How do you teach a kid to write in this day and age? Do we still want people to express themselves in writing? Or are we cool with them using AI slop to do it?

It’s almost as if college isn’t about bettering yourself but paying a racket so you can check off a mandatory box on your resume for the pleasure of your corporate liege-lords…

make education stupider and less important, put AI assistants in front of everyone, automate more and more, and then allow the proletariat class to enjoy fading levels of control over society

I may disagree with you that the ability to write alone is where the problem is. In my view, LLMs are further exposing that our education system is doing a very poor job of teaching kids to think critically. It seems to me that this discussion tends to be targeted at A) Kids who already don’t want to be at school, and B) Kids who are taking classes simply to fulfill a requirement by their district— and both are using LLMs as a way to pass a class that they either don’t care about or don’t have the energy to pass without it.

What irked me about this headline is labeling them as “cheaters,” and I got push-back for challenging that. I ask again: if public education is not engaging you as a student, what is your incentive not to use AI to write your paper? Why are we requiring kids to learn how to write annotated bibliographies when they already know that they aren’t interested in pursuing research? A lot of the stuff we’re still teaching kids doesn’t make any sense.

I believe a solution cuts both ways:

A) Find something that makes them want to think critically. Project-based learning still appears to be one of the best catalysts for making this happen, but we should be targeting it towards real-world industries, and we should be doing it more quickly. As a personal example: I didn’t need to take 4 months of biology in high school to know that I didn’t want to do it for a living. I participated in FIRST Robotics for 4 years, and that program alone gave me a better chance than any in the classroom to think critically, exercise leadership skills, and learn soft and hard skills on my way to my chosen career path. I’ve watched the program turn lights on in kids’ heads as they finally understand what they want to do for a living. It gave them purpose and something worth learning for; isn’t that what this is all about anyway?

B) LLMs (just like calculators, the internet, and other mainstream technologies that have emerged in recent memory) are not going anywhere. I hate all the corporate bullshit surrounding AI just as much as the next user on here, but LLMs still add significant value to select professions. We should be teaching all kids how to use LLMs as an extension of their brain rather than as a replacement for it, and especially rather than universally demonizing it.

How long before Respondus introduces an education equivalent of BattlEye or other kernel-level anticheats as a result of stuff like this?

And I don't mean the Lockdown browser, I mean something beyond that, so as to block local AI Implementations in addition to web-based ones.

Also, I'm pretty sure there's still plenty of fields that are more hands-on and either really hard or impossible to AI-cheat your way through. For example, if you're going for carpentry at the local vo-tech, good luck AI-cheating your way through that when that's a very hands-on subject by its nature.

Honestly, we're having the same revolution for white-collar jobs that automation made for blue-collar ones.

Like with chess, we're going to reach a point where AI isn't just 'as good as humans,' but it will be many times superior to the point humans need to make their own competitions excluding AI in order for them to be fair.

Correct.

It's also why everyone needs a linkedin and to wear a suit. We have an environment where you're not an attractive hire unless you can show you've 'paid into the system.'

It's fucked, and that's by design. We need to start respecting people who are fighting back instead of shaming them.

Yeah sure, enjoy that glue pizza.

If my surgeon was booting up chat gpt I'd just euthanize myself to save them the trouble.

Yeah, people say they don't want AI driving cars while AI has better safety records than the average human.

People also fought back against having machinery to automate production.

You might want to look into the "Luddites."

I hope you can admit you're wrong when the time comes, but I genuinely expect you to just pretend you never stuck your neck out in the first place.

Here's a wrench for you: the Luddites were 100% right

Deskilling blue collar labor is how America gave China a manufacturing edge. What do you think will be the result of deskilling white collar labor?

Hear! Hear!

Don't act like a smug asshole while simultaneously admitting you're replaceable at work, can't draw, can't drive and can't think for yourself.

Or, ya'know, they could just have students take tests on paper in a lecture hall.

Actually, it's the American business owners that gave china the manufacturing edge.

They cared more about maximizing profits off of Americans rather than competing with foreign companies offering customers better deals.

Keep in mind, you're trying to argue against industrialization right now. Are you suggesting we shouldn't have industrialized to prevent "deskilling blue collar labor" so "China doesn't get a manufacturing edge"?

Or even actually show what they learned in a practical sense. In a vo-tech, for example, have the students fix up a car or get a small LAN set up, or even in the case of an art school, have the class do a mural or a sidewalk-scale mosaic outside as their end-of-instruction project (both of those sound like really fun end-of-instruction projects, btw), with admin approval, of course.

I'm suggesting that the choice between industrialization and skilled labor is a false one because China is industrialized and has a highly skilled labor force. I agree this is because of American owners seeking profit, but it seems the same won't happen to China now that they're industrialized.

Because nobody ever cheated on a paper exam before.

perfect not being the enemy of the good and all that

I would argue that in person exams with no resources to do research goes against how the world works for most white collar workers.

Few are unable to research on the internet to verify information, or at least look at say a man page for coding or look up past stuff on stackoverflow, if they are working through a problem.

Standardized testing is just not as useful as-is. I do great at it and can typically pass exams without really studying the material, but others are not so lucky.

I've met people who can flunk exams but talk about the problems, go into how they would fix it, and work through a problem to implementation and testing in the real world.

Oh, and LLMs are the new typewriter, for better or worse. It's unlikely we are going to have a future where they are not readily available. We already have models that run locally and do not transmit data anywhere, and AI customized to your own data that is not shared is already a service provided by Microsoft.

Education needs to evolve with technology. It's always been 5-10 years behind the curve.

Maybe we should be using LLMs to proctor tests and generate interactive testing. Grading can be verified by a professor reading a transcript to verify hallucinations didn't occur or influence the results. We can even have LLMs monitor the working process of people to help determine what are the most efficient ways to work custom tailored to individuals. This is just one idea of many potential options.