heyWhatsayProfessors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students' Ability to Think
LLMhater1312So much ai slop in the professional world too
đ¸âđľâđŞâđ¨âđşâđąâđŚâđšâđŞâđˇâI got my first obviously AI email from a boss recently. The tone didnât match his normal cadence of writing, it was sterile, repetitive, and could have really been summed up as, âDo you have additional information about item X that can help is explain this to our customer?â
It was three paragraphs long.
So, I was wondering, will you reply efficiently with your own words or, in order for them to learn to respect your time, will you use AI to reply?
I walked into his office and answered verbally, lol.
Thatâs even more efficient =)
yea i heard research papers are plagued with them, and it already adds into the slop that is being produced otherwise by professors prior to AI, low quality slop just to get thier CV looking more robust for employers, and now with AI its even worst.
Oxysis/OxyOn Thursday there was a guy in my history class who was using ChatGPT the entire time.
We were watching a documentary and supposed to take notes on a physical sheet of paper. Some of the boxes on that sheet of paper only needed like 4 or 5 words to get the gist of it.
Iâve heard much of the same from my friends who teach middle and high schoolers: most alarmingly that they can put information up on the board, ask a question about it, and the students donât even connect that the answer is already in front of their eyes.
And sadly, a very common question they get is: âIf AI can do this for me, why do I need to learn it in the first place?â
The worst part is that, in the short-term, the only recourse people have is suing social media and LLM companies, who are awash in cash and happy to settle, or throw their weight behind age verification, which in its various forms poses a security risk. Parents, clearly, are parking their kids in front of screens and unwilling to parent, so thatâs not something you can depend upon.
Iâm just glad I never procreated, but this problem is going to affect us all when these kids try to enter the work force and canât actually do anything.
Captain AggravatedReminds me a lot of teachers lying that we wouldnât have calculators with us at all times.
Valid point: One needs to know how arithmetic works in order to get a computer/calculator to do it for you. This is fair; I use CAD software to design furniture, I do it parametrically, I have to solve problems like âif the overall width of the table top is 24 inches, the top overhangs by two inches all the way around, and the legs are an inch and a half wide, how long does the apron board between the legs need to be? And how long do I cut the board to add 3/4â long tenons?" I have to keep order of operations in mind there. But I write the expression and allow the computer to solve it.
Also valid point: I havenât once done long division since middle school, because guess what? I have machines for that. I have had use for the concept of quotients and remaindersâŚbut I had to learn for myself how to get computers to calculate them using modulo operators. 5 / 2 = 2, 5 % 2 = 1. five divided by two is two remainder one. The algorithm of drawing the sideways L and putting one number under it and the other number to the left of it and then doing long division is not something I needed an entire semester of practice doing. You canât convince me that was designed for my benefit, that was designed to keep me quiet.
Modern school is framed largely as a series of assignments one needs to get good grades in in order to be allowed to do something. A high school diploma is required toâŚpractically be a citizen. âYou have to get a good grade on this essay because itâs required for you to pass this class, which is required for you to graduate and get your diploma that we are legally required to force you to get.â
Children arenât stupid, they know what bullshit is and they donât like having their time wasted anymore than adults do. Children as a demographic have dozens of millennia of experience growing up into adults, theyâve been playing house and playing job since the invention of houses and jobs, they played cave and played hunt before that. They can feel when school isnât like house or job and wonât help them do house or job. And itâs gotten to the point where that describes most of school, because they focus more on the difficulty of a class or test or curriculum than its usefulness.
Thereâs a lot more to life than house and job and learning how to learn is the most important thing you can get from grade school.
Explain to me how a decade of busywork teaches children how to learn.
UniversalBasicJusticeIt doesnât.
Itâs a consequence of government departments and school administration lacking knowledge of pedagogy forcing underpaid and overworked educators to teach their pupils how to pass standardized tests. Itâs a consequence of a cultural and societal de-prioritization and outright disdain for critical thinking.
