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‘I wish I could push ChatGPT off a cliff’: professors scramble to save critical thinking in an age of AI (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Lea Pao, a professor of literature at Stanford University, has been experimenting with ways to get her students to learn offline. She has them memorize poems, perform at recitation events, look at art in the real world.

It’s an effort to reconnect them to the bodily experience of learning, she said, and to keep them from turning to artificial intelligence to do the work for them. “There’s no AI-proof anything,” Pao said. “Rather than policing it, I hope that their overall experiences in this class will show them that there’s a way out.”

It doesn’t always work. Recently, she asked students to visit a local museum, look at a painting for 10 minutes, and write a few paragraphs describing the experience. It was a purposefully personal assignment, yet one student responded with a sophisticated but drab reflection – “too perfect, without saying anything”, Pao said. She later learned the student had tried to visit the museum on a Monday, when it was closed, and then turned to AI.

As artificial intelligence has upended the way in which students read, learn and write, professors like Pao have been left to their own devices to figure out how to teach in a transformed landscape.

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14 comments in c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world view that post
[–] 32 points 8 months ago (1 child)

Ai tanks my problem solving skills, surprisingly fast too. I stopped using it, but now I'm being directed to basically only vibe code or get fired. I hate this reality

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  • [–] 26 points 8 months ago

    The c-suite is perpetually in love with it, and as someone who often consults start-ups, it's impossible to dissuade them. Every month I have to explain why their product isn't working, and every month I'm surprised by how much longer they want to throw money at vibe coded projects.

    I say... at this point let it all burn to the ground with glorious malicious compliance.

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    • [–] 29 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    Yeah that's valid. It's definitely ruined my critical thinking skills as it pertains to plasma physics

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    plasma physics

    Let's be honest here, plasma physics has never been a fascinating field of research. It makes this similar to anteater study - ever boring. If I had to choose two things to throw from the cliff, let's say plasma physics shouldn't feel safe in this case

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    • [–] 28 points 8 months ago

    These companies are giving these technological tools away partly because they’re hoping to addict a generation of students, ...

    Can tech just please go back to making Wiimotes again?

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    [–] 9 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    127.0.0.1 chatgpt.com

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    13 comments in c/technology@beehaw.org view that post
    [–] 11 points 8 months ago

    Amen, Professors. Amen.

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    [–] 8 points 8 months ago (6 children)

    The people who invented all the stuff that led to this (not grifters like scam altman) such as diffusion, backpropagation, transformers, perceptrons, embeddings, etc all went to university. Lots of papers that they wrote.

    Maybe universities failed to teach those geniuses about ethics or civics.

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  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago

    That's really not fair to universities or the inventors. Knowledge is not inherently evil, and things that have far reaching positive impacts can be used for nefarious purposes. Modern society has perverse incentives, but individuals adding to a corpus of humanity's knowledge are not the ones at fault.

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  • [–] 5 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    i think people who worked on llms either thought their work would geniunely make world better, or they are "just following orders" people.

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  • [–] 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    LLMs do a really good job interpreting natural language inputs and deciphering the meaning behind it. The issue is they're being presented as a fully fleshed out analytical machine that can replace entire job roles instead of the interpretation layer towards other processing they should be used as. The grifters are selling something as someone it very much is not

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago

    Right? The idea of a natural language user interface isn't a bad one, and I think it will actually have positive impacts in the long run. We're just running into a "calculator problem" where people think that if you have a calculator you don't need to understand math.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago

    the thing is, these 'grifters' have insane pull on our society, even across borders. That this is even happening is result of bigger problem that should be addressed. corporations should be SEVERELY limited in their power across the globe and results of not doing so is evident all around. I think way things are going, it will either lead to things getting even worse by forcing llm to everything or there will at some point be severe backlash which likely restricts llms badly and deprives us of their positive impacts too. Or the worse case scenario is llm usage increases and things get slightly less worse, but corporations gain even bigger grip on our throats via them.

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    • [–] 16 points 8 months ago (4 children)

    The education system has been killing critical thinking for decades. Why start trying to save it now?

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  • [–] 26 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I keep seeing this, but I think people forget what things were like before we had a formalized education system. They were not good. The modern system can certainly be improved, but it has overall improved upon itself essentially since its inception. I'm not sure if there's some kind of golden age of US education people are imagining, or they're just pointing out current flaws, but it really is (unfortunately or not) the best it's ever been.

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