“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate…Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
I can totally see a world where teachers use AI to create assignments, students use AI to complete assignments, teachers use AI to grade assignments, and no one learned a damned thing.
I just wanna thank silicon valley shareholders for literally accelerating the actual non-hyperbolic death of human society in order to make a quick buck. Thanks guys.
You have to question the pre-existing critical thinking skills of students willing to pay a shit-tonne of money for an education they cheat their way through, and a meaningless certificate that will disintegrate on contact with their first job.
When I was teaching 15 years ago, we were tearing our hair out over all the students who pasted in whole sections from Wikipedia into their essays. Can't say I'm surprised that we're here now, but still...it's mind-blowing to think of the breadth and scale of problems this will cause.
In-class writing assignments. Required in-person lecture attendance. Proctors monitoring exam taking.
These are ways to get AI out of college learning.
I suspect this will end up biting students on the bum, because the obvious answer is to go back to old-school closed book exams as the main way of assessing students. It has well-discussed issues, but it does at least address the AI slop.
This reminds me of an episode of "Outer Limits" from 1997. Everyone's got a neural implant to a future Internet except one kid with a TBI who's taught himself to read. Net does haywire, humanity is left illiterate. theouterlimits.fandom.com/wiki/Stream_...
The fun thing about software engineering is that it's pretty easy to tell when somebody has been vibe coding. Just ask them literally anything about the design of their code and see if they can answer. My professors do this frequently to catch suspected vibe coders.
i like how the article says they changed their names for privacy and then a paragraph later is like “here’s all the social media sites she uses and here’s her username” lol
The push to adopt AI is encouraging people to outsource their thinking and stunt their own development.
What's really worries me is people doing tasks that require skill and knowledge to complete competently being usurped by inadequate AI products.
It's already happening.
Genuine question? Isn't that maybe the goal?
Students that don't know their history are easy to lead, easy to misdirect and easy to use. They are easy prey, and are already taught to believe everything they are told.
If they believe what chatgpt tells them, all you need to do is tell them that (victim of genocide) is bad bad, and they'll believe it without a second thought. They'll cheer for murder of whatever target those controlling these AI tools put in front of them.
That's why I am sticking to pen and paper exams. Much harder for the students to use ChatGPT that way.
I did set two ungraded at home assignments this semester and told them what I want them to learn by doing them. Explicitly told them if they are doing it with ChatGPT to just not hand it in.
How should legal education respond to AI? Together with 11 UCL Laws colleagues, this paper is our vision for the sector. It's rooted in academic integrity, fundamental competences, and concerns around impacts on learning to learn and intellectual risk taking. (🧵)
discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10...
I think the answer is clear. We need an overhaul in the infrastructure: basically all student assignments (including theses) need to done in special rooms at campuses that are being monitored (exam aquaria). No more home assignments. This is the only realistic way forward.
bsky.app/profile/hype...
“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate…Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
A (fantastic) professor of mine required that we compose our work in google docs, and give her editor permissions upon submission. She could then see the edit history of the document. Not infallible but better than nothing.
I feel like this is by design. Especially in regards to how ChatGPT seemingly exploded into the space - it does feel like a maliciously placed claymore to crank out hordes of uneducated educated that a certain segment can point towards and use as "proof" public education is a failure.
They're already missing lateral thinking, which has shown up lacking in the workforce for the past 15 years or so since the big STEM push...this in combination with that....shudder
Not only is this crisis very real here in higher education but higher education leaders are doing little or nothing to provide adequate guidance or tools to faculty to mitigate this disaster.
So many of you are forgetting disabled and poor people who NEED remote learning services.
No in person classes should be necessary.
There are other ways to fight AI without leaving us behind.
I watch every ad I see for Grammarly with a kind of horror. Language and cognition are tightly linked. If you don't learn to express yourself in writing you are limiting your ability to think creatively.
I recently retired from a career in corporate communications. This problem has long existed - in 2018, I had to educate 1 HR staffer as to why slavery wasn’t a form of immigration. AI is making it even worse. And don’t get me started on the inability to write a simple declarative sentence!
When I was in highschool we lost the licence to the plagiarism checker, so my ap English teacher made us write ALL of our essays in class. Everyone groaned at first but ultimately it was both amazing test prep and led to significantly less homework, which ruled.
The thinking that is required both to prepare for writing, and for the writing itself, the process of “finding one’s voice”, is itself a form of exploring and establishing an identity. These kids will also be way behind in emotional development. Identity masked by an AI superficiality.
People think the final output (the paper, the picture, the book, etc) is the only thing that matters and don't realize it is the input (the effort, the thought, the struggle) is the valuable part and how you learn and become more of a person.
Companies that make word processing software could update the software to flag any pasted text in “track changes”, so teachers can check if it’s identified as a quote or if it’s AI/plagiarism.
Hot take: It won't matter to employers. College degrees are mostly just a thing you have to do to get a job. They require it so they know you are capable of jumping through hoops on command. You almost always have to learn everything on the job anyway.
this is also said as someone in the hell that is college. yeah it fucking sucks but what's the point of going if i'm not gonna learn anything. i'm in the medical field very vaguely speaking so if i don't know my shit, someone or something Will Die
"'I spend so much time on TikTok,' she said. 'Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.'"
