I did undergrad before chatGPT and now I’m back in school for an MBA at a school where the school pays for all students to have access to GPT4o. Maybe because we’re all older the tools are less of a problem, but I would say they have been a net positive. GPT3 was ass and students could easily tell when a classmate used it for their group contributions. Profs seems to be about 6-12 months behind the curve in terms of the tech. All profs are aware and thinking deeply about how AI is changing how they teach.
Group papers are usually made into an outline at first and then we divvy up the responsibilities. If you use AI, most kids only care if your work sucks. AI consistently scores like an 80-85% (profs sometimes submit and blindly grade the responses), but almost always misses the core teaching points of classwork.
In my program, grades don’t matter (so employers can’t stack rank us). People who make extensive use of AI are really only cheating themselves. If you’re a big AI user, other kids generally know and try to avoid forming groups with you if they know in advance. You learn better when learning alongside others and if all someone does is dump AI slop in the google doc, you’re wasting my time in addition to yours.
I use AI to flesh out points, especially on assignments I don’t care about. It can help for idea generation and “connecting the dots” between ideas, but I always edit the output because the AI makes stylistic choices I don’t like. It’s definitely an accelerator for me when writing papers. I stand behind all the papers I’ve submitted, though some have sucked (regardless of AI usage or not).
In undergrad, when my priorities were less about learning and more towards dating/partying, I definitely would have abused this tool. At the end of the day, using the tool mainly cheats your own learning. I hope they transition to talking about using LLMs like one uses gambling - a little is fine here and there but if it’s all you do that’s a problem.
I’m not sure what to do about elementary age kids, because the AI easily writes “better” essays. At least in college I could do better than an AI if I applied myself. But in sixth grade? Good luck me. Cats out of the bag now and we should be really empathetic to the younger generations. Imagine getting slammed with TikTok->Pandemic->ChatGPT in the span of like 6-7 formative years. They are growing up differently and I certainly have no clue what we need to do to help them be successful.