"Do you people all have brain injuries? AI writing is almost comically easy to detect"
Some can't and that's fine.
I also find it comically easy to detect, but it's a kind of pattern recognition, a skill that takes a bit of investment of time and energy on some internal disposition. It also operates on the unconscious: if it feels off it might well be off. Like map reading, or like listening to jazz, some people just don't can't seem to do it and that's fine. Most people around me can't read code and thats fine.
Also: some others don't care about what they see or how they write and levels of literacy are also lowering, and some others are enthusiastic users of the new technology so have to protect their investment.
My way of detecting it has become less about patterns and cliches and more about the content of the text itself. The article gives many examples of AI generated restaurant descriptions and while they are written very similarly, the bigger problem is that the text has no actual meaning in the first place. It's just pointless descriptions of what a restaurant is, but written in different cliched ways. A human could rewrite the same content to not use cliches and it would still clearly be AI due to how worthless it is.
From the article: "When tasked with coding, writing, editing, or summarizing, ask the user up to three targeted clarifying questions. Proceed with the task once you've received answers and understand the prompt fully. If the task is a simple factual question or conversational message, respond directly."
Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
My first impression is that floods of articles do not accurately reflect the real world, but just show some facet of it.
But if they are both correct and both are to be taken as real, should we expect that students will agree with academia and not use AI in their education? Might we see the return of traditional learning?
(Education is different than our industry. In our industry, most of those using LLMs are forced to by the powers to be. In education, the powers to be do not want the students to use LLMs.)
As a recent graduate, both headlines read as plausible and non-contradictory. Students right now are faced with two things:
1. a machine that can do the things asked of them faster, more accurately, and higher quality.
2. the threat that that machine completely or mostly invalidates their education, in particular for getting an entry-level job because they don't exist anymore.
The former headline is a result of point 1 and the latter point 2. They're using it not because they think "it's good, actually" but because they're resigning themselves to their education not mattering for their professional development and taking the easy path. That breeds the resentment that you see with "students are anti-AI".
One of the "grown up" moments everyone needs to make their way through is: Realizing that the vast majority of people are not internally consistent, and that by the way includes you.
Every single student who boo'd Eric Schmidt the other day was regularly using AI for their schoolwork. People are not cistercian monks.
Its easy to draw a conclusion from this like "revealed preferences outweigh spoken ones, we can ignore the boos" but much like the tech executives, you're not thinking deeply enough. The tech industry will face the music for relentlessly creating products that the world hates to be forced to use. But, for now, the industry is too addicted to it. It sounds crazy, but: There are vanishingly few companies left who have the ability to manufacture products & services that their customers are excited to use. Its a lot easier to monopolize a space, re-baseline the industry around the expectations of your product's existence, then deploy capital and lawyers to put up fences.
If some students use LLMs to do tasks faster and at higher quality, that changes the grading curve, so everybody else might have no choice but to do so as well if they want to graduate. It's the "and yet you participate in society" meme.
I don't think those two things are mutually exclusive. Good chance that a few students that cheated or at the least used AI in a major capacity to graduate, still booed when that former Google CEO brought up AI at the graduation speech. Being pro AI when it benefits them and anti AI when it doesn't is just human nature. I'm being a little reductive here though.
Both happen at the same time, by the same people. The reason for usage differs by major, but usually it's an expedient to either get past tasks that represent busywork or just the cheating you've seen described. Students have explained to me how much they hate in the same explanation of what they do with it.
(just FYI: There's no "traditional learning" to return to; you will definitely hear a lot of faculty going to "paper and pen" situations - kinda uncritically, if you ask me! - but I ask folks to remember that writing itself is a technology, and the media/means historically associated with it are technological advances in their own rights).
> Recently there was a flood of articles about "students are using AI to cheat". Now there's a flood of articles about "students are anti AI".
Sure, both are true, although I think you'll find that they differentiate between "cheating" on their math homework by using AI, and kids who are cheating on exams by sneaking in a smartphone and giving a photo of the problem to ChatGPT.
As far as homework goes, AI is just the new Google, useful perhaps, but hardly outweighing all the anxiety of their future being taken away by AI, or all the societal enshittification by AI that they see all around them.
counter intuitively criminal ransomware gangs operate on trust. They have to ensure that we believe they really will shred it, otherwise no victim will ever pay a ransom ever again.
Therefore one way to weaken these criminals would be to weaken this trust factor. In a way therefore comments like "can we actually believe they will really shred it" goes towards this aim.
I have to wonder what criminal hacking gangs that do not operate on trust would do. Would it be like the replacement of organized crime (mafia) with the arguably wider damaging unorganized violent drug gangs?
There is a dissonance here, can anyone help. It's weird. Doesnt anyone else see this?
To me it feels like an anti-fur protest by people who themselves are wearing fur coats. Why don't we see news of academics happy that their students have made the u-turn they want?
I thought the outcry against AI was from the universities themselves because the students have all happily embraced it and were using it all the time?
But now the outcry seems to be by the students themselves?
Are these different students? Maybe: they seem to be about to leave education instead of using it to pass their exams. They have got their certificates. If they are the same students, maybe it's about their use of AI? Perhaps the reaction is a kind of psychological effect of their use, an effect of shame or guilt? Or maybe its not about their personal use but about a wider adoption by other people and the change in the world around them? They don't see their own use of AI as relevant.
Maybe its about the news stories? They all seem to be hype.
Or perhaps it's a fashionable topic for the latest small protest movement? its news because its new, but its not a widespread movement or is it? Is it more like an anti-car protest by people who are forced to use cars and cant use public transport?
So: Will we see the reduction of use by students on their work, and a kind of happiness by the academics on how their students want to learn properly?
you are overthinking. most of these students had hard time getting a job or didn't get a job yet. they have 100K+ loan to pay. only thing AI has successfully done so far is replacing human labor.
Everyone is being told they have to use AI to get ahead, so they do.
They're still not going to get a job, and if they have a job, they're still going to get laid off no matter how hard they use AI, because the AI can also use AI.
We're being told there's no room for humans in the future.
Up to 80% of software projects fail. Most startups will fail. VC's and bankers know this.
Does using AI increase or lower that failure rate?
Does seeing a project that uses AI fail mean it wasn't going to fail if it didn't use AI?
To try to answer it with my gut: I imagine that we could see more projects failing, but the percentage that fail would be the same. Most projects that use AI will fail because most projects generally will fail, but the time and cost to get a successful project will lower.
For the big McMurdo US base they have flown in a few times in the winter for extremely important life or death medical reasons (last year: Aug 25 [1]) For the smaller other country bases it tends to be too dangerous and impossible. They are not able to use mcmurdo and the americans cant help either.
The general rule is that the Americans don't fly during the winter but they do tend to downplay and not publicize the times when they do fly.
One of those eye opening moments for me was learning about how these criminals work on trust. They need to be trusted to not release the data or to unencrypt when paid, and by and large they do.
One way to weaken any group that works on trust would be to make them less trustworthy. That way victims wouldn't be as confident paying the criminals and thereby making the effort by the criminals less attractive.
Some can't and that's fine. I also find it comically easy to detect, but it's a kind of pattern recognition, a skill that takes a bit of investment of time and energy on some internal disposition. It also operates on the unconscious: if it feels off it might well be off. Like map reading, or like listening to jazz, some people just don't can't seem to do it and that's fine. Most people around me can't read code and thats fine.
Also: some others don't care about what they see or how they write and levels of literacy are also lowering, and some others are enthusiastic users of the new technology so have to protect their investment.
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