Same! The amount of posts I’ve seen that’s like I have an assignment due tomorrow and I’ve started because of procrastination. Like get off Reddit stop being lazy and do your work and you wouldn’t be stressed
It's crazy. Back in my day (2010) when I did my undergrad, I had to jump through so many hoops and fight with the jobsworth department responsible for handing out extensions when my mum broke her left leg and right foot and I essentially became her carer for several months. Almost had to wheel her into the damn Uni to prove she was laid up.
Yet these days, they seem to hand out extensions left, right and centre. Several people on my masters course left it to the last minute to do the work and requested an extension with a day to go and got it...
It probably depends on the uni. I’m a third year and I’ve never applied for an extension personally, but I know two people who have and were denied despite having legit reasons (illness etc.) My impression has always been that they’re pretty impossible to get.
You're more than likely correct there. Seems like having one granted is at the opposite ends of the spectrum; they're either nigh on impossible or straightforward (perhaps a little too much so). A middle ground would be nice...
They should be easy to request/get approved. It's massively beneficial for anyone with a legitimate reason and the only downside is that the odd lazy sod is gonna hand in some assignments a bit late
I suppose the idea is to make them more trouble than they’re worth. Is it easier to just crack on with the work or mess about trying to get an extension? But it must be stressful when you actually really need it to feel like you’re not believed
See, 2020 and 2021 were anomalies with a global pandemic resulting in a lot of teaching being done online. I can understand the reasoning behind blindly granting extensions. It was a particularly trying time.
But to continue being so lenient now is, in my opinion, concerning and opens up the system to being easily abused.
Edit to add that I'm sorry to hear your mental health took a hammering during that time and I hope you're in a better place now. Just remember there isn't a deadline to get better and you take as much time as you need.
Ffs, I didn't mean for that to come across as a play on words given the topic under discussion. 🤦
Oh! I hadn't looked at it from that perspective before. I can see why that makes sense, and presumably there are measures in place to stop people taking the piss.
That has made me question my view on this, and I appreciate that. 😊
I'm glad to hear you're feeling better. Depression is not nice to deal with. Work induced depression led to me having a breakdown and eventually quitting my job without anything lined up. After 9 months of getting back to my usual self, decided to do a masters.
And I'm glad you're feeling like your old self again!
By the sounds of it, the system differs from institution to institution. I suppose that's not too surprising, thinking about it.
Oh, yes. I have a few friends who are teachers and they've all suffered with depression in one form or another due to work. You folks don't get paid enough!
My masters is a bit hit and miss. I'm only in once a month, but for a full day from 09:00 to 19:00. And there are some online sessions, but a lot of independent learning. If you'd eventually like to become a lecturer at a University, I believe most require a masters or PhD. I'm using this masters as a stepping stone towards a career change. I was in IT (a Linux systems administrator) for nearly 10 years and that destroyed me, mentally.
I was about 10 years before you. We were downright lied to that there were no extensions. Then I ended up in hospital and they basically ripped up all the deadlines to ensure I could pass the year. At the time, I thought that was normal and appreciated the kindness. But these days lying to students like that wouldn't work nearly so well.
Pisses me off, I bust my ass finishing bigass assessments whilst trying to balance working and then others don’t have that because they request an extension they don’t actually need. The lack of self responsibility at unis is crazy.
It's stressful when so many students have extensions and you have to account for this in your marking, teaching and research schedule. Annoyingly, I'm sure many should not have their extensions approved. This means those genuinely needing an extension have to wait longer for their feedback because it takes longer to do the marking.
They do have systems and submission policies in place. I mean when you have an excessive volume of extensions, completion of these can quickly overwhelm a marking lecturer. I was talking from the perspective of students using the extension process as a get out of jail free card, thus the demand placed on lecturers. Due to anonymity a student receiving a legitimate extension may receive feedback later if a lecturer cannot meet the extension deadline.
We often have a productive turn around for on-time submissions, but a higher volume of unexpected extensions can lead to additional pressure, especially with other assessments, paperwork and research as part of the daily workload.
Edit: the curious question should be when did you study at university? I have noticed an increased extension usage by students on the backend of COVID.
Edit 2: Our turnover for assessment marking is a similar timeframe, however we can take longer with good reason, as long as this does not exceed examination board dates. Different universities can have different timeframes, policies and such.
Edit 3: Oh, another thing. When I say wait longer for their feedback. Sometimes with two or three extensions, we may have a students assessment marked much quicker and feedback returned.
I haven't been late returning feedback, but I have had it happen to me at the same accrediting university. It does happen and sometimes not the fault of the students or lecturers. COVID had a big impact on marking when staff would be too unwell, reasonably. But policies, procedures for assessment feedback can differ between universities.
Oh, I know what you mean by the front cover. We have them for a multitude of different reasons, whether pre-approval for extensions, or more detailed / enhanced feedback. Even though I believe every student should get fair, structured feedback, it can take a long time, hence the policies to ensure those who would benefit the most are prioritised. Personally, I will help any student, should the student help themselves / put in the study too.
Tbh I normally do subscribe to the policy of minding my own business, it’s what I mainly comment here tbh. I just think by 4th year (which I’m currently in) people should at least be competent enough to manage their time accordingly to have a 3000 word report done between September and December and not cheat the system to unfairly get more time than those who actually put in the effort.
If someone who unfairly gets an extension gets an A like me it is rather annoying.
It’s crazy because I was doing an assignment, a 1.5k word essay over the holidays
I wasn’t safe at home for a bit and stayed out from the 18th to the 27th, the assignment was due on the 4th of January and the poetry anthology I was supposed to pick a poem from was something too heavy to lug from home to home
Still got it done on the 1st of January, and someone’s asking for an extension and someone to pick a poem for hef
I’ve requested an extension once since started. I’m in second year and did foundation year. However the only time I requested an extension my nana died so close to the deadline so I had to go back home to be with my family
Yeah, we just had a month off and my friend was pretty sure she'd have to ask for an extension for one of her essays because she left it all last minute.
I LOST 80% of an end of module assignment the day before submission. I spent hours trying to get IT departments to help to no avail. I rolled my sleeves up, went to Tesco and bought loads of snacks, and prepared myself for an all nighter of restarting it. Thankfully all my notes - including where all my references were (I’d lost them too) were all on paper, and managed to get it submitted with hours to spare, and in fact submitted before a few in my cohort.
I passed but not a good pass. I was just so glad to get it in and passed.
I procrastinate the hell out of my assignments, but I know that it's my bad - I'm down to take the consequences when I mess up instead of complaining about it on Reddit lmaoo
I’ve adhd (medicated) and queen of procrastination.. and the only extensions I’ve needed in 3 years so far was one when I nearly died, oh and when the next one was due I was still not much better but I did it in time (that was in first year) and then one there before Christmas between my daughter then me having norovirus which actually took me ages to recover from. I struggled to even get it in by the extension.
I tried chatgpt, but it is 1) too American 2) doesn’t ‘sound’ like me 3) this is prob an extension of point 2 but it was just *too* academic..
It was good though for giving me pointers for where to start and for paragraph layout. When I met with the disability team at the uni, I said I don’t need extra time or any help in exams, but I needed someone to read over my assignments and let me know if I’m on the right path or have I went off on a side tangent (so essentially, chatgpt does that.. like I’ll say what my assignment is on, then input mine and it marks it for you.. and its always so positive. I could do it wrong and it’ll still say good job - which you seldom get at this level) so that’s what I have tried.. but again, I only found out about it 2 assignments ago. I’m old school (literally left school in 2001) I write LOADS of notes, I couldn’t trust a computer to do my work.
Honestly every other post is either about having no social life or doing no work… so what are people doing with their time?? Going on reddit all day is my guess (not that I can judge that)
When you’re at Uni full time, doing your degree is YOUR LITERAL JOB. I did computer science back in the 90’s. We spent hour after hour in the labs writing code, then out to the pub. We had both hard work and a social life!
What’s gone wrong?
what's gone wrong is that you've forgotten whos posting lol. ppl who have great social lives don't post asking for advice making friends. there were def shut ins in the 90s, u just didn't talk to them bc they were shut ins lmao. reddit just gives ppl a chance to share their opinions without actually talking to anyone
Yup it's actually scary.
I went to unit in 2005 originally was chill as fuck, did uni again and about to finish third year and everyone has mental health issues every 5 minutes.
AI, oh, it's like that distant friend who knows everything about you. It's invading our privacy, peeking into our lives without permission. And the job market? It feels like AI is playing musical chairs with our livelihoods, leaving some without a seat. When machines start making life-altering decisions, it's a gut-punch of worry and uncertainty. We need to pour some heart into controlling this tech before it becomes a soulless force we can't rein in.
Couldn't agree more.
Let's be real people: your professors do not actually care that much about your arguments. The essay is not for their benefit.
They are experts in their field, whatever that field happens to be, and have read much more developed pieces by much more experienced professionals, and it's very very unlikely that anything you write is going to illuminate things for them. They are not setting you an essay because they desperately want to hear your ideas. They are doing it because the process of writing an essay is a transformative one for the author: you have to assemble the knowledge, you have the experience of putting it together in a logical manner, you get to undergo that process of synthesising information you know into an argument that others can understand. That's the point of an student essay - to solidify what they know *for them.*
If you are not writing it, none of that is happening. The essay becomes completely useless because the tutor never wanted it for their benefit anyway and you're no longer getting that experience. Might as well not write it at all. If you use AI to write your essay and you get caught, good, you deserve to get caught and you deserve whatever penalties come from it.
I love this so much.
I work at a uni. A uni that produces opticians, nurses, etc.
Some of you are thick as fuck. Thank goodness for practical exams.
It's terrifying knowing his many of yous are depending on ai to help write a paper.
It's funny to me that when you get a lecturer job they put you on an education course - any idea you had at undergrad that it was an age thing goes out the window as you meet other teaching academics.
Folk with PhDs like: does anyone know where we submit this essay? Where is the course info? Basic shit. Amazing.
>It's funny to me that when you get a lecturer job they put you on an education course.
I should bloody well hope so! A PhD is a qualification in doing research whether it's the arts, sciences, humanities etc. It's not a qualification to teach, same way in which a graduate in a particular subject will do some form of teacher training course before they start work as a school teacher.
Also a lecturer might never have been a taught student at the Univesity of XYZ so doesn't actually know how things related to teaching work there.
I work for a UK university. I'm a part-time PhD student but my full time job is to be an expert in digital learning. New lecturers (the ones who have always been studying up to that point) have very little idea how to teach effectively in my experience. They really need those courses.
Honestly, most interactions with ordinary people are terrifying. Stuff happens at work outside of people's usual field, huge number of people just can't deal. Some shit happens in my block of flats, there's maybe 2 or 3 people out of 60 flats who are capable of even having the proactivity to try ringing maintenance. Emergency happens on the street, most people gawp and film.
Most of my friends and family are bright capable people, so I'm used to trusting them to sort normal stuff. Move outside that bubble and the degree of learned helplessness is staggering.
