversial now. But when they first became cheap and widely available, they were not allowed in math classes. Then only four function calculators, then graphing calculators. But still today, programmable calculators are prohibited in many academic contexts.

blamestross 1y ago
Turns out education done right is vaguely a speed-run of how the knowledge was developed. Adding calculating tools makes sense as you advance the the corresponding point in the process. Honestly, I think there should be a chunk of precal and calc where they use slide rules only, then calculators of increasing complexity (or just increasingly complex features of one calculator). "When will I use this in real life" is a declaration that you have no expectations of learning the next lesson that builds upon this one.
ortusdux 1y ago
The concepts of adding machines and calculators were also slowly phased in over the span of a century. The first commercially successfully adding machines hit the market in the 1890's, and pocket calculators took off in the 1980's. AI went from theory to answering hand written math homework questions from a photograph in a few years.
- ghaff 1y ago
  I only had a calculator (at a technical university) starting in the mid-1970s. Prices were dropping like a stone in about that period. In high school it was pretty much slide rules.
grimnebulin 1y ago
As a teen in the late 80's I had an HP calculator that I programmed to compute molecular weights given an input string like "H2SO4". It felt like having a secret superpower, especially when I participated in competitive exams. I was a very straightlaced kid and would not have used the program if it such things were explicitly forbidden, but as far as I could tell, they never were.

aydyn 1y ago

> most students are overcommitted; college is expensive, so they need good grades for a good return on their investment; and AI is everywhere, including the post-college workforce. Yeah. Overcommitted to partying and skipping class. Has this author ever been to an average American university?

DeepYogurt 1y ago
Speak for yourself maybe
- aydyn 1y ago
  Speaking for myself, has the author ever been to an average American university?
  - DaSHacka 1y ago
    I have, I'd recommended speaking for yourself
    - aydyn 1y ago
      Cool, but has the author?
  - warmedcookie 1y ago
    Heh, especially the non-major freshman classes. A few weeks in and half the seats are empty compared to the first day of class.
bluefirebrand 1y ago
Overcommitted in this context probably means "has a schedule that is packed too full" Between work and school and other responsibilities they have no time to decompress so they burn out
- yoz-y 1y ago

Aurornis 1y ago

> There are valid reasons why college students in particular might prefer that AI do their writing for them: most students are overcommitted; Tangentially: I've helped out some college students with mentoring and advice from time to time. One common theme I've noticed is that their class load virtually doesn't matter. They find ways to run out of time no matter how much free time they start with. We all like to imagine the poor, overburdened college student working 2 jobs and attending classes to make ends meet when reading statements like that. But to be completely honest, the students like that usually have their time management on point. The hardest ones to coach were the students who had no real responsibilities outside of classes, yet who found their free time slipping through their fingers no matter what they did. Among all of the other problems with easy AI cheating, I wonder how much the availability of these tools will encourage even more procrastination. Feeling like you always have the fallback option of having ChatGPT write the homework for you leaves the door open to procrastinating even longer > I asked my students to complete a baseline survey registering their agreement with several statements, including “It is unethical to use a calculator in a math class” Unless there was more to this survey, this wording seems misleading. In a college-level math class, using a calculator is a common expectation depending on the type of class and the problem. The students would probably think of their TI-89, not a magical AI calculator that could solve every freeform problem for them.