JFC these kids are cooked and have no idea.
This reminds me of an excellent argument by Harvard prof Michael Sandel: We view college as an end unto itself – a replicated credentialism that simply allows the wealthy to maintain their status under the guise of “meritocracy”.
Why else burn $200k just to dry up the planet’s water with LLMs?
'A philosophy professor...U of Ark at Little Rock caught students in her Ethics and Technology class using AI to respond to the prompt “Briefly introduce yourself and say what you’re hoping to get out of this class.”'
Every gen complains the one coming up is dumber. This time they might be right.
It blows my mind that every college hasn't adjusted to this by switching to all digital papers with version control. Make these idiots type every word of their ChatGPT, and at least provide the *appearance* of editing. The best English teacher I ever had made us do hand-written, in-class essays.
The dark irony of this is that a dumbed down class of college graduates will accelerate the incentive for companies to replace entry level jobs with AI.
The real value of AI is in the hands of someone who is already an expert in their field. An entry level employee running AI who didn’t learn in college because they just used AI will be less than worthless to an employer because they have no ability to use it critically.
I wonder if this could simply be fixed where students would have to go to monitored assignment rooms where they check in their phones/laptops and use a school computer with no internet or even go old school with a pen and paper- they don’t write cursive anymore do they remember how to write?
They’ve gotta cut digital and go analogue. Of course that also assumes that everyone involved can write at a college or even high school level. Or have used a pen ever.
Medical textbook is pulled from shelves after an extract found stating the line – "It is important to note that as an AI language model, I can provide a general perspective, but you should consult with medical professionals for personalized advice."
pivot-to-ai.com/2025/04/12/1...
Honestly it makes sense since the US has made degrees a receipt instead of a pedigree of championed interests. Companies just want flashy receipts for clients that want unrealistic results. AI has filled all those gaps. The US has lost the direction humanity.
This was a big problem when I was in university 30 years ago in Computer Science. Huge numbers of the students straight up copied other people's work and changed a few variable names.
Ultimately assignments were lowered to like 20% of our grade even though it represented the majority of the work.
I relate to this. I can confirm.
I now read a paper and look for any signs of human voice or grammatical error, authenticity and connection. I now structure assignments that require narrative. Students seem to gladly “just pass” rather than do the brain work. Allowing AI to steal their learning,
i remember a duller version of this when i was doing my undergrad in the early 00s and the internet had just reached most people. many people blatantly cheated. i flunked a paper in French but it turned out everyone else had plagiarized (the same two sources) and my grade was bumped to a 65%... lol
No worries. Once we pull humans out of the loop, with A1 Professors teaching A1 students, everyone will have more time for the important things in life…like posting social media responses.
what a fantastic mind control tool we have invented. want to change society? simply distribute a model with the right bias, everyone will start marching to your beat
I am a little unsympathetic to colleges. For years, colleges have approached the evolution of technology as “the golden goose for expanding admissions,” while failing to prepare for its negative impact on learning.
When I became a senior NCO in the Army reserves in the early aughts and I had to start senior reviewing other NCO’s reviews I learned that at least a plurality of them were functionally illiterate. A friend of mine in college (1993) paid his tuition by writing other peoples papers. This ain’t new.
We’re already phasing from a literary culture to a more oral & visual culture because of online. Now AI is kneecapping education via reading and writing. But it’s absurd to think complex human knowledge can be created, learned, shared and preserved without writing. Big new ideas needed!
Who didn’t see that coming? Kids no longer know how to physically research instead of googling. Not only are they not being taught cursive, they can’t read it. This is the logical next step.
When I was growing up I thought atomic bombs would end humanity, something that made its creators weep at what they'd done. What irony, that it will be something that helps us into helplessness, gleefully pushed by marketer barons with bright smiles and firm handshakes.
On the other hand, if education wasn't being used as a proxy for "The Hunger Games," people might not be so tempted to cheat.
Deny as we might, education is still designed around a 19th-century idea of measuring one-dimensional "merit", to slot you into the social hierarchy.
Talking to them will work until Elon's brain self-driving brain interface becomes a reality and they can sit back and let the IA run the body, answer the questions, and most important, get them a girlfriend.
This broke me: Altman saying ‘well maybe it’s a problem but for some money we can pretend we have a solution’:
“OpenAI contends that students and teachers need to be taught how to use it responsibly, pointing to the ChatGPT Edu product it sells to academic institutions.”
It’s great that all the major AI companies are giving free premium subscriptions to college students timed with finals to accelerate the demise of higher ed
When I'm looking for signs of deep understanding I ask my students to teach [insert concept/technique/argument etc] to me. If you can't teach it to someone, you don't understand it.
I ran a test, using various AI sites to summarize Hamlin Garland's "Under the Lion's Paw," a story I use in class. Some summaries were OK, but one gave all of the characters Scandinavian names. WTF?
There are actually AI detectors used in evaluating essays, etc. Not so easy to cheat their way through! So far, we still have some humans left in colleges and universities! For how long? I'm not sure!
May 7, 2025 11:08
It’s great that all the major AI companies are giving free premium subscriptions to college students timed with finals to accelerate the demise of higher ed
