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The AI zombification of universities

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Re: The AI zombification of universities

#71

Post by graceful6800 »

spicyusername wrote: post #60
Lerc wrote: post #51

If people attend university for certification instead of education I think the battle is already lost. AI is an easy, but possibly high risk approach to gaining the certification without work, but the tried and tested approach is doing the bare minimum, cramming, then forgetting everything after graduation. If you penalize people who use AI but in the process have learned the required information you make the problem…

> These problems are all because of a culture that favours the measurement over what is being measured. What other kind of culture is there? A culture of not measuring?

Read the last four words of the sentence you quoted. You'll find your answer.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#72

Post by the_af »

overgard wrote: post #64

I can't help but wonder if the fundamental problem is just that we spent decades pretending that a university degree was some sort of useful job training in the first place. As a professional software developer, I think my computer science degree is not actually all that important. Sure there are some relevant concepts, but they're ones you'd pick up on the job anyway. I don't regret getting my degree (back in 2009),…

For Computer Science in particular: it's not supposed to be job training. CS is an education closer to math or science (in fact, at my university it belongs to the department of hard sciences and math). If you like that (and I sure did!) it'll be worth your time. If you're just looking for job training, you're looking in the wrong place.

My university CS program didn't even teach programming in any of the major classes, it was assumed you'd learn on your own or by doing one of the optional workshops.

There's a lot of stuff taught in academic CS that you simply won't learn on the job, or if you do, it won't be as rigorous and you'll be missing the fundamentals.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#73

Post by JumpCrisscross »

> Tying education to a capital-intensive and (likely soon to be) tightly regulated technology is one more step toward a different, frightening future. A world in which independent educational institutions are neutered and transformed by their reliance on a central authority into factories designed to train students according to the “needs of society” is not a new prospect — it has been the persistent dream of Fabians, technocrats, and engineers…

I hadn’t thought of this. Every school district and university tied into centralized AI inherently undermined its ability to decide how its kids are to be taught.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#74

Post by JumpCrisscross »

chung8123 wrote: post #44

The 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…

> 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

Apart from entry-level texts, what discipline are you thinking of? Pretty much all my after-freshman-year undergrad texts contained debates.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#76

Post by graceful6800 »

XorNot wrote: post #50
chung8123 wrote: post #44

The 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.

Trade schools and apprenticeships exist.

Trades can pay very well and frequently require nothing more than on the job training.

You think you need college for the same reason you equate "job" with survival. These are not universal truths, not even in capitalist hellscape America. It might be harder but it is in no way a requirement. Anyone who tells you different is lying to you.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#77

Post by hansmayer »

chung8123 wrote: post #44

The 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…

> You don't need college to teach you how to learn text book items anymore and I think that is scary to some.

a) This is about universities, not "college" b) The University teaches you critical thinking, not how to learn "textbook items". It's not vocational training for upper middle class. It's for building and developing citizens who can think critically.

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#78

Post by asdff »

corywadd wrote: post #62
drmanhat wrote: post #46

Oddly 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 co…

I would suggest the one exception to this would be courses explicitly designed to teach how to use AI, and how not to. But in that case, it's less "use AI to cheat on this course" and "AI is the tool this course is about." Otherwise your suggestion makes sense.

Then it becomes, teach what? "To use AI", yes, and, then, to do what? Use it how? To make some software? Why? You are already taking software engineering classes to learn to make software. To write something? Why? You are already taking classes that ask you write things yourself. An AI class, to me at least, is akin to taking a class about how to pay someone to write your essay for you.

And if we are talking about the various AI strategies people have where they have LLMs talking to LLMs to come up with whatever gooblyguck, are the poor souls who've been asked to come up with the AI class for the department going to know any of these strategies themselves? Are these strategies even going to be sustainable going forward after VC is no longer subsidizing tokens?

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#79

Post by ghaff »

ls612 wrote: post #29
nimonian wrote: post #17

Earlier 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.

This is such an ignorant trope. The last few places I worked ALL used em-dashes as part of house style and I will continue to use them. It's extremely common (and arguably the LLMs do it because it is extremely common).

Re: The AI zombification of universities

#80

Post by JumpCrisscross »

nwhnwh wrote: post #33

> The prevalence of AI use on college campuses, particularly at “elite” universities, is a cancer on our culture that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons... Modern education is like that, even before AI. Check this https://www.jstor.org/stable/25006902

> Check this

Evidence of people complaining about a thing isn’t evidence of the thing per se.

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