241–250 of 672 posts
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.
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…
Teachers and professors: you can say "no". Your students will thank you in the future.
I would go further than that, along two axes: it's not just AI and it's not just young people.
An increasing proportion of our economy is following a drug dealer playbook: give people a free intro, get them hooked, then attach your siphon and begin extracting their money. The subscription-model-ization of everything is an obvious example. Another is the "blitzscaling" model of offering unsustainably low prices to drive out competition and/or get people used to using something that they would never use if they had to pay the true cost. More generally, a lot of companies are more focused on hiding costs (environmental, psychological, privacy, etc.) from their customers than on actually improving their products.
Alcohol, gambling, and sex, are things that we more or less trust adults to do sensibly and in moderation. Many people can handle that, and there are modest guardrails in place even so (e.g., rules that prevent selling alcohol to drunk people, rules that limit gambling to certain places). I would put many social media and other tech offerings more in the category of dangerous chemicals or prescription drugs or opiates (like the laudanum the article mentions). This would restrict their use, yes, but the more important part is to restrict their production and set high standards for the companies that engage in such businesses.
Basically, you shouldn't be able to show someone --- child or adult --- an infinite scrolling video feed, or give them a GPT-style chatbot, or offer free same-day shipping, without getting some kind of permit. Those things are addictive and should be regulated like drugs.
And the penalties for failing to do everything absolutely squeaky clean should be ruinous. The article mentions one of Facebook's AIs showing CSAM to kids. One misstep on something like that should be the end of the company, with multi-year jail terms for the executives and the venture capitalists who funded the operation. Every wealthy person investing in these kinds of things should live in constant fear that something will go wrong and they will wind up penniless in prison.
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> proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat. If they don’t catch them they don’t have a business model. They have one job. The University of London, Open University and British Council all have 50+ years experience on proctoring university exams for distance learning students and it’s not like Thomson Prometric haven’t thought about how to do it either, even…
Teachers typically also have years, sometimes decades, of experience running exams. Yet I've never seen a teacher that is any good at stopping cheating. And that's in person for the class that they are teaching.
The difference is running exams is a small part of a teacher's job, and almost certainly not the part they're passionate about.
Also proctors demand things I've seen no teacher at any level demand (or be able to demand).
How did we solve this when calculators came along and ruined peoples ability to do mental arithmetic and use slide rulers?
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…
Yeah I feel like teachers are going to try and use LLMs as an excuse to push more of the burden of schooling to their pupils homelife somehow. Like, increasing homework burdens to compensate.
If the trend continues, it seems like most college degrees will be completely worthless. If students using AI to cheat on homework are graduating with a degree, then it has lost all value as a certificate that the holder has completed some minimum level of education and learning. Institutions that award such degrees will be no different than degree mills of the past. I’m just grateful my college degree has the year 2…
The immediate effect was the distrust of the professors towards most everyone and lots classes felt like some kind of babysitting scheme, which I did not appreciate.
To offer a flip side of the coin, I can't imagine I would have the patience outside of school, to have learned Rust this past year without AI. Having a personal tutor who I can access at all hours of the day, and who can answer off hand questions I have after musing about something in the shower, is an incredible asset. At the same time, I can totally believe if I was teleported back to school, it would become a tota…
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Variations in this system are in active use in the US as well. Do you feel it is effective? It seems to me that there is a massive asymmetry in the war here: proctoring services have tiny incentives to catch cheaters. Cheaters have massive incentives to cheat. I expect the system will only catch a small fraction of the cheating that occurs.
Way back like 25 years ago in what we call high school in the US, my statistics teacher tried her damndest to make final exams fair. I said next to someone I had a huge crush on, and offered to take their exam for them. I needed a ‘c’ to ace the class, and she needed an ‘a’ to pass. 3 different tests and sets of questions/scantrons. I got her the grade she needed, she did not get me the grade I needed. So to your poi…
You wanted to "ace the class", which is an "A" on your final report card? But your crush's exam tanked your grade? You passed the class anyway, right?
Did you swap Scantrons, then, and your crush sat next to you, writing answers on the dgfitz forms?
She wouldn't pass without an "A" on the exams, so her running point total was circling the drain, and your effort gave her a "C-" or something?
In what ways did your teacher make the exams "fair"? What percentage of the grade did they comprise?
Were the 3 tests administered on 3 separate occasions, so nobody caught you repeatedly cheating the same way?
The fundamental question that AI raises for me, but nobody seems to answer: In our competitive, profit-driven world--what is the value of a human being and having human experiences? AI is neither inevitable nor necessary--but it seems like the next inevitable step in reducing the value of a human life to its 'outputs'.
Capitalism barely concerns itself with humans and whether human experiences exist or not is largely irrelevant for the field. As far as capitalism knows, humans are nothing but a noisy set of knobs that regulate how much profit one can make out of a situation. While tongue-in-cheek, this SMBC comic [1] about the Ultimatum game is an example of the type of paradoxes one gets when looking at life exclusively from an economics perspective.
The question is not "what's the value of a human under capitalism?" but rather "how do we avoid reducing humans to their economic output?". Or in different terms: it is not the blender's job to care about the pain of whatever it's blending, and if you find yourself asking "what's the value of pain in a blender-driven world?" then you are solving the wrong problem.