Relentless advancement to produce new gen of blob-no-thoughts seppos

I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

  • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    I have a hypothesis that college can solve this problem by “inversing” lectures and homework.

    edit: sounds like a lot of places do this already so that’s cool.

    Have your students watch lectures and do reading on their own time. Hell, they can ask ChatGPT to summarize it for them if “it’s just a tool” and they want to use it! But everything that gets a grade should be done in class. You will write the essay by hand, you will do the math with no more powerful a calculator than a TI-83, you will give a presentation to show that you understand the material. Book is open, accommodations for special needs are available, and the teacher is here to help and give guidance and clarification, but internet connections are banned.

    Buuuuut American colleges would never do this because ensuring that your graduates actually learn things was never the point.

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      My art degree (and AFAIK anywhere else you go) did this. You produce all of your work in class with extra time spent at home to finish (usually 2 hours per hour spent in class). Classes were 3~4 hours each session. It makes it impossible to commission someone else unless you have them also go to your classes for you.

      Also made it rough scheduling multiple studio classes each term. Usually 2 studio classes and 1 or 2 lectures. Every once in a while I’d put 3 studios all on the same days, which meant 12 hour “workdays,” a day between to do any homework, but I got 4-day weekends each week with no homework. The real killer was finals where it was like 60 hours worth of projects between 3 classes in a single week, which is the main reason I didn’t do this very often.

      Surprised more degree programs don’t use this model. I think some of the performing arts do similar class setups along with medical degrees, but that’s it.

    • T34_69 [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      My university does “flipped” lectures/homework for a lot of the engineering courses and yeah it’s pretty dope a lot of the time, it’s an efficient way to do things… but it also means some students just don’t show up, and the professors tend not to like that (for a synchronous course).

      • Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson@lemmy.ml
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        but it also means some students just don’t show up, and the professors tend not to like that

        TBH I hated when attendance was graded in college because I just did the course work instead of going to class most of the time. Engineering schools tend to have the worst teachers.

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          Yeah same, they tend to justify it as “professional development” but the thing is… the lesson is redundant because most of us have had jobs already lol

          • Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson@lemmy.ml
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            Yeah it was crazy to get labor disciplined by people who’s only real time tables (they mostly make their own schedule, some day by day) were having to talk to a room of 20 year olds for an hour. Y’all don’t even go to work every day M-F.

      • Carl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Same. All my classes where I got As were classes like this, or classes where they gave us all the homework at the top and I was able to essentially ignore the lecture and do the work at my own pace during class.

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      Treating homework and quizzes as participation credit and only grading tests is fairly common in US universities. Probably a minority, but still common.

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      I think i generally agree with this, although this seems like it basically removes the need to actually look for sources yourself, which feels like it’s an important thing to learn to do. That said i don’t think i have a better idea so

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        Ideally I think researching and critically evaluating your sources should be taught and reinforced well before college, but from what I’ve heard from my friends who went to high school in the States (I’m American but I lucked out in this regard) attending an American High School is like being one of the feral children in Logan’s Run.

    • Lamprey [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      That was my immediate thought as well but that’s assuming colleges even actually care lol

      Its been the joke that college is just a way to purchase a degree. Now it’s literally that. The kids still gotta pay for it, which means for capital there’s been zero change

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      I had a professor that tried this and didn’t work out. To be fair though, one of the issues I had was that it was the only class structured like this so it made it a pain when taking 5 other courses alongside this inverted course

    • Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson@lemmy.ml
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      Buuuuut American colleges would never do this because ensuring that your graduates actually learn things was never the point.

      It starts earlier. What you described is not possible because the system in both collegiate levels and in K-12 has been shrinking educator labor rather than expanding it.

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      I probably can’t write my name without a keyboard, not enough dexterity in the paws, but I agree with the calculators, in fact I’d say no calculators at all, if your test requires logarithms a log table should be provided.

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        a log table should be provided.

        I did flight school with a slide rule twentyish years ago, so I would be at home with this.

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      You will write the essay by hand

      i would have failed out of highschool/college if i was forced to write everything by hand, i think i have some mild form of disgraphia or something like that but it takes me at least 10x as long to write something by hand as it does to type for me, not even just with how fast i can type compared to how i write but it’s a fucking nightmare trying to collect my thoughts when im handwriting a paper. also if im making my handwriting actually legible for other people it takes even longer.

  • Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson@lemmy.ml
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    The actual problem every one of these articles is whinging about is that AI completely destroys the economy of scale of education. Which I frankly do not care about, schooling has been first on the austerity plan since the apex of the US empire. Larger class sizes, teaching how to pass standardized testing, lack of support for disability, lack of funding, hollowed out curricula, reliance on adjunct faculty, reliance on TA’s, etc. This has all been a race to the bottom to make education as cheap as possible without a real regard for quality. Governments and administrators extracted as much labor as possible out of educators, they’ve thinned their ranks. Along comes this stupid little statistical parrot box and now these morons who have been making this system as fragile and shitty as possible while directing as much money to the top heavy administrators can reap what they’ve sown.

    I care for the educators who will be squeezed to “do something about this”, but as a society it’s time to pony up or fail at social reproduction over and over again. Smaller class ratios more individualized instruction and assessment, higher standards of proof of work. If the outcome is more teachers, higher pay, and better students it will be good that AI killed these cheap, impersonal, mechanized forms of education.

    Kids don’t enjoy learning because we put them to work on themselves in a high stress educational assembly line. They’re alienated from their own development. And who wouldn’t be in a system where your entire first 18 years of life are just prepping you for a choice of how you’re going to gamble in the job market? Statistically most of their parents haven’t accumulated enough information to make a half way decent bet in that casino. Of course this is happening. This system rewards gambling and scamming your way through life.

    Exactly, good education should create a willingness to learn and further ones education by its own merits. Not by scolding or “torturing” kids/YA into it. No, this does not mean there should be no discipline or “just doing what the kids want”.

    • Sinisterium [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      Exactly, good education should create a willingness to learn and further ones education by its own merits. Not by scolding or “torturing” kids/YA into it. No, this does not mean there should be no discipline or “just doing what the kids want”.

      Teachers in a capitalist system are there to reinforce that system, not create revolutionary free thinkers.

  • imogen_underscore [it/its, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    my friend described it as a logical endpoint of the commodification of education, which i think i agree with. degree being seen as simply a visa to the corporate world has been a problem since long before AI proliferation. of course students don’t care and just want the piece of paper. the great failing of contemporary liberal education is that it totally fails to instil a love of learning (and often actually instils a dislike of it). undergrads are treated so poorly by institutions it’s no surprise most of them usually end up in the mindset of “do as little work as possible, fuck this awful system”.

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      the great failing of contemporary liberal education is that it totally fails to instil a love of learning (and often actually instils a dislike of i

      important to note this failing starts way before college, i think it would be unreasonable to expect universities to be able to fix this when school from 5-18 sucks so much shit in the vast majority of the country

    • I totally agree. I’m very glad that my education and the way I pursued it didn’t completely erase my send of why I was learning (to more fully inhabit the world, to live a more examined life, etc etc), but I recognize that I was privileged to have that luxury. The total commodification of education is absolutely the default path forward in this society.

    • DragonBallZinn [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Said it before, but the porks view education as a problem to be solved. Just like how they view abundant housing, walkable, green cities and towns, and even a working class with the ability to do some consumer spending. This is totally alien to this pig-like society and they needed to solve it as fast as humanly possible.

      If I ever do a master’s I have vowed to apply to foreign universities first and GTFO.

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    I think it was on this machine kills, but they talked about the rise of AI use is correlated to the fall of computer literacy. Specifically with big tech rise causing less visibility in how the products we use work and more reliance on ease of use. I think they talked about kids not even knowing how file systems work since everything is an app.

    This can be solved when we bring back torrents

    • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.net
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      oh god the thing where people don’t know what files and folders are is so goddamn frustrating. motherfucker you should not need a youtube video showing you how to drag a file from an archive into a folder to mod a videogame.

      • Madzielle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        But if you’ve never done it before it isnt as intuitive. My first computer ran dos. If anything, I think in middle school they should start with a really simple os, something resembling the technology in its bare bones. Year after year, learn the systems increased complexity so the understanding of how a computer works is full to its current standard.

