The US is fucking cooked
I can’t help but think this is a phenomenon unique to the US where education has been completely devalued. If the only point of education is to fulfill a requirement to make more money then it makes sense to shortcut as much as possible.
The solution is of course no computer
Yes. It absolutely is.
How so?
I meant to respond this morning and was going to write a whole lot but the day got away from me.
When people had to cheat using Cliff’s notes or whatever they still had to engage critical thinking. There were only a few places where the information was summarized and you couldn’t directly copy, so you at least had to read and interpret the summary in order to make a passable end product. With an LLM you literally don’t even need to know what the question was, you can blindfold yourself and copy/paste a prompt and then copy/paste the output.
When new “shortcuts” emerged in the past, good teachers tried to game-ify a way to teach something the students who were going to rely on them anyway. That’s so much harder to do with LLMs and the education system is finally starting to die after decades of strangulation, it’s in no position to meet this level of challenge. That means that kids and teachers will feel more like education is worthless because you’re a sucker for trying to learn or teach.
People use calculators as an example, they can do the math for you and it hasn’t led to the death of math or whatever. They can do the specific calculation for you, but the critical thinking aspect of knowing what the correct calculation should be still had to come from you. These models are changing that in a pretty terrible way.
Granted, AI is more convenient than previous tools, but it is only the final step towards the decay process rather than a qualitative leap on its own. If AI wasn’t invented, the state of education would still be backsliding. It would only be delayed a little.
To give an example, for virtually every course I have taken at university, there is a common pattern. The exam has been made easier year on year starting from about 2015-2018. This had to be done to prevent the pass rates from declining too much. And much of the decline happened before covid actually.
Not to mention that a huge portion of the current is due to covid and austerity, not necessarily AI.
It’s not that AI is more convenient, it’s that it is completely disengaging. I don’t think that AI is going to be the thing that breaks education, I think it’s going to break dramatically more than that. I’d never heard of Chegg before and that shit sounds really scummy, but at the end of the day all it could do is make you less likely to learn something about a particular assignment. People are straight up turning their brains off and leaving them that way now.