altairprime 1y ago
Being one of those students and with a career under my belt of process analysis and coaching, I have an interesting observation: I harness free time as an explicit part of my writing process, rather than something that interferes with it. I write at about 1200 words per day and I considered each fo the major multi-week assignments in my entry-level English courses to be worth no more than one day of my time apiece. For the finals, I gave them two days apiece, because I wanted an extra day to define the scaffolding for my argument. My mother indicates that this is how she went through college too; very occasionally, a serious paper would require more effort than this, but for the most part it was “load assignment into brain, study assignment mentally until T-2d, write assignment, submit”. If several essays are due, then they have to be staged at various days numbered T-2d through T-5d for example — and it’s really important to not depend on T-1d existing at all due to courseware/internet/power outages. I could technically write a worse essay the day it was assigned, but ultimately, I’m turning in A-tier work by this method. The hardest lesson was that I have to try not to wait until T-1d, because there’s a lot of risk encoded in that and it outweighs the value derived from having an extra day to think about it while I do other things. But it wasn’t about “free time slipping away” — it’s just that I’m writing crap throwaway work that doesn’t matter after it’s done, and so I can barely motivate to care relative to literally anything else in my life that matters. Thus the T-2d compromise: I’m not about to give them precedence over literally anything, but I will concede that I do need to do so one day early, however boring it feels, because I’d rather have a crap day at T-2d than the same crap day at T-1d with the unproductive anxiety of risking a class-retake if my internet drops out. Notably, when I actually genuinely care about what I’m writing, I’ll spend weeks researching sources and studying arguments and selecting quotes and then assembling it all over a couple days into a work of art — but assembly day is still always as late as possible in the time window assigned, because by then I’m most able to think and write about it efficiently and with a minimum of frustration. Not a zero of frustration, that is — I am a grouchy writer — but I’m healthy-grouchy on T-2d and bitter-grouchy on T-1d, so I do make the effort to put in my writing that day early now. So: for your coaching efforts, try working with students to construct a working calendar that has non-writing activities in the leadup and then writing activities at the end. ie assuming a 7-day window, T-7d: Assignment given: Read the assignment. (Seems obvious; is not obvious!) T-6d: Think about your argument during your free time, while playing games or out at coffee or whatever. T-5d: Try to construct a very halfass outline on a piece of paper. One sentence per argument you’d like to make, draw arrows to rearrange them. Not complete sentences, not punctuated, doesn’t have any structure at all. Point is that trying will help brain coalesce. T-4d: Research references for fun. End up with far too many. Start highlighting quotes to yourself using highlighter or digital tools. If you’re going to experiment with a new tool, get it working and productive in 2 hours or discard it and do something shittier. T-3d: Bind quotes to your argument phrases from that halfass outline. This may force reorg of outline; cool. Compile Works Cited from whatever you end up using so that you don’t have to fuck around with it tomorrow. T-2d: Write paper, referring to outline / phrases handwritten note. Do one paragraph at a time. Plan to spend your entire day on this with 1 hour away from desk handling bio/sanity needs for every 2 hours at desk. Enforce that upon yourself. T-1d: Finish whatever writing you didn’t feel like you were prepared to write on T-2d. Ideally try to do this earlier in the day than later, since that every hour you let this slip towards midnight l measurably increases your chances of a life outage causing you to fail the class. The point of this schedule is to bake in the daydreaming / slow cooker aspect of the creative process but to keep it on the rails. I play video games extensively when I’m thinking about a paper because I can feed my literary brain the assignment to simmer and then go occupy my reflex brain with the game. I usually end up having to use some T-1d time but I’m getting better at managing my life’s dependencies ie. Food and Water and Sleep so that I’m more reliably at T-2d completion :)

anigbrowl 1y ago

Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud: [...] I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad. But that's what it has been trained on - almost all academic writing is bland flavorless word salad, and this is extremely noticeable in title fads. I have a nearly decade-long game running with my friend where me make up absolutely bullshit concepts that could nevertheless be plausibly published in a journal, and the process has been going on long before that. 'Verbing the noun: towards a genericization theory of expressivity in high-entropy counter-heterogeneity' describes an ongoing problem in academic writing where novelty is deprioritized in favor of acceptability by an evermore tightly circumscribed set of peer professionals whose socioeconomic interests favor the establishment of intellectual stasis that maximally conserves positionality in a quais-Simmelian network space parameterized by income, tenure proximity, and citation count. Or put more clearly, the more academics write to impress each other instead of to reach the public, the more generic their titles and language will be. Being able to parse and regurgitate wordy titles and abstracts constitutes table stakes in academia, so the incentives tilt toward burying the lede any original proposals as deeply as possible so as the minimize the career-damaging possibility of rejection on technical/syntactical grounds.

