Idk, I think we're back to "it depends on how you use it". Once upon a time, the same was said of the internet in general, because people could just go online and copy and paste shit and share answers and stuff, but the Internet can also just be a really great educational resource in general. I think that using LLMs in non load-bearing "trust but verify" type roles (study buddies, brainstorming, very high level information searching) is actually really useful. One of my favorite uses of ChatGPT is when I have a concept so loose that I don't even know the right question to Google, I can just kind of chat with the LLM and potentially refine a narrower, more google-able subject.

The moment that we change school to be about learning instead of making it the requirement for employment then we will see students prioritize learning over "just getting through it to get the degree"

Only topic I am close-minded and strict about.

If you need to cheat as a highschooler or younger there is something else going wrong, focus on that.

And if you are an undergrad or higher you should be better than AI already. Unless you cheated on important stuff before.

It’s funny how everyone is against using AI for students to get summaries of texts, pdfs etc which I totally get.

But during my time through medschool, I never got my exam paper back (ever!) so the exam was a test where I needed to prove that I have enough knowledge but the exam is also allowed to show me my weaknesses are so I would work on them but no, we never get out papers back. And this extends beyond medschool, exams like the USMLE are long and tiring at the end of the day we just want a pass, another hurdle to jump on.

We criticize students a lot (righfully so) but we don’t criticize the system where students only study becase there is an exam, not because they are particularly interested in the topic at given hand.

A lot of topics that I found interesting in medicine were dropped off because I had to sit for other examinations.

Even more concerning, their dependance on AI will carry over into their professional lives, effectively training our software replacements.

Students turn in bullshit LLM papers. Instructors run those bullshit LLM papers through LLM grading. Humans need not apply.

The issue as I see it is that college is a barometer for success in life, which for the sake of brevity I'll just say means economic success. It's not just a place of learning, it's the barrier to entry - and any metric that becomes a goal is prone to corruption.

A student won't necessarily think of using AI as cheating themselves out of an education because we don't teach the value of education except as a tool for economic success.

If the tool is education, the barrier to success is college, and the actual goal is to be economically successful, why wouldn't a student start using a tool that breaks open that barrier with as little effort as possible?

Even setting aside all of those things, the whole point of school is that you learn how to do shit; not pass it off to someone or something else to do for you.

If you are just gonna use AI to do your job, why should I hire you instead of using AI myself?

galileosballs is the last screw holding the house together i swear

This reasoning applies to everything, like the tariff rates that the Trump admin imposed to each countries and places is very likely based from the response from Chat GPT.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. The only thing AI can, or should be used for in the current era, is templating... I suppose things that don't require truth or accuracy are fine too, but yeah.

You can build the framework of an article, report, story, publication, assignment, etc using AI to get some words on paper to start from. Every fact, declaration, or reference needs to be handled as false information unless otherwise proven, and most of the work will need to be rewritten. It's there to provide, more or less, a structure to start from and you do the rest.

When I did essays and the like in school, I didn't have AI to lean on, and the hardest part of doing any essay was.... How the fuck do I start this thing? I knew what I wanted to say, I knew how I wanted to say it, but the initial declarations and wording to "break the ice" so-to-speak, always gave me issues.

It's shit like that where AI can help.

Take everything AI gives you with a gigantic asterisk, that any/all information is liable to be false. Do your own research.

Given how fast things are moving in terms of knowledge and developments in science, technology, medicine, etc that's transforming how we work, now, more than ever before, what you know is less important than what you can figure out. That's what the youth need to be taught, how to figure that shit out for themselves, do the research and verify your findings. Once you know how to do that, then you'll be able to adapt to almost any job that you can comprehend from a high level, it's just a matter of time patience, research and learning. With that being said, some occupations have little to no margin for error, which is where my thought process inverts. Train long and hard before you start doing the job.... Stuff like doctors, who can literally kill patients if they don't know what they don't know.... Or nuclear power plant techs... Stuff like that.

Well that disqualifies 95% of the doctors I've had the pleasure of being the patient of in Finland.

It's just not LLM:'s they're addicted to, it's bureaucracy.

No child left behind already stripped it from public education...

Because there was zero incentives for a school performing well. And serious repercussions if a school failed multiple years, the worst schools had to focus only what was on the annual test. The only thing that matters was that year's scores, so that was the only thing that got taught.

If a kid got it early. They could be largely ignored so the school could focus on the worst.

It was teaching to the lowest common denominator, and now people are shocked the kids who spent 12 years in that system don't know the things we stopped teaching 20+ years ago.

Quick edit:

Standardized testing is valuable. For lots of rural kids getting 99*'s was how they learned they were actually smart and just for in their tiny schools.

The issue with "no child left behind" was the implementation and demand for swift responses to institutional problems that had been developing for decades. It's the only time moderates and Republicans agreed to do something fast, and it was obviously something that shouldn't be rushed.

With such a generic argument, I feel this smartass would come up with the same shitty reasoning if it came to using calculators and wikipedia or google when those things were becoming mainstream.

Using "AI to get through college" can mean a lot of different things for different people. You definitely don't need AI to "set aside concern for truth" and you can use AI to learn things better/faster.

How people think I use AI "Please write my essay and cite your sources."

How I use it
"please make my autistic word slop that I wrote already into something readable for the nerotypical folk, use simple words, make it tonally neutral. stop using emdashes, headers, and list and don't mess with the quotes"

Gotta say, if someone gets through medical school with AI, we're fucked.

Okay but I use AI with great concern for truth, evidence, and verification. In fact, I think it has sharpened my ability to double-check things.

My philosophy: use AI in situations where a high error-rate is tolerable, or if it's easier to validate an answer than to posit one.

There is a much better reason not to use AI -- it weakens one's ability to posit an answer to a query in the first place. It's hard to think critically if you're not thinking at all to begin with.

We weren't verifying things with our own eyes before AI came along either, we were reading Wikipedia, text books, journals, attending lectures, etc, and accepting what we were told as facts (through the lens of critical thinking and applying what we're told as best we can against other hopefully true facts, etc etc).

I'm a Relaxed Empiricist, I suppose :P Bill Bailey knew what he was talking about.