231–240 of 672 posts
One of the most offensive words in the anthropomophization of LLMs is: hallucinate. It's not only an anthropomorphism, it's also a euphemism. A correct interpretation of the word would imply that the LLM has some fantastical vision that it mistakes for reality. What utter bullsh1t. Let's just use the correct word for this type of output: wrong. When the LLM generates a sequence of words, that may or may not be gramma…
I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge…
I think things are going to have to get a lot worse before they get better. If we're lucky, things will get so bad that we finally fix some shaky foundations that our society has been trying to ignore for decades (or even centuries). If we're not lucky, things will still get that bad but we won't fix them.
A bit off-topic, but I think AI has the potential to supercharge learning for the students of the future. Similar to Montessori, LLMs can help students who wander off in various directions. I remember often being “stuck” on some concept (usually in biology and chemistry), where the teacher would hand-wave something as truth, this dismissing my request for further depth. Of course, LLMs in the current educational land…
>>> Of course, LLMs in the current educational landscape (homework-heavy) only benefit the students who are truly curious I think you hit on a major issue: Homework-heavy . What I think would benefit the truly curious is spare time . These things are at odds with one another. Present-day busy work could easily be replaced by occupying kids' attention with continual lessons that require a large quantity of low-quality…
I see both sides of this. When I was a teenager, I went to a pretty bad middle school where there were fights everyday, and I wasn’t learning anything from the easy homework. On the upside, I had tons of free time to teach myself how to make websites and get into all kinds of trouble botting my favorite online games.
My learning always hit a wall though because I wasn’t able to learn programming on my own. I eventually asked my parents to send me to a school that had a lot more structure (and a lot more homework), and then I properly learned math and logic and programming from first principles. The upside: I could code. The downside: there was no free time to apply this knowledge to anything fun
I teach math at a large university (30,000 students) and have also gone “back to the earth”, to pen-and-paper, proctored and exams. Students don’t seem to mind this reversion. The administration, however, doesn’t like this trend. They want all evaluation to be remote-friendly, so that the same course with the same evaluations can be given to students learning in person or enrolled online. Online enrollment is a huge…
It's probably not as bad for mathematical derivations. I still do those by hand since they are more like drawing than expression.
There is a tremendous lack of understandings between the genx and millennial teachers and the way they see and use AI, and how younger people are using it. Kids use AI like an operating system, seamlessly integrated into their workflows, their thinking, their lives. It’s not a tool they pick up and put down; it’s the environment they navigate, as natural as air. To them, AI isn’t cheating—it’s just how you get things…
I assume it's because many of the commenters of this post are skewed towards academia, and perhaps view the disruption by AI to the traditional methods of grading student work as a challenge to their profession.
As we have seen many times throughout history, when disruptive forces of technical or demographic changes or a new set of market forces occurs, incumbents often struggle to adapt to the new situation.
Established traditional education is a massive ship to turn around.
Your comments contain much food for thought and deserve to be debated. I agree with you that educators should not be branding students as cheaters. Using AI in an educational context is a rational and natural thing to do, especially for younger students.
> ... AI as some profane mimicry of the human mind ignores how it’s already reshaping cognition, not replacing it.
- Yes, this is such an important point and it's why we need enlightened policy making leading to meaningful education reform.
I do disagree with you about incorporating more pen and paper activities - I think this would provide balance and some important key skills.
No doubt AI is challenging to many areas of society, especially education. I'm not saying it's a wonderful thing that we don't need to worry about, but we do need to think deeply about its impacts and how we can harness its positive strengths and radically improve teaching and learning outcomes. It's not about locking students in exam rooms with high tech surveillance.
With AI it's disappointing that the prevalent opinions of many educators are seemingly stuck and struggling to adapt.
Meanwhile society will move on.
Edit: good to see you got a response!
The author is teaching a skill an LLM can do well enough to pass his exams. Is learning English composition in the literary sense now worth what it costs to learn it at a university? That's a very real question now.
What is the alternative, we carry on without people skilled in the English language?
One of the most offensive words in the anthropomophization of LLMs is: hallucinate. It's not only an anthropomorphism, it's also a euphemism. A correct interpretation of the word would imply that the LLM has some fantastical vision that it mistakes for reality. What utter bullsh1t. Let's just use the correct word for this type of output: wrong. When the LLM generates a sequence of words, that may or may not be gramma…
I mark "hallucinations" as "LLM Slop" in my grading sheets, when someone gives me a 100-character sed filter that just doesn't work that there is no way we discussed in class/in examples/in materials, or a made up API endpoint, or non-nonsensical file paths that reference non-existent commands.
Slop is an overused term these days, but it sums it up for me. Slop, from a trough, thrown out by an uncaring overseer, to be greedily eaten up by the piggies, who don't care if its full of shit.
Basically analog thinking is still critical, and schools need to teach it. I have no issues with classrooms bringing back the blue exam books and evaluating learning quality that way.
I teach computer science / programming, and I don't know what a good AI policy is. On the one hand, I use AI extensively for my own learning, and it's helping me a lot. On the other hand, it gets work done quickly and poorly. Students mistake mandatory assignments for something they have to overcome as effortlessly as possible. Once they're past this hurdle, they can mind their own business again. To them, AI is not…
At the time it was optional, but I get the feeling that if they still use that framework, it just became mandatory, because it has no internet facing documentation.
That said, I imagine they might have chucked it in for Unity before AI hit, in which case they are largely out of luck.
>But every year a small handful of dum-dums made it all the way to exam without having connected two dots, and I have to fail them and tell them that the three semesters they have wasted so far without any teachers calling their bullshit is a waste of life and won't lead them to a meaningful existence as a professional programmer.
This happened to me with my 3d maths class, and I was able to power through a second run. But I am not sure I learned anything super meaningful, other than I should have been cramming better.