deleted 1y ago

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tkgally 1y ago

Interesting report. I understand why much of the discussion about AI and university education has focused on first-year writing classes in the U.S. Some of my own first experiments with ChatGPT in December 2022 were having it write school-like essays [1]. Over the past few months, I cotaught a university class in which we also had first-year students use and reflect on their use of AI in their classwork. But the context was different: the class was a seminar on science communication (how to make science engaging to children and the general public), and most of the time was spent with the students doing group projects. Also, the class was at a university in Tokyo, and we taught it in Japanese. We have just started analyzing the feedback from the students, but my impression is that they were less conflicted about the use of AI for their group work than they might have been if they had been doing their projects as individuals. Meanwhile, as the semester progressed, agentic frameworks started to mature. I spent a lot of time on my own experimenting with Claude Code and Gemini CLI. While none of the students in that class seemed to use them, it became clear to me that such higher-level cognitive tools will pose an even greater challenge to higher education than essay-writing chatbots do now. [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html

astrobe_ 1y ago

AIs grading AI-generated essays looks like a recipe for model collapse. That's why we certainly need people who go after the "diminishing returns" of improving their writing skills beyond the "good enough" that AI delivers. Should education systems aim for that for all of their students? Certainly, because AI alone is not sufficient to raise the bar. As impressive an AI is when it seems to invent a new molecule, it is still only possible because of the original works of many people.

cootsnuck 1y ago

Really enjoyed that. Shows the "messy middle" that people are caught in during this current wave of AI tech. I think one undeniable positive outcome has been the like collective introspection AI has sparked among so many people. With a tool challenging what it means to be "human" or "creative" (more so than prior technological advances), I've been seeing a lot of wonderful discussions, articles, videos, etc. with people wrestling with those questions and also just affirming their own singular voice and unique creative essence. It's been cool to see.

joe_the_user 1y ago
I think one undeniable positive outcome has been the like collective introspection AI has sparked among so many people. Has it sparked that? I'm doubtful but I'd be very interested if anyone has a references about such introspection. I grew up reading Douglas Hofstadter back in the 70s and what I appreciated with his ideas was using AI to illuminate what is human. His wave of AI failed, of course. But still, it's disheartening how little of that kind of inquiry seems missing from the current wave of AI.

gwerbret 1y ago

A lot of the purposes in education for which the use of AI would be considered "cheating" involve writing assignments of one sort or another, so I don't know why most of these education scenarios don't simply redirect the incentive. For example, in an English class with a lot of essay-writing assignments, the assignments could simply be worth 0% of the final mark. There would still be deadlines as usual, and they would be marked as usual, but the students would be free to do them or not as they pleased. The catch would be that the *proctored, for-credit* exams would demand that they write similar essays, which would then be graded based on the knowledge/skills the students would have been expected to gain if they'd done the assignments. Advantages: - No more issues with cheating. - Students get to manage (or learn to manage) their own time and priorities, as is expected of adults, without being whipped as much with the cane of class grades. - The advanced students who can already write clearly, concisely and convincingly (or whatever the objectives are of the writing exercises) don't have to waste time with unneeded assignments. - If students skip the assignments, learn to write on their own time using ChatGPT and friends, and can demonstrate their skills in exam conditions, then it's a win-win. This all requires that whoever is in charge of the class have clear and testable learning goals in mind -- which, alas, they all-too-often do not.

siddboots 1y ago
This would mean moving to 100% weighted exams, and there's good reasons why there has been a general trend away from that over recent decades. For one thing, some students simply perform better under pressure than others, independent of their preparedness and knowledge of the material. Mind you, I don't really have any alternative suggestions.
- gwerbret 1y ago
  Fair point, but the solution I propose would only apply to those parts of the assessment involving solo writing assignments -- so excluding class participation, group assignments, etc. (Which is not to say that students can't use AI to cheat on these, but they have other solutions.)
- renewiltord 1y ago

ninetyninenine 1y ago

Ai being a calculator is a bad analogy. A typical calculator doesn’t do the full assignment for you. AI can do the full assignment and do it faster and better