Itâs a consequence of shifting the focus away from learning how to learn and towards learning how to work. You were failed by a system that was designed to fail you.
queermunist she/herIt teaches them to be good employees.
So, I donât want to reach but, are you saying education should be a function of the usefulness of the knowledge in a given everyday job?
Yes; and for K-12 education that âjobâ should be âbeing a citizen.â
Ask an elementary school teacher what the point of school is, theyâll say itâs to prepare the child for their adult life. Throughout school, ask that question: How does this lesson prepare students to live in the world? Elementary school teachers give pretty good answers: weâre teaching them to read so they can glean knowledge from anything from road signs to research papers, itâs probably the most powerful skill that can be taught. Weâre teaching them to add and subtract because thatâs how basically everything works. A question youâll ask or be asked millions of times in your life is âhow many?â
No ask a middle school teacher why weâre spending so much time on graphing functions. You know why? Because Texas Instruments lobbied to have their own products legislated into curricula.
I donât think we are from the same country. I find very strange the notion of recognizing the importance of reading, but not the importance of writing, which implies some analysis. The very same source of so-called AI are precisely written knowledge and maths. Wasnât that the spark of this conversation?
What worries me is the idea of being educated as a function of usefulness for an everyday job. That notion just assumes that people must comply at being a part in the production machinery, without free will of the very same people. Personally, Iâd kill myself before having to spend 48 hours a week assembling cars, for example. Preparing for adultâs life should also consider being completely out of what the State was expecting from you as a citizen, and from the world they projected for their future adults.
Iâm not against the teaching of writing skills. I think itâs currently done badly and I hope AI becomes such a problem that they change how itâs done.
From high school up until I dropped out of college for the second time, scholarly writing was approached in a really stupid way: Assign a topic the student doesnât care about and have them âdo a paperâ on it. The boundary conditions of the paper are given in word, sentence, paragraph and/or page numbers. The alleged purpose for this exercise is to develop research skills; constructing arguments, supporting those arguments with vetted sources, drawing logical conclusions. In practice, the skills being built are padding with non-statements, use of MS Wordâs rich text features and paying for an MLA handbook. The teacher doesnât grade the paper based on the validity of sources or the quality of the arguments, itâs graded on the correctness of grammar, punctuation, spelling and formatting. Because to actually grade student papers based on the merit of their ideas is a monumental task; youâre asking a high school teacher to peer review 60 to 120 essays a month. So it doesnât happen; you get students throwing inappropriate sentences in the middle of essays to see if the professor notices and often they donât.
Have you ever heard the phrase âpractice makes perfect?â Itâs referring to Thorndikeâs principle of exercise. A behavior is most strongly established through frequent stimulus and response. Itâs why actors rehearse and athletes practice. But! âPracticeâ requires a feedback mechanism to correct wayward behaviors, you need a director or coach to correct anything wrong. When I was in 7th grade, I was handed half a page of sheet music for all-county band tryouts and told to take it home and practice it. I had 14 months of trumpet playing experience at this point, I wasnât perfect at sight reading, so I took it home and learned to play it wrong. I showed up to the audition, confidently played a piece of music that only vaguely resembled what was on the page and did not make all-county band that year.
Of all the students currently in writing classes whose essays wonât be graded or even read by their teachersâŚhow many of them are learning how to research wrong?
Iâm most of the way toward convinced that long essays are required specifically to be a massive opportunity cost for the students. The cult of academia reveres the shut-in scholar who eschews personal life in favor of work and research, so they force all students to cosplay as this arch-saint by assigning pointless tasks that look like what a scholar does. If AI can unceremoniously kill the entrenched ritual so that actual education can resume, so much the better.
Whatâs the problem with using AI to write a research paper? The problem schools have with AI is it makes completing the assignment too fast and too easy. My problem is AI blatantly makes shit up, itâs an outright bad tool.
