> Ms. Stapleton decided to do some digging. She reviewed her professor’s slide presentations and discovered other telltale signs of A.I.: distorted text, photos of office workers with extraneous body parts and egregious misspellings.
> She was not happy. Given the school’s cost and reputation, she expected a top-tier education. This course was required for her business minor; its syllabus forbade “academically dishonest activities,” including the unauthorized use of artificial intelligence or chatbots.
> “He’s telling us not to use it, and then he’s using it himself,” she said.
> But, oh, how the tables have turned. Now students are complaining on sites like Rate My Professors about their instructors’ overreliance on A.I. and scrutinizing course materials for words ChatGPT tends to overuse, like “crucial” and “delve.” In addition to calling out hypocrisy, they make a financial argument: They are paying, often quite a lot, to be taught by humans, not an algorithm that they, too, could consult for free.
> Shingirai Christopher Kwaramba, a business professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, described ChatGPT as a partner that saved time. Lesson plans that used to take days to develop now take hours, he said. He uses it, for example, to generate data sets for fictional chain stores, which students use in an exercise to understand various statistical concepts.
> “I see it as the age of the calculator on steroids,” Dr. Kwaramba said.
> Dr. Kwaramba said he now had more time for student office hours.
Generating ”data sets for fictional chain stores, which students use in an exercise to understand various statistical concepts“ is actually a great use of AI.
Students using it to create “results“ faster underestimate the value of wrangling with a subject with their own brain to learn something about it.
ryzvonusef•8mo ago