        You can’t write a dissertation unless you know the alphabet.

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          i figured that shit out when i was 6 or 7 years old without explicit instruction. before the obfuscation of phone apps you would have to lack any and all curiosity to not be right-clicking on everything in windows.

          interface design should’ve been educating users instead of making a black box usable by toddlers.

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            The problem is our system isn’t designed to educate people on anything other than to become wage cattle as fast as possible.

            [Animal cruelty]

            spoiler

            Reminds me of how chickens are bred to grow in fast forward so they get to laying age faster, the chicken dies young because of this, so they just replace it with another chicken. They don’t want to waste money on training the next chickens how to forrage, that’s not their role in our society. They’re a commodity, just like the general public is to capitalists.

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            Something I try to remind myself when I’m helping the tech illiterate is that not everybody had a family PC in the living room growing up. It can be a struggle sometimes.

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    A friend of mine had her boyfriend go in and take an important test in her name when she was badly sick. No one cared or even noticed. College has always been fake. Its basically a paper saying you are wealthy and privileged enough to be hired by a Fortune 500. Lie as much as you can, fleece those shithole companies, say you have 50 degrees when you have none shrug-outta-hecks

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      Yeah cheating was rampant when I was in school. I remember in my physics class there was a group who had access to each midterm and final exam and would cheat. They wouldn’t share with anyone else and sure as shit weren’t going to say how they got ahold of the tests. Most of us were irritated because A) we actually did the work of learning the material; B) everything was graded on curve.

      Professor was trying to figure out who they were, but you can’t just accuse people of something that could get them expelled just because they got a 91% on a test.

      • Sinisterium [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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        The same thing happened to me. Ironically I was foolish for not trying harder to be included in that “group”. When I complained at home, I got the “oh you did it all by your self and didnt need to cheat, be proud of that!” - My own family believes that some magical force will “reward” pure intentions and so keep being “good workers”. In the end the people that cheated graduated with honours and now earn more money than me. Life is rarely fair, until we make it so.

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    Gotta wonder what is gonna happen to these people when ChatGPT shuts down after investors pull out to salvage what’s left of their principal

        • plinky [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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          but that implies work requires a lot of thought, it really doesn’t majority of the time, just being accepted and shown the ropes.

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            that really depends on the job.

            where a credential opens a door to a role in an organization requiring a balanced skillset and competency–as in say public/civil service–someone who cannot think through a problem and develop/implement a solution is going to be recognized as a “bad fit” among stakeholders and colleagues.

            but yeah, if you’re just pushing emails and being a monkey for some loser petite bourgeois heir, then nothing really matters anyway because they will cut you lose to save a buck when they get caught by their uncle buying coke with petty cash. so, by all means, don’t waste any energy on personal edification when you can waste it on appearing to personally edify for what is certain to be a very enriching and totally not alienating future.

            there are still actual jobs doing actual work that requires one to actually think using the context of their training, formal education and experience to deploy resources in a way that helps people. these roles are real and necessary and the lack of recognition for them in the US, by and large, is not some honest understanding of the deeper material reality. it is a cynical normalization of capitalist ideology, and the more young people with opportunities to learn buy into the frame, the more any potential collaborative future is cannibalized by The Ever Expanding Grift Maelstrom of now.

            • Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson@lemmy.ml
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              as in say public/civil service–someone

              Most people in civil service jobs are already like this. Have you ever tried to get a building permit? The whole process is slap dash and bullshit in almost every jurisdiction. Because of this almost every contractor has a guy they pay to expedite permits. The process of that in every jurisdiction is that the guy who expedites your permits is the guy friends with everyone in the permit department. It’s thinly veiled corruption.

              The reality is that you’re describing an era that’s already flew by. Austerity, capitalist computerization, and political issues have hollowed out civil service in the US completely. Our federal revenue service, the thing that is a profit center for the whole government cannot for the life of it create a standard accessible digitized way to collect taxes without spending boatloads of money on contractors who make a half working system and suck maintenance fees out of it.

