this post was submitted on 19 Aug 2024
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As for his teaching job, matters have only gotten worse. He said that he’s lost trust in his students. Generative AI has “pretty much ruined the integrity of online classes,” which are increasingly common as schools such as ASU attempt to scale up access. No matter how small the assignments, many students will complete them using ChatGPT. “Students would submit ChatGPT responses even to prompts like ‘Introduce yourself to the class in 500 words or fewer,’” he said.

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But giving up doesn’t seem to be an option either. If college professors seem obsessed with student fraud, that’s because it’s widespread. This was true even before ChatGPT arrived: Historically, studies estimate that more than half of all high-school and college students have cheated in some way.

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Even last year, one survey found, more than half of K-12 teachers were using ChatGPT for course and lesson planning. Another one, conducted just six months ago, found that more than 70 percent of the higher-ed instructors who regularly use generative AI were employing it to give grades or feedback to student work.

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In the most farcical version of this arrangement, students would be incentivized to generate assignments with AI, to which teachers would then respond with AI-generated comments.

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Honestly, it just makes me sad for future generations.

LLMs aren't like the computers we've grown accustomed to, where we rely on them to be accurate because the output is all based on distinct and repeatable mathematical operations. A LLM can't provide any feedback on the accuracy of its outputs, because it is simply predicting a set of tokens based on its training data. We've already seen cases where professionals who literally have advanced degrees have tried to pass off its output without scrutiny and it backfired spectacularly.

As students, who by definition lack context and experience in a given field make use of this technology, I fear they will overestimate their own skills far past the point of no return and I fear catastrophic results over the long run. Perhaps I'm being a bit overly pessimistic here, but I have trouble identifying mitigating factors that provide a significant level of reassurance.