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MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

aiandeducation.mit.edu

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Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#81

Post by cs_throwaway »

JLO64 wrote: post #76

> In a listening session with instructors, we learned that some were considering using AI agents as research assistants instead of hiring undergraduates as UROPs. If researchers at a well funded institution like MIT are seriously considering replacing hiring undergrads with LLMs, I can just imagine how researchers at schools with less funding are open to it. I never did research as part of my undergrad (something I r…

If you know how to use an agent, and I do, you can have do in minutes what would take a undergrad all summer to do.

But undergrad research has always served two roles: getting my work done and the pleasure of giving the best students the chance to go beyond the curriculum, which is designed for the average student.

I think the impact of AI on undergrad research opportunities will be zero. The bigger impact is reduced science funding. I have directed lots of PhD student grant funding to undergrads who deserved it. I don’t see myself doing that in the near future.

Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#82

Post by wafflemaker »

plasticchris wrote: post #45
ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but as a K-12 administrator, I sadly have to tell you this is just about one of the more substantive things I have seen. Yes, it's 95% fluff, but there is a real admission here that the guidance really ought to accept that there will be a whole host of tasks/assignments that kids engage in where the assumption SHOULD be that they basically will leverage AI, and that for their own benefit, resources should be set…

It will only get harder. From the trenches in tech it’s hard enough to get people who should know better to put in the work to understand the ai output. For education I can’t imagine. You might have to resort to actual discussion in classrooms instead of homework, with the accompanying need for both more educators and higher quality therein. Which isn’t going to be easy when education is fully under regulatory captur…

>K-12

K-12 means the public school system in USA & canada. It consists of kindergarten, elementary , middle and high schools, encompassing 12 grades/classes, each taking one year to complete.

Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#83

Post by ygouzerh »

"Since AI excels at tasks like coding and some types of design, instructors can now assign projects that are much more ambitious." --> it's quite true.

For example, we never had time to learn well for example CI/CD in my years.

It's something that takes time to build (feedback loop is around 10 to 20 min for pipelines, instead of 1 min when coding something), and become quite costly for trial and error in term of time.

But it's now 60% of my work as DevOps Engineer, and a big part of other devs/lead devs work. They are a lot of good and bad practices.

We could imagine a class to learn about how to build proper CI/CD pipelines and experiment --> philosophies, different patterns, testing different caching strategy, etc

Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#84

Post by 21wa »

losvedir wrote: post #65

I think you can tell who still has the ability to read long form content by whether they thought this was full of fluff or decently actionable. I think the bolded parts of section 3 are definitely not fluff. I found the document pretty interesting.

Yes, only MIB (Massachusetts Institute of Bureaucracy) alumni have the capacity of understanding such an august publication!

Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#85

Post by ghaff »

peri-cl wrote: post #80
ghaff wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not an LLM and use em-dashes and they were house style in my last 20+ years of employment. The whole em dashes == AI thing needs to just stop.

Speaking about style choices, I was curious why you sometimes use the 'f' from the Latin Extended-B block, U+0192, in your comments. I've never seen that before! (I'd meant to ignore it but you seem to be soliciting typography discussions...)

Probably a fat finger of some sort or it came through a copy and paste. Nothing I do deliberately.

Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#86

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

phasefactor wrote: post #15
16bitvoid wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

97% human-written

I guess prolific em-dashes is not considered a sign of LLM writing anymore.

Do you think LLMs invented the em dash? Pre LLM, em dashes were a sign of pretentiousness. Which is why LLMs learned to use them, and why a document produced by a university has plenty of them.

Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#87

Post by ChicagoBoy11 »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #53
plasticchris wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will only get harder. From the trenches in tech it’s hard enough to get people who should know better to put in the work to understand the ai output. For education I can’t imagine. You might have to resort to actual discussion in classrooms instead of homework, with the accompanying need for both more educators and higher quality therein. Which isn’t going to be easy when education is fully under regulatory captur…

Maybe it just requires approaching the problem differently. What about the vulcan study pod things? Have the discussion with the AI itself. Have the AI regularly assess understanding.

So this is an alternative that I actually don't object to at all, but you still need to create mechanisms where you then get at the quality of the mental models formed without the assistance of AI. My (very unpopular) hot take is that some of this will actually usher in a new era of "standardized test"-like things; we will be far more permissive about how/in what ways students/professionals acquire knowledge, and the real task will now shift from that to guaranteeing that there is some competency that was reached with the assurance that it isn't masked by an outside influence.

If you basically assume that everyone can and will cheat at all times, then you can let yourself be far more agnostic about it AS LONG as you are confident in some ability to measure the person's skill without the tools.

Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#88

Post by FabHK »

jacobolus wrote: post #36
tyrabound wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually not em-dashes, they are en-dashes, which is either intentionally to deceive (e.g., swapped) or used incorrectly. Both of which are bad, it's up to everyone to decide on which is worse coming from MITality.

Spaced en dashes – like this – are a correct and accepted typographical choice. Whether to use spaced en dashes or (spaced or unspaced) em dashes is a matter of taste or local convention, and varies from one publication to another. Other than a typo or two where the space was left out on one side of a dash, the dashes in this linked document are just fine. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dash#En_dash_versus_em_dash

Sad that people now consider basic knowledge of typography, punctuation, and orthography a sign of AI.

Re: MIT's Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training

#89

Post by ali_alkhazraji »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #87
fc417fc802 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it just requires approaching the problem differently. What about the vulcan study pod things? Have the discussion with the AI itself. Have the AI regularly assess understanding.

So this is an alternative that I actually don't object to at all, but you still need to create mechanisms where you then get at the quality of the mental models formed without the assistance of AI. My (very unpopular) hot take is that some of this will actually usher in a new era of "standardized test"-like things; we will be far more permissive about how/in what ways students/professionals acquire knowledge, and the…

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