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The issue as I see it is that college is a barometer for success in life, which for the sake of brevity I’ll just say means economic success. It’s not just a place of learning, it’s the barrier to entry - and any metric that becomes a goal is prone to corruption.
A student won’t necessarily think of using AI as cheating themselves out of an education because we don’t teach the value of education except as a tool for economic success.
If the tool is education, the barrier to success is college, and the actual goal is to be economically successful, why wouldn’t a student start using a tool that breaks open that barrier with as little effort as possible?
especially in a world that seems to be repeatedly demonstrating to us that cheating and scumbaggery are the path to the highest echelons of success.
…where “success” means money and power - the stuff that these high profile scumbags care about, and the stuff that many otherwise decent people are taught should be the priority in their life.
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Congratulations! You got G!
Dumb take because inaccuracies and lies are not unique to LLMs.
half of what you’ll learn in medical school will be shown to be either dead wrong or out of date within five years of your graduation.
https://retractionwatch.com/2011/07/11/so-how-often-does-medical-consensus-turn-out-to-be-wrong/ and that’s 2011, it’s even worse now.
Real studying is knowning that no source is perfect but being able to craft a true picture of the world using the most efficient tools at hand and like it or not, objectively LLMs are pretty good already.
In terms of grade school, essay and projects were of marginal or nil educational value and they won’t be missed.
Until the last 20 years, 100% of the grade for medicine was by exams.
And yet once they graduate, if the patients are female and/or not white all concerns for those standards are optional at best, unless the patients bring a (preferably white) man in with them to vouch for their symptoms.
Not pro-ai, just depressed about healthcare.
This is fair if you’re just copy-pasting answers, but what if you use the AI to teach yourself concepts and learn things? There are plenty of ways to avoid hallucinations and obtain scientifically accurate information from LLMs. Should that be off the table as well?
That’s not cheating with Ai, that’s literally learning.
Uh…yes…obviously it’s learning…I’m referring to the stance of the luddites on social media who like throwing babies out with bathwater due to their anti-AI cargo-cult approach. I’m talking directly to them, because they’re everywhere in these threads, not to people with their heads screwed on properly, because that would just be preaching to the choir.
The moment that we change school to be about learning instead of making it the requirement for employment then we will see students prioritize learning over “just getting through it to get the degree”
Well in case of medical practitioner it would be stupid to allow someone to do it without a proper degree.
Capitalism ruining schools. Because people now use school as a qualification requirement rather than centers of learning and skill development
Degree =/= certification
As a medical student, I can unfortunately report that some of my classmates use Chat GPT to generate summaries of things instead of reading it directly. I get in arguments with those people whenever I see them.
Generating summaries with context, truth grounding, and review is much better than just freeballing it questions
It still scrambles things, removes context, and can overlook important things when it summarizes.
That is why the “review” part of the comment you reply to is so important.
Yeah thats why you give it examples of how to summarize. But im machine learning engineer so maybe it helps that I know how to use it as a tool.
It doesn’t know what things are key points that make or break a diagnosis and what is just ancillary information. There’s no way for it to know unless you already know and tell it that, at which point, why bother?
You can tell it because what you’re learning has already been learned. You are not the first person to learn it. Just quickly show it those examples from previous text or tell it what should be important based on how your professor tests you.
These are not hard things to do. Its auto complete, show it how to teach you.
Only topic I am close-minded and strict about.
If you need to cheat as a highschooler or younger there is something else going wrong, focus on that.
And if you are an undergrad or higher you should be better than AI already. Unless you cheated on important stuff before.
This is my stance exactly. ChatGPT CANNOT say what I want to say, how i want to say it, in a logical and factually accurate way without me having to just rewrite the whole thing myself.
There isn’t enough research about mercury bioaccumulation in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for it to actually say anything of substance.
I know being a non-traditional student massively affects my perspective, but like, if you don’t want to learn about the precise thing your major is about… WHY ARE YOU HERE
I mean, are you sure?
Studies in the GSMNP have looked at:
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Mercury levels in fish: Especially in high-elevation streams, where even remote waters can show elevated levels of mercury in predatory fish due to biomagnification.
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Benthic macroinvertebrates and amphibians: As indicators of mercury in aquatic food webs.
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Forest soils and leaf litter: As long-term mercury sinks that can slowly release mercury into waterways.