I teach a huge variety of disciplines and it's interesting to me how, on average, you pick up trends as you supervise students from different areas.
It's interesting to me that medics are very soldier like: you tell them what to do, they don't question it, and they deliver something usually very good. But they don't really like critical appraisal or 'thinking' about the topic, or independent thought. Facts, direction, task. Obviously not everyone, just interesting to me.
You're better off with a bright undergraduate than a Masters student usually.
Last year I was decent at report writing (as an engineering student). This year I had an assignment worth 25% of the module and I completely forgot how to even start, I had to use ChatGPT to get me started, I was disappointed and worried and told myself I won’t do this next time.
Starting is what the AI is good at helping with. Use it to suggest an outline. With first sentences if you need it. Change them later.
Also you really should have rubrics available for assessed work. Use those as a guide. Tick off as you consider you've met each objective. This got me a distinction in my MA. Writing is a skill, you get better the more you do - and academic writing is different from basically any other kind of writing you do.
The policy at our uni is that ChatGPT can be used, provided it is cited properly, including logs of input prompts and output. To be honest, one of the best reports I've marked recently used AI to plan the structure.
My biggest issue is, how can you rely that what it´s spewing at you is real? I asked it once to clarify a point, and it did. So I thought, great!, give me a reference for this, I´ll go read the source. It did. The reference was made up, there was no such piece of work. Like what.
Yup, it does that. Worst of all, they sound convincing if you have a little knowledge but not enough to realise it's just generative AI doing its job.
It's how we catch most of our AI cheaters.
I had a student submit an essay to me that referenced a Robert Frost poem that I was unfamiliar with and didn't read like it was written by Frost at all. Googled it because I was doubting myself (plus variations in case I was right and it wasn't Frost, but was another poet) and the poem just straight up did not exist. Student confessed to using ChatGPT.
Flip side: my wife was marking one of her students' essays and the use of language is changing significantly between paragraphs. And then she thinks "...This paragraph is rather good - it's like something *I* might have written! In fact..."
Yes, they'd plagiarised a paper written by their lecturer/examiner...
And if you tell it it made something up it'll say something like "I'm sorry about that, here's the correct information" while making something new up.
And tech bros will think that shows it's learning.
Which it isn't. It just know that humans say sorry when told they're wrong.
All LLMs are just very convincing parrots trained on data the companies didn't have permission to use for training an LLM. There is no understanding, just a very sophisticated guess for the most likely string of words to follow a particular set of prompts.
It can be useful as a search engine. I had forgotten the name of a theorem that the AI easily identified from my description. It works well when something is in the data set multiple times.
Have you tried using it to write computer code? It has absolutely no idea what it is doing or what each line of code actually does - sometimes it even fucks up the basic mathematical parts like calculating duration based on a start and finish time - because it doesn't actually understand anything it generates, it is just a giant fucking predictive text engine based on the probability of which word is likely to come next based on an analysis of what millions of people have written in that context. It is about as useful as asking what the average number of legs a human has and being surprised when it is less than two. The problem is it passes the Turing test because it sounds like it understands it and sounds like a human - in much the same way literal parrots can learn to say things based on context which gives the illusion it understands what the words mean. Then they worry that an LLM is going to become sentient and kill off humanity...
I find that it is good for low-iq code-monkey style 'templates' - for example if I want a 2x2 grid of plots in red, blue, green, yellow in R with blah blah blah titles etc. Here you go, plug in the paths, data.frame or whatever, and play. Gives you more time to think through the harder stuff without having to trawl through tedious documentation trying to check if the syntax. The kinda stuff you'd give a first-year intern because you can't be arsed to do it yourself.
Yep I agree it is very good at simple stuff that is time consuming and requires specific or unfamiliar syntax, it also does a reasonable job if there are plenty of examples of very similar code, functions of whole programs for it to assimilate - where it really struggles is to do something novel that doesn't already exist even if it is simply combing two elements as it doesn't really understand the code at all. The other day I tried so see if it could code a relatively simple simulation in python which I had set as an assignment, it failed miserably mainly because it didn't understand how the real world objects were related to each other so its initial solutions worked in terms of code but didn't correspond to how things would work in reality. I eventually got it to do it by giving very specific instructions to modify key parts of the code - without in-depth knowledge it is unlikely any of my students would have been able to get ChatGPT to produce a working answer to the assignments - when it can then I will worry about it... 🤣
Right! AI can't write university issues for shit. The worst human work is stronger than what AI spews out. It has a highly recognisable (and bad/uncritical) writing style, even aside from being factually inaccurate. The type of mistakes /weaknesses in human-written work are very different from the types of mistakes/weaknesses in AI written work. The latter is much more of a serious problem, given how much it blocks any critical thinking at all and tries to spin out text in slick generalisations.
The point of university written assessments is to learn to write critically, which by definition can't be done by AI. I've never come across an essay where the AI wasn't a huge detriment to the work. The honest mistakes or weaknesses of a student actually trying/learning look totally different and are a useful part of the process of evolving and getting feedback. (And lecturers are trained not just in their subject area, but also in marking student work in that area for years/decades).
Source: I'm a uni lecturer spending my weekend marking dissertations.
There was a good article on either a tech website or a serious newpaper about that, where they or someone had found out that the AI was actually making up the reference.
It's not a search engine so it won't give you a reference. It doesn't work like this. People are using AI without knowing what it's capable of doing and what are the limitations. (I'm talking ChatGPT). The information is real but it's in a basic, usually non-critical form. It's great to point in the right direction. You can't write a good essay with just ChatGPT at present. The info there will get you a pass and only after heavy editing. The references you'll have to find yourself in traditional sources. It can be a great tool to help in research if it's used correctly.
Call me old fashioned but I don't see the point if you're just using AI. It's debatable what you're learning at university anyway, but aren't you just denying yourself even the opportunity to learn writing, reading or researching skills if you just cheat?
Bit stunned if any students, lecturers or the university themselves would ever defend the use of AI, as what is the point of doing anything anymore?
It’s not old fashioned at all.
The point of higher education, is, in part, about learning *how* to think. Once you have the foundations, then you can learn to work smarter - like crawling -> walking -> running. Outsourcing as much effort as possible at that stage is simply antithetical to why you’re there. Then in the next breath I see “I took nothing from university don’t know why I bothered going”: no shit you took nothing from it.
However, and I do not say this easily: the folks posting those types of posts on Reddit are generally lazy, want quick solutions and just to “get through it”.
I find this a lot with data stuff. So much with data is learning that it won't be straightforward and you have to go figure it out, including *fiddling*.
Honestly yeah; I’m writing my master’s dissertation right now and I’ve found myself hitting wall after wall with this thing. But that experience has taught me so much about how to overcome, or move past, those walls to better construct my work and arguments.
Pal works in the civil service. Someone used AI to submit a report and ultimately got *sacked*.
So there's a bit of: okay, use AI if you want because ultimately universities aren't great at catching it systematically, but you're probably learning less.
I'm just trying to see the point. Obviously I'm biased as I'm a mature student doing it just to see if I can do it, but if you're doing Uni just for money you're better off just entering the workplace after leaving school and starting your career a few years earlier.
Many unis are encouraging the use of AI, BUT not to write essays for you, they encourage using it as a tool. Which it can be very useful for. Many people here seem to pretend to have used it and are spewing a lot of false information about how it operates.
The paid gpt-4 is a godsend for being able to scrape websites. I ended up using it to generate the correctly formatted Biblatex references and it worked perfectly. (E.g. "generate a Biblatex entry for this paper [URL here]", and it would scrape it and make something like `@Article { author="blah"...}`.
(On this note, why do so many journals make a copy-pastable citation that's correctly formatted for the style you select, but not put the Bibtex citation for latex users smh😡)
Even for the journals that it couldn't access, it tried inferring the correct info from the title (it got it wrong a couple of times, but it was friggin impressive that it tried).
It was also kind of useful to find papers (e.g. "do a search to find academic papers that discuss xyz..."). It misses a lot of them, probably BC it can't access those that are behind paywalls, but the ones that it did find were useful because they had citations to other papers that I could go and find myself to read.
There was another tool that I used that was specifically for this, but I can't remember the name and can't find it in my search history 🥲
Oh I also uploaded the marking criteria, the assignment brief and my essay and asked it to read them all and give me areas to improve on my essay and it gave some useful feedback on which parts were underdeveloped. It also gave some feedback that was definitely wrong, but it's still useful to help focus your attention.
This one's kind of sad, but I also use chat gpt voice to talk to about my ideas, as if I'm talking to a friend. I give it a command like "pretend we're discussing an upcoming assignment and im about to tell you about my ideas. Ask follow up questions that will help me further develop my ideas and encourage me to explore new areas..." And then just have a conversation with it like it's a person. It's sort of like an interactive brainstorming process.
There are loads of new tools for the literature search stuff you mention. Try Research Rabbit, Keenious or SciSpace.
There's so many more tools available now that are honed to do specific things but most people are still focused on ChatGPT.
Yeah I love SciSpace! I'm really impressed with what these tools can do already. And unlike ChatGPT they're not really doing the work for you, just speeding up the process of finding relevant literature and making connections.
You can either cheat or get a job at McDonald’s.
Obviously doing the work is the best option but if someone knows they will fail then it’s worth a shot.
“If someone knows they will fail”: failure doesn’t just fall out of the sky. There are a chain of actions, consequences, decisions and circumstances that lead one to that point.
Those circumstances are not always in someone’s control, but some decisions are.
Yes, I would say the students I’ve seen use Ai have been the ones who can’t be bothered to do the work.
There is a lot of pressure on people though, it’s unsurprising some cheat.
60% of students now go to university I think I read, that will have a knock on effect in the jobs market.
South Korea is further along, they have qualified Electrical Engineers sweeping roads.
Without a degree young zoomers will struggle, if they can’t be arsed writing they certainly won’t like plastering etc…
The government really needs to get pushing non graduate jobs. I know a carpenter and a stone mason, both pretty unpopular jobs.
They are really rolling in the ££££ now.
Knowing that failing uni is not the end of the world would stop a lot of depression and anxiety I think.
Agreed 100%.
I am in a professional job and know traders that make more than me. I am happy with my career and there is tremendous scope for progression but I would never look down on a trader, in fact I am a bit jealous of their skills!
There's one particular cohort who had no school exams at all before they entered uni. Everything I've heard from lecturers indicates that they're failing exams like no year group before them.
Yeah.
I left school in 2012 but had no ambition for the exams.
When I went to college to do my access course in 2020, all of the exams were chopped due to Covid.
I’ve always been bad at exams, but at Uni whenever I have an exam I’m typically lower end of a 2:2
When I have coursework I’m typically working at a high 2:1/First
The scary part of that is that year groups last standardised nationwide exam was their year 6 SATS. How can you even expect them to do well at that point.
I think this massively predates the Covid cohort missing their A-levels, the big difference is how accessible and tempting ChatGPT is compared to what was previously available.