48terry 1y ago
Is the goal of the assignment to produce yet another essay, or to demonstrate you understand and can expand on the coursework?
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  Usually the goal of the student is not aligned with that of the school. The student wants money from a job. The degree helps him find a job. The essay itself or understanding the coursework does not help him find a job directly. If he can bypass understanding to get a degree, he will do it. The school thinks that the student joined to learn and the school acts this way up to a certain extent. But in the end grading a failing student isn't helping him learn. The school ends up fostering competition and stress internally and uses GPA as a ranking system. Why a school does all this to a student when the student pays them? Like why give students bad grades when the student gives them money? Because of integrity. Jobs trust the school if the school has prestige and integrity. In order to maintain that prestige and integrity the school needs to pressure and rank the students. Then when the school is sufficiently prestigious companies know and students pay tuition to get the integrity and thus get the job. The more prestigious the school the more is invested into "ranking". Only at schools with lower prestige do you get more of a "learning environment". But companies prefer candidates who can make it through a ranking system over ones that have to be coddled in an environment that fosters learning. It is not an illogical concept. Students that make it into these prestigious schools generally have much higher IQ. This is a data driven fact along with the fact that entrance to many schools involves the equivalent of an IQ test. People with higher IQ perform better. So it's the most rational choice for companies to want to pick students from schools that are bad at teaching and better at ranking. Some students go to higher ed for learning. Most go to run the gauntlet of a ranking system and end up with a degree that bestows prestige and excellence. There's my ultra real take on your "why don't students want to learn" bs. But it's not like I said anything you didn't already know.

nelox 1y ago

Hand written essays in class. Short and longer form discussions, questions and answers in class. End of unit, term, semester, year. Interview on topic in spoken form.

calvinmorrison 1y ago
That doesn't mesh with the $5000 per credit hour ,get students in and out and degree'd ASAP. No 100 level outside of Marlboro college are you going to find a graduate sized class cohort meeting with professors 1 on 1 and debating philosophy and doing stand up rhetorical studies. Oh yeah, Marlboro is out bidness.
- nelox 1y ago
  Works for Oxford and Cambridge.
  - jplusequalt 1y ago
    You may have well just said, "well it works for Google and Meta".

eviks 1y ago

> several statements, including “It is unethical to use a calculator in a math class” That's too broad to be of any use, if the math class is teaching you to calculate in your head, then using any calculator is cheating. If the math class is teaching some algebra equation solving skills, then using a programmable calculator that auto solves them is cheating. That's the similar issue with such experiments - they unfortunately aren't rigorous to provide any insight into education

ryao 1y ago

It occurs to me that writing by those in STEM fields and those in the humanities is entirely different and each group dislikes the other’s writing. When I was in college, my professors in technical classes had no problems with my writing. After I graduated and I wrote some technical articles, my writing received praise from readers. However, when I took two semesters of mandatory English writing classes in college, my professors hated my writing and nothing I did made them happy with it. When LLMs became widely usable, I was one of the people who really liked much of the writing that they did. I found it was relatively close to my writing style, which I consider to be good, despite the disagreement from those in the humanities. It was close enough to my own writing that I have even had people on Discord accuse me of using LLMs to write my messages for me, when I had not. The linked article was clearly written by an English teacher. He criticizes AI-generated texts as “a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad“. Now, there are many cases where LLMs output nonsense, but in cases where the writing logically flows, does not self-contradict in any way and avoids unnecessary repetition, “bland” and “flavorless” are good. The goal of writing is to convey information across space-time; writing that is “bland” and “flavorless” is the best way of conveying information. I can see a number of things he did in his writing to avoid being “bland” and “flavorless”, and I consider them to be examples of poor writing: He used dozens of idioms that make the text difficult for non-native speakers and unpleasant for native readers. He used a number of colloquialisms, including some that are inappropriate in professional contexts (although I will not repeat them since I refuse to write them). He used a word whose only definition is provided by Urban Dictionary and therefore is not even an official word: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cyborging https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cyborging He also brought politics into an apolitical topic. The injection of politics is a great way to derail any form of productive dialogue and should be avoided. He used a story format of the kind that has infected journalism. It is very rare that the process by which something was learned is useful to readers and presenting it for dramatics wastes their time. That is with the exception of stories on the topic of security, where hearing the process is often genuinely informative. My aversion to this writing style is so severe that I have a standing policy to stop reading a news article the moment that I see that it uses this style for a topic that is not security-related. After reading his article, I will extend my policy to apply to essays by academics in the humanities too. He made numerous attempts to evoke emotional responses to elicit agreement, rather than to make clear arguments based on facts. This is great for propaganda, but not so great for making points. Every one of these appeals to emotions is poor writing. Beyond those things, he also did not properly cite sources in multiple places. To name a few, the quotes from Sam Altman and Annalee Newitz are uncited. As an academic, he should know better. Some of these things might actually have places in certain types of writing. They certainly have places in propaganda. They also have places in fictional literature. However, they do not have places in attempts to argue a point. I imagine if he corrected all of my criticisms, he would find the result to be “bland” and “flavorless”. That is how an attempt to argue a point should be.

