In addition to making people stupid, I wonder what affect will LLMs like Claude will have on programmers? How will new programmers learn if companies start using Claude?
In addition to making people stupid, I wonder what affect will LLMs like Claude will have on programmers? How will new programmers learn if companies start using Claude?
Again an article that draws the wrong conclusions.
No, it does not make people stupider. It makes people lazier. Just. Like. All. Tech.
How many of us do research in libraries rather than on the internet these days? Back when internet became popular there were similar criticisms to what we have today on AI.
Essays are AI generated, show poor critical thinking, and you can tell? Great, grade it like what it is. A piss poor work. Just like someone who would copy a wikipedia article 15 years ago would be graded like shit, perhaps even considered cheating and given a 0 (or F or whatever is the worst grade in your system)
If you can’t tell, then the tool was properly used. If you can’t tell the difference between an AI generated essay and a human-made essay, then perhaps essays are no longer good tests of someone’s abilities.
Rather than pushing back against a tech that is probably never going away, even when the bubble pops, how about we start thinking productively and adapt how we learn, evaluate, and work instead?
Not even close to the same. Any (actual) research done online is still using real sources that have just been catalogued online.
The entire point of having students write essays is to demonstrate an understanding of the subject matter. Being able to come up with a good enough prompt to spit out a few paragraphs good enough to fool your teacher defeats the purpose entirely.
My point stands: the technology is not going to disappear. What are we going to do about not being able to use essays to evaluate how well a student understands a subject? Push back on AI? Futile ban attempts?
You’re saying using AI for essays defeats the purpose of essays, I’m saying essays are no longer a good way to evaluate understanding of a topic.
Can you not see how this is actively making people more stupid?
No? An essay is a test, not a proof of intelligence. Humans tend to do the minimal effort on things they dislike. If the task is not something we are interested in, we will tend to do the minimum needed to accomplish the task. That’s not being stupid. What is stupid is forcing humans to do things they dislike.
We are perfectly capable to spend our mind on tasks we are interested in. AI just makes it easier to be lazy on shit we don’t care about.
This is about effort, not intelligence. The article, like 99% of news articles these days, finds a shocking headline that is not supported by research (no serious research will associate effort spent on an essay with intelligence), and is happy with the high number of people it pleases.
Do you have thoughts on how we would do that ?
Well I’m already changing the way I work to use my brain on what AI can’t do well, and letting AI do what it can do well. I haven’t spent time thinking about how to change the world, and I don’t exactly have that time, but I’ll support left leaning parties that focus on integrating with the change rather than forbidding it.
The most essential thing in my opinion is a UBI. For decades we’ve been automating jobs away. Unemployment is no longer a problem because of economic troubles, it’s a problem because we’re using automation to increase production rather than improve people’s lives. The most essential thing, in my opinion, is shifting the way we think about work from “you must work to survive” to “you are surviving by default, you can work to improve your life”.
Then the second thing is education. But, I am very opinionated and might be wrong. I find the whole system, in every country that I know of, so antiquated. It is the one thing in our lives that has barely changed in centuries. Exam-driven education does not work. Brilliant, mostly neurodivergent minds (which are much more common than we used to think) are excluded from success because of it. AI won’t replace passion, students use AI because they dislike what they do. We as a species are not lazy, we’re just great at doing things that we love. Stop hammering students with exams, start letting them choose earlier on what they study, and they’ll stop using AI to offload everything.
by exams do you mean just grades in general? since you also mention essays earlier?
I include essays, yes. It’s all archaic. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have a way to evaluate student performance, but this is not it.