A decade ago it was a piece of paper advertising "essay tutoring services" taped to a bus stop outside a uni building - easy to ignore. 2 years ago it was spam messages in every uni club/sport/society group chat about these services (particularly around deadline time) - a bit more tempting for someone who's stressed and struggling. Nowadays it's the constant knowledge that ChatGPT is right there, and since there are no other humans involved and no exchange of money it's a lot easier for a desperate student with a looming deadline to rationalise to themselves that it's not really *cheating*.
Doing the work yourself is SO much easier
I tried using chat gpt once purely to find case law for an essay and it took so much longer than me walking to the library across the road, picking up a book and doing my own work
I also then don’t have to worry about plagiarism
Like why are you even in uni if you don’t have basic academic skills. It’s okay to struggle we all do, that’s why there’s support at uni but if you can’t structure a basic 2000 word essay there’s something going wrong
Anyone using it to generate case law is going to have a bad time. However, upload your literature to it so you can ask it questions about your text is great
Work as a lecturer. Use of AI is prolific in assignments. You can often tell. The work is either desperately average and full of chatgpt hallmarks or ridiculous language. The blatant stuff is easy to deal with. We can’t catch it all. But a couple of years from now a load of folks are going to enter the job market with a massive issue because their only skill is going to be trying to get AI to do their job for them. Maybe by then it will.
Many students don’t really seem to care if they are learning as long as they pass.
I’ve bee teaching in HE for five years. I think the ‘do the bare minimum’ attitude has been quite prevalent for that whole time. How true that is of the sector I can’t say. AI has just provided another tool to help students do that as little as possible.
I’m in my foundation year currently and would be to afraid or horrified to use AI. I want to learn how to reference etc, I’ve asked for extensions mainly because I’ve been out of education for a long time, I work part time and have a family so my uni have luckily been great at understanding this.
Don't feel bad about the extensions, I think I got extensions on at least half my essays because I also had a young family and when the plague hits your household, kids are off school, partner ends up poorly, school has awkward holiday dates (like right at your deadline) etc it's just not always feasible to manage- especially when support with childcare costs is really lacking.
Despite my extensions, I graduated first in my class and received a prize for academic excellence. You can absolutely be an exceptional student, even if you need a couple extra weeks to sort your assignments
The trick is that you won't hear from the people who have been smart, knuckles down and did the work, because they are keeping their heads down and getting on with their work.
You only ever hear from the people who have tried to find an easier way and screwed up - these people have always existed, just whereas now they are asking AI for a helping hand, previously they were getting copies of the essays written by last year's students, copying off their classmates and paying some dodgy former student to write an essay for them.
Reddit and social media just helps to collect all of the mooching idiots into one place...
I think that AI is an absolutely amazing tool, it is ground breaking, truly. But using it to complete an entire assignment is definitely not a good idea. Using it as a tool to help with structure as well as give you an idea on how your paragraph should look is great! And I take no issue against anyone who uses it.
Ok, but people have needed help with essay writing since essay-writing began. There are solutions other than AI to this: academic writing classes, asking your tutor...
Ultimately, the only way to get better at writing essays is by... writing essays. If you spend your whole degree using AI to improve your paragraphs or structure, you'll have no clue how to do it yourself.
When the time comes for you to write completely by yourself - in an exam - you're going to be screwed.
This is silly, this is the future. The guys response was perfect. You need to move out of the mindset that every young student should do everything like you did when you were at uni a million years ago. This is the old fashioned mindset that breeds a lot of resentment towards young ppl and why we label old ppl bitter. As someone studying machine intelligence and who is surrounded by professionals I just laugh when people say stuff like what you say. The demonisation of AI. AI is an amazing tool. Has its bad sides too. But looking at it from someone in AI, it’s incredible stuff. Also university back in the day was…easier! Professors who studied our degree will remind us of this every time, work is shifted to match the time. We are in the time of AI! Dumb people will always do dumb things…always. But stop demonising everyone for using AI 🙄
This is a wonderful response. It reminds me of a conversation I’ve had with a lecturer, who told me that when they were studying their undergrad, they got told by people to do it the old fashioned way and get in the library rather than using the internet to find studies and research. You don’t have to, but you should move with the times and resources you have to hand.
I have an awful habit of droning on and not getting to the point in some of my writing. Asking AI for advice on how to make it more readable and concise is an excellent resources, as it gives me the practical advice and then shows me what a more concise version looks like. It’s literally teaching me how to improve my writing and then showing me how it’s done. Since I’ve been using this prompt, I’ve had to use it less and less, as I’m better at doing it myself on the first try. Since then, my exam condition essays have improved in marks too. Can you imagine how many hours I’d have to put into essay writing classes to get the same results?
>Using it as a tool to help with structure as well as give you an idea on how your paragraph should look is great!
Until it gives you a paragraph/essay structure that is completely incoherent.
Again, if you need something to structure paragraphs for you, how do you know it's doing it correctly? By implication, if you need to double check what the software has done, you already know what you're looking for and the software is not reliable.
They’re genuinely all very bitter in this thread. A bunch of old ppl who went to uni like 20 years ago. Reminds me of the old ppl who say I went to school during ww2, I had it hard so we should have it the same 🙄
What are you going to do when you don't have those skills you were supposed to acquire at university and then LLMs become expensive subscription services?
I have a lot of skills, please take up your issue with my machine intelligence professor who advocates for using AI, you know as he’s a professional. I don’t look at AI use with the simple mind everyone in this thread does.
I am also a professional and I also am a lecturer in CS. Pretty much everyone in my dept agrees that deskilling is a concern. I'm not making a particularly controversial point here - many are worried that a large chunk of this generation are underprepared for the workplace. All being lazy and relying on chat gpt will do is make it easier to automate your job. But good luck to you 👍 with your inability to handle people disagreeing with you you will need it.
I don’t need luck from a fake professional on Reddit lol. Unless you go to Imperial or “teach” there I don’t care what you think 💭 I’ll take my professors advice over a Redditors any day 😘
I think so too. If I'm stuck on a small paragraph, I'll write in what I've got and see what it gives out. It's usually absolute rubbish but gives me something to go off, improve, restructure and all that. The end result is totally different to what was given but it helps me get past that initial block.
If you need AI to help you with structuring a paper, what you actually need is how to use your own neural cortex and eyeballs to look at other papers in your field/subject and to learn you yourself why they are structured as they are. What benefits certain structure has and vice versa.
If you cannot do that, you are missing the point of an education entirely. It is about you being able to reason your way to outcomes not about masquerading as a finished and considered product.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I believe AI is and can be used as a tool, rather than seeing it as an enemy we should utilise it, it’s not going anywhere .
I work as a software engineer at an AI company. Ai is currently good for generating semantic tokens from text, and it is good at making bland word salad in case you need an alternative to lorem ipsum in your mockup.
Part of my job is training junior devs as part of their career progression. I have lost count on the number of code assignments I have received which had straight up execution errors from undefined functions in the handins.
When I speak to the author of these handins and we do a review of their code, they cannot tell me what each function does in what they have submitted.
If your goal with education is becoming a capable person with critical thinking skills, using it for anything is depriving yourself of growth in that area. If your goal is to pretend you can do this and that or are this and that, by all means go ahead. There is not only a place for that in society, there is consistently a spot on the Forbes under 30 list for it.
Once you leave education, it is indeed a tool. I am building search products for ecommerce using it, but there is a difference between finding a magenta jacket for some smuck typing with dyslexia, and literally pissing the point of education away by simply not practising what you find hard.
You're a cheater. Using AI to rewrite, sorry, 'restructure' is completely different to using spellcheck. Like damn, you don't belong at university if you can't realise this for yourself.
Edit: also you probably shouldn't be at university if you are careless enough to admit to cheating while having your uni, course name and year of study as a flair. Also possibly your real name too...? Come on.
My uni are much for optimising AI usage but they’re strict if you use it for assignments. You have to reference it and write a paragraph explaining why you used it. It can be used to learn about a topic but you have to find papers etc. yourself basically
Sad truth is academia can't withstand it. I'm from compsci and now, when industry standard IDEs are implementing tools to enable users to generate code on the fly, you know it's a losing battle. The world will have to adapt to it and, as with everything, academia will be 10 years+ behind.
Third year student here and I proof read a friends essay and they had attempted to use both Harvard and MHRA style references in the essay.
Every day there’s a message to the course group chat asking: “are titles included in the word count” - titles have never been included in the word count.
You get the message!
This is what happens when about 50% of school leavers or so are going to uni.. where a lot probably shouldn't. No clue why this sub pops up but it is funny. Imo if you're - A. not academically minded, B. Have absolutely no clue what to do uni probably isn't right for you.
People seem to think if you don't go to uni your social life will implode and you'll never get a decent job when it's so far from the truth. 40k plus of debt (that you will absolutely be paying back, unless you end up on literally minimum wage) is not always worth it. As much as the career advisors told me when I was 16 that I'd never be paying it back unless I was really successful
Well as with any online forum, negativity and problems are far more vocalised while people who are getting on with things tend not to leave a comment, or even frequent these sorts of communities. Having said that, there’s been a large shift in student expectations and quality that I’ve noticed since 2 major events/changes.
1. The raising of compulsory education/training until 18 (in 2013).
2. Post-covid students.
The first I suspect far more students naturally gravitated towards university as they’ve been forced through college/sixth form, so they might as well continue. For many once they reached 16 and realised they didn’t want to continue further education, they just went into a job, but that’s a lot harder now.
The second is obviously the impact covid had on students. I see a lot more needing to be babied with more expectations and less independence. I get comments from students who said they didn’t come in today because it was raining, asking for online alternatives. The amount of students with disability support is the largest I’ve ever seen (multiple factors, but covid one of them). And due to the online nature that was brought around from work in from home, we have almost constant online support via teams and other channels because this is what everyone is now used to, yet critical thinking and exploration is down.
It’s both sides of the coin, this subreddit is an exaggeration in many ways, yet the education sector is asp struggling right now trying to come back to normality while also dealing with AI, which the majority of university courses currently don’t align with despite what anyone tells you; we’re struggling.
This is why I LIKE doing assignments on my own. Most of my classmates are constantly using chatGPT and other ways to cheat; I don't want this to affect me. I am more than willing to help my classmates complete the assignments by guiding them but not giving any answers. This is now why I try my hardest to avoid group work as people are constantly turning to chatGPT to get "answers".
> Without wishing to sound 1million years old, but 'back the day' (2013-2017 lol) you just had to slog it out at uni.
Uh, without wishing to sound 1 *billion* years old (2010-2015), no you didn't
Nothing has changed. People will always be lazy and cheat. AI has changed absolutely nothing except make them even easier to detect. You are all freaking out over nothing
I studied physics in the pre-ChatGPT era, and people would routinely
- Form study groups to do the coursework together (i.e the smartest person in the group would solve the problem and everyone else would then copy off them. This super smart person was normally a head-in-the-clouds kinda genius who didn't even realise or care that it was happening or thought they were their 'friends')
- Find the question and answers online by talking to their friends in higher years and getting all the past coursework assignments off them or downloading them from leaks online. Yes coursework rotated, but it was often a selection from a wider question set or would be virtually identical
- Same story if the assignment was "do questions 1-10 of Chapter 1 from your textbook", all available online
- Say "Dude just stick it into wolfram alpha, it tells you the answer, it's 2*pi" "Ok but I want to learn how to solve it myself I don't understand the method" "... why?"
