this just reinforced my recent belief that the best way to handle the AI boom is to pivot into robotics
College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
251–260 of 451 posts
Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute to download and operate exactly that for free, with performance perhaps a year behind the state of the art.
> but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute Even if we assume that to be true, you severely underestimate how many people that condition excludes.
It doesn't exclude people who attend high schools and colleges that have a computer lab.
Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#253Would this be a good time to post about my AI controlled typewriter project?
A computer controlled typewriter is a thing already. It's called a teletype (tty for short).
Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#254I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, an…
>why aren't they creating schoolwork that requires AI?
Because this makes a subscription a requirement for education, and thus advances the grift that is subscriptions, rent-seeking and dependence on a service. This isn't something we should ingrain into our children from an early age.
Calculators were buy once, use forever. Subscriptions to slop generators are a long term dependency and I want my children to not be exposed to that until they can decide for themselves.
Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#255I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, an…
At this stage, I can no longer take comparing LLMs to calculators as a good faith argument. That’s a talking point, a framing device, one whose flaws have been explained ad nauseam (as exemplified by the sibling replies), and I’m left questioning either the reasoning abilities or the honesty of those still making it.
They. Are not. The same.
Have you ever known people to commit suicide, kill, or give themselves rare diseases because of their calculators? How about people dating their calculator and going batshit for a software update?
Not to mention learning to do on your own is a useful skill to teach you to think, and an essential skill to (as you suggest) verify answers. People not understanding how things work is exactly why they take bullshit output from an LLM as gospel.
I also note that such arguments tend to be profoundly selfish and self-centred. Your anecdote happened to have an outcome you enjoyed and benefitted from, but I bet that wasn’t the reality for all your colleagues. Just like you are glad for the calculators in your class, some other student may be glad for the lack of them in theirs and it may be the reason they got into their field of study.
Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
No projects, no labs, no teamwork, no papers? What a narrow set of skills to send into your economy.
Given the way things are going, not knowing how to use AI will be like coming out not knowing about revision control
Weaponized FOMO to drive everyone to use AI isn't really a great idea
Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment is framed like "giving a student a personal AI datacenter to carry with them" is unrealistic, but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute to download and operate exactly that for free, with performance perhaps a year behind the state of the art.
> but in fact it is easy for anyone with access to $1000-$2000 worth of compute Even if we assume that to be true, you severely underestimate how many people that condition excludes.
There are simpler LLMs that run on much cheaper devices and are still helpful for baseline tasks. Of course they are prone to hallucinating once they reach the limits of their world knowledge, but this also changes their effectiveness in an educational context: they can help you polish a paper (much of their reliable knowledge is about language, syntax and style/pragmatics of the input texts), but you still have to plan the writing on your own.
Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#258I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, an…
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Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#259Reading all these comments, I feel like US universities are a joke. I had to do all the exams in person. 100% of the grade was decided at the exam. Millions of people graduated this way and they are fine. No students were harmed in the process.
I agree fully. Not sure what they are on about, with "no labs??" in the replies.
You still do all the same things, and they are graded, but this doesn't affect your final grade. Instead, you need to pass a threshold to enter the exam, which is then graded.
The US isn't so amazing at this, it simply can be done better. Recognizing where you can improve and from whom you can learn is a great first step to ACTUAL improvement.
Re: College instructor turns to typewriters to curb AI-written work
#260I'm old enough to remember a similar controversy over whether to allow calculators in math classes. While most schools were banning them to force kids to learn how to do math without them, my school went the other way. They mandated that every student had one and then changed the assignments and tests to account for it. Gone were questions that had whole number answers that could be computed in our heads. Instead, an…
So, scientific calculators
- made tasks easy that were a necessary prerequisite for advanced math (basic arithmetic), but not what the lesson was supposed to be about
- could in theory also let students skip over what they were supposed to be learning (applying the correct operations in the correct order to solve a problem) but doing so would require programming or getting a program from someone else, which the teachers probably figured was a high-enough hurdle to accept the risk
Hence, scientific calculators helped teachers by removing unnecessary friction.
Meanwhile, current LLMs
- will happily attempt to do the student's entire homework for them
- cannot reliably be restricted in functionality to leave the part the students are supposed to do themselves to the student
Hence, LLMs undermine teachers by removing necessary effort.
Sure, in theory LLMs could enable even more focused lessons by removing even bigger unnecessary frictions (e.g. in history class, have a LLM scour a large collection of primary sources to exhaustively list passages mentioning a certain topic), but students cannot be trusted to use them this way.
Hence, teachers are trying to use all kinds of tricks to ensure that what they wanted to teach actually passed through the student's brain at some point.