anoncow 1y ago

So many video ads!

marcus_holmes 1y ago

> imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable I was there. We had been given slide rules, and a decent chunk of my 11-yr-old maths classes were devoted to teaching us how to use them. Calculators were banned because they "didn't teach us anything" (but somehow slide rules did? It didn't make any sense at the time either). Over the course of the next few years, calculators became more acceptable, and by my 18-yr-old Maths A-level class, we were being advised on which scientific calculators to buy. It's an interesting analogy, as TFA says.

1718627440 1y ago
Slide rules tell you how logarithmic scales work.
- marcus_holmes 1y ago
  Calculators let you write "boobless" upside down.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    How does that serve to improve your mathematical understanding?

PeterStuer 1y ago

Thinking back, I have had some woderfull professors that had expertise beyond just published work and knew how to convey it. Then I have had many bland curriculum reciters matching a semi decent youtube lecture, and some bad communicators where you were better of just reading the book they tried to teach. There was also a few that couldn't really teach, but whose class was more like a standup comedy performance. I'd say with the exception of the first and last group, ChatGPT would probably be a good if not better replacement for day to day teaching and mentoring.

karel-3d 1y ago

> Reflecting on the fact that 3 credits at UVA costs me $5000+ and 2100+ minutes,” Drew wrote, “I do not believe I grew enough through this course for it to be worth it.” Having noticed only “incremental improvements in [his] writing and thinking,” he concluded that “I would rather have spent this large sum of money and time on a course that interests me and teaches me about my career aspirations, like the finances of real estate. If I need to learn to write, I believe AI can serve me well for MY purpose at a fraction of the cost Somehow this hits hard

bluecalm 1y ago
A monopoly on certificates (degrees) is causing it. It's ridiculous that an English course costs 5000$. A lot of people can do a better job teaching this material for 500$ or less but they don't have a right to issue a prestigious certificates. I just hope "free market fails" people realise one day that the most overpriced industries (healthcare and education) are the ones free competition is not allowed in.
- hdgvhicv 1y ago
  We used to have no regulations on healthcare. It was terrible. Other countries don’t have populations chomping at the bit to allow Amazon to dropship healthcare. They aren’t perfect, but the US system is singularly broken.
  - _3u10 1y ago
    They sort of do, Turkish hairlines, and Cali come immediately to mind. It’s just that you have to drop ship yourself there.
    - jjani 1y ago
      This concept is very far from all rainbows and sunshine [1], exactly what you'd expect to happen leaving it all up to the market indeed. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9jv1xyxm0o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce9jv1xyxm0o

spwa4 1y ago

I find this a strange criticism. If you look at all of human written stories, the number of stories is quite limited too. There's a lot of retelling of "classic" stories (except in classical times they were probably retelling them too). This even applies to religious stories: The kings/men who fight over a beauty (which can be a land/crown, or a woman) overcoming a monster/evil opponent or a series of opponents (The Illiad/Troy, Beowulf, King Arthur, ...) The orphan/abandoned kid/extremely poor that conquers the kingdom, either through marriage or by conquering a (series of) challenges (Moses, Aladdin, Oedipus, Theseus, Heracles, Cinderella, the foundation story of islam/mohamed, ...) The vizier/prime minister who decides he'll be king and becomes incredibly evil to achieve it. (robin hood, paradise lost (ie. the story of lucifer/the devil), queen esther, aladdin, MacBeth, ...) The not-evil-but-quite-evil mother who sees her king/husband make a child, either with another woman or sees/fears she or her child will be put aside because of the other child and ... (Hera, Snow White, Medea, biblical story of Abraham, ...) And then there's stories like Game of Thrones that are in large part a combination and integration of a lot of such stories: Circe and her children. John Snow, after being rejected, climbing up and up and up. Bran becoming king. Arya living through a sort of Herculanean heroic epic. And the kings fighting constantly. Humans are clearly still a big step up even from state-of-the-art AI, but we are not infinitely creative like we like to think we are. It's a difference in scale, not a fundamental difference.