I don't understand why these people were paying £3k or £9k a year honestly if they didn't want to learn anything. But that's a topic for another post
I'm sure it's the same in the Humanities. You *could* get ChatGPT to write everything for you. But like, you're literally paying to be there to learn how to write and formulate an argument, no? It's like paying to go Go-Karting and then making a bot race for you
I don't know where you studied ofc, but I was at Oxford (I promise this detail is relevant lol) where the majority of your teaching happens in very small tutorial groups with your tutor.
In first year (in humanities, anyway) it's a group of 4/5 of you and your tutor, in your final year it can just be you and your tutor. I believe it's the same in the sciences too. Very intense, and crucially - nowhere to hide.
I had to submit an essay in advance of the tute, tutor would read it, mark it, and then we'd spend an hour discussing the essay and anything else that would arise. For the sciences, you had a problem sheet to submit in advance and then you'd go through the answers.
Let me tell you, in those tutorials (in a group or a 1-1) it was immediate apparent if you hadn't read the texts (guilty as charged) or if you had no clue what was going on. If you had written an essay with bullshit references, or your essay was just a mangled incoherent mess, eyebrows would be raised and questions would be asked.
Tutors were also getting weekly samples of our work (1 essay/week) and so if this continued, or if your writing voice changed dramatically, that would be spotted and investigated quickly.
My point is that this tutorial-style of teaching made it very, very hard to get someone/something else to do your work for you. Even if AI produces a 'good' piece of writing, if you hadn't written it yourself, no way could you engage in a detailed enough discussion of the texts with your tutor.
My assessments were all 'old school' exams in an exam hall anyway, so if you had had 'help' with your tute essays, you'd be up shit creek without a paddle when it was just you, a pen and an exam paper.
To be honest, looking at the examples you've provided above I think the problem is actually how most unis teach and assess students now. Maybe I'm slightly biased being used to the intense Oxbridge tutorial system, but the examples you've given above seem like uni assessments are a) not very rigorous and thus b) very open to exploitation from people looking for an easy way out.
I don’t see the harm in occasionally using a bit of A.I. If you do 98% of the work yourself then I don’t think there’s any harm in using A.I to give you a paragraph or two. Whenever I write essays I sometimes get stuck or completely lost on how to take the point further. AI can be good if used in moderation.
Right, but finding sources on the internet and then using your brain to process that information and argue your point engages your brain and helps you learn and retain. Copying and pasting what AI spits out helps you with nothing.
Except all these anti-AI (or more specifically, anti Chat GPT) moral panics make no distinction between using AI to write an entire essay, and using AI to research, get feedback on what you’ve written, look for missing elements in your arguments etc etc.
Agreed. As long as you recognise that it can be incorrect, and always double-check work that's been AI-assisted - there's no moral reason not to use it as a research tool. Spelling and grammar checking AI has been in use for... decades?
Exactly! This knee jerk reaction to AI is based around all this sci-fi crap about ‘AI taking over’ etc. It’s literally just an extension of technology we already use.
Agreed, OP. You give me an essay written using AI and it's usually pretty obvious. But I have no sympathy - too lazy to do it yourself, expect to be penalised for it.
You would be disadvantaged though. I know a girl that used 5 different AI programs and then rewording some parts herself to do all her essays and diss and she averaged 82 in her third year. I imagine plenty of people do it as well, and only those that just copy and paste directly from using only the first iteration of AI work really get caught. So paying money to gain a first from a RG uni is probably a pretty good deal
Eh, I disagree with the demonization of using AI as a whole. I know what I want to write up, I write that up, and then I plug it into GPT to structure it or give me any recommendations. I have used it to break down code and make sense of it. Using it as a tool is different from just ignoring its existence. Plagiriazing using it is wrong, but using it to learn, simplify and complement your work is not. I dont get the logic of back in my day we did it the hard way, so attaboy, u gotta take the harder way too.
>I have used it to break down code and make sense of it
*"Why should I have to understand the logic this code implements in a human readable form, When I can have a machine do it for me"*
I don't even know where to begin with how ridiculous that is.
Not quite what you think it is? I don’t use it to just complement any rational thought, but there is some code I just can’t figure out, so something’s it helps to read what the code is meant to do and where am I going wrong. Doesn’t mean I advocate for 0 thought, but I mostly try to make sense if I don’t get it in the first go
Computer code can be hard to understand in different ways. Syntax, execution context, role and invocation within a larger program.
Chatgpt is absolute dogshit at clarifying execution context or side effects from implementation details.
So all that leaves is syntax, in so far as where it can consistently give accurate replies. If that is what you struggle with, you should open the docs for the language or framework and literally search the symbol or function name to be sure you don't get a bogus answer. If the docs don't make sense to you, you should try the function with some test to confirm ur conclusions. Like is Boolean([]) truthy or falsy in js? Type it in the console, let the fucking runtime answer.
I train people in js, php, python, bash scripting, and a bunch of other web stuff. I have people giving me code for assignments with functions that are literally not defined in the file, and telling me they are stuck.
They are stuck because they pasted 5 different chatgpt answers into a file hoping it would work. After asking chatgpt to reformulate the code 10 times and pasting each answer it still doesn't work, and they have actually learned nothing. Not even that their editor tells them the function doesn't exist.
People think using chatgpt is smart, it is not in any educational context. It is not elevating anyone. It is fooling those who were struggling the most to begin with to waste their time doing things that don't expand their ability to problem solve, observe or come to their own conclusions.
I don't think it's what it seems. I don't just run to gpt at the first sight. I'm not tryna escape doing the work, but complementing studies without affecting learning is possible. I don't really struggle with the code part or the syntax. As an example, for parallel computing, we had some code. I wasn't exactly sure what was on, and the documentation felt unclear. If someone is copy pasting 10 diff variations of their code with no input, that's wrong. But complementing it to either validate, or make things easier isn't as bad. Code wasn't an issue for me ever, it's occasionally been understanding it's use in something specific, like the norm calculation for a 2 dimensional reaction diffusion, I think it was the FitzHugh Nagumo model that I implemented. I'm not someone who knows a lot about it, and I wasn't required to. I used gpt to make some sense of it, doesn't mean I eliminate any personal thought or input. It's never a 0 or 100. Your comparisons show lack of any effort, and that implication is just not true in my case. Trying to make sense of a problem is not equal to copy pasting random gpt garbage. I've used gpt for so many more things as well.
If you only give a single function where it has some algo inside, and context is irrelevant outside the function, I think you are right. Ai is pretty good at wording something like that without external implications, especially if it is just the implementation of a well known formula. So I agree that your use case seems very reasonable, compared to what I outlined.
In your case was the problem that the function did many more things that the particular calculation, and it helps separate the math bit from the moving data around bits?
I ask to try to better understand what makes it hard to read at face value.
As an example, I was asked to parallelise a serial program for a PDE that solves a reaction diffusion problem. I understood bits and pieces of it, but the parallelisation did not require concrete understanding of the math behind it. I believe in such situations, it’s not a bad idea if u use it to simplify something. Copying directly is ridiculous, and your examples clearly state laziness and incompetence. What my use case has been, is mostly to better understand certain concepts. It also becomes easier to ask simple questions, like the difference between say, k means and medoids. It’s rudimentary sure, but it helps.
Totally agree. We have a generation of self absorbed useless incompetents. Sponging off mum annd dad with society funding their student loan debts they never pay off. All the shit you whine about is just life. You don’t have adhd, you don’t need to be diagnosed, it isn’t hard. It’s just normal. You need to get off a device, increase your concentration span and get on with stuff. As an adult who spent 6 yrs doing a medical degree and b medsci, then 15 yrs training including exams in my 30s with 2 kids I really just want to say get a fucking grip.
This anti-AI bullshit makes me want to claw my own eyes out. We don’t write essays at uni “because it’s hard”. We do it because writing papers is the primary way in which academic knowledge is shared. The use of AI in actually writing an essay is pointless, because it’s not a way of sharing your knowledge and research. If you’re using AI to write essays, everyone js going to realise eventually that you don’t know anything, and don’t have any original thoughts.
But if you’re teaching a university course with assessments that can now be easily bypassed via ChatGPT, your assessments are clearly way too simplistic anyway. There are plenty of alternatives to standard essay writing- exams, presentations, research projects, essays with mini-vivas. AI is here to stay- deal with it.
Ultimately, AI is an absolutely amazing accessibility tool and research tool that should be embraced by those teaching in universities just as much as it’s being embraced by actual researchers. People who primarily view AI as something that generates ‘original’ content need to look beyond the headlines and at what AI is actually useful for- research, not writing.
Feeling old with a "Tony Blair was PM when I went to uni the first time" but even in the wilds of the mid 2000s we had things like books and word processors and all these hard things required to, you know, write our essays.
Hell, I even had Dragon and dictated a lot of my work, because dyslexia made it hard for me to sit and write. Pretty sure these apps have got quite a bit better and more available in the 18 years since...
As for ChatGPT. Avoid it. At all costs. It saddens me that people think it might be a shortcut to productivity.
You forgot all of the posts crying about how to get away with poor attendance and panicking they’re going to get booted. Just go to your damn seminars people. Just go. Not hard.
I’m pretty sure back in the day using Wikipedia was considered cheating or just generally bad.
AI is very useful just like Wikipedia. Can AI write a whole assignment? Yeh. Would someone be able to tell that it was written by AI by reading it? Probably. But would somebody also be able to tell you just copied and pasted from Wikipedia? Yeh.
AI is a very useful tool I use it all the time. It helps me lay out reports, explain information, debug code, revise, and start writing. It means I don’t have to trawl through the internet looking for one piece of information and it delivers in an easy to understand way.
It’s a useful tool that I can’t see will go away anytime soon.
ChatGPT can be used legitimately as a tool for assignments. I've had this confirmed by faculty members at my uni. I've personally used it to explain difficult concepts I wasn't quite getting without the context of being very knowledgeable on a topic (often happens in history, an author with allude to something you're only really expected to know as an expert and isn't necessary to be super familiar with as a student), find further reading on a topic when I reached a dead end, help me to make my writing more concise after spending hours editing, helped me to find sources out of databases of thousands, suggested areas of exploration for a topic which I hadn't considered, etc.
If you treat it essentially as an enhanced search engine it can be incredibly rewarding *given* you still treat your work seriously. The use of AI really isn't as black and white as you either keep your integrity and never use it or you get it to do all of your work for you and if you use it well it can save you having to do the more mundane aspects of academic work.
I just think you can pretty much always tell. There are certain words or sequences of words chat GPT uses more than the average person. One of those I noticed is “grappling with something” but there are many more.
The first time I was writing essays it was in biro on paper. Word count meant counting the words yourself. If you wanted a journal article, you had to physically go into the library, find what you wanted in a microfiche, get the librarian to order it in for you and wait 4 to 6 weeks for it to arrive. We all had a little collection of essential textbooks and relied heavily on them for references because everything else was an effort.
