Always been this way, no? Sometimes, though, the imbeciles hire very competent people

Depends on who writes the books.

Yes, and the problem is not having beliefs, but the organizations exploiting and weaponizing them.

No? An essay is a test, not a proof of intelligence. Humans tend to do the minimal effort on things they dislike. If the task is not something we are interested in, we will tend to do the minimum needed to accomplish the task. That's not being stupid. What is stupid is forcing humans to do things they dislike.

We are perfectly capable to spend our mind on tasks we are interested in. AI just makes it easier to be lazy on shit we don't care about.

This is about effort, not intelligence. The article, like 99% of news articles these days, finds a shocking headline that is not supported by research (no serious research will associate effort spent on an essay with intelligence), and is happy with the high number of people it pleases.

My point stands: the technology is not going to disappear. What are we going to do about not being able to use essays to evaluate how well a student understands a subject? Push back on AI? Futile ban attempts?

You're saying using AI for essays defeats the purpose of essays, I'm saying essays are no longer a good way to evaluate understanding of a topic.

I include essays, yes. It's all archaic. I'm not saying we shouldn't have a way to evaluate student performance, but this is not it.

Well I'm already changing the way I work to use my brain on what AI can't do well, and letting AI do what it can do well. I haven't spent time thinking about how to change the world, and I don't exactly have that time, but I'll support left leaning parties that focus on integrating with the change rather than forbidding it.

The most essential thing in my opinion is a UBI. For decades we've been automating jobs away. Unemployment is no longer a problem because of economic troubles, it's a problem because we're using automation to increase production rather than improve people's lives. The most essential thing, in my opinion, is shifting the way we think about work from "you must work to survive" to "you are surviving by default, you can work to improve your life".

Then the second thing is education. But, I am very opinionated and might be wrong. I find the whole system, in every country that I know of, so antiquated. It is the one thing in our lives that has barely changed in centuries. Exam-driven education does not work. Brilliant, mostly neurodivergent minds (which are much more common than we used to think) are excluded from success because of it. AI won't replace passion, students use AI because they dislike what they do. We as a species are not lazy, we're just great at doing things that we love. Stop hammering students with exams, start letting them choose earlier on what they study, and they'll stop using AI to offload everything.

Well, if you hold a grudge against french individuals for what their ancestors did, yeah, you're wrong. You can hold a grudge against France as a country for what they did, though. Unfortunately it seems that you're doing the former.

You should understand the principles before accessing the short cuts.

I don't really agree with this take. The reason we teach kids mental calculus is to indeed understand basic principles, but only because their further education is based on those principles.

But it doesn't generalise to everything. I don't need to understand assembly or the basic principles that make a computer work to be a good software engineer using high level programming languages.

And this might be an unpopular take, but you don't even need to understand well low level development to be a good software engineer using high level languages.

Any age is a good time to learn anything! Most people stop caring after school and you don't, and that's fantastic.

Again an article that draws the wrong conclusions.

No, it does not make people stupider. It makes people lazier. Just. Like. All. Tech.

How many of us do research in libraries rather than on the internet these days? Back when internet became popular there were similar criticisms to what we have today on AI.

Essays are AI generated, show poor critical thinking, and you can tell? Great, grade it like what it is. A piss poor work. Just like someone who would copy a wikipedia article 15 years ago would be graded like shit, perhaps even considered cheating and given a 0 (or F or whatever is the worst grade in your system)

If you can't tell, then the tool was properly used. If you can't tell the difference between an AI generated essay and a human-made essay, then perhaps essays are no longer good tests of someone's abilities.

Rather than pushing back against a tech that is probably never going away, even when the bubble pops, how about we start thinking productively and adapt how we learn, evaluate, and work instead?

I've grown increasingly disappointed with fairphone

It would be nice to include why!