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In an online discussion post, Alcorn State University history professor Dr. Jason Gibson posed a question that represented part of his students' midterm. It was about the...

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[-] Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca 167 points 21 hours ago

This is hysterical. Like the cheaters couldn't even be bothered to proof read what the AI wrote to make sure it was correct.

[-] Redditisbollocks@feddit.uk 69 points 21 hours ago

People are dumb. People will always be dumb, there's no getting away from it.

We are just apes after all.

[-] Trex202@lemmy.world 18 points 18 hours ago

Yes, but school is there to teach you to use brain. Why go school if no use brain?

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 17 points 16 hours ago

"You have to go to college to get a good job"

[-] tburkhol@slrpnk.net 22 points 15 hours ago

Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Used to be that a college degree indicated people with time, money, and drive to put four years into study. It was a good measure of the "right" kind of person. Now it's just another job requirement and doesn't indicate anything.

[-] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

It was a good measure of the “right” kind of person.

Long ago, a college education used to assure that you were white, male, Protestant, at least upper middle class, and at least semi-literate (assuming you managed to at least get Gentleman's C's, so the required "drive" was minimal if you were from the right family). Admission was much more of a sure thing for the offspring of alumni.

And that was what was necessary to join a business at that time: respectability and clubbability.

A minimum admission requirement regarding academic performance was made more prominent as other acceptance criteria were broadened, but most private universities will still give an easy ride to legacies and to the offspring of large donors.

Now it’s just another job requirement and doesn’t indicate anything.

Well, you're generally expected not only to have a degree, but one in a relevant field of study, and to have gotten good grades. And most of the big-name high-tech firms won't generally accept a degree from any but a few globally prominent universities. They go by brand as much as by objective criteria of performance. That's the new clubbability filter. Someone who cut-and-pasted AI slop at Stanford has a much better shot at a job than someone who did real work at Podunk State.

[-] BoneheadBruin@pawb.social 5 points 14 hours ago

My first job required a bachelor's degree because AND I QUOTE "So we know you can read and write in English"

[-] wittymyusername@lemmy.zip 5 points 9 hours ago

Hmm… I wonder how they’d feel about my Bachelor’s in Spanish Language and Culture.

[-] Malyca@lemmy.zip 22 points 18 hours ago

Why pay astronomical tuition, room and board, textbooks, all of it, just to learn nothing and use chat got. The bottom of the article said a professor at Brown thought all but 2 of his students cheated. At Brown. We're so fucked.

[-] anomnom@sh.itjust.works 9 points 9 hours ago

These selective colleges aren’t about education, they’re about getting you into a club with the other assholes that likely cheated their way through business school and got jobs the same way.

Same with private high schools in the us. They aren’t teaching kids to read, math or think, they’re teaching them that being born rich means you get to be in charge of the plebs (which includes the professors and instructors at these institutions).

[-] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

Networking matters. I went to an academically rigorous private university, but not one the better-known ones. I graduated during a recession and had plenty of doors slammed in my face. But one of my professors who liked my work had an old friend from Harvard who was a hiring manager at an important nearby company. The letter of reference he wrote to his friend got me in the door. I rose fast in the company after that, because I'm a quick study and actually knew how to do things. But I probably wouldn't have gotten in without that string having been pulled.

[-] asdfasdfasdf@lemmy.world 1 points 1 minute ago

I'm on the other side of the spectrum. No relevant degree in my field, no certifications, just real world experience. I rose very quickly too.

I also haven't really seen real world effects of networking with anyone I know. Lots of people join college clubs, go to networking events, etc. but when they need a job or a lawyer or something they get the same rates as everyone else. Maybe it's just my friends though.

[-] Pxtl@lemmy.ca 16 points 17 hours ago

Teenagers aren't really known for making great decisions.

Source: was once a teenager, made bad decisions.

[-] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

It's much more fun making bad decisions when you're a septuagenarian.

