It's just too tempting for most and talking all day about how one should check sources is antiquated because that only worked decently when cheating wasn't so easy. Academic ethics and responsibility cannot scale in the age of AI.
But look at many parts of the world and you see that it isn't unique.
I saw it from some Cooker-anti Vax folks the saying "You future doctor is currently using ChatGPT so you had better get your health in order now." And on that one point I had to agree with them. A weird future awaits.
If getting the degree is just a certificate to allow you to get jobs, that’s all a lot of people will care about.
We need a system of apprenticeship. Some school, yes, but we have over indexed on school and forced it into a role for which it is ill suited.
On the other hand, these students are proving that AI is as capable as a student (in their eyes at least) which bodes very well for employers. Limitless numbers of cheap workers.
Limitless numbers of cheap workers are great for employers when they have them. Not as great when everyone has them.
Who is going to pay for the goods or services provided by your limitless number of cheap artificial workers when everyone else has also replaced their natural consumer human employees with their own cheap artificial workers?
It's also a little ironic that he's showing all of this while wearing Ray-Ban Metas.
Also, the professor should see the history of the student writing in the document editor.
I write everything using AI and nobody has detected it because I know how to remove llmisms and prompt effectively.
Here's an article on llmisms from people on the front lines.
To be more positive, you could also just have different taste in what the output has and are adjusting it to that.
About your actual point: can you also make AI actually say things and have something to say, and not just try to imitate someone who is trying to get a point across?
I'm not catching students, I'm reviewing comments in code and documentation written with AI. I even wish it would convince me and try not to notice it, but I can't. I'm pretty sure I'd fail AI generated slop, not for cheating, but for nonsense.
Ps. You didn't write that comment with AI, did you?
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure"
Many people see others taking short cuts and getting rewarded so that is seen as a legitimate path now. This works short term but errodes the foundations of that society over time.
So yeah this tracks for how things are going.
We have designed education around exams and evaluation. If I design an exercise that does not contribute to their final grade, students don’t even look at it. If I design a 30min tutorial on a programming subject, students will not look at it and will spend 8 hours on the (graded) assignment that was designed for 1 hour on top of the 30 minute tutorial.
I am making some changes: evaluation will be as randomly as possible to minimize overfitting to our exercises. Draw from real world if possible.
I would also like to get rid of bologna’s modular structure and go to the UK’s one-exam-at-the-end-of-the-degree model.
But overall, we need more passionate students. Those don’t care about all this cheating and would appreciate that professors and future employers see their effort and success.
One of the students was certain the reports were not reviewed and just given a vibes grade based on the student.
So he handed in pages of literally “blaah blaaaah blaaah…” and got an A
Somehow feels relevant to this article
But it turns out that the committee does in fact flip through each thesis at least once. And guess on which page the manuscript tends to open most easily - yeah, the one that was shown to everyone in the past few weeks >_<
But this video is a little suspicious. The fact that none of the 32 students bothered to even read the generated output feels strange. Or that those students didn't notice the extremely obvious white text at the bottom of the question when copy/pasting the assignment.
Combined with a TikTok account of a person who is clearly participating in the attention economy, I am skeptical.
This is entirely believable to me based on the stories and trends they talk about.
Anything else can easily be cheated in many ways.
As a screen reader user, I have seen plenty of real world examples of people trying to be clever with white-on-white. The Joke is on them, I got their ID numbers and the secret instructions they gave to their coworkers. I even got my IP banned because of this once (from Arxiv I believe), back in the day when they had a "please don't click this" link on their website as an anti-crawler measure, which was accidentally made visible to screen readers.
Otherwise, I think it is an unambiguous instruction to include the word.
In my time at university, I would write responses in a text editor with the specification pasted above, as canvas can be notorious for losing unsubmitted text…
This it the root of the problem. Gibson is concerned about mocking his students? How about failing them on the course for academic dishonesty?
If you treat cheating as an oopsie in school, that attitude continues into the real world.
One answer is for AI to conduct a viva exam with each student: after the student answers a question on a topic, the session prompts with another question which digs deeper. This goes on for say 8-12 questions, getting deeper each time.
I checked this idea by asking ChatGPT to examine my understand of 1970’s CPU history, assuming I was a CompSci student. After it asked me a series of 8 questions on Intel’s devices from the 4004 onwards, ChatGPT assessed me as a 2nd year student and graded me with a Credit. The experience was quite convincing and at the end it summarised the gaps in my knowledge, which I agreed with. It was also able to say what criteria it was using to assess me.
So why can’t AI-viva be a method to help students and professors with teaching and learning?
Try it out, in a subject or language you know well…
At least, one should have to attend mandatory session on academic honesty with a note in your file. Then a second offense can lead to dismissal with prejudice. These consequences are too infrequent and light to be effective.
The end result of that is a shit society to live in, but overall welfare is not what we optimize for.
That was always the goal and what the adult world would rate anyway.
And that meant that memory and repetition ended up being the core of the education system and it works very well from law to very advanced math where memorizing proofs and substitution rules is most of the curriculum anyway.
Problem solving, critical thinking, these things never really showed up or were valued by the system.
It was always the grades.
So a system that has emphasized the wrong metrics has always been gamified. AI is only speeding this gamification.
I bet if you had one of these students explain the rationale behind a strategy they put together for winning at TFT, he or she would likely give you a very well thought out, coherent, and smart line of thinking.
If I had to guess, I would bet that it has far less to do with people being "unwilling to think" and far more of kids becoming exhausted by the boring, learn by memorization, pad your writing to fill space, monotony of an old and outdated education system, divorced from anything at all resembling the real world.
Speaking from experience, I did horrible in school and 100% would've been using ChatGPT whenever I could just to get through it.
The second I got out of school and found out work is far more result/merit based, I "learned" really, really quickly.
The old Mark Twain classic: “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
So whether it bodes well or not depends upon whether that gap exists or not. It's probably job specific.
A desire to learn generally only gets you to a superficial level before you get bored and realize there is a lot of hard work before you could get a useful level of knowledge. Getting deep requires years of focused effort and that almost always means forced effort. The few adults who learn a musical instrument or foreign language prove the point.
> I write everything using AI and nobody has detected it
Might need to rethink this one, Googling 'how to use AI to write for me and not get caught' isn't exactly some black magic skill.
I don't particularly care if someone I'm communicating with has used AI. If it reads gummily, unless I know it's important, I'm going to assume they–or what they're writing about–is stupid and silently move on. Unless they work for me, it's not really my role to coach them.
kylenessen•1h ago
vjvjvjvjghv•56m ago
I am at the moment going through a codebase where the dev told me that he had AI write the tests and that the project is finished. Turns out that some tests are totally nonsensical and a lot of the real world edge conditions aren’t tested at all.
I am all for AI but you can’t just blindly let it do its thing and think you are fine.
vouaobrasil•38m ago
icedchai•31m ago
NDlurker•51m ago
bigmattystyles•39m ago
ColdStream•35m ago
switchbak•20m ago
If you have so little scruples, I can imagine you wouldn’t think twice about doing that with an assignment.