Fuck AI

Curious why you're only posting the archived version? This article is not paywalled...

I'm guessing 33 people were too lazy to copy data into a box and relied on ChatGPT OCR lol.

This was a great article about the use of AI, but I think this also exposed bad/zero effort cheating.

There's a reason why even the ye olde Wikipedia copy-pasters would rearrange sentences to make sure they can game the plagiarism checker.

Great story with predictable results. Welcome to your AI future where people give their thinking over to machines made by sociopaths.

Distillation:

Let me tell you why the Trojan horse worked. It is because students do not know what they do not know. My hidden text asked them to write the paper “from a Marxist perspective”. Since the events in the book had little to do with the later development of Marxism, I thought the resulting essay might raise a red flag with students, but it didn’t.

I had at least eight students come to my office to make their case against the allegations, but not a single one of them could explain to me what Marxism is, how it worked as an analytical lens or how it even made its way into their papers they claimed to have written. The most shocking part was that apparently, when ChatGPT read the prompt, it even directly asked if it should include Marxism, and they all said yes. As one student said to me, “I thought it sounded smart.”

I decided to not punish them. All I know how to do is teach, so that’s what I did. I assigned a wonderful essay by Cal Poly professor Patrick Lin that he addressed to his class on the benefits and detriments of AI use. I attached instructions that asked them to read it and reflect. These instructions also had a Trojan horse.

Thirty-six of my AI students completed it. One of them used AI, and the other 12 have been slowly dropping the class. Ultimately, 35 out of 47 isn’t too bad. The responses to the assignment were generally good, and some were deeply reflective.

But a handful said something I found quite sad: “I just wanted to write the best essay I could.” Those students in question, who at least tried to provide some of their own thoughts before mixing them with the generated result, had already written the best essay they could. And I guess that’s why I hate AI in the classroom as much as I do.

Students are afraid to fail, and AI presents itself as a saviour. But what we learn from history is that progress requires failure. It requires reflection. Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead.

Here's the link to the actual article. I get that you're trying to do users a favour to bypass tracking at the original URL, but the Internet Archive is a Free service that shouldn't be abused for link cleaning as it costs a lot of money to store and serve all this stuff and it's meant as an "archive", not an ad-blocking proxy.

I'm posting this in part because currently clicking that link errors it with a "too many requests" error. Let's try to be a little kinder to the good guys, shall we?

If users wasnt a cleaner/safer/faster browsing experience, I recommend ditching Chrome for Firefox and getting the standard set of extensions: uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, etc.

Whatever happened to the tests which you have to sit and do to prove you know the thing you’re writing about?

Great article.

How do we teach that when a student doesn’t want to learn?

Good question. But maybe we've gone overboard with the density of information and we just need to relax a little and give the kids their childhood back.

39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI

That's better than my class. I taught CS101 last year, code not papers. 90%+ of the homework was done with AI. There was literally just 1 person who would turn in unique code. Everyone else would turn in ChatGPT code.

I adapted by making the homework worth very little of the grade and moving the bulk of the grade to in-class paper and pencil exams.

Don't really know how to feel about this because 15 years ago, all I did was reword Wikipedia pages to make a good paper. I went to college because I was led to believe it was a requirement to do well in life. I still learned a lot, but that was mostly through the social interaction of coursework. And honestly, I don't use anything from college in my current engineering job, it was all on-the-job panic learning. If I were to go back to college today, it would be such an enlightening experience of learning, but when you're a kid getting out of high school, you're just trying to get by with some gameplan that you've only been told about. Idk. I don't blame them for using a tool that's so easily accessible because college is about fun too. I guess I wouldn't do it different at that age .