Haven't we trained everyone to context switch between screens at all times?
I suspect that has something to do with it.
My Students Can't Read
11–20 of 225 posts
Re: My Students Can't Read
#12[flagged]
AI detectors are all garbage, with very high false positive rates.
They use, unwittingly, proxies for "AI" stylometry, with no specific or explicable features they can point to and say "Look! That is evidence that the text is written by AI", as if there were such features in the first place. The best they can do is validate the very lazy one-shot patterns that humans should be able to highlight in the first place.
Anything beyond that - even telling your AI to go use a "humanizer" skill in your prompt - creates a text distribution that is functionally indistinguishable from human generated writing. Throw in the fact that people who use AI will be influenced by the writing, often in positive, beneficial ways, and the software becomes a vicious, punitive tool. It's worse than waving a dowsing rod or pendulum, because the software comes with the implication of legitimacy and fairness.
Re: My Students Can't Read
#13>And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college.
Well… yes. The loans are secured, so it is within the college’s interest to make 13th grade.
>showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests
Claim without data that I see, but ok… going on…
>Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier.
Well, this makes sense. They didn’t write anything. This isn’t ground breaking, they let the students cheat.
>districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding
I remember this first hand.
>The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I’m certain I remember my parents complaining about the same with my generation…
There are probably excellent points around these topics. But… this article doesn’t make the point as well as that kid getting his classmates failing to read a simple sentence on video.
Re: My Students Can't Read
#14[flagged]
pangram is AI garbage spewing AI garbage
Re: My Students Can't Read
#15Haven't we trained everyone to context switch between screens at all times? I suspect that has something to do with it.
I know formerly smart people, the same people are phone addicts. They’re not kids.
It definitely has something to do with it. I’m not convinced the best way to discuss it is long form article. Nor do I know how to fix it, no majority group is going to give up their phones.
Re: My Students Can't Read
#16https://archive.ph/WY1yk
Says unable to connect
Re: My Students Can't Read
#17[flagged]
Ai was trained on news and journal articles and this is the reason we see so many em-dashes as well. The side effect is that good writing is now classified as AI generated, which makes it bad writing. What a messed up world we live in
Re: My Students Can't Read
#18what was the article?
Re: My Students Can't Read
#19>And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. Well… yes. The loans are secured, so it is within the college’s interest to make 13th grade. >showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive test…
I think 13th grade is a stretch. It seems more like they are charging mid six figures to teach grades 6 through 10.
Re: My Students Can't Read
#20> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes.
I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.