"You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here" • Hacker News Board

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#261

Post by fennecfoxy » Fri, Oct 06, 2023, 10:35 AM UTC

gustavus wrote: post #3

AI Detection services are the oiliest of snake oils. Seems like education is going to need to change drastically in the next few years. Maybe we'll go all the way back to oral examinations again.

As per usual the problem isn't the technology or the tools, it's the dumb meatbag using them.

This teacher should have thought "hmm, well if I'm going to pull up students on this then it's probably important I do my own research to make sure that I know that the score means and how reliable it is" but nope.

"LLMs are bad cause people will use them to generate spam and fake news!" LLMs aren't the bad actor there...it's the human doing the spamming.

There is a fine line, though. For example the "guns don't kill people argument" is pretty moot, gun control saves lives. If someone grabs an LLM, tells it to "generate text telling young impressionable teens to kill themselves" and spam it on Twitter...well the human is doing bad stuff but they're still enabled by the LLM. However it's easy to enact something like gun control on a physical object. Software? Well, damn that's gonna a problem - especially when the metric by which these LLMs "do better" is how closely the text resembles a hooman.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#262

Post by fennecfoxy » Fri, Oct 06, 2023, 10:36 AM UTC

GloriousKoji wrote: post #102

gustavus wrote: post #3

AI Detection services are the oiliest of snake oils. Seems like education is going to need to change drastically in the next few years. Maybe we'll go all the way back to oral examinations again.

"The more things change, the more they stay the same." When I was a student decades ago it was when they first introduced anti-plagiarism software. We all had to submit a printed out copy of our book reports along with a floppy disk or cd-rom of our report in the latest Microsoft Word format. Almost the whole class was flagged for plagiarism. Of course the school takes plagiarism very seriously so we all had to have…

Yeah I remember TurnItIn. It sucked hard. And of course all Uni staff put 100% trust in it to be completely infallible and not be a piece of crap bit of software.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#263

Post by ralphc » Fri, Oct 06, 2023, 1:32 PM UTC

Miraste wrote: post #21

_yb2s wrote: post #8

I would sue the teacher and school if this happened to me… total BS. Also plagarism and having other people do your work, or even take exams for you is as old as time. How is AI any different? Some trust is in order here. The students are the ones paying to be educated, if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways.

>if they cheat they are only cheating themselves anyways. I've heard people say this a lot. It's a very old-school liberal arts perspective that doesn't fit with the modern world. In practice, for most students, education is a third-place benefit of university behind 1. the certificate and 2. networking.

It isn't all or nothing. Computer Science degree, and I regularly use the principles I learned in my CS classes, but the required English classes? Not so much. So some "cheating" wouldn't be cheating myself.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#264

Post by HDThoreaun » Fri, Oct 06, 2023, 5:27 PM UTC

pierat wrote: post #258

HDThoreaun wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The point of curves is to differentiate the students. Students who don’t understand do and the material should be failed, it that doesn’t tell us who should get A vs B vs C

"Do they proficiently understand the topic?" Should be met with a trinary answer: YES, NO, WITHDRAW. We should not encourage stack ranking (or a curve) as a way to stratify students because they joined the class with too many smarter people. Go read up about stack ranking, and why it's a horrific practice. In a "grade on a curve" situation, it benefits you to drop the class if there's too many people you think smarte…

In the end I guess it comes down to what the point of undergrad is. Imo we have completely left the "learn stuff" era and are in the "differentiate yourself to employers" era. That means that stack ranking is largely the point, even if it has many downsides.

Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#265

Post by phoebeannabel » Sat, Oct 07, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

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Re: "You have a 27% 'AI' issue in here"

#266

Post by logicalmonster » Mon, Oct 09, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

vineyardmike wrote: post #208

nicbou wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I don't understand is that despite automating more and more of the work away, we seem to have fewer and fewer humans available for anything that's left. I have to scan my own groceries, I can't ever talk to an actual human at any business, I order my food from a machine. Where is everyone?

As you may have heard, in the US at least, there’s record low unemployment. There’s literally not enough people to do those jobs. It’s complex why… 1. Demographic changes means more retirees, and smaller workforce. Literally less people to go around. 2. With low unemployment, everyone’s doing something else. Something harder to automate, or otherwise more valuable. It’s not like people are sitting around unemployed (…

> 1. Demographic changes means more retirees, and smaller workforce. Literally less people to go around.

A small point, but I think what you meant to say here is that there's a greater ratio of retired to employed people than there used to be, which is somewhat different than what you stated.

That said, I think this idea that we necessarily need some incredible amount of low-skill immigration to cover some drastic understaffing is bullshit propaganda put out to achieve bad wages and treatment of workers through basic supply and demand (drastically increasing the supply of labor). Technical innovations such as self-checkout lines and great security cameras and other tools of the modern age mean that you need fewer workers to do the same work.

As I think others have pointed out, the unemployment rate figures can be massaged in a lot of ways to be misleading. Actual wages should be the stat that tells you whether or not the workforce is too small. If wages are dropping or stagnant versus inflation, then claims of low unemployment should be considered laughable because otherwise wages would be increasing.