We have been banned from using Ami Pro for writing a technical reports on my highschool in late 90s and required to write them by hand as an attempt to combat copy&pasting. We "shared" all the calculations in the class anyway, so it haven't worked well.
It's how it was with the internet. I grew up in the 90s, and teacher didn't know how to deal with the fact we no longer had to go through multiple books in the library to get the information they needed. We barely needed to write it.
Now nobody expects students to not use the internet. Same here: teachers must accept that AI can and will write papers and answer questions / do homework. How you test student must be reinvented.
There is an obvious reason why LLM use should be discouraged in classwork focused on writing: the process that's needed for a brain to learn the skills can't be outsourced.
The Internet is different. Even with access to websites like Wikipedia, you had to write your own content. Plagiarism was easily detectable.
We shouldn't confuse "we don't have a solution at the moment" with "we should completely abandon no-LLM education". Like with social media, we can always change the direction of progress.
I get that students are using the LLM crutch -and who wouldn’t?
What I don’t get is why wouldn’t they act like an editor and add their own voice to the writing. The heavy lifting was done now you just have to polish it by hand. Is that too hard to do?
Those looking for shortcuts look for easiest and fastest and least effort shortcuts. Also unlike when they are themselves doing the copying and get the feeling I really should change things so I won't get caught, same won't happen when something is generated for them. As it probably looks unique enough.
Teachers are also heavy users of AI. Entire academic business staff is using AI.
The goals of academic assessment need to change. What are they assessing and why? Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans. Just like the school kids are now allowed to use calculators in the exam halls.
The academic industry need to redefine their purpose. Identify the human abilities that are needed for the future that is filled with AI and devices. Teach that and assess that.
In person, proctored blue book exams are back! Sharpen those pencils kids.
I've been wondering lately if one of the good things to come out of heavy LLM use will be a return to mostly in-person interactions once nothing that happens online is trustworthy anymore.
I've heard some teachers are assigning their students to 'grade' a paper written by LLM. The students use an LLM to generate a paper on the topic, print it out, then notate in the margins by hand where it's right and wrong, including checking the sources.
I don't see the whole AI topic as a large crisis, as others have mentioned: put more emphasis on in-person tests and exams. Make it clear that homework assignments are for practice, learning, and feedback. If a person thinks that copy/pasting helps them, give them the freedom to so, but if as a result they fail the exams and similar in-person evaluations, then so be it. Let them fail.
I would like to hire students who actually have skills and know their material.
Or even better, if AI is actually the amazing learning tool many claim then it should enhance their learning and as a result help them succeed in tests without any AI assistance. If they can't, then clearly AI was a detriment to them and their learning and they lack the ability to think critically about their own abilities.
If everyone is supposed to use AI anyway, why should I ever prefer a candidate who is not able to do anything without AI assistance over someone who can? And if you hold the actual opinion that proper ai-independent knowledge is not required, then why should I hire a student at all instead of buying software solutions from AI companies (and maybe put a random person without a relevant degree in front of it)?
There’s a lot of interacting parts as to why many places have arrived where we are where cheap ghost writers (AI or not) can so easily negatively impact education. But it pretty much all comes down to costs.
I put a day of careful thought into writing a cover letter for a job a few weeks ago. Knowing there is there was the potential of AI screening, I checked if it would get flagged.
Every detection program I tried said the letter that I personally wrote by hand was 100% AI generated!
So, I looked for humanizer programs and ran my cover letter through a couple. Without the results in front of me at the moment, I can only revert to my judgemental conclusion instead of solid observations...
You need to write like an idiot to pass AI detection algorithms. The rewritten cover letter was awful, unprofessional, and embarrassing.
19 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 35.3 ms ] thread* grep to remove em dashes and emojis
* re-run through another llm with a prompt to remove excessive sycophantry and invalid url citations
Here is a wiki article with all common tell-tales of AI writing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
It's how it was with the internet. I grew up in the 90s, and teacher didn't know how to deal with the fact we no longer had to go through multiple books in the library to get the information they needed. We barely needed to write it.
Now nobody expects students to not use the internet. Same here: teachers must accept that AI can and will write papers and answer questions / do homework. How you test student must be reinvented.
The Internet is different. Even with access to websites like Wikipedia, you had to write your own content. Plagiarism was easily detectable.
We shouldn't confuse "we don't have a solution at the moment" with "we should completely abandon no-LLM education". Like with social media, we can always change the direction of progress.
What I don’t get is why wouldn’t they act like an editor and add their own voice to the writing. The heavy lifting was done now you just have to polish it by hand. Is that too hard to do?
The goals of academic assessment need to change. What are they assessing and why? Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans. Just like the school kids are now allowed to use calculators in the exam halls.
The academic industry need to redefine their purpose. Identify the human abilities that are needed for the future that is filled with AI and devices. Teach that and assess that.
I've been wondering lately if one of the good things to come out of heavy LLM use will be a return to mostly in-person interactions once nothing that happens online is trustworthy anymore.
I would like to hire students who actually have skills and know their material. Or even better, if AI is actually the amazing learning tool many claim then it should enhance their learning and as a result help them succeed in tests without any AI assistance. If they can't, then clearly AI was a detriment to them and their learning and they lack the ability to think critically about their own abilities.
If everyone is supposed to use AI anyway, why should I ever prefer a candidate who is not able to do anything without AI assistance over someone who can? And if you hold the actual opinion that proper ai-independent knowledge is not required, then why should I hire a student at all instead of buying software solutions from AI companies (and maybe put a random person without a relevant degree in front of it)?
$$$
There’s a lot of interacting parts as to why many places have arrived where we are where cheap ghost writers (AI or not) can so easily negatively impact education. But it pretty much all comes down to costs.
Every detection program I tried said the letter that I personally wrote by hand was 100% AI generated!
So, I looked for humanizer programs and ran my cover letter through a couple. Without the results in front of me at the moment, I can only revert to my judgemental conclusion instead of solid observations...
You need to write like an idiot to pass AI detection algorithms. The rewritten cover letter was awful, unprofessional, and embarrassing.