Trash Future repeatedly makes the point that AI chat bots are the inverse of the printing press. The printing press created a way for information to be reliably stored, retrieved, and exchanged. It created a sort of ecosystem where ideas (including competing ideas) could circulate in society.

Chat bots do the opposite. They basically destroy the reliable transmission of information and ideas. Instead of creating reliable records of human thought (models, stories, theories, etc.), it's a black box which randomly messes with averages. It's so fucking harmful

cheating in education in general, AI or not, is more caused by the financial and systemic repercussions of failing. When these students fail a class, it's often another few thousand dollars they don't have down the drain, and if they fail too many classes it locks them out of higher education entirely

failure is one of the biggest drivers of true learning, and the educational system directly discourages it

Kids can't even cheat properly anymore, because of woke

I tried using AI to help find sources for my partners thesis. It's a niche topic on body phenomenology and existentialism in pregnancy and birth. Instead, it cited Heidegger books that don’t even exist. A colleague recommended it, but honestly, you would have to be insane to rely on this.

told them the paper is an "A" if they can show me every quotation and failing otherwise. Does this seem like a fair policy (my thought is -- no matter the method, fabrication of evidence is justification for failing work)?

If the policy for plagiarism at your school is a F on the assignment, that seems fair to me. Asking LLMs to do your work is plagiarism.

(it's writing/research, so like, engaging in a discipline and looking at what's been written before on your topic, etc.)

BTW, I took time to look up some of these sources my student used, couldn't find the quotes they quote, so told them the paper is an "A" if they can show me every quotation and failing otherwise. Does this seem like a fair policy (my thought is -- no matter the method, fabrication of evidence is justification for failing work)?

I think they will learn an important life lesson: that if they're going to cheat, then they have to, at a minimum, be sure that they are at least "getting the right answer". The tide of AI dystopia is unstoppable, but you can at least teach them that they can't just completely shut their brains off to the extent that they are just presenting completely fabricated research and factual claims.

Seems a fair policy. I like to imagine if you stress this policy up front in advance, students might actually check and verify all their own sources (and thus actually do their own research even with ai stuff)

Using AI to write papers for a writing class is like using speech to text for a touch typing course. You’re bypassing the exercises that will actually provide the value you’re paying for

I'm going back to school for my Master's degree. I am in my 30s and I have realized that "Generative AI" does nothing but cheat me out of learning. Using AI for your homework/assignments does nothing but outsource your thinking and learning to the machine. It makes you dumber.

BTW, I took time to look up some of these sources my student used, couldn't find the quotes they quote, so told them the paper is an "A" if they can show me every quotation and failing otherwise. Does this seem like a fair policy (my thought is -- no matter the method, fabrication of evidence is justification for failing work)?

Most class syllabuses I've seen tie LLM into the same category as plagiarism. That's an automatic failure on the assignment and sometimes failure of the class.

It seems 100% fair to me. Using AI will be a big part of the future, but if your class is about a particular set of skills that don't involve asking Computer-Daddy to do your homework for you then good on you for trying to ensure it.

if two students are using exact same (unneeded) variable in a script, did they do similar prompt or do they talk to each other

fucking hate this shit, something which could be done in like 20 lines of code is like 200. I don't particularly have to care, cause i'm not teaching programming but jesus christ

Your policy is fair, because then your students would hypothetically actually use their damn brains a tiny bit, which is what school should be about

I would also posit that any false quotation could just be docked one letter grade, so 5 of them is an F

I had to do this in like 2008 for a humanities course about web 2.0, because my paper was about forum types and how different designs had different outcomes, etc. I literally could find almost no relevant stuff to quote so eventually I just fully bullshitted lol.

Pass Fail Verbal exams. Seriously just ask them a random very simple question about their paper and if they cant answer it then 0%.

This bypasses the AI problem because if they've gone to all the trouble of making a fake paper and then learning it's bullshit by heart then hopefully they've learned something about how papers are written, even if by accident.

I was in conversation with a friend who works in tech and we were talking about a thing that we wanted to find some science on. So I found a paper on it and started to read, but before I got done he replied by sending me a chat gpt summary of the paper. And I could already tell it wasn't correct from reading it myself even a little. What I really wanted to say to him was that I'd rather think for myself, tyvm.

If students are all doing this now, nobody will think of anything themselves anymore or form an actual deep understanding of a thing, be it whatever. Not really. Anyone who has done reading knows how that shapes us and then can develop into something deeper. It's the f'n "innovation" these same tech types go on and on about that dies with this tech.

Fail them on the first fake citation. Does your uni have SafeAssign or Turnitin?

I'm getting my Masters right now at a college that has a really big foreign student population, particularly Desi people. I was in a class with this one kid who straight up did not speak English, like not he spoke it poorly or with a heavy accent, just did not speak it at all. He had ChatGPT on his laptop every class. At the end of the semester we had student presentations, this kid presented a slide show that was clearly made by AI, bad images and all, and kept trying to speak English phonetically. It was awkward as fuck.

Your policy is fine, but what matters is the schools academic integrity rules and procedures. Usually you have to report it if you suspect they cheated or plagiarized.

I've heard some schools have given up on AI though and just refuse to pursue it. Made up citations is an easy catch though.

being a teacher has to be absolute hell these days, I'm so sorry

I would make having photo evidence of the citations available on request a prerequisite. They all have cell phones that can make this process very easy and screenshots of course are trivial.

"Tell you what Bawby, back in mah day, we used to type the main topic of our homework on wikipedia, paraphrase the best quotes, and then copy and paste the citation links for those quotes into the same citation generator the teacher would recommend in the class syllabus. Gosh darn kids don't even know how to bullshit their work enough for an overworked public school teacher to give it a B-."

Is this for a creative writing course? Because wtf

Shit like this makes me kinda glad I dropped out rather than continue in higher ed. I can see how like 80% of my classmates back then would be the people using AI now. Maybe I'll go back to school for something worthwhile one day, I did have some decent philosophy and sociology professors, but the in-major stuff was just utterly useless.

I don't even know why this inspires this sort of reaction in me, I wasn't the type to use AI for everything, and I actually was starting to kinda enjoy writing papers towards the end, it wouldn't have affected me personally much in that sense, but (among many other things) being surrounded by people who fundamentally didn't care and did their best to cheat through it, or who had clearly been failed by their prior education, was pretty demoralizing, so I guess this lands in that category