‘But there is a difference between recognising AI use and proving its use. So I tried an experiment. … I received 122 paper submissions. Of those, the Trojan horse easily identified 33 AI-generated papers. I sent these stats to all the students and gave them the opportunity to admit to using AI before they were locked into failing the class. Another 14 outed themselves. In other words, nearly 39% of the submissions were at least partially written by AI.‘
Article archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20251125225915/https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/set-trap-to-catch-students-cheating-ai_uk_691f20d1e4b00ed8a94f4c01
Don’t really know how to feel about this because 15 years ago, all I did was reword Wikipedia pages to make a good paper. I went to college because I was led to believe it was a requirement to do well in life. I still learned a lot, but that was mostly through the social interaction of coursework. And honestly, I don’t use anything from college in my current engineering job, it was all on-the-job panic learning. If I were to go back to college today, it would be such an enlightening experience of learning, but when you’re a kid getting out of high school, you’re just trying to get by with some gameplan that you’ve only been told about. Idk. I don’t blame them for using a tool that’s so easily accessible because college is about fun too. I guess I wouldn’t do it different at that age .
This refrain I keep hearing of “I don’t use anything I learned in college” is an INSANE take. Unless you went to some fly-by-night for-profit scam college, you learned way more than you think, even if it didn’t include some specific engineering technique. You mentioned social interaction, but critical thinking is the big one. We need to stop devaluing education-it’s critical for our future. We can’t dismiss it just because capitalist vultures are ruining it. We need to fight to make it what it should be.
Apparently you learned to learn, which I suppose is one major goal of college.
That’s a nice ideal but the reality is that this world is cruel and we’re burdening future generations with debt for their degrees and the job market sucks. If reality was different, then maybe kids could enjoy learning in college. But it’s not, so they need to make sure they are capable of being good little sheep that can do what the C suite wants otherwise they’re going to be in poverty and debt for the rest of their lives with very little safety net.
US here, in case it wasn’t obvious.
You hit the nail on the head.
The problem is the cost of education in the US.
But not all of the world is such a capitalist hellscape as the US is, where people were embezzled of affordable living, healthcare and education.
That doesn’t make the concept of education a bad one. The framework in which it’s implemented is to blame and the people who created said framework.
I’m in the same boat, and for me personally no, in uni I learnt to do as minimal of a job as possible to “pass” the arbitrary goals set by uncaring world. I had to unlearn all of that very quickly when I got my first real job that I actually like. My uni broke me, for sure, and I’m lucky I fixed a little bit of that decades later.
I’m sorry to hear that.
Would you say that your experience was typical or was it especially bad for you (as in not designed for your needs) while other people were better off?
I think that rewording wikipedia is slightly better though. It still requires you to digest some of the information. Kind of like when your teacher let you create notes on a note card for the test. You have to actually read and write the information. You get tricked into learning information.
Ai, just does it for you. There’s no need to do much else, and it’s reliability is significantly worse that random wiki editors could ever be. I see little real learning with ai.
Another thing is, you often gain interest on the topic, and Wikipedia indeed has the neat little thing of articles being related to each other, so it’s very plausible to start on Chandler Bing and end on the Atlantic slave trade, for instance. With LLMs, this is much, MUCH rarer, considering whatever you find interesting must be researched manually, since LLMs are more or less useless.