Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet a Top 10 school like University of Chicago has apparently not been able to fix that problem. That's telling in and of itself.
AI camera watching the students?
Faraday cage. EMP blast if that doesn't work.
The AI zombification of universities
41–50 of 231 posts
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#42Profs can push back on this if they want. Not all of them want to (or want to justify pushback given their pay).
For me when I teach, no laptops or phones in class along with in-class handwritten paper quizzes on course readings and concepts has helped a lot.
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#43Zombification of USA people was already happening before AI. Not surprisingly, it's been one of the favorite cultural themes in the country's cultural produce for long years. Zombies + superheroes was not poised to produce great non-drooling non-moron americans.
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#44The college system is creating the zombie underclass with AI or without it. The amount of money colleges charge combined with the text book thinking shapes people into thinking there are steps to success, there are right answers, and "getting a job" is the right way to go. Colleges don't teach independent thinking and that is the exact thinking we need in the era of Youtube and AI. You don't need college to teach you how to learn text book items anymore and I think that is scary to some.
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
but how would you do that? what about homework and coursework? students will just transcribe claude slop on paper and submit that.
Requiring them to write it in longhand at least removes the instant gratification. I think that will work for some students.
It would be fun trying to draw all those emojis in longhand. You could probably do the bullet points as tiny manicules.
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#46Oddly enough my reaction to this is that it's a broader societal problem as opposed to an A.I. problem.
Why shouldn't universities switch to examinations where no technology (apart from say calculators) are allowed; and this is strictly enforced? This was certainly the norm when I went to university.
I agree that A.I. trivializes (or changes how you approach) a lot of take home work; but people who wanted to cheat could more or less always do so for that to some degree. I guess it makes it easier to do so; however my expectation would be a greater reliance or weighting on in person examinations as a response; as opposed to a normalization of cheating.
One way in which A.I. could be seen as contributing to this is that it is devaluing the importance of what were seen as 'intellectual' pursuits; as we now have automation for them that is at the very least often surface level effective for undergraduate work.
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
More in class, in discussion, and less "assignments" Unfortunately that's way more expensive to do.
for STEM topics, I feel like some amount of "personal study time" is kind of needed to really grok stuff, at least for a percentage of students. I studied maths, and spending time alone trying to solve problems and redoing the proofs from memory was important for my learning. I don't think I'd have learned as much had those moments been replaced with more in class discussion.
Yes but AI doesn't prevent you from doing that learning. What is makes harder is the old broken ways of credentialing your learning. The way you do the learning has no need to change.
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
The solution is obvious. Teaching must be no-tech—just go back to 1950s. The other problem of course is attention span due to social-media erosion. The big tech has really done a number on society already and they’re just getting started.
but how would you do that? what about homework and coursework? students will just transcribe claude slop on paper and submit that.
Engineering at my EU uni, homework and coursework were at most a tiny part of the total grade, and never enough on their own to pass. If they were relatively bigger projects, you'll pass an interview or similar review after delivering it. This all were just nudges study and to check ourselves and they were seen as a "gift" of the Bologne Process (restructuring/standardizing of unis in the EU).
The only thing that mattered were the exams, be it pen and paper or coding/electronics labs, in person and proctored. No matter how much slop I could have access to back in the day I would have failed the same subjects I did.
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
I read a lot of AI prose three days and this bears none of the hallmarks. If this is AI, if really live to see the prompt. I'm confident this is human.
It is easy to change the system prompt to make the AI talk with a different voice. It is remarkably hard (at least for Claude, I haven't experimented as much with GPT) to get it to not use so many em-dashes like this essay does.
There's no way. Just the first paragraph alone is enough to convince me; it's too well-written and melodious to be AI, with too much original thought:
Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.
Without defending the quality of the rest of the essay, it's a great start. LLMs today could never match it.
Re: The AI zombification of universities
#50The college system is creating the zombie underclass with AI or without it. The amount of money colleges charge combined with the text book thinking shapes people into thinking there are steps to success, there are right answers, and "getting a job" is the right way to go. Colleges don't teach independent thinking and that is the exact thinking we need in the era of Youtube and AI. You don't need college to teach you…
Ok but I need a job to live.
And if I want to do something interesting I need the skills and knowledge which are learned at a college level.