heyWhatsayProfessors Say AI Is Destroying Their Students' Ability to Think
theBATCLAMIt’s 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 “You ever ask chat(gpt) a question and it gives you a whole, like, paragraph you then have to read? like, why can’t it simplify it?”
So yeah, even reading paragraphs is too much for these people. Future workforce is fucking cooked.
I’m almost 50 doing a doctorate in engineering. ChatGPT is very helpful to do homework but won’t really teach you to do things. That said, I’m very glad to have it because this program would be so much harder without something to check my answers and understanding.
…except that it doesn’t really “check your answers and understanding”…
Sure it does. It’s 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 “check your homework”.
sheetzoosThis is an echo chamber. Logical and rational thoughts will be downvoted if they go against the narrative. Don’t take it personally.
i dont know if you’re 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?
We’re 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 can’t actually do math. It can only give you an answer that looks right because it has no fundamental understanding of what “right” 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 Months…
Early in January I wrote about the possibility of connecting ChatGPT to Wolfram|Alpha. And today—just two and a half months later—I’m excited to announce that it’s happened! Thanks to some heroic software engineering by our team and by OpenAI, ChatGPT can now call on Wolfram|Alpha—and Wolfram Language as well—to give it what we might think of as “computational superpowers”. It’s still very early days for all of this, but it’s already very impressive—and one can begin to see how amazingly powerful (and perhaps even revolutionary) what we can call “ChatGPT + Wolfram” can be.
No, it actually doesn’t. 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. That’s literally it.
Hence, there’s absolutely no guarantee that ChatGPT’s ‘review’ 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 it’s purpose to process an input. 1 + 1 will always equal 2.
I’d wager your supervisor will be horrified to learn that you’re getting an LLM to learn from rather than your peers. This is why i absolutely hate that it’s being used as a substitute what essentially makes us human: art, music, research, learning etc.
It’s a tool that needs a licence because you need to know how to use it to complement your existing skills, not supplement it.
Ah very interesting. Still, it’s a shame cutting out the peer to peer discussions to expand one’s own learning and understanding.
To do an in person degree I’d 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 I’d 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 they’re talking.
forestbeastsAh yes “looking people in the eyes while talking”, famously something actually important and meaningful and not just literally the most well-known neurotypical “if you don’t follow the expected social rules you are Wrong” demand…
– Frost
Yeah dude that’s how norms work.
If you’re staring off into space and can’t talk directly to someone, you need to learn that skill.
Like, this is common sense.
Bold of you to assume “looking someone in the eye” and “talking directly” are the same thing!
Have you MET autistic people?
– Frost
Not when you’re 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. It’s specifically why I never studied stem previously.
You know you could also just like… Do research, like you’re expected to do and is how people actually learn, but I understand that’s 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 exhausted…
Thank you. I appreciate the support among a sea of personal attacks. I didn’t realize that this place had such strong tankie vibes.
Distrusting an unreliable system does not make someone a tankie. Now you’re just throwing out insults without even understanding them
You: We attacked you as a group over a period of days because you’re 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 don’t understand what a tankie is, you’re just saying words you’ve 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. You’re 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 ‘learn’. You don’t like the truth and that’s on you, I guess, but it’s not discrimination to tell you you’re making mistakes. It’s absolutely hilarious you would even use that word in this situation and just confirms to me that you’re 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. It’s not the best idea.
It genuinely feels that way yeah like idk what we do about this problem it’s bad, however bad you think it is it’s worse
I’ve seen some videos of Costco brawls between gen z men over Pokemon cards they want to flip. Surely the bar can’t get lower then that
I think, unfortunately, we are being lead by grifters creating a society of grifters i.e. the future generation is learning the lesson that the way to get ahead is by grifting.
I know this is gonna sound dramatic but if it keeps going? We’re looking at apocalyptic outcomes for the future of civilization.
the future generation is learning the lesson that the way to get ahead is by grifting.
So basically how it always was?
There’s a reason why there are billionaires…
But yeah it’s likely getting worse, like an elite and otherwise brain-dead propaganda following society (to exaggerate a little bit…). Initially after reading Adorno years ago, I never thought that the rather negative way he wrote, and something like the third Reich will not happen again, yet here we are repeating mistakes, fueled by accelerating climate-change (and the resulting conflicts)…
We are leaving (or rather have left) the most peaceful era of humanity, back to smashing each others heads without a real reason, leaving a more positive holistic utopian future… Sad.
i think thats a different situation, some people are greedy and think they can make money flipping cards which is pretty mucha problem with TCPi/TCPJ but they have very little incentive to fix that issue, MTG unintentionally remediated that issue by pushing out UB sets multiple times a year more than normal, essentially making older sets useless/or less useful as you have to keep buying the new sets to keep up. this is about people inability to think for themselves.
That’s right, It goes in the SquArE hole!
I have a friend who was frustrated that his programming exam was too hard (Python) and stated " why do I need to learn this? I can just use ai and get the job done ". We’re absolutely fugged.
It’s honestly disheartening. I understand our education system is not well in that tests aren’t actually very condusive to learning, but they treat the idea of learning a skill like it’s some obnoxious chore they just want over with so they never have to do it again when its like bruh civilization/tech grows exponentially y’all gotta learn your whole lives and it should be something you ENJOY it should give you pride to be good at something or understand a subject thoroughly.
i don’t even know what to begin doing about this problem but even if you pretend the environmental impacts are fine/manageable, I can’t help but think this shits gotta be destroyed for the future of humanity.
learning isn’t fun for the vast majority of people, it’s painful and miserable.
I don’t even know what kind of exam it could have been but python is the least problematic language to learn, except ruby and go lang maybe, that are fairly simpler and intuitive.
I exclude LUA because I only used it in TIC-80 and for these minigames.
So far only senior devs are using AI effectively, if that is possible.
Unsure on the specifics, something for one of those online colleges. Yeah that’s exactly why it’s a concerning statement. This isn’t assembly, just scripting basics
Oh yes adult students are still motivated to yeet that LLM out of the windows, but young ones are just there.
Future workforce is fucking cooked.
Yep, and I predict that programmers actually understanding code (and especially being able to quickly and thoroughly review code), are becoming increasingly valuable (again?) in the future, when someone really has to guarantee what the AI actually generated (and let me tell you there are still so many stupid things the AI does…).
We’re already seeing it a little, I know IBM just had to start massively hiring just in Feb
No1It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the “chat” slang was short for ChatGPT.
Ah ok, didn’t realize that was the original source. But now I wonder if it’ll eventually be supplanted as a reference to ChatGPT.
It depends on the context, it is slang for both. That’s why I put the parenthesis. Don’t be embarrassed, it’s hard to keep up with slang.
my older bro who is in tech, depends on it for almost every question he has or when he is ask a very simple question. asked him something about laundry last year, he said “use CHATGPT”, theres really no hope for these people.