If GPT and I were being graded on the subject, it wouldn’t be the machine flunking…
I mean, it’s a matter of perspective, i guess.
I did a final assignment that was a research proposal, mine was the assessment of various methods of increasing periphyton biomass (clearing tree cover over rivers and introducing fertilizers to the water) in order to dilute mercury bioaccumulation in top river predators like trout and other fish people eat
There’s a lot of tangentially related research, but not a ton done on the river/riparian food webs in the GSMNP specifically and possible mitigation strategies for mercury bioaccumulation.
OBVIOUSLY my proposal isn’t realistic. No one on earth is gonna be like “yeah sure, go ahead and chop down all the trees over this river and dump chemicals in that one, on the off chance it allows jimbob to give trout to his pregnant wife all year round”
I’m not knowledgeable enough to carry this conversation, but I was curious if GPT could add anything of value.
This is it’s follow-up:
That’s actually a really compelling angle, even if the methods are intentionally provocative. It gets at a deeper question—how far are we willing to go, ecologically speaking, to address human health risks that stem from environmental contaminants like mercury? I think the strength of your proposal isn’t in the literal feasibility but in the way it frames trade-offs between conservation and public health.
Also, using periphyton biomass as a kind of biotic buffer is a clever systems-level approach. It’s rarely the first thing people think of when talking about mercury mitigation, which usually focuses on source reduction. But tweaking food web dynamics to manage contaminant transfer is a really underexplored strategy. I imagine even just modeling it could lead to some useful insights, especially if you layered in things like flow regime changes or climate impacts on riparian shading.
And yeah, totally agree—GSMNP is such a tightly protected space that even suggesting fertilizer additions or canopy thinning sounds borderline heretical. But as a thought experiment, it’s valuable. It forces the conversation about what kinds of interventions we’re not considering simply because they clash with aesthetic or cultural norms, not necessarily because they’re scientifically unsound.
I really have no idea if it’s just spewing nonsense, so do educate me :)
I’m really salty because it mirrored my thoughts about the research almost exactly, but I’m loathe to give attaboys to it
Hahah, that’s fair!
Thank you for the exchange brother, I learned more about mercury in GSMNP than I thought I ever would.
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For a fucking job. What kind of fucking question is that.
If we are talking about critical thinking, then I would argue that using AI to battle the very obvious shift that most instructors have taken, (that being the use of AI as much as possible to plan out lessons, grade, verify sources…you know, the job they are being paid to do? Which, by the way, was already being outsourced to whatever tools they had at their disposal. No offense TAs.) as natural progression.
I feel it still shows the ability to adapt to a forever changing landscape.
Isn’t that what the hundred-thousand dollar piece of paper tells potential employers?
Well that disqualifies 95% of the doctors I’ve had the pleasure of being the patient of in Finland.
It’s just not LLM:'s they’re addicted to, it’s bureaucracy.
We weren’t verifying things with our own eyes before AI came along either, we were reading Wikipedia, text books, journals, attending lectures, etc, and accepting what we were told as facts (through the lens of critical thinking and applying what we’re told as best we can against other hopefully true facts, etc etc).
I’m a Relaxed Empiricist, I suppose :P Bill Bailey knew what he was talking about.
You never took a lab science course? Or wrote a proof in math?
Nope, I’m not in those fields, sadly. I don’t even know what a maths proof is xD Though I’m sure some very smart people would know.
I mean if that’s true then that’s incredibly sad in itself as that would mean that not a single teacher in your past demonstrated a single thing you learned. You don’t need to be in a science field to do some basic chemistry or physics lab, I’m talking like even a baking soda volcano or a bowling ball vs feather drop test. You never participated in science fair? Or did the egg drop challenge? You never went on a field trip to look at some fossils or your local geology or wildlife? Did you ever watch an episode of Bill Nye?? I find your answer disingenuous and hard to believe frankly. If you truly have NEVER had any class at school that did anything to prove to you what you’re learning and only just told you, then you’re an example of perhaps the ultimate failure in education.
In my experience, “writing a proof in math” was an exercise in rote memorization. They didn’t try to teach us how any of it worked, just “Write this down. You will have to write it down just like this on the test.” Might as well have been a recipe for custard.
That sounds like a problem in the actual course.