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                there is far more to civil service than rejecting your 3rd iteration of gazebo plans.

                indeed, I have met many in civil service, having been in it for over a decade in more than one jurisdiction.

                sorry your experience has been one inviting you to universal disdain for public facing personnel, but you might consider that if all you ever meet are assholes… you might just be the asshole.

                schools, infrastructure, adult education… the list of valuable work to provide for communities stretches to the horizon, but I suppose with your totally-not-capitalist-and-actually-empirical perspective, public service is not for you.

                I wouldn’t want someone who cheats through evaluations and hates public servants on my team of all day suckers that give a fuck. a cheating anti-government zealot is more of a resume for a high level political appointee of a MAGA official, which are really hot right now in the most underserved places in the US.

                so, maybe you can make your mark and have a grand legacy, a great many political allies, and a life you can hang your hat on after looting some libraries or whatever.

                • Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson@lemmy.ml
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                  Which AES country do you hail from that you’ve mostly experienced public service based on a Marxist Leninist party line instead of a decrepit capitalist austerity system? Here in Amerikkka that’s all we know and until the revolution comes that’s not changing no matter how many bright eyed and bushy tailed valedictorians throw themselves willingly into the pit. They’ll still be managing a payments clearing house whose sole purpose is to funnel tax money into private coffers. Even if you import cadres of bureaucrats from the glorious FALGSC of the future they’ll be fired, burned out and ineffective by the end of the week. Don’t kid yourself. It’s nice that you have a high standards of public service, but that’s just you, that’s not the United States.

                  I’m not inditing the people who decide to choose public service, I’m sure many of them have good intentions, but they work in a system that does not care about them or their humanitarian dreams. Teachers are the prime example of that. You think teachers want to be working in a system that fails children every single day? They don’t, but the reality is no matter how hard they try that’s what the system does on average. Not only that but they pay an average of $500-$1500 a year out of pocket in supplies for their own job, for other people’s kids, and for the pleasure of maybe just maybe affecting a single child’s life in a positive way. Through economic, moral, and psychological occupational hazards public service members are victims of this system too.

                  Pretending that reality is any other way is playing into the same systemic functions that keep public service workers underpaid and ineffectual. Yeah it’s “a higher calling”, but that intrinsic personal motivation of a public service worker should be secondary to the proper functioning of the state in service of its people. Our state functions primarily in service of capital. I don’t know what state you’re talking about.

                  So ultimately it doesn’t matter if your public service worker graduated from ChatGPT, Harvard or wherever. It doesn’t matter if they are doing it for the love of the game, or an ever dwindling paycheck. The system on average going to flatten all those differences away and keep the austerity train rolling. These things literally don’t matter because just like the private sector there’s always a boss in the chain that’s going to tell someone below them, “fuck your opinions, do what I tell you”, and that shit rolls down hill. My views on public services in the US are bad because that’s what I’ve experienced, and ultimately it doesn’t matter what I think because the system doesn’t care. I don’t have time to get to know the nicest guy down at the permit office and invite him out for beers. I have plenty of other horrifying interactions with various government agencies to get to, so I’ve quit trying to figure out how to get the fourth iteration of my gazebo plans approved.

    • Inui [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      ChatGPT is just one of many models. There’s lots of other free commercial ones people can use like Claude and Gemini. But beyond that, people can now run AI locally and the really small but worse models (shorter memory, less training material) can run on lower end hardware. The genie is out of the bottle.

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      I think the probable answer is it won’t shut down. As more people depend on it more money will get thrown at it. It would be like the equivalent of the internet shutting down. Probably will get bailed out by the government

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    Makes sense, we’re an empire in decline. American capital is stripping the copper out of the wires. Child labor is coming back. Slavery is coming back (and never really went away). For what purpose do you need an educated populace as a capitalist. AI being the last possible new market is way more important to them

  • Dirt_Owl [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.net
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    Something that is very annoying is that AI is being blamed for the problems that education under capitalism has been facing for decades. Poor reading comprehension has been an issue for decades. We have a system that not only teaches people to hate learning, but where everyone is too tired and time poor to learn, or even teach.

    Fuck AI, but don’t use technology as a scapegoat for systemic problems, it only amplifies what is already there.