viccis 1y ago

The calculator comparison is so tired and misleading. It's embarrassing to think that rote computation like calculators serve in most math classes is comparable to the "formulate an insightful answer to a prompt and express it clearly through writing" role an LLM fills in (especially early) humanities coursework.

ccppurcell 1y ago

I recently did a short stint teaching English to university students. This is English as a second language (possibly unnecessary context) but the level is fairly high. The course was hastily rearranged to prevent the students using llms. They had to hand write their essays under supervision, which made them a real pain to grade btw. Then I was asked to review the questions for the final exam and I noticed some pretty weird constructions in the sample texts and sentences. Nothing completely grammatically wrong just unusual or semantically off. The example I recall was "... disproportionately affects men and women" but there were other worse examples. You can guess where this is going. But I knew that another native speaker had written the listening texts so I didn't want to directly criticise these, and I thought they might have been pulled from magazines or some corpus. But, of course, the course leader had generated them with chatgpt.

spidersouris 1y ago
What's the issue with "… disproportionately affects …"? It seems to be a correct English construction (even though the frequency in COCA is relatively low; 72). Some examples: > Indeed, the recent cases of hyperinflation in Brazil, Argentina, and Poland illustrate that although hyperinflation is harmful to savers and disproportionately affects the poor (The Independent Review) > A hearing is set Thursday on the new version of a legislative bill to eliminate scheduled pay increases for state employees that nixes a section that disproportionately affects rural legislative information offices (USA Today) > Suicide is a key mental health issue which disproportionately affects men. (london.gov.uk)
- ace32229 1y ago
  "disproportionately affects men AND WOMEN" is nonsensical. "disproportionately affects men" makes sense.

londons_explore 1y ago

> big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad. I guess nobody tried to adjust the temperature via the API then... You can make something really unbland then! Eg. "Write a 3 sentence story" Temperature=1 The old cat, Bartholomew, stretched languidly in a patch of afternoon sun, his purr a rumbling motor. A mischievous bluebird, emboldened by the cat's sleepy demeanor, swooped down to steal a whisker for its nest. Bartholomew's eyes snapped open, a silent promise that their game was far from over. Temperature=2: The old clockmaker found a gear he didn't recognize, its teeth shimmering with an otherworldly light. He fitted it into the grand clock tower, and as the hands struck midnight, the town square was bathed in a soft, silver glow. From that day on, no one in the town ever seemed to age.

ace32229 1y ago
Which of these are meant to be unbland?

ctenb 1y ago

Assignments should in total be worth ten percent of the total mark. Not too much to cheat over and waste your chance of valuable feedback. Not too little to ignore, so giving some short term incentive to actually work on them.

xivzgrev 1y ago

What a great application of AI in college course. The processor made them critically think about how AI may impact their writing, the value of it vs human writing. That's exactly what college should be doing, producing critical thinkers to navigate tomorrow's world.

yapyap 1y ago

chat originates from streamers calling twitch chat chat like a singular entity which has transferred into the common persons vernacular, not chat as in chatgpt

epatjas 1y ago

I think the most interesting detail was that students started recognizing AI by its tics (obsessive em-dashes, always exactly three examples) and turned detection into a game. Accidentally became better readers.

diffuse_l 1y ago
I'm wondering if the usage of an em-dash in the article (somewhere towards the middle) is self-aware trolling, or just the result of excessive ai use... > includes both a human and a computer—and “surprisingly,

incone123 1y ago

From the title I thought this was going to be about a student using AI to take their place in class. I imagined a modern version of the montage in Real Genius (1985) where students leave tape recorders on their seats in the lecture hall.

bluenose69 1y ago

Regarding the phrase "imagine how radically math class must have changed when calculators became widely affordable" in the text, I'm old enough to know what has changed. Today, many university students struggle with basic calculations. I'm not talking about long division of 8-digit numbers. I'm talking about things like expressing 2/10 as a percentage or knowing how many zeros to use when writing 1/1000 in decimal form. Many very bright students, at both undergraduate and postgraduate level, struggle with such things. It's heartbreaking.