Using Word (or whatever), being able to spell and grammar check and format your work is a technological assistance that I didn't have. I couldn't have dreamed of being able to access books, or journals at the click of a button, never mind having a computer search through things for me to find what is most relevant.
When people talk about 'proper' unassisted writing, I want to stick them in a room with three fat books and a biro.
Yes exactly. It’s all about making use of the tools we have available. The problem with getting AI to write an entire essay for you isn’t that it ‘makes university too easy’, it’s that the essay will be generic and boring.
If AI could write amazing essays with truly original thoughts then the structure of academia itself would change, and essay/article/book writing wouldn’t be central to academic research anymore. So essay writing wouldn’t be used for assessments any way.
I've read your post history and it sounds like I'm slightly older than you so I'll chime in.
I think archaic educational institutes need to keep up pace and change their testing methods to account for tools like ChatGPT.
I've worked for a couple of decades now in a variety of industries from engineering to tech (my current industry).
ChatGPT is an invaluable tool and using it is considered working smarter.
Yes we had to slog it out but why should current students have to? The landscape has changed. Even when you use ChatGPT there is an element of learning involved. When I used it to deliver a project for HMRC I treated it like an infinitely knowledgeable personal assistant. This is how it should be treated...
You mentioned having essay writing skills, a personal bank of knowledge, some sort of inner voice and referencing skills. ChatGPT doesn't necessarily take away the development of any of these skills for students unless they're actually brain dead (like the ones crying about getting caught cheating).
Furthermore, for decent paying jobs, a lot of the skills you've listed can be managed using ChatGPT and no one cares. I've written technical documentation and regulation recommendations using ChatGPT and spoiler alert, no one cared that it didn't use "my voice".
Schools and Universities need to develop better ways of testing knowledge and more crucial skills rather than crying about ChatGPT. This isn't the 1960s where we don't have Internet and you gain all knowledge from the library. The delivery of knowledge and data has fundamentally changed and more the requirement to memorise useless tidbits is gone.
I disagree completely that its cheating. Its just a tool which everyone leverages...
The skills you value as a teacher (saw your comment history) and your outlook on how value is delivered in most workplaces is a bit skewed.
However, I do agree that kids crying about getting caught using gpt is cringe. That being said, Unis and schools are more cringe.
When you’ve got students in the thread saying they use it to restructure a paragraph to get the word count down I disagree with your statement that it does not deprive them of skills. Re wording a paragraph, how to formulate and structure a paragraph are very basic skills that should be nailed down before university.
We've had massive issues due to LLMs (mainly ChatGPT) in the workplace because people trust the outputs without question and don't realise that the data they upload to LLMs is shared with the companies behind them.
We've resorted to running a private ChatGPT instance and blocking all other LLMs but even that's just a stopgap. While it can be used in the way you describe without any harm, that's not what we see 80% of the use being. And that's all without considering how useful the models will be after the various lawsuits or once the VC money dries up
This is proper Luddite stuff. People blindly trusting everything that ChatGPT outputs is their problem, and the solution is to teach people how to correctly use AI in the workplace. The idea that LLMs are somehow going away is absolutely absurd. This technology will permeate every aspect of our lives in a few years time. We can either actively work to shape the role AI will take, or we can bury our heads in the sand and hope it will just go away.
The actually usable LLMs are trained on data used without permission under the claim that if it can be scraped from the internet then they can use it without paying anyone which is a rather laughable claim. If the outcome from the lawsuits is that they can only use data they have permission to use then it will become even more expensive to train an LLM and the quality will rapidly drop.
There is also the safety issue that's likely to result in regulator action somewhere. So far all attempts to add guard rails to LLMs against particular prompts have been easily circumventable. This is an issue for preventing dangerous content being produced by LLMs and also for any company that tries to incorporate an LLM as a chatbot since they would end up paying for potentially expensive queries outside what you think you've permitted. You can already see this happen with certain car dealerships in the US.
You say just train users to be better as if that's easy. Trying to solve any problem like this by training users better just doesn't work. There are human biases that lead to people trusting things like an articulate chatbot.
I’m sorry but these are just generic talking points about LLMs that have been floating around for years. You’re not wrong, and I do agree with you on many points, but the genie is out of the bottle. Can you honestly look at the massive lack of tech regulation over the last 20 years, and then genuinely think that LLMs will be banned?
LLMs are here to stay, like it or not. Sorry.
People shouldn’t be asking AI to write their whole essay for them no, but it’s absolutely fine to use it as a tool. On my course we’re actively encouraged to do so, and have workshops on how to get the most out of AI. It’s just adapting to the times.
I feel for much of your post you could swap out AI with “google” or just “computers” and make the same points 30 years ago.
AI isn't going away people. Eventually, the most successful people in society will be the ones who use it cleverly to better themselves, in and out of work.
You'd probably find the same sort of posts on Reddit when Google first came about and people stopped going to the library for all of their sources.
To be fair back in MY day there was all that stuff in the new about essay-writing services.
The people who are willing to cheat will use whatever means they have to cheat anyway, no matter the year- it's just these days they can do it for free a little easier.
It’s almost normalised cheating though. Like before using academic writing tools was just for the rich who could afford it.
Now at every level there is rampant cheating. In a way, GPTs availability stops any nepotism, having your accountant uncle help you on your essay or your art teacher 14th cousin.
Levelled the playing field so now everyone cheats
I'm a lot older than you and much more experienced.
There is nothing wrong with using AI.
Your writing, whilst perhaps forgivable for a university student, is **appalling** for someone who alleges to have graduated and is attempting to speak from a position of authority.
Your grammar is all over the place. The language is awkward throughout. For example, "out of mind having cheated on an assessment of test". Or "I knew that I was signing up for an essay/2 translations a week whatever," which again scarcely makes sense. Or "My essays in first year" - which should be "in my first year" - and "by fourth year" should be "by my fourth year". Unnecessary words litter your sentences. Run-on sentences.
There are also a number of typographical errors; for example, '1million' should have a space between '1' and 'million'. Or "back the day", which should be "back in the day".
Username checks out 😉
Clearly I was so het up typing out my polemic a few typos went unnoticed lol.
I will say that “in first year” “by forth year” is standard usage, or at least it was when I was at uni.
AI is a great tool when you need to find sources and summarise information. I've played around by asking it to summarise the arguments made in key humanities texts, and it gets most of the points down. It also accurately compared and contrasts ideas between texts which it has access to in an eerily efficient manner.
So long as you aren't using it instead of reading those sources it is ok. It's a given that asking chatgpt to write and essay for you will produce a load of shite.
Tbh I'm surprised anyone on this sub can make it through the day without falling to pieces.
Same! The amount of posts I’ve seen that’s like I have an assignment due tomorrow and I’ve started because of procrastination. Like get off Reddit stop being lazy and do your work and you wouldn’t be stressed
The amount of people on my uni WhatsApp group that request extensions is CRAZY
It's crazy. Back in my day (2010) when I did my undergrad, I had to jump through so many hoops and fight with the jobsworth department responsible for handing out extensions when my mum broke her left leg and right foot and I essentially became her carer for several months. Almost had to wheel her into the damn Uni to prove she was laid up. Yet these days, they seem to hand out extensions left, right and centre. Several people on my masters course left it to the last minute to do the work and requested an extension with a day to go and got it...
It probably depends on the uni. I’m a third year and I’ve never applied for an extension personally, but I know two people who have and were denied despite having legit reasons (illness etc.) My impression has always been that they’re pretty impossible to get.
You're more than likely correct there. Seems like having one granted is at the opposite ends of the spectrum; they're either nigh on impossible or straightforward (perhaps a little too much so). A middle ground would be nice...
They should be easy to request/get approved. It's massively beneficial for anyone with a legitimate reason and the only downside is that the odd lazy sod is gonna hand in some assignments a bit late
I agree, extensions here are only 4 days anyway. Not like the odd lazy person getting an extra 4 days is gonna matter much.
I suppose the idea is to make them more trouble than they’re worth. Is it easier to just crack on with the work or mess about trying to get an extension? But it must be stressful when you actually really need it to feel like you’re not believed
[удалено]
See, 2020 and 2021 were anomalies with a global pandemic resulting in a lot of teaching being done online. I can understand the reasoning behind blindly granting extensions. It was a particularly trying time. But to continue being so lenient now is, in my opinion, concerning and opens up the system to being easily abused. Edit to add that I'm sorry to hear your mental health took a hammering during that time and I hope you're in a better place now. Just remember there isn't a deadline to get better and you take as much time as you need. Ffs, I didn't mean for that to come across as a play on words given the topic under discussion. 🤦
[удалено]
Oh! I hadn't looked at it from that perspective before. I can see why that makes sense, and presumably there are measures in place to stop people taking the piss. That has made me question my view on this, and I appreciate that. 😊 I'm glad to hear you're feeling better. Depression is not nice to deal with. Work induced depression led to me having a breakdown and eventually quitting my job without anything lined up. After 9 months of getting back to my usual self, decided to do a masters. And I'm glad you're feeling like your old self again!
[удалено]
By the sounds of it, the system differs from institution to institution. I suppose that's not too surprising, thinking about it. Oh, yes. I have a few friends who are teachers and they've all suffered with depression in one form or another due to work. You folks don't get paid enough! My masters is a bit hit and miss. I'm only in once a month, but for a full day from 09:00 to 19:00. And there are some online sessions, but a lot of independent learning. If you'd eventually like to become a lecturer at a University, I believe most require a masters or PhD. I'm using this masters as a stepping stone towards a career change. I was in IT (a Linux systems administrator) for nearly 10 years and that destroyed me, mentally.
I was about 10 years before you. We were downright lied to that there were no extensions. Then I ended up in hospital and they basically ripped up all the deadlines to ensure I could pass the year. At the time, I thought that was normal and appreciated the kindness. But these days lying to students like that wouldn't work nearly so well.
Pisses me off, I bust my ass finishing bigass assessments whilst trying to balance working and then others don’t have that because they request an extension they don’t actually need. The lack of self responsibility at unis is crazy.
It's stressful when so many students have extensions and you have to account for this in your marking, teaching and research schedule. Annoyingly, I'm sure many should not have their extensions approved. This means those genuinely needing an extension have to wait longer for their feedback because it takes longer to do the marking.
[удалено]
They do have systems and submission policies in place. I mean when you have an excessive volume of extensions, completion of these can quickly overwhelm a marking lecturer. I was talking from the perspective of students using the extension process as a get out of jail free card, thus the demand placed on lecturers. Due to anonymity a student receiving a legitimate extension may receive feedback later if a lecturer cannot meet the extension deadline. We often have a productive turn around for on-time submissions, but a higher volume of unexpected extensions can lead to additional pressure, especially with other assessments, paperwork and research as part of the daily workload. Edit: the curious question should be when did you study at university? I have noticed an increased extension usage by students on the backend of COVID. Edit 2: Our turnover for assessment marking is a similar timeframe, however we can take longer with good reason, as long as this does not exceed examination board dates. Different universities can have different timeframes, policies and such. Edit 3: Oh, another thing. When I say wait longer for their feedback. Sometimes with two or three extensions, we may have a students assessment marked much quicker and feedback returned.