Iâve got a better idea: decrease the importance of writing research papers from scratch, and start them out reviewing the research of others. Hand them a paper and have them follow up the sources and see if itâs bullshit or not. Peer review is a massive part of science, right? So why donât they ever teach students to do it?
Itâs absolutely terrifying. I am a returning student to uni in my thirties and the only person not using any AI. They literally depend on it.
I just had a classmate the other day turn to me, frustrated, saying âYou ever ask chat(gpt) a question and it gives you a whole, like, paragraph you then have to read? like, why canât it simplify it?â
So yeah, even reading paragraphs is too much for these people. Future workforce is fucking cooked.
Iâm almost 50 doing a doctorate in engineering. ChatGPT is very helpful to do homework but wonât really teach you to do things. That said, Iâm very glad to have it because this program would be so much harder without something to check my answers and understanding.
âŚexcept that it doesnât really âcheck your answers and understandingââŚ
Sure it does. Itâs a calculator and can tell me if I did my statistics homework correctly. I can also ask it to summarize a concept I find difficult.
With that naivety you are setting yourself up for failure.
I have a long, successful career. I am doing this program for personal growth and to create a challenge for myself. Please stop projecting your impressions on my life, I am my own person and very confident in what I have accomplished.
Edit: I got downvoted for being confident in my successes. Really?
I am not objecting to you to learn something new. The naivety is what you display assuming you can use LLMs to âcheck your homeworkâ.
sheetzoosThis is an echo chamber. Logical and rational thoughts will be downvoted if they go against the narrative. Donât take it personally.
i dont know if youâre trolling but you would be making a pretty poor engineer if you are using a something to check your answers that may or may not be right, and not use an actual engineering calculator. how would you know your answers are correct in the forest place if you took them from an LLM. its literally just equivalant to finding the answers on a website and copy and pasting it to your hw, you arnt learning anything, and people who done that have been shown to do very poorly on tests.
How old are you and what doctorates do you have? Calling this 50yo naive with the 2 sentences of context is pretty wild.
How old are you and what doctorates do you have?
Weâre not in a dick-swinging contest here. At least I am not :) What a dumb way to deflect from the point I am making. If you have any understanding of the matter, you know that LLMs are only statistically accurate, and mathematically, that is useless.
If you want a calculator, try an actual calculator or a website that actually does math like Wolfram alpha.
A chatbot canât actually do math. It can only give you an answer that looks right because it has no fundamental understanding of what ârightâ actually is.
Love Wolfram. I believe Stephen is a big proponent of this stuff? Found his blog on it (turns three years old next Monday) and curious for your thoughts on it.
In Just Two and a Half MonthsâŚ
Early in January I wrote about the possibility of connecting ChatGPT to Wolfram|Alpha. And todayâjust two and a half months laterâIâm excited to announce that itâs happened! Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alphaâand Wolfram Language as wellâto give it what we might think of as âcomputational superpowersâ. Itâs still very early days for all of this, but itâs already very impressiveâand one can begin to see how amazingly powerful (and perhaps even revolutionary) what we can call âChatGPT + Wolframâ can be.
No, it actually doesnât. How LLMs work is that it takes in written words and makes a sentence based on the likelihood of what the next word will be based on human readable text. Thatâs literally it.
Hence, thereâs absolutely no guarantee that ChatGPTâs âreviewâ of your homework will always be 100% correct because it is probable that the answer was written incorrectly in the billions of lines of text it has been fed.
On the other hand, a calculator has been superficially wired for itâs purpose to process an input. 1 + 1 will always equal 2.
Iâd wager your supervisor will be horrified to learn that youâre getting an LLM to learn from rather than your peers. This is why i absolutely hate that itâs being used as a substitute what essentially makes us human: art, music, research, learning etc.
Itâs a tool that needs a licence because you need to know how to use it to complement your existing skills, not supplement it.
Weâre allowed to use them. We just have to provide the prompt used and the answer given.