Vinnl 1y ago
I'm from the post-calculator era, and those examples are definitely not problematic for me or even a single one of my peers. So apparently calculators don't automatically lead to that skill atrophying.

EmilStenstrom 1y ago

This essay is SO well written. I find myself smiling and laughing along. Is great writing a must for communication? No. Would I wish that all writing was like this? Most definitely YES!

charcircuit 1y ago

>My students liked to hate on AI I suspect this was just a vocal minority. This kind of vocal minority is common online to.

ApeWithCompiler 1y ago

In my opinion the comparison to calculators is flawed. At least for simpler calculators as someone might imagine. In its application that would mean for a LLM you define a sentence with one blank, restructure the sentence so the blank gets extracted and then enter it into the LLM to get exactly one word for your blank. On the oppoisite you wouldn't use the calculator for solving equations, but to also formulate them based on a abstract definition. Furthermore "math" and "text" are two fundamentaly distinct categories. In math we express mathematical observations/context, which can be proven in its correctnes. We can conclude that 1 Apple + 2 Apples won't result in 5 Apples, but 3. Text may express emotions, toughts, directives, information or observations in context of its author. Not in every case it may be proven as math and we may attribute other values to it. Like honesty, authenticity, information and effort. If it was only for the information, you could filter out hallucinations and call it a day. But for other values you literally can not outsource the work to a tool. Except you live in a South Park episode.

djoldman 1y ago

> Navigating the Digital Age: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives, Learning, and Well-Being > Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal Reflection on Technology > Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal and Peer Perspective on Technology’s Role in Our Lives > Navigating Connection: An Exploration of Personal Relationships with Technology > From Connection to Disconnection: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives > From Connection to Distraction: How Technology Shapes Our Social and Academic Lives > From Connection to Distraction: Navigating a Love-Hate Relationship with Technology > Between Connection and Distraction: Navigating the Role of Technology in Our Lives The immediate and obvious response to the above is: turn up the temperature. As an aside: many of the critiques of genAI in this piece are about the quality of AI right now and won't hold if and when quality increases.

WaltPurvis 1y ago
> The immediate and obvious response to the above is: turn up the temperature. I assume the students were using the ChatGPT web app (as ~99% of teenagers would); there is no way to adjust the temperature in the web app.

dako2117 1y ago

Isn't this written by AI

nancyminusone 1y ago

>My students call it “Chat,” a cute nickname they all seem to have agreed on at some point. This instantly paints the author as someone out of touch with their students. For the record, it comes from streamers/Twitch a la "Chat, is this real?" I'm not saying everyone needs to know every meme, but starting off with this does taint the rest of the piece a little.

genshii 1y ago
It's both. I've seen people both in real life (coworkers) and online refer to ChatGPT as "Chat", completely independent of the Twitch "chat" meme.
- nancyminusone 1y ago
  Huh, everyone I know appends -gpt to the end of things to designate AI. Probably because "chat" is already taken. I suppose there are multiple usages though.
- BoxOfRain 1y ago
  Yeah I've seen people refer to it as "Chat" too who've nothing to do with Twitch.
- danso 1y ago
  My first reflex at this was revulsion, similar to my reaction to “crypto” becoming a term for both cryptography and everything bitcoin-adjacent. But now I think the conflation is pretty cute and apt. LLM chatbots, for better or worse. are aiming to replace actual human chat, so might as well use language that makes it explicit
zamadatix 1y ago
Nah, it's just inconvenient to say "Chat-G-P-T". Particularly in voice mode. If it had officially been GoogleMGL people would have still say "Google it" despite the lack of live streaming reference.

kevink23 1y ago

Maybe AI is changing how we learn, but it can’t replace the real skill of understanding and thinking for ourselves.