[-] victorz@lemmy.world 3 points 18 hours ago

Because forced by society machine

[-] madeinthebackseat@lemmy.world 7 points 16 hours ago

It's not that we're solely dumb and incapable of intelligence, it's that many, if not most, will seek the solution with the lowest energy required. In turn, AI is creating a spiraling of learning and knowledge acquisition.

Who knows where civilization lands in 20 years.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 39 points 20 hours ago

You haven't ran into someone doing this on work emails?

They don't read the full email they get, just far enough to see if they got what they want. Then they plug it into an AI, and tell it to respond, then copy/paste it back to Outlook and hit reply.

They'll keep doing that, over and over. And it usually ends up with them insisting on a meeting to "discuss" where they essentially get in a loop of "it'll work, just do it"

And it's like pulling fucking teeth to get them to admit the only thing they're basing that on, is a chatbot told them it would work.

People are worried about the kids, and we should be, but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they've got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent. Couple with Covid related IQ drops and the fact that time is linear and we'll keep getting older...

Society is fucked.

We need to seriously treat AI like an addictive drug that people aren't capable of limiting themselves with.

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 12 points 16 hours ago

I don't need to use AI to not read my colleagues' emails

[-] Doomsider@lemmy.world 2 points 7 hours ago

They don't either, that is the neat part. AI will step in and answer the email for both parties which neither will care about or read.

[-] WesternInfidels@feddit.online 10 points 17 hours ago

but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they’ve got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent.

Look here, I'm an adult who uses AI all the time and you need to understand that the people of Madagascar waft blissfully through the tropical waters en masse.

[-] phutatorius@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 hour ago

Yeah, now I'm imagining the smell of vanilla. Thanks for that.

[-] MonaySimpson@lemmy.ml 4 points 14 hours ago

Thanks. This + OP has given me an idea. In going to add white text before my signature. Something along the Madagascar lines, or maybe just to agree with my email and and the conversation.

[-] HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 7 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

They’ll keep doing that, over and over. And it usually ends up with them insisting on a meeting to “discuss” where they essentially get in a loop of “it’ll work, just do it”

And it’s like pulling fucking teeth to get them to admit the only thing they’re basing that on, is a chatbot told them it would work.

Strange. I am experiencing the same. In one case, I had to make, after six months of discussing an interface, an end-to-end test to show it didn't work and their, ahem, unit tests failed to show that. That was for a stepper motor interface and driver with three essential methods.

This guy is senior software architect at my workplace.

Boss insisting that I get to an agreement with him on ai usage.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 5 points 18 hours ago

Boss insisting that I get to an agreement with him on ai usage.

Because most bosses don't understand if one person is using a bunch of AI, that almost always means everyone else is spending a lot of time behind the scenes making it workable.

They want AI to cut workers, so one worker using AI and touching a lot of things looks great...

As long as the other humans are there to clean up the mess, the AI users appears super productive.

But then when managers layoff everyone that doesn't use AI because they're not as productive, chickens roost and you realize no one still in the building actually knows their own work let alone the wider product

Even if caught before layoffs, by the time a worker's over reliance on AI is noticed, that employee can often no longer function without it.

But besides all that:

Anyone that expects employers to still pay for tokens a decade from now is insane. We're gonna see people taking 100k salary, and spend >50% of that on AI tokens themselves.

There's no way American corporations will keep shouldering the cost, they'll push that off onto the employees the second they can.

[-] HWKII@lemmy.world 3 points 16 hours ago

People who use AI to do this at work, were doing it before AI too, just manually. Half-reading emails, restating the obvious, asking off topic questions and demanding meetings without purpose has been a norm in my career field for 20 years. Especially amongst middle managers.

[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 4 points 15 hours ago

The difference is they're lazy...

With AI they can "produce" and everyone else that's lazy doesn't notice it's gibberish.

The only people who realize it, are the ones who were always doing the work.

Those people were usually already struggling to pick up the slack. But now all the lazy idiots reply with multiple page emails and once you're dealing with 5-6 of them at once, it's impossible to keep up.