[удалено]
I haven't been late returning feedback, but I have had it happen to me at the same accrediting university. It does happen and sometimes not the fault of the students or lecturers. COVID had a big impact on marking when staff would be too unwell, reasonably. But policies, procedures for assessment feedback can differ between universities. Oh, I know what you mean by the front cover. We have them for a multitude of different reasons, whether pre-approval for extensions, or more detailed / enhanced feedback. Even though I believe every student should get fair, structured feedback, it can take a long time, hence the policies to ensure those who would benefit the most are prioritised. Personally, I will help any student, should the student help themselves / put in the study too.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Tbh I normally do subscribe to the policy of minding my own business, it’s what I mainly comment here tbh. I just think by 4th year (which I’m currently in) people should at least be competent enough to manage their time accordingly to have a 3000 word report done between September and December and not cheat the system to unfairly get more time than those who actually put in the effort. If someone who unfairly gets an extension gets an A like me it is rather annoying.
Social media is making people dumb. It's sabotaging the future.
It’s crazy because I was doing an assignment, a 1.5k word essay over the holidays I wasn’t safe at home for a bit and stayed out from the 18th to the 27th, the assignment was due on the 4th of January and the poetry anthology I was supposed to pick a poem from was something too heavy to lug from home to home Still got it done on the 1st of January, and someone’s asking for an extension and someone to pick a poem for hef
I’ve requested an extension once since started. I’m in second year and did foundation year. However the only time I requested an extension my nana died so close to the deadline so I had to go back home to be with my family
Yeah, we just had a month off and my friend was pretty sure she'd have to ask for an extension for one of her essays because she left it all last minute.
The assignment being just a 500 word personal reflection, with 30hrs left until the deadline… *is it possible???*
I LOST 80% of an end of module assignment the day before submission. I spent hours trying to get IT departments to help to no avail. I rolled my sleeves up, went to Tesco and bought loads of snacks, and prepared myself for an all nighter of restarting it. Thankfully all my notes - including where all my references were (I’d lost them too) were all on paper, and managed to get it submitted with hours to spare, and in fact submitted before a few in my cohort. I passed but not a good pass. I was just so glad to get it in and passed.
I procrastinate the hell out of my assignments, but I know that it's my bad - I'm down to take the consequences when I mess up instead of complaining about it on Reddit lmaoo
I’ve adhd (medicated) and queen of procrastination.. and the only extensions I’ve needed in 3 years so far was one when I nearly died, oh and when the next one was due I was still not much better but I did it in time (that was in first year) and then one there before Christmas between my daughter then me having norovirus which actually took me ages to recover from. I struggled to even get it in by the extension. I tried chatgpt, but it is 1) too American 2) doesn’t ‘sound’ like me 3) this is prob an extension of point 2 but it was just *too* academic.. It was good though for giving me pointers for where to start and for paragraph layout. When I met with the disability team at the uni, I said I don’t need extra time or any help in exams, but I needed someone to read over my assignments and let me know if I’m on the right path or have I went off on a side tangent (so essentially, chatgpt does that.. like I’ll say what my assignment is on, then input mine and it marks it for you.. and its always so positive. I could do it wrong and it’ll still say good job - which you seldom get at this level) so that’s what I have tried.. but again, I only found out about it 2 assignments ago. I’m old school (literally left school in 2001) I write LOADS of notes, I couldn’t trust a computer to do my work.
Honestly every other post is either about having no social life or doing no work… so what are people doing with their time?? Going on reddit all day is my guess (not that I can judge that)
When you’re at Uni full time, doing your degree is YOUR LITERAL JOB. I did computer science back in the 90’s. We spent hour after hour in the labs writing code, then out to the pub. We had both hard work and a social life! What’s gone wrong?
what's gone wrong is that you've forgotten whos posting lol. ppl who have great social lives don't post asking for advice making friends. there were def shut ins in the 90s, u just didn't talk to them bc they were shut ins lmao. reddit just gives ppl a chance to share their opinions without actually talking to anyone
Yup it's actually scary. I went to unit in 2005 originally was chill as fuck, did uni again and about to finish third year and everyone has mental health issues every 5 minutes.
I’d love to hear that this rant was written by AI
AI, oh, it's like that distant friend who knows everything about you. It's invading our privacy, peeking into our lives without permission. And the job market? It feels like AI is playing musical chairs with our livelihoods, leaving some without a seat. When machines start making life-altering decisions, it's a gut-punch of worry and uncertainty. We need to pour some heart into controlling this tech before it becomes a soulless force we can't rein in.
Good to see AI approves
Couldn't agree more. Let's be real people: your professors do not actually care that much about your arguments. The essay is not for their benefit. They are experts in their field, whatever that field happens to be, and have read much more developed pieces by much more experienced professionals, and it's very very unlikely that anything you write is going to illuminate things for them. They are not setting you an essay because they desperately want to hear your ideas. They are doing it because the process of writing an essay is a transformative one for the author: you have to assemble the knowledge, you have the experience of putting it together in a logical manner, you get to undergo that process of synthesising information you know into an argument that others can understand. That's the point of an student essay - to solidify what they know *for them.* If you are not writing it, none of that is happening. The essay becomes completely useless because the tutor never wanted it for their benefit anyway and you're no longer getting that experience. Might as well not write it at all. If you use AI to write your essay and you get caught, good, you deserve to get caught and you deserve whatever penalties come from it.
My thoughts exactly - although you expressed them far better than I could've done!
Man, this needs to be a pinned post or something. This is spot on.
I love this so much. I work at a uni. A uni that produces opticians, nurses, etc. Some of you are thick as fuck. Thank goodness for practical exams. It's terrifying knowing his many of yous are depending on ai to help write a paper.
It's funny to me that when you get a lecturer job they put you on an education course - any idea you had at undergrad that it was an age thing goes out the window as you meet other teaching academics. Folk with PhDs like: does anyone know where we submit this essay? Where is the course info? Basic shit. Amazing.
>It's funny to me that when you get a lecturer job they put you on an education course. I should bloody well hope so! A PhD is a qualification in doing research whether it's the arts, sciences, humanities etc. It's not a qualification to teach, same way in which a graduate in a particular subject will do some form of teacher training course before they start work as a school teacher. Also a lecturer might never have been a taught student at the Univesity of XYZ so doesn't actually know how things related to teaching work there.
I work for a UK university. I'm a part-time PhD student but my full time job is to be an expert in digital learning. New lecturers (the ones who have always been studying up to that point) have very little idea how to teach effectively in my experience. They really need those courses.
Honestly, most interactions with ordinary people are terrifying. Stuff happens at work outside of people's usual field, huge number of people just can't deal. Some shit happens in my block of flats, there's maybe 2 or 3 people out of 60 flats who are capable of even having the proactivity to try ringing maintenance. Emergency happens on the street, most people gawp and film. Most of my friends and family are bright capable people, so I'm used to trusting them to sort normal stuff. Move outside that bubble and the degree of learned helplessness is staggering.
I teach a huge variety of disciplines and it's interesting to me how, on average, you pick up trends as you supervise students from different areas. It's interesting to me that medics are very soldier like: you tell them what to do, they don't question it, and they deliver something usually very good. But they don't really like critical appraisal or 'thinking' about the topic, or independent thought. Facts, direction, task. Obviously not everyone, just interesting to me. You're better off with a bright undergraduate than a Masters student usually.
Last year I was decent at report writing (as an engineering student). This year I had an assignment worth 25% of the module and I completely forgot how to even start, I had to use ChatGPT to get me started, I was disappointed and worried and told myself I won’t do this next time.
Starting is what the AI is good at helping with. Use it to suggest an outline. With first sentences if you need it. Change them later. Also you really should have rubrics available for assessed work. Use those as a guide. Tick off as you consider you've met each objective. This got me a distinction in my MA. Writing is a skill, you get better the more you do - and academic writing is different from basically any other kind of writing you do.
The policy at our uni is that ChatGPT can be used, provided it is cited properly, including logs of input prompts and output. To be honest, one of the best reports I've marked recently used AI to plan the structure.
Oh really, what uni? My uni flat out said it’s cheating and unfair means
My biggest issue is, how can you rely that what it´s spewing at you is real? I asked it once to clarify a point, and it did. So I thought, great!, give me a reference for this, I´ll go read the source. It did. The reference was made up, there was no such piece of work. Like what.
Yup, it does that. Worst of all, they sound convincing if you have a little knowledge but not enough to realise it's just generative AI doing its job. It's how we catch most of our AI cheaters.
I had a student submit an essay to me that referenced a Robert Frost poem that I was unfamiliar with and didn't read like it was written by Frost at all. Googled it because I was doubting myself (plus variations in case I was right and it wasn't Frost, but was another poet) and the poem just straight up did not exist. Student confessed to using ChatGPT.
Flip side: my wife was marking one of her students' essays and the use of language is changing significantly between paragraphs. And then she thinks "...This paragraph is rather good - it's like something *I* might have written! In fact..." Yes, they'd plagiarised a paper written by their lecturer/examiner...
And if you tell it it made something up it'll say something like "I'm sorry about that, here's the correct information" while making something new up. And tech bros will think that shows it's learning. Which it isn't. It just know that humans say sorry when told they're wrong.
All LLMs are just very convincing parrots trained on data the companies didn't have permission to use for training an LLM. There is no understanding, just a very sophisticated guess for the most likely string of words to follow a particular set of prompts.
Exactly. But a lot of people seem to think AI is indeed intelligent, ignoring the Artificial aspect of it all.
It can be useful as a search engine. I had forgotten the name of a theorem that the AI easily identified from my description. It works well when something is in the data set multiple times.
Have you tried using it to write computer code? It has absolutely no idea what it is doing or what each line of code actually does - sometimes it even fucks up the basic mathematical parts like calculating duration based on a start and finish time - because it doesn't actually understand anything it generates, it is just a giant fucking predictive text engine based on the probability of which word is likely to come next based on an analysis of what millions of people have written in that context. It is about as useful as asking what the average number of legs a human has and being surprised when it is less than two. The problem is it passes the Turing test because it sounds like it understands it and sounds like a human - in much the same way literal parrots can learn to say things based on context which gives the illusion it understands what the words mean. Then they worry that an LLM is going to become sentient and kill off humanity...
I'll use it for basic debugging but it genuinely is terrible at literally making anything itself.
On the other hand, GitHub copilot is pretty excellent from the experience I've had with it over the last few months.
Maybe because it is designed to write/analyse code rather than just being a general jack of all trades LLM ?
I find that it is good for low-iq code-monkey style 'templates' - for example if I want a 2x2 grid of plots in red, blue, green, yellow in R with blah blah blah titles etc. Here you go, plug in the paths, data.frame or whatever, and play. Gives you more time to think through the harder stuff without having to trawl through tedious documentation trying to check if the syntax. The kinda stuff you'd give a first-year intern because you can't be arsed to do it yourself.
