"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
In high school, I was on the Academic Decathlon team. The book everyone was supposed to read for the literature portion was Frankenstein. I never read it, but at the regional competition I won the essay contest on the question of whether Frankenstein or his creation was the true monster.
I was really good at bullshitting my way through an essay.
I had a class where I wrote a ~70 page report for the midterm project, and a ~120 page report for the final project. My lab partner and I had to pull all nighters for both, and I drank an entire 2-liter of mountain dew to stay awake to finish the final project's report. This was before I even had any machine learning or AI classes, so having AI write it wasn't even an option to me.
All that to say, kids these days are soft ๐ค
I had to use various AIs to create an SOP for one of my courses this year. It was so much more exhausting than just writing one because there's so much you can't trust in it. Almost every section had a very specific reference that I needed to check to be sure it wasn't hallucinating.
Luckily I was supposed to pick one as my favorite, so I chose the one with the fewest specific references, deleted the few it had and generalized them instead.
As someone that finished a couple of years ago it was already becoming that way then.
This didn't mean that people weren't learning but they were getting lazy. The AI detection isn't good enough because a lot of people are willing to write their papers through the AI in pieces and check that, since it's still faster than doing it yourself in most cases.
It's becoming this weird cycle. It's expected that you'll use AI anyway, that you'll be discriminated against for it, that professionals are going to try to use it to cut down on their work once hired, that HR is going to use it in the hiring process. So no one sees a reason not to use it.
Checked out the necessary books for citations the afternoon before. Chugged an energy drink. One draft submitted before the deadline. Grabbed breakfast. Passed out in class. TWICE.
I vividly remember people writing 10+ page diaries for foreign language classes as homework before home internet was common where I lived.
Tho I will be fair, "lack of internet" was a big reason it was possible. The inherent boredom.
I remember my brother used to write 10 page essays by hand. I think the longest I did by hand was 5.
I would hide out and read the sparknotes summaries right before class and still get good marks. I guess that's why I struggled to get back into reading for a while lmao. So maybe some of these kids will make it out?
I'm so sad. People are becoming so reliant on AI that they can't write (nor read) more than one sentence
Wat????
This needs more upvotes :)
I got so good at cranking out papers in college that I could BS my way through them in a couple of hours
I'm absolutely sickened by the crap that people are somehow paid for on websites now. I just wanted to look at different ideas about the ending of a show I like and I got the laziest writing I've ever seen. Any teacher I've ever had would have had red marks all over the page and demanded I fix it and return it. Proper names were misspelled and sentences didn't follow smoothly. It's so frustrating.
Plagiarism has always existed, it just got easier over time. Before AI, a lot of students just copy and pasted stuff they found online and changed some words to get past the plagiarism checking programs. Right now all that manual work got automated so you don't have to copy and paste or alter what you took, you can just prompt an AI chatbot to do it for you.
This was painful