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Students fight back over course taught by AI

theguardian.com

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Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#101

Post by marstall »

IAmBroom wrote: post #43
marstall wrote: post #14

I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.

Well, that's certainly one piece of anecdata. I guess that refutes the experience of all the college students.

sorry, i didn't even read the article because I have everything blocked. From the comments, whatever it is it sounds terrible.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#102

Post by marstall »

cogman10 wrote: post #36
marstall wrote: post #14

I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.

But you aren't a student paying for a university education presumably taught by someone that has experience in the field. Perhaps the insights are good or bad and that's fine if you can correct later with a conversation with your doctor. But would you want a doctor trained by the same AI? Importantly, you have no idea what part or what percentage of the conversation was accurate. How much of it was a hallucination fr…

I have the sense overall, from talking to it about aspects of his condition that I understand well, and also using it as a coding assistant in work, that by and large it's on point.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#103

Post by beej71 »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #60
IAmBroom wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teaching isn't bi directional. ... said no decent teacher, ever. The flows aren't symmetrical, but they are bidirectional.

[flagged]

>"Those who can’t do… teach"

I worked two decades in industry. Worked at megacorps, in games, at startups, and co-founded a successful company. I was pretty good at what I did. Not the best, but pretty good.

And then I got humbled by trying to teach.

It's a completely different skill. It's the hardest, most rewarding job I've ever had.

So when I hear this line, I think, "Try it. Try to be a good teacher and see how well you do." Because I thought I'd be a good teacher, too... until I tried it. 7 years in and I'm still working my ass off trying to improve, and I now have enough skill to know that I have a long way to go.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#104

Post by graemep »

HeinzStuckeIt wrote: post #47
_yvnd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All universities outside of the US Edit: Apparently not. Thanks for the insight, I stand corrected. I really should think twice before posting!

Your post is very naive. In the UK, some universities are so dependent now on foreign students paying high fees to break even, that it has been widely reported in the media. And in a few EU countries, polytechnics have been upgraded to university status (at least in their English-language names) in order to attract fee-paying students from the developing world. Finnish polytechnics, for example, run whole marketing c…

British universities do the same marketing. Seen it there.

The problem in the UK has been ridiculous the expansion of universities. if we shut at least half of them down, reduced some of the others in size, there would be a lot more money for the rest.

AI teaching is the opposite of what the best universities do, which is things like small group tutorials on top of face to face lectures.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#105

Post by marstall »

GJim wrote: post #82
marstall wrote: post #14

I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.

> I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, Which percentage? And how important/misleading was that particular percentage? (As an aside, personally, I precent the term 'bullshits' to 'hallucinating'; the latter is the daft Silicon Valley term.)

i guess i'd rather have the understanding it's offering me, with a smudge of, sure, call it bullshit, than not know it at all.

If you think about it, there is no source out there that is unimpeachable, and there is a need to consult many sources to get closer to the truth. triple all that for a rare disease.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#106

Post by marstall »

locallost wrote: post #17
marstall wrote: post #14

I just had a pretty amazing 4 hour session with gpt 5.1 going over my son's rare disease. Chat broke it all down for me in a really deep and clear way in the back and forth. Insights I've never gotten to from talking to docs, reading papers, reading bio textbooks etc. I guess some small percentage of it was hallucinated, but if you want to call it a teacher/student relationship, it was pretty amazing.

I've had this experience as well, but I also noticed I am much less blown away when the information is put to the test. So I don't trust it anymore, at best it's a good start.

What kind of area were you talking to it about?

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#107

Post by lenkite »

tekne wrote: post #9
zulban wrote: post #7

It has been many years that most courses in most universities have inferior lectures than just watching a great series of YouTube videos. Many professors have no passion or training in teaching, they just want to do research. Or they have no time or pay to prepare a course. So of course they use AI slop wherever they can. Even if they record their lectures, that's almost never better than the best free ones out there…

When I started undergrad, my father told me that university was not for learning; that was what the Internet was for, and since I was in tech; it wasn't quite for proving myself either: that was internships and portfolio. It was, rather, for the people. And a place to grow up. That matters too.

> It was, rather, for the people. And a place to grow up. That matters too.

Now, you can "grow up" and "matter" with Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok etc. They are "people", you know ?

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#108

Post by HiroProtagonist »

morkalork wrote: post #8

Tangent: There's a short story I vaguely remember from when I was young about a kid being raised in a bunker after a nuclear war and the big twist was that all his friends he went to school with (virtually on the TV screen) were just AIs to keep him company. I could never find it again though, even when interrogating google or chatgpt I couldn't find it. Anyone else know of this story?

The story you’re recalling is “Just Deserts,” a short story by M. T. Anderson. It appears in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (2011), an anthology edited by Chris Van Allsburg where various authors wrote tales to match Van Allsburg’s mysterious illustrations. In “Just Deserts,” a lone child is raised in a simulated town after an apocalyptic event (implied nuclear war). He attends “school” and interacts with other children via screens, only to discover – in a scene involving a hollow pumpkin – that his parents and classmates are all artificial constructs created to keep him company. This twist reveals he is the last real child on Earth. The story was first published in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Houghton Mifflin, 2011).

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#109

Post by pants2 »

camdenreslink wrote: post #97
zkmon wrote: post #12

Outrageous at the least. These universities already became so commercial that they show photos of some Victorian era buildings as their campus, but most students never set foot in those buildings, as all classrooms are held in rented building outside of campus, and the main buildings are kept only as ornamental pieces. Also, there are hardly any good teachers left. Most are hired on sharing basis, who shuttle between…

If you live in a city with multiple colleges/universities check out the cars in the staff parking lot. Many will have parking passes/stickers for multiple colleges on there. These are adjuncts that have to drive all over town to cobble together a full time job as an instructor.

My experience with adjunct professors is they're much better at teaching than old tenured professors who just want to do their research and couldn't care less about the students.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#110

Post by wartywhoa23 »

palmotea wrote: post #34

> But after a term of AI-generated slides being read, at times, by an AI voiceover, James said he had lost faith in the programme and the people running it, worrying he had “used up two years” of his life on a course that had been done “in the cheapest way possible”. This is the future guys, get used to it. The upside is Sam Altman will get really, really rich.

But muh vibe coding :/

I'm now able to create a fucking shit nobody will ever care about in no time!

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