    • HATEFISH@midwest.social
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      Technology has been ingrained to the system. Largely due to capitalism. School districts were sold on the idea that every kid needed a chromebook to learn, a decade+ later we are seeing the increase in technology in classrooms hasn’t helped. Those additional devices and licenses to use their software aren’t cheap and impact class sizes and # of staff that can be hired.

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    I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.

    Turns out the Bible was the word of God handed down to man, it’s just that God is the AI bot running our simulation.

    This says to me that our leadership is only going to get worse and worse. The meritocracy will be full of people with degrees from the right universities but with zero ability to think dynamically. Thus novel situations will be handled with AI slop only further exacerbating the “constantly trying to fight the last war” problem (metaphorically speaking).

    • context [fae/faer, fae/faer]@hexbear.netM
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      I then fed a chunk of text from the Book of Genesis into ZeroGPT and it came back as 93.33 percent AI-generated.

      it’d be pretty funny if it’s just picking up on the fact the text is a mishmash from different authors writing for different purposes

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        After seeing this I was curious so I took a chunk of fanfiction that I wrote myself, then had ChatGPT write a second chapter, fed both into it, and it was extremely inaccurate. It rated my chapter at 20% AI and the ChatGPT chapter at 40%, which is a bit of a correlation but both the false positive and false negative rates are way too high to use this tool for anything.

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    Wild that Frank Herbert actually nailed the meta commentary of the Butlerian Jihad, the man was actually cooking with that premise

    Of course this doesn’t actually “unravel the entire academic project” simply unravels the concept of homework and online schooling

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    Yeah, you can’t give students a done-at-home essay as an assessment any longer, that’s just asking for AI slop and setting the students up for failure. Students can’t be trusted to avoid the temptation of AI, even the good ones from time to time. Over the past couple of years I’ve had to completely rethink every assessment I give. Essays are useless now. In-class tests and exams are ok, but students struggle with these more than they did a few years ago as they are less practiced at thinking through the written word. In-class presentations work pretty well, if you have a few restrictions. Keeping the time limits short so they stay focused and do not use vague and verbose AI writing helps, limiting the amount of text in slides or number or slides or even just banning slides entirely can also help to reduce slop. But most importantly, have a lengthy question and answer period at the end. This is where the students will actually demonstrate their own understanding as they need to actually know the material themselves to get through even very simple questions. If a student only used AI to write a presentation script even “what did you think about the book?” is a tough question for them. Usually one of the students will try using AI but will very visibly crash and burn in front of the whole class during the Q&A. The public shaming that results usually serves as a good warning to the rest.

  • CarlMarks@lemmygrad.ml
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    12 days ago

    If your coursework can be solved by a plagiarism markov chain-ish machine that is more of an indictment of your course than the students.

    • space_comrade [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Eh I dunno about that, the plagiarism machine would probably also be good for, for example, undergrad math or compsci because the work is usually fairly simple but necessary to get into the deeper stuff. This kind of cheating on an industrial scale seems dangerous.

      • CarlMarks@lemmygrad.ml
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        12 days ago

        I think it’s probably pretty bad at both of those things when it comes to what should actually be evaluated, which is students’ understanding of concepts, not just recall. If you ask for the complexity of some algorithm, an LLM will try to find some pattern that matches the kinds of answers it has already seen before. It might get the answer right because it has digested 100 examples like it before and matched the input to it. But if you ask students to actually explain their reasoning and walk through it step by step, and throw in a modification to the algorithm that impacts the answer, the LLM is likely to fail in some way.

        Though really, what should be graded is evaluations like tests. Homework should be for learning and practice, not a grade.

    • Le_Wokisme [they/them, undecided]@hexbear.net
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      12 days ago

      i haven’t done long division by hand in years but it was still important to learn how math works even though we all carry a calculator around.

      the basics are basic, extremely well understood, and covered in great detail, of course a stochastic parrot can regurgitate them.

    • GeneralSwitch2Boycott [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      It’s not actually being solved, an imitation of a solution is being presented. Kids using AI sludge is the same as if their parents did all their work for them. Changing the coursework to ensure their parents or machine sludge aren’t doing it for them is going to turn schoolwork more and more into multiple choice exams with linear thinking.