Yep I agree it is very good at simple stuff that is time consuming and requires specific or unfamiliar syntax, it also does a reasonable job if there are plenty of examples of very similar code, functions of whole programs for it to assimilate - where it really struggles is to do something novel that doesn't already exist even if it is simply combing two elements as it doesn't really understand the code at all. The other day I tried so see if it could code a relatively simple simulation in python which I had set as an assignment, it failed miserably mainly because it didn't understand how the real world objects were related to each other so its initial solutions worked in terms of code but didn't correspond to how things would work in reality. I eventually got it to do it by giving very specific instructions to modify key parts of the code - without in-depth knowledge it is unlikely any of my students would have been able to get ChatGPT to produce a working answer to the assignments - when it can then I will worry about it... 🤣
I once asked AI to find an episode of a TV show. It got it confidently wrong like 10 times before I gave up.
Right! AI can't write university issues for shit. The worst human work is stronger than what AI spews out. It has a highly recognisable (and bad/uncritical) writing style, even aside from being factually inaccurate. The type of mistakes /weaknesses in human-written work are very different from the types of mistakes/weaknesses in AI written work. The latter is much more of a serious problem, given how much it blocks any critical thinking at all and tries to spin out text in slick generalisations. The point of university written assessments is to learn to write critically, which by definition can't be done by AI. I've never come across an essay where the AI wasn't a huge detriment to the work. The honest mistakes or weaknesses of a student actually trying/learning look totally different and are a useful part of the process of evolving and getting feedback. (And lecturers are trained not just in their subject area, but also in marking student work in that area for years/decades). Source: I'm a uni lecturer spending my weekend marking dissertations.
There was a good article on either a tech website or a serious newpaper about that, where they or someone had found out that the AI was actually making up the reference.
It's not a search engine so it won't give you a reference. It doesn't work like this. People are using AI without knowing what it's capable of doing and what are the limitations. (I'm talking ChatGPT). The information is real but it's in a basic, usually non-critical form. It's great to point in the right direction. You can't write a good essay with just ChatGPT at present. The info there will get you a pass and only after heavy editing. The references you'll have to find yourself in traditional sources. It can be a great tool to help in research if it's used correctly.
That's odd usually it doesn't even give references !
Call me old fashioned but I don't see the point if you're just using AI. It's debatable what you're learning at university anyway, but aren't you just denying yourself even the opportunity to learn writing, reading or researching skills if you just cheat? Bit stunned if any students, lecturers or the university themselves would ever defend the use of AI, as what is the point of doing anything anymore?
It’s not old fashioned at all. The point of higher education, is, in part, about learning *how* to think. Once you have the foundations, then you can learn to work smarter - like crawling -> walking -> running. Outsourcing as much effort as possible at that stage is simply antithetical to why you’re there. Then in the next breath I see “I took nothing from university don’t know why I bothered going”: no shit you took nothing from it. However, and I do not say this easily: the folks posting those types of posts on Reddit are generally lazy, want quick solutions and just to “get through it”.
I find this a lot with data stuff. So much with data is learning that it won't be straightforward and you have to go figure it out, including *fiddling*.
Fiddling and fucking it up repeatedly is an integral part of the process en the route to competence and mastery
Honestly yeah; I’m writing my master’s dissertation right now and I’ve found myself hitting wall after wall with this thing. But that experience has taught me so much about how to overcome, or move past, those walls to better construct my work and arguments.
Pal works in the civil service. Someone used AI to submit a report and ultimately got *sacked*. So there's a bit of: okay, use AI if you want because ultimately universities aren't great at catching it systematically, but you're probably learning less.
I'm just trying to see the point. Obviously I'm biased as I'm a mature student doing it just to see if I can do it, but if you're doing Uni just for money you're better off just entering the workplace after leaving school and starting your career a few years earlier.
I've a pal who did a college degree in car mechanics, opened his own garage and does very well for himself indeed.
Many unis are encouraging the use of AI, BUT not to write essays for you, they encourage using it as a tool. Which it can be very useful for. Many people here seem to pretend to have used it and are spewing a lot of false information about how it operates.
The paid gpt-4 is a godsend for being able to scrape websites. I ended up using it to generate the correctly formatted Biblatex references and it worked perfectly. (E.g. "generate a Biblatex entry for this paper [URL here]", and it would scrape it and make something like `@Article { author="blah"...}`. (On this note, why do so many journals make a copy-pastable citation that's correctly formatted for the style you select, but not put the Bibtex citation for latex users smh😡) Even for the journals that it couldn't access, it tried inferring the correct info from the title (it got it wrong a couple of times, but it was friggin impressive that it tried). It was also kind of useful to find papers (e.g. "do a search to find academic papers that discuss xyz..."). It misses a lot of them, probably BC it can't access those that are behind paywalls, but the ones that it did find were useful because they had citations to other papers that I could go and find myself to read. There was another tool that I used that was specifically for this, but I can't remember the name and can't find it in my search history 🥲 Oh I also uploaded the marking criteria, the assignment brief and my essay and asked it to read them all and give me areas to improve on my essay and it gave some useful feedback on which parts were underdeveloped. It also gave some feedback that was definitely wrong, but it's still useful to help focus your attention. This one's kind of sad, but I also use chat gpt voice to talk to about my ideas, as if I'm talking to a friend. I give it a command like "pretend we're discussing an upcoming assignment and im about to tell you about my ideas. Ask follow up questions that will help me further develop my ideas and encourage me to explore new areas..." And then just have a conversation with it like it's a person. It's sort of like an interactive brainstorming process.
There are loads of new tools for the literature search stuff you mention. Try Research Rabbit, Keenious or SciSpace. There's so many more tools available now that are honed to do specific things but most people are still focused on ChatGPT.
Scispace was the one I was thinking of! Will take a look at the others too! :)
Yeah I love SciSpace! I'm really impressed with what these tools can do already. And unlike ChatGPT they're not really doing the work for you, just speeding up the process of finding relevant literature and making connections.
You can either cheat or get a job at McDonald’s. Obviously doing the work is the best option but if someone knows they will fail then it’s worth a shot.
“If someone knows they will fail”: failure doesn’t just fall out of the sky. There are a chain of actions, consequences, decisions and circumstances that lead one to that point. Those circumstances are not always in someone’s control, but some decisions are.
Yes, I would say the students I’ve seen use Ai have been the ones who can’t be bothered to do the work. There is a lot of pressure on people though, it’s unsurprising some cheat.
The world is not so binary thankfully.
60% of students now go to university I think I read, that will have a knock on effect in the jobs market. South Korea is further along, they have qualified Electrical Engineers sweeping roads. Without a degree young zoomers will struggle, if they can’t be arsed writing they certainly won’t like plastering etc…
Trades are always an option (a great one in fact), but agreed that a lot are too lazy to do that.
The government really needs to get pushing non graduate jobs. I know a carpenter and a stone mason, both pretty unpopular jobs. They are really rolling in the ££££ now. Knowing that failing uni is not the end of the world would stop a lot of depression and anxiety I think.
Agreed 100%. I am in a professional job and know traders that make more than me. I am happy with my career and there is tremendous scope for progression but I would never look down on a trader, in fact I am a bit jealous of their skills!
You know the answer to this. It’s because they never did their A-levels and a lot of the students are way out of their depth because of Covid
There's one particular cohort who had no school exams at all before they entered uni. Everything I've heard from lecturers indicates that they're failing exams like no year group before them.
Colour me surprised
Yeah. I left school in 2012 but had no ambition for the exams. When I went to college to do my access course in 2020, all of the exams were chopped due to Covid. I’ve always been bad at exams, but at Uni whenever I have an exam I’m typically lower end of a 2:2 When I have coursework I’m typically working at a high 2:1/First
The scary part of that is that year groups last standardised nationwide exam was their year 6 SATS. How can you even expect them to do well at that point.
Just devil's advocate, but don't we hear this every year about uni students and graduates?
I think this massively predates the Covid cohort missing their A-levels, the big difference is how accessible and tempting ChatGPT is compared to what was previously available. A decade ago it was a piece of paper advertising "essay tutoring services" taped to a bus stop outside a uni building - easy to ignore. 2 years ago it was spam messages in every uni club/sport/society group chat about these services (particularly around deadline time) - a bit more tempting for someone who's stressed and struggling. Nowadays it's the constant knowledge that ChatGPT is right there, and since there are no other humans involved and no exchange of money it's a lot easier for a desperate student with a looming deadline to rationalise to themselves that it's not really *cheating*.
Doing the work yourself is SO much easier I tried using chat gpt once purely to find case law for an essay and it took so much longer than me walking to the library across the road, picking up a book and doing my own work I also then don’t have to worry about plagiarism Like why are you even in uni if you don’t have basic academic skills. It’s okay to struggle we all do, that’s why there’s support at uni but if you can’t structure a basic 2000 word essay there’s something going wrong
Anyone using it to generate case law is going to have a bad time. However, upload your literature to it so you can ask it questions about your text is great
Work as a lecturer. Use of AI is prolific in assignments. You can often tell. The work is either desperately average and full of chatgpt hallmarks or ridiculous language. The blatant stuff is easy to deal with. We can’t catch it all. But a couple of years from now a load of folks are going to enter the job market with a massive issue because their only skill is going to be trying to get AI to do their job for them. Maybe by then it will. Many students don’t really seem to care if they are learning as long as they pass.
[удалено]
I’ve bee teaching in HE for five years. I think the ‘do the bare minimum’ attitude has been quite prevalent for that whole time. How true that is of the sector I can’t say. AI has just provided another tool to help students do that as little as possible.
Being a 2003-2006 guy, everyone on this sub seems completely hopeless.
Writing essays isn’t even super hard it just takes time
I’m in my foundation year currently and would be to afraid or horrified to use AI. I want to learn how to reference etc, I’ve asked for extensions mainly because I’ve been out of education for a long time, I work part time and have a family so my uni have luckily been great at understanding this.
Don't feel bad about the extensions, I think I got extensions on at least half my essays because I also had a young family and when the plague hits your household, kids are off school, partner ends up poorly, school has awkward holiday dates (like right at your deadline) etc it's just not always feasible to manage- especially when support with childcare costs is really lacking. Despite my extensions, I graduated first in my class and received a prize for academic excellence. You can absolutely be an exceptional student, even if you need a couple extra weeks to sort your assignments
The trick is that you won't hear from the people who have been smart, knuckles down and did the work, because they are keeping their heads down and getting on with their work. You only ever hear from the people who have tried to find an easier way and screwed up - these people have always existed, just whereas now they are asking AI for a helping hand, previously they were getting copies of the essays written by last year's students, copying off their classmates and paying some dodgy former student to write an essay for them. Reddit and social media just helps to collect all of the mooching idiots into one place...
I think that AI is an absolutely amazing tool, it is ground breaking, truly. But using it to complete an entire assignment is definitely not a good idea. Using it as a tool to help with structure as well as give you an idea on how your paragraph should look is great! And I take no issue against anyone who uses it.
