It's absolutely terrifying. I am a returning student to uni in my thirties and the only person not using any AI. They literally depend on it.

I just had a classmate the other day turn to me, frustrated, saying "You ever ask chat(gpt) a question and it gives you a whole, like, paragraph you then have to read? like, why can't it simplify it?"

Did I mention I am an electrical/computer engineering double major? So yeah, even reading is too much for these kids. Future workforce is fucking cooked.

So much ai slop in the professional world too

No shit. LLMs are the anti-thesis of education. The basis of which is hands on practice. Using a glorified autocomplete-my-assignments should be barred from education without exception.

This is the tip of the iceberg. The world is facing a critical collapse of profession. We're nearing a point that was foretold ins sci-fi where humans no longer understand how the machine works.Just that they can use it and it works.

Except sci-fi was too optimistic. Science fiction has actual AGI. We have glorified autocomplete. A non-intelligence.

I've heard much of the same from my friends who teach middle and high schoolers: most alarmingly that they can put information up on the board, ask a question about it, and the students don't even connect that the answer is already in front of their eyes.

And sadly, a very common question they get is: "If AI can do this for me, why do I need to learn it in the first place?"

The worst part is that, in the short-term, the only recourse people have is suing social media and LLM companies, who are awash in cash and happy to settle, or throw their weight behind age verification, which in its various forms poses a security risk. Parents, clearly, are parking their kids in front of screens and unwilling to parent, so that's not something you can depend upon.

I'm just glad I never procreated, but this problem is going to affect us all when these kids try to enter the work force and can't actually do anything.

It seems like a huge pervasive part of modern culture is that success and fortune equal never having to get your hands dirty, never worry about the details, and never learning to figure shit out because you can just pay somebody else to do it (or ask the "AI" to).

Obviously some amount of specialization and delegation is good. That's how you get a society.

But to just exist passively is something else. It's bad for us, and I don't mean that as a moral judgment. Nobody needs certain skills to justify their existence. I mean it in the clinical sense, like that you can be sedentary with more than just your physical body.

The kids who were 12 when the pandemic happened are now 18 and will be having their own kids soon.

what they're doing to push back against the tech.

Classify it as a cheating tool.

The bubble needs to pop yesterday

Then fail them. Oh, that would look bad? The "system "won't allow it? Remind me, what's your fucking job again?

A huge part is the tools they're using to "detect" AI use. My sister in law fought with Grammarly, which she was required to pay for and use by the school, to prove her paper wasn't written by AI.

She spent twenty hours trying to "de-ai" a paper that wasn't written by AI. The only things that worked were using bad grammar and poor sentence structure. The class was pass/fail, and probably for that reason.

It's not really surprising, and there are already quite a few studies on cognitive decline related to AI usage out there. I guess the wide scale effects will only be visible in a few decades, but I suspect it will look a lot like Idiocracy.

On Thursday there was a guy in my history class who was using ChatGPT the entire time.

We were watching a documentary and supposed to take notes on a physical sheet of paper. Some of the boxes on that sheet of paper only needed like 4 or 5 words to get the gist of it.

Having to add AI to the products I work on is destroying my ability to think.

This is a consequence that the Epstein class will welcome and invest more heavily in. And the rest of us will have to deal with literal idiots for the rest of our lives.

in India, it's common to pay someone to take exams. congratulations Doctor

During a conversation with my sister about going back to school to finish her electrical engineering degree she basically said this:

As an older student. What /I/ see is a bunch of students who don't really know how the workforce works, but who HAVE grasped these facts:

1. The school wants you to have a social life. That's why there's all these events, and they cancel class for games and stuff sometimes. So you SHOULD be doing social stuff.

2. It's a dog-eat-dog world, and the only way to get ahead is to use every tool at your disposal, including and especially GenAI.

3. Everybody is doing it, especially the smart people, including the grad students, AND sometimes even the teachers. Even the professionals are like "this is how you can use ChatGPT!"

4. So, to get everything done and have A Good College Experience, obviously you just use ChatGPT! Why spend hours in the library like all those losers?????

And, then, on the other hand, I see:

A bunch of very tired, overworked, overwhelmed teachers who are doing their damndest with students who can't do even half of the bare minimum that was expected when they went through college.

Bending over backwards and then back upwards to pass these kids, by hook or by crook.

Like, people giving 100s of points of extra credit.

People putting together a whole website of specific terms for each unit AND the slide shows from the classes, quizzes that are pass/fail - as in, you get the credit if you take the quiz on time, period, regardless of what you get, so you can use it to review, AND the weekly essays are either:

1. 750 word summary of the reading + answer 4 questions (no word limit) + pose two questions about the text, no specifc formatting required.

OR

2. 250 word reflection: how does what we learned apply to your life? No specific format required.

I was writing 5 page research papers for classes my first year of college. What the fuck. What the fuck.

(She went back to school to finish her degree)

You're telling me you can't write a 750 word SUMMARY that doesn't need to be formatted beyond "put your name on it and use punctuation"?????????

The classes themselves are not hard. IF you have a good grounding in logic and math and writing. Which these people DO NOT.

They have a good grounding in letting ChatGPT do the work for them and letting the teacher tell them how to do everything.

And goddamn I might get 77s because I can't do algebra and I can't do math fast enough to finish a test.

But at least I'm not failing because I can't THINK.

She also mentioned that a lot of professors are kind of trying to walk the thin line between failing students (who will then go to places like "ratemyprofessor.com and leave what essentially amount to bad reviews which can threaten their employment), and passing students who aren't actually grasping the basics and I think social media is just compounding the problem because of that.

Imagine working in fast food and already getting complaints all the time and then having to worry about someone putting you on a rate my server website where they trash talk you and you have no recourse to have that information taken down.

At least with yelp it's not first and last names and it's the business that takes the flak.

I would like to think if I were a student, that I would use AI to explain things to me that I had too much anxiety to ask. I'd probably to use it to do my homework but to mainly check that I did it right? I'd "like" to think that but I wonder how the temptation would get me to just shortcut it ...?

I'm in software and we have to use it for work. There's some toxic positivity going around with it and everyone is just saying how they don't write code any more and how proud they are of that. They even turn their nose at me because I don't use it as much because I'm lower on the Cursor dashboards than them. I like using AI to explain things to me but I'm mainly a senior so I don't write as much code, I actually spend more time reading and it's far more arduous. We actually have juniors turning into prompt monkeys were they just put everything into AI and if you ask them why, they just put your question into AI and giving it back to you. To be clear, that's been happening to other seniors that work with them. If it was me, I'd rip them apart and tell them I can find a quick way to cut cost in the company if they don't wanna learn anything.

So, it's all going to plan then?

I’d say that social media platforms opened that door a long time a go. A bunch of people telling others what’s cool, what “truth” is being hidden from you, click here for the “fact” you won’t believe, how to do anything but actually think critically about what you’re presented with. People search social media for answers before they look at wikipedia, forget considering a summary from actual scientific sites.

Coupled with algorithms pushing tailored engagement bait over boring facts and AI just wraps it all up in a top search result shoehorned above 10 “Sponsored” links and SEO garbage, there’s no room for boring old critical thought and truth anymore.