      • CarlMarks@lemmygrad.ml
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        12 days ago

        100%. By solved I really mean graded with a high score. Also, rampant cheating on homework is also basically the same as using an LLM. I have seen a very large number of college students share homrqork answers. But I don’t think homework should be scored for a grade anyways. Homework should be for learning and for the teacher to know how well the class is going. If students understand this, that homework is a participation grade, and that the evaluations like tests are what determine grades, then cheating, LLMs, and getting parents’ doing all the homework will be solely detrimental to grades, i.e. will no longer have any incentive. A win-win for pedagogy.

    • trinicorn [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      12 days ago

      downbear

      The whole point is that A) the goal of school assignments isn’t to get the right answer it’s to learn to understand the surrounding concepts and how to get the right answer in a more generalizable way and B) the students aren’t learning anything if its copy pasted from an AI. And C) frankly the LLM doesn’t usually “solve” it. Its outputs are often easily distinguishable, poor answers, that just look good enough at first glance to hit submit.

      What about an LLM producing plausible output (the one thing it’s built to do) in response to a prompt (the question/assignment) actually means the coursework is poorly designed?

      I genuinely want to know your thought process here. Is it just that teachers should be expected to outpace cheating technology or that you genuinely think anything that can convincingly be done by an LLM isn’t worth having a human do it?

      Writing an essay on a topic is not just a way of assessing your knowledge of the topic, it’s great practice for communicating your ideas in a coherent polished form in general. Just because an LLM can write something that sometimes passes for a human-written essay doesn’t mean that essays are useless now…

      • Losurdo_Enjoyer [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        12 days ago

        A) the goal of school assignments isn’t to get the right answer it’s to learn to understand the surrounding concepts and how to get the right answer in a more generalizable way

        where are you from this is not how schools operate in the US

        • trinicorn [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          12 days ago

          unfortunately I am a burger american. There are good and bad teachers, and a lot of bad incentive structures and structural issues undermining education quality here, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t still ostensibly the goal of most assignments. Admittedly I went to supposedly good k-12 schools and the hit rate was probably still like 50% in HS, but it was better than that in college, even at a not at all prestigious school

            • trinicorn [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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              12 days ago

              and my comment said that in >50% of my classes, what it did was genuinely foster learning in the way described. Not all of the evils of the US school system even conflict with this very basic model of learning, and regardless schools aren’t a monolith. A blanket statement about how schools operate in the US isn’t appropriate in this case, because it’s a gross exaggeration of how useless they are and doesn’t apply across the board.

              edit: and to be clear I agree that classes/assignments that only foster learning in theory, are meaningless, but many still do in practice

      • CarlMarks@lemmygrad.ml
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        12 days ago

        If homework and other at home assignments are graded (not just scored for learning), the teacher is already following bad practice. As you suggest, homework is for practice and learning. So it doesn’t need to be graded, just scored so that students know what to improve on. It is evakuations like tests that should be graded. Tests aren’t foolable by “AI” so long as they arw done in person.

        Also, as you mention, the better demonstration of learning is synthesis, to apply concepts in new situations (teaching is even better for demonstrating knowledge, but this is rarely evaluated). LLMs don’t understand concepts, they are bad at any actual synthesis questions. They can merge vocabularies and patterns, ape narrative structures, etc, but are very bad at combining actual reasoning concepts. If a teacher’s test grading (let’s say it’s online) is fooled by an LLM it is unlikely to be synthesis questions. More likely recall and patterns.

        • trinicorn [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          I’m not sure that I agree that the model “only tests are graded” is a good ideal. What is generally thought of as homework, sure, that is counter-productive to grade, but for things like essays, projects, etc. I’m not sure that’s true. There is only so much essay you can write in one sitting, and the practice polishing, restructuring and generally just increased time spent thinking through that essay, that is afforded by it being done at home, is valuable.

          And I think you underestimate what an LLM can (at least in theory) produce. Especially if you let students pick topics or take liberties with structure, etc. at all. What you’re asking of teachers, when you say that students successfully using LLMs to pass their class is an indictment of their coursework, is an obligation to always provide sufficiently novel prompts and questions and such that an “AI” can’t answer well.