It's a literal gosh gallop attack, you can't address all the ways everyone's chatbot is wrong, and every email can I troduce multiple new issues while completely dropping the issue the chatbot insisted was most important.

So yeah....

The problem isn't new, it always existed

But now the issue is 10x the volume to get cleaned up

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[-] stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca 17 points 20 hours ago

Most people who use AI to write something can't be bothered to make sure it is correct. It pisses me off at work so bad when someone "writes" a document or does "research" with AI and just copy pastes it into an email without actually reading to see if it makes sense.

I got so pissed of a couple months ago when people were telling me about a "great research document" that someone put together for something we had coming up that we desperately needed information about. As soon as they shared the document to me I realized it was completely AI generated and 1/3 of it didn't make a lick of sense. I wanted to yell at the person who created it to at least take 10 minutes to delete all of the obviously incorrect crap.

[-] urushitan@kakera.kintsugi.moe 20 points 19 hours ago

You've hit the nail on the head. What you're describing isn't just laziness — it's a fundamental breakdown of trust in the modern workplace. Let's delve into this.

Here's the thing: when someone copy-pastes AI output without reading it, the document was never the deliverable — the verification was the deliverable. The prose isn't load-bearing; the checking is. A document nobody read isn't a document — it's a liability with formatting.

And that's the thing, isn't it? Is the AI actually the problem here? No — the workflow is. This genuinely comes down to ownership:

  • Trust erodes silently. Every unchecked paragraph is a small withdrawal from a shared account nobody audits — until the balance is zero.
  • Verification is idempotent. Ten minutes of reading costs the same whether you do it once or a hundred times — but skipping it compounds.
  • The failure isn't technical — it's cultural. No review, no judgment, no accountability.

This is exactly the kind of thing that starts as one bad research doc and scales — from a single email, to a team norm, to an entire organization quietly outsourcing its thinking. In today's fast-paced world, the ability to say "I read this and I stand behind it" isn't just a soft skill — it's a superpower, and honestly? A testament to the rich tapestry of what human-AI collaboration could be.

Ultimately, your colleague didn't fail to use AI correctly — they failed to be the human in the loop. The tool didn't remove their judgment. They left it at the door.

I hope this helps! Would you like me to draft a one-page best-practices memo your team can circulate? 🚀

/s in case this isn't blatantly obvious

[-] fluxx@mander.xyz 17 points 18 hours ago

Ugh... I don't know whether to upvote or downvote...

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 4 points 16 hours ago

If you actually wrote this out, that's way more effort for a bit than I would have put forth

[-] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 4 points 16 hours ago

You’ve hit the nail on the head.

This phrase is VERY popular with LLMs, I've noticed.

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip 4 points 16 hours ago
[-] samus12345@sh.itjust.works 3 points 15 hours ago

I haven't seen that particular phrase singled out as being super common with LLMs before, so I was just remarking on it.

[-] BillyClark@piefed.social 4 points 14 hours ago

I worked in software for, well, let's say 20 years, at some elite places, too. And the one thing that I never understood was how few people ever bothered "to make sure it is correct," as you put it, even before this new problem with AI. They didn't even bother to make sure it was correct even when they wrote it themselves.

You don't know how many times I've been sent a request to review code, and it should have only been like 20 lines of code, but instead it was page after page of irrelevant stuff, because they created the review from the wrong baseline. But they never even took a single look at it before they sent it to me.

So many people don't write tests for their code that generally my biggest achievement at any given assignment was creating test frameworks that let them write tests using domain specific language, because it made it much easier. At a certain point, if it's easy enough, even those people will write tests, especially if they know that I'll be doing the review.

I honestly don't see AI code as being all that different. People still don't even do the minimum, but they just get exposed and embarrassed more easily.

[-] morto@piefed.social 1 points 11 hours ago

The biggest lie that people tell these days is that they proofread ai content lol

[-] lIlIlIlIlIlIl@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago

Yeah but how many caught it? More than we’ll ever know

[-] Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca 4 points 19 hours ago

Article said 32 out of 35.

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this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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