Ah very interesting. Still, itâs a shame cutting out the peer to peer discussions to expand oneâs own learning and understanding.
To do an in person degree Iâd have to quit my job. I have been waiting for years for a program like this. That said, doing it in person would be a better experience and I wish Iâd had the opportunity to do something like that years ago.
TLDR; should have had my doctorate years ago. I went to Argentina and had to abandon my work when the economy collapsed.
For sure; nothing beats in person but you have to make do with what you can. I wish you the best of luck in your doctorate (from another mature age student and soon to be commencing Masters).
novemberthis program would be so much harder without something to check my answers and understanding.
Do students these days not have study buddies?
Gen Alpha can barely look people in the eyes when theyâre talking.
forestbeastsAh yes âlooking people in the eyes while talkingâ, famously something actually important and meaningful and not just literally the most well-known neurotypical âif you donât follow the expected social rules you are Wrongâ demandâŚ
â Frost
Yeah dude thatâs how norms work.
If youâre staring off into space and canât talk directly to someone, you need to learn that skill.
Like, this is common sense.
Bold of you to assume âlooking someone in the eyeâ and âtalking directlyâ are the same thing!
Have you MET autistic people?
â Frost
Not when youâre in an online program and have to do it fully alone. Even when I was in a traditional situation I always had a job and never could do study groups. Itâs specifically why I never studied stem previously.
You know you could also just like⌠Do research, like youâre expected to do and is how people actually learn, but I understand thatâs hard and nobody has time for that. I guess you could also ask the local drunk to proofread your homework and get an answer just as likely to be correct as an AI
The thing is; you have the experience and knowledge necessary to understand when you are being fed wrong information when it hallucinates. You have come this far not needing a machine to think for you and are not useless without it.
I had a networking lab in which we were faced with using an Aruba router, after learning Cisco all semester. The point was for us to research Aruba commands, and rather than even try to look up any actual references or the information provided by our professor they immediately tried to ask chat, which proceeded to keep giving them CLEARLY Cisco commands. Despite me expaining this they chose to ignore me until a half hour of failed commands later lead then to give up and just wait for me to try and figured it out.
Learned helplessness. There is nothing more shameful then just giving up after the obvious route is exhaustedâŚ
Thank you. I appreciate the support among a sea of personal attacks. I didnât realize that this place had such strong tankie vibes.
Distrusting an unreliable system does not make someone a tankie. Now youâre just throwing out insults without even understanding them
You: We attacked you as a group over a period of days because youâre stupid and it was wrong of you to say something back. Especially when you point out that we acted towards you just the way those others do.
Proof that the slop dispenser has ruined your critical thinking skills. All I said was that you donât understand what a tankie is, youâre just saying words youâve heard that have a negative context without knowing what the word actually means. Not criticizing you talking back
No, you decided long before making a comment that I was worthy of your discrimination and anything I could say would just be evidence of that. Youâre stuck in the circlejerk, my friend. It is time for you to learn to be kind instead of cruel.
Being cruel would be letting someone hurt themselves in the long run and weaken their own ability to do something they set out to do. Being cruel would be to encourage your use of LLMs to âlearnâ. You donât like the truth and thatâs on you, I guess, but itâs not discrimination to tell you youâre making mistakes. Itâs absolutely hilarious you would even use that word in this situation and just confirms to me that youâre just a pretty convincing troll, arguing in bad faith.
Using AI to help with assignments in education is like using a forklift in the gym. You are taking stats for everyone else and undermining your opportunity to learn and train your brain.
You are paying to get the opportunity to train your brain and educate yourself, a d are squandering the chance by using AI. Itâs not the best idea.
It genuinely feels that way yeah like idk what we do about this problem itâs bad, however bad you think it is itâs worse
Iâve seen some videos of Costco brawls between gen z men over Pokemon cards they want to flip. Surely the bar canât get lower then that