          I agree that an LLM probably can’t convincingly synthesize two concepts that were both represented separately in its training data (though I expect they’ll get closer to being able to pass this off for non-complex examples), but what if the synthesis itself was in the training data? In HS and undergrad level courses, how often are the topics at hand really novel enough to rely on that not being the case? Or how often is the syllabus really flexible enough to allow teachers to reframe all assessments into synthesis questions? And as these companies get better at incorporating fresh material, how often will teachers have to completely rethink their coursework to keep up. This isn’t a treadmill that it’s reasonable to expect teachers to get on or condemn them for being imperfect at detecting.

          The problem isn’t that teachers can’t tell, it’s that they can’t prove it. The difference between a student who isn’t really getting it 100% but is trying and one who used AI and the slop it put out doesn’t quite make logical sense is not that cut and dry and they don’t deserve the same grade.

          As a matter of practicality, what you describe may become necessary for serious educational institutions, but I wouldn’t lay that on the teachers or say that it’s ideal in any abstract sense, absent LLMs.

          • CarlMarks@lemmygrad.ml
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            11 days ago

            Essays should be done in class if they are graded. Not to add a time crunch, but the opposite: at-home assignments leads to unrealistic and often classist expectations of homework time and parental/tutor support. Yes, spending time writing alone is valuable for learning. So is homework. Neither should be scored for a student’s grade. At-home essays suffer from the same rampant cheating that homework does, which does a disservice to everyone involved in terms of learning. It’s important to distinguish evaluations from the act of learning itself, the two are not synonymous: if students’ essays are to be graded, they should be done under proctorship and with time and venue alotted for fairness, subject to special cases. Many standardized tests have essay portions and for all the problems with standardized testing, it is appropriate that they don’t let test takers go home and mull over it for as long as their economic and support sotiation allows.

            Writing essays in class runs into a time crunch in most primary and secondary schools because each class is alotted an arbitrary hourish window once per day. But there are schools that do 2+ hour sessions and have off days, making this practical. A student can write a rough draft one day, turn it in, get feedback, and then polish and turn it in for a grade. And universities can always dedicate appropriate amounts of class time, they just don’t want to pay TAs for anything that can be turned into homework time. Too busy doing financialized real estate schemes instead.

            Re: LLMs, they can produce essays yep. This is an indictment of a course that grades take-home essays. The course was already inappropriately constructed. The LLM didn’t cause the problem here, it just exacerbated the existing problem that manifests as standard cheating (paying/bullying for essays), generally accepted soft cheating (parents write the essay), generally accepted classist legs up (parents help but don’t write it/tutors do the same), and the inequalities in free time that impacts students heavily enough already.

            but what if the synthesis itself was in the training data?

            Then it has a good chance of regurgitating it. But this is very close to reusing test questions, which is already bad practice and leads to cheating. It’s true that an LLM will solve a problem that none of the students have seen if the teacher’s strategy of synthesis is to Google for examples, though. That pary is unfortunate but an assessment shouldn’t be done in the context where someone can use an LLM anyways. Either way it’s not synthesis.

            In HS and undergrad level courses, how often are the topics at hand really novel enough to rely on that not being the case?

            The topics aren’t novel at all. But that doesn’t really have anything to do with rote memorization regurgitation vs. synthesis. Synthesis questions are often new and different, even just changing the words used for a biological process for a question will strip memorization and force a focus on concepts. Add a follow up question to relate it to something else that was learned and you get synthesis. This is actually a very easy kind of test to write if you practice it.

            Or how often is the syllabus really flexible enough to allow teachers to reframe all assessments into synthesis questions?

            Assessments should be done in-person. In-person assessments can include simple recall questions. At-home work that is simple recall questions can already be solved by just Googling things. And you’re describing a problem in course design. It’s not individual teachers’ faults that schooling is broken.

            Re: the rest, you seem to think that I am picking on teachers. Not sure why.

  • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.ml
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    12 days ago

    I ain’t gonna read all that but some quotes are hilarious

    When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

    Lee explained to me that by showing the world AI could be used to cheat during a remote job interview, he had pushed the tech industry to evolve the same way AI was forcing higher education to evolve.

    AI frontiersman pushing the envelope of technology by building the torment nexus