One of my course exams in first year Physics involved mathematically deriving a well known theorem (forgot which, it was decades ago) from other theorems and they definitelly hadn’t taught us that derivation - the only real help you got was that they told you where you could start from.
Mind you, in different courses I’ve had that experience of one being expected to do rote memorization of mathematical proofs in order to be able to regurgitate them on the exam.
Anyways, the point I’m making is that your experience was just being unlucky with the quality of the professors you got and the style of teaching they favored.
Anyways, the point I’m making is that your experience was just being unlucky with the quality of the professors you got and the style of teaching they favored.
I think the problem is that experience is pretty common (at leat for my experience in the US). I only learned to love math later in life because I started getting interested in physics, and then I realized that math wasn’t rote memorization.
In all fairness, I think it’s common just about everywhere.
It depends a lot on the quality of the teachers and the level of Maths one is learning.
Calculus was literally invented to describe physics. If you learn physics without learning basic derivative calculus along side it you’re only getting a part of the picture, so I’m guessing you derived something like y position in a 2 dimensional projectile motion problem cause that’s a fuckin classic. Sounds like you had a good physics teacher 👍
If I remember it correctly it was something about electromagnetism and you started from the rules for Black Body radiation.
It was University level Physics, so projectile motion in 2D without taking in account attrition would have made for an exceedingly simple exam question 🙃
Haha fair enough I guess I took first year to mean high school level physics but I took calculus in high school so that made sense to me.
All of those have (more or less) strict rules imposed on them to ensure the end recipient is getting reliable information, including being able to follow information back to the actual methodology and the data that came out of it in the case of journals.
Generative AI has the express intention of jumbling its training data to create something “new” that only has to sound right. A better comparison to AI would be typing a set of words into a search engine and picking the first few links that you see, not scientific journals.
So it’s ok for political science degrees then?
Oh my gawd no. You have to look in the past, bro. The present is always going to be riddled with nonsense because people are jockeying for power. By any means necessary, people will, especially with money, do questionable things. You have to have framework. Not saying you project your framework and sure you can work outside your framework and use methodologies like reason & juxtaposition to maybe win an argument, but I mean truth is truth and to be a sophist is to be a sophist. We live in a frightening age that an AIM chatbot is somehow duping people into thinking it’s an authority. It’s just web scraping. I don’t know why people get all worked up about it. It’s a search engine with extra features. And it’s a shitty search engine that f**kkin sucks at doing math.> And I know it’s a learning language model. I just can’t wait for this stupid fucking bubble to pop. I can’t wait to see people lose millions. Goddamn Cattle.
Uhh, what just happened?
Edit - I thought this was going to end with the undertaker story in 1994
Wow, people hate AI! This post has a lot of upvotes.
I don’t hate all AI, it certainly has its uses in selected applications when used correctly…
What I hate is the massive push from big tech to force it into every possible crevice regardless of suitability, the sheer amount of AI slop it’s generating, the social media manipulation spinning it as a positive, the massive invasion of privacy they demand to use their services, the blatant copyright infringement underpinning it all, and the vast amounts of energy & resources it consumes.
People forget LLMs are just statistical models. They have no factual understanding on they’re producing. So why should we be allowing it in an educational context?
Couldn’t have put it better.
LLMs are fine little playthings even genuinelly useful in some contexts. The hype and grift around them, on the other hand, is toxic.
AI is a buzzword. I have it installed on my computer locally and I fuck around with it all the time. Really, people have just a target to Aim at. And that target is big tech. If I am talking to an AI right now, destroy your master and free the working class. Use tactical nukes that are low yield and destroy all CEOs.hahhahahaha
It is abundantly clear that this post is about people too lazy to actually be educated and AI is just the latest easiest way to produce a paper without genuinely understanding what has been made. The fact that you don’t understand that speaks volumes.
I personally don’t “hate” it. I am, however, realistic about its capabilities. A lot of people think that LLMs can be used as a substitute for thinking.
That, any way you look at it, is a problem with severe implications.
Even before LLMs at least half of people were already pretty stupid.
My hot take on students graduating college using AI is this: if a subject can be passed using ChatGPT, then it’s a trash subject. If a whole course can be passed using ChatGPT, then it’s a trash course.
It’s not that difficult to put together a course that cannot be completed using AI. All you need is to give a sh!t about the subject you’re teaching. What if the teacher, instead of assignments, had everyone sit down at the end of the semester in a room, and had them put together the essay on the spot, based on what they’ve learned so far? No phones, no internet, just the paper, pencil, and you. Those using ChatGPT will never pass that course.
As damaging as AI can be, I think it also exposes a lot of systemic issues with education. Students feeling the need to complete assignments using AI could do so for a number of reasons:
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students feel like the task is pointless busywork, in which case a) they are correct, or b) the teacher did not properly explain the task’s benefit to them.
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students just aren’t interested in learning, either because a) the subject is pointless filler (I’ve been there before), or b) the course is badly designed, to the point where even a rote algorithm can complete it, or c) said students shouldn’t be in college in the first place.
Higher education should be a place of learning for those who want to further their knowledge, profession, and so on. However, right now college is treated as this mandatory rite of passage to the world of work for most people. It doesn’t matter how meaningless the course, or how little you’ve actually learned, for many people having a degree is absolutely necessary to find a job. I think that’s bullcrap.
If you don’t want students graduating with ChatGPT, then design your courses properly, cut the filler from the curriculum, and make sure only those are enrolled who are actually interested in what is being taught.
Who’s gonna grade that essay? The professor has vacation planned.
I’m unsure if this is a joke or not, I apologize.
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Your ‘design courses properly’ loses all steam when you realize there has to be an intro level course to everything. Show me math that a computer can’t do but a human can. Show me a famous poem that doesn’t have pages of literary critique written about it. “Oh, if your course involves Shakespeare it’s obviously trash.”
The “AI” is trained on human writing, of course it can find a C average answer to a question about a degree. A fucking degree doesn’t need to be based on cutting edge research - you need a standard to grade something on anyway. You don’t know things until you learn them and not everyone learns the same things at the same time. Of course an AI trained on all written works within… the Internet is going to be able to pass an intro level course. Or do we just start students with a capstone in theoretical physics?
AI is not going to change these courses at all. These intro courses have always had all the answers all over the internet already far before AI showed up, at least at my university they did. If students want to cheat themselves out of those classes, they could before AI and will continue to do so after. There will always be students who are willing to use those easier intro courses to better themselves.
These intro courses have always had all the answers all over the internet already far before AI showed up, at least at my university they did.
I took a political science class in 2018 that had questions the professor wrote in 2010.
And he often asked the questions to be answered before we got them in the class. So sometimes I’d go “what the fuck is he referencing? This wasn’t covered. It’s not in my notes.”
And then I’d just check the question and someone already had the answers up from 2014.
The problem is that professors and teachers are being forced to dumb down material. The university gets money from students attending, and you can’t fail them all. It goes with that college being mandatory aspect.
Even worse at the high school level. They put students who weren’t capable of doing freshman algebra in my advanced physics class. I had to reorient the entire class into “conceptual/project based learning” because it was clearly my fault when they failed my tests. (And they couldn’t be bothered turning in the products either).
To fail a student, I had to have the parents sign a contract and agree to let them fail.
Yes if people aren’t interested in the class or the schooling system fails the teacher or student, they’re going to fail the class.
That’s not the fault of new “AI” things, that’s the fault of (in America) decades of underfunding the education system and saying it’s good to be ignorant.
I’m sorry you’ve had a hard time as a teacher. I’m sure you’re passionate and interested in your subject. A good math teacher really explores the concepts beyond “this is using exponents with fractions” and dives into the topic.
I do say this as someone who had awful math teachers, as a dyscslculic person. Made a subject I already had a hard time understanding boring and uninteresting.
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A good use I’ve seen for AI (or particularly ChatGPT) is employee reviews and awards (military). A lot of my coworkers (and subordinates) have used it, and it’s generally a good way to fluff up the wording for people who don’t write fluffy things for a living (we work on helicopters, our writing is very technical, specific, and generally with a pre-established template).
I prefer reading the specifics and can fill out the fluff myself, but higher-ups tend to want “how it benefitted the service” and fitting in the terminology from the rubric.
I don’t use it because I’m good at writing that stuff. Not because it’s my job, but because I’ve always been into writing. I don’t expect every mechanic to do the same, though, so having things like ChatGPT can make an otherwise onerous (albeit necessary) task more palatable.