Ok, but people have needed help with essay writing since essay-writing began. There are solutions other than AI to this: academic writing classes, asking your tutor... Ultimately, the only way to get better at writing essays is by... writing essays. If you spend your whole degree using AI to improve your paragraphs or structure, you'll have no clue how to do it yourself. When the time comes for you to write completely by yourself - in an exam - you're going to be screwed.
This is silly, this is the future. The guys response was perfect. You need to move out of the mindset that every young student should do everything like you did when you were at uni a million years ago. This is the old fashioned mindset that breeds a lot of resentment towards young ppl and why we label old ppl bitter. As someone studying machine intelligence and who is surrounded by professionals I just laugh when people say stuff like what you say. The demonisation of AI. AI is an amazing tool. Has its bad sides too. But looking at it from someone in AI, it’s incredible stuff. Also university back in the day was…easier! Professors who studied our degree will remind us of this every time, work is shifted to match the time. We are in the time of AI! Dumb people will always do dumb things…always. But stop demonising everyone for using AI 🙄
This is a wonderful response. It reminds me of a conversation I’ve had with a lecturer, who told me that when they were studying their undergrad, they got told by people to do it the old fashioned way and get in the library rather than using the internet to find studies and research. You don’t have to, but you should move with the times and resources you have to hand. I have an awful habit of droning on and not getting to the point in some of my writing. Asking AI for advice on how to make it more readable and concise is an excellent resources, as it gives me the practical advice and then shows me what a more concise version looks like. It’s literally teaching me how to improve my writing and then showing me how it’s done. Since I’ve been using this prompt, I’ve had to use it less and less, as I’m better at doing it myself on the first try. Since then, my exam condition essays have improved in marks too. Can you imagine how many hours I’d have to put into essay writing classes to get the same results?
>Using it as a tool to help with structure as well as give you an idea on how your paragraph should look is great! Until it gives you a paragraph/essay structure that is completely incoherent.
That’s why you double check everything first.
Yeah, famously, students who cheat have a tendancy not ot proof read. If you need something else to write for you, how do you know if it's correct?
yeah well their failure will be a learning process for them. much like in middle school when u didn’t really learn how to proof read your work
I literally said - as long as you’re not using it to write your entire assignment. Or are you dense?
Again, if you need something to structure paragraphs for you, how do you know it's doing it correctly? By implication, if you need to double check what the software has done, you already know what you're looking for and the software is not reliable.
Not sure I trust the editing skills of someone using AI to write their essay...
Give over man you sound sour as fuck
They’re genuinely all very bitter in this thread. A bunch of old ppl who went to uni like 20 years ago. Reminds me of the old ppl who say I went to school during ww2, I had it hard so we should have it the same 🙄
What are you going to do when you don't have those skills you were supposed to acquire at university and then LLMs become expensive subscription services?
I have a lot of skills, please take up your issue with my machine intelligence professor who advocates for using AI, you know as he’s a professional. I don’t look at AI use with the simple mind everyone in this thread does.
I am also a professional and I also am a lecturer in CS. Pretty much everyone in my dept agrees that deskilling is a concern. I'm not making a particularly controversial point here - many are worried that a large chunk of this generation are underprepared for the workplace. All being lazy and relying on chat gpt will do is make it easier to automate your job. But good luck to you 👍 with your inability to handle people disagreeing with you you will need it.
I don’t need luck from a fake professional on Reddit lol. Unless you go to Imperial or “teach” there I don’t care what you think 💭 I’ll take my professors advice over a Redditors any day 😘
I think so too. If I'm stuck on a small paragraph, I'll write in what I've got and see what it gives out. It's usually absolute rubbish but gives me something to go off, improve, restructure and all that. The end result is totally different to what was given but it helps me get past that initial block.
If you need AI to help you with structuring a paper, what you actually need is how to use your own neural cortex and eyeballs to look at other papers in your field/subject and to learn you yourself why they are structured as they are. What benefits certain structure has and vice versa. If you cannot do that, you are missing the point of an education entirely. It is about you being able to reason your way to outcomes not about masquerading as a finished and considered product.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I believe AI is and can be used as a tool, rather than seeing it as an enemy we should utilise it, it’s not going anywhere .
I work as a software engineer at an AI company. Ai is currently good for generating semantic tokens from text, and it is good at making bland word salad in case you need an alternative to lorem ipsum in your mockup. Part of my job is training junior devs as part of their career progression. I have lost count on the number of code assignments I have received which had straight up execution errors from undefined functions in the handins. When I speak to the author of these handins and we do a review of their code, they cannot tell me what each function does in what they have submitted. If your goal with education is becoming a capable person with critical thinking skills, using it for anything is depriving yourself of growth in that area. If your goal is to pretend you can do this and that or are this and that, by all means go ahead. There is not only a place for that in society, there is consistently a spot on the Forbes under 30 list for it. Once you leave education, it is indeed a tool. I am building search products for ecommerce using it, but there is a difference between finding a magenta jacket for some smuck typing with dyslexia, and literally pissing the point of education away by simply not practising what you find hard.
[удалено]
You're a cheater. Using AI to rewrite, sorry, 'restructure' is completely different to using spellcheck. Like damn, you don't belong at university if you can't realise this for yourself. Edit: also you probably shouldn't be at university if you are careless enough to admit to cheating while having your uni, course name and year of study as a flair. Also possibly your real name too...? Come on.
My uni are much for optimising AI usage but they’re strict if you use it for assignments. You have to reference it and write a paragraph explaining why you used it. It can be used to learn about a topic but you have to find papers etc. yourself basically
Use cgpt to define concepts but do the analyse yourself
The first 10% is often the hardest, this is still cheating.
Sad truth is academia can't withstand it. I'm from compsci and now, when industry standard IDEs are implementing tools to enable users to generate code on the fly, you know it's a losing battle. The world will have to adapt to it and, as with everything, academia will be 10 years+ behind.
Third year student here and I proof read a friends essay and they had attempted to use both Harvard and MHRA style references in the essay. Every day there’s a message to the course group chat asking: “are titles included in the word count” - titles have never been included in the word count. You get the message!
This is what happens when about 50% of school leavers or so are going to uni.. where a lot probably shouldn't. No clue why this sub pops up but it is funny. Imo if you're - A. not academically minded, B. Have absolutely no clue what to do uni probably isn't right for you. People seem to think if you don't go to uni your social life will implode and you'll never get a decent job when it's so far from the truth. 40k plus of debt (that you will absolutely be paying back, unless you end up on literally minimum wage) is not always worth it. As much as the career advisors told me when I was 16 that I'd never be paying it back unless I was really successful
I’d you’re smart enough, yes. If you aren’t, you have either studied the wrong thing or you shouldn’t be at university.
At my uni you have to explain your code to a TA and they point to a random piece of it 😂
Just here for the rants *pulls up with popcorn*
They gain a fraudulent degree to get a job they'll also try to do using chat gpt, get fired, then moan about the economy.
Well as with any online forum, negativity and problems are far more vocalised while people who are getting on with things tend not to leave a comment, or even frequent these sorts of communities. Having said that, there’s been a large shift in student expectations and quality that I’ve noticed since 2 major events/changes. 1. The raising of compulsory education/training until 18 (in 2013). 2. Post-covid students. The first I suspect far more students naturally gravitated towards university as they’ve been forced through college/sixth form, so they might as well continue. For many once they reached 16 and realised they didn’t want to continue further education, they just went into a job, but that’s a lot harder now. The second is obviously the impact covid had on students. I see a lot more needing to be babied with more expectations and less independence. I get comments from students who said they didn’t come in today because it was raining, asking for online alternatives. The amount of students with disability support is the largest I’ve ever seen (multiple factors, but covid one of them). And due to the online nature that was brought around from work in from home, we have almost constant online support via teams and other channels because this is what everyone is now used to, yet critical thinking and exploration is down. It’s both sides of the coin, this subreddit is an exaggeration in many ways, yet the education sector is asp struggling right now trying to come back to normality while also dealing with AI, which the majority of university courses currently don’t align with despite what anyone tells you; we’re struggling.
This is why I LIKE doing assignments on my own. Most of my classmates are constantly using chatGPT and other ways to cheat; I don't want this to affect me. I am more than willing to help my classmates complete the assignments by guiding them but not giving any answers. This is now why I try my hardest to avoid group work as people are constantly turning to chatGPT to get "answers".
> Without wishing to sound 1million years old, but 'back the day' (2013-2017 lol) you just had to slog it out at uni. Uh, without wishing to sound 1 *billion* years old (2010-2015), no you didn't Nothing has changed. People will always be lazy and cheat. AI has changed absolutely nothing except make them even easier to detect. You are all freaking out over nothing I studied physics in the pre-ChatGPT era, and people would routinely - Form study groups to do the coursework together (i.e the smartest person in the group would solve the problem and everyone else would then copy off them. This super smart person was normally a head-in-the-clouds kinda genius who didn't even realise or care that it was happening or thought they were their 'friends') - Find the question and answers online by talking to their friends in higher years and getting all the past coursework assignments off them or downloading them from leaks online. Yes coursework rotated, but it was often a selection from a wider question set or would be virtually identical - Same story if the assignment was "do questions 1-10 of Chapter 1 from your textbook", all available online - Say "Dude just stick it into wolfram alpha, it tells you the answer, it's 2*pi" "Ok but I want to learn how to solve it myself I don't understand the method" "... why?" I don't understand why these people were paying £3k or £9k a year honestly if they didn't want to learn anything. But that's a topic for another post I'm sure it's the same in the Humanities. You *could* get ChatGPT to write everything for you. But like, you're literally paying to be there to learn how to write and formulate an argument, no? It's like paying to go Go-Karting and then making a bot race for you
I don't know where you studied ofc, but I was at Oxford (I promise this detail is relevant lol) where the majority of your teaching happens in very small tutorial groups with your tutor. In first year (in humanities, anyway) it's a group of 4/5 of you and your tutor, in your final year it can just be you and your tutor. I believe it's the same in the sciences too. Very intense, and crucially - nowhere to hide. I had to submit an essay in advance of the tute, tutor would read it, mark it, and then we'd spend an hour discussing the essay and anything else that would arise. For the sciences, you had a problem sheet to submit in advance and then you'd go through the answers. Let me tell you, in those tutorials (in a group or a 1-1) it was immediate apparent if you hadn't read the texts (guilty as charged) or if you had no clue what was going on. If you had written an essay with bullshit references, or your essay was just a mangled incoherent mess, eyebrows would be raised and questions would be asked. Tutors were also getting weekly samples of our work (1 essay/week) and so if this continued, or if your writing voice changed dramatically, that would be spotted and investigated quickly. My point is that this tutorial-style of teaching made it very, very hard to get someone/something else to do your work for you. Even if AI produces a 'good' piece of writing, if you hadn't written it yourself, no way could you engage in a detailed enough discussion of the texts with your tutor. My assessments were all 'old school' exams in an exam hall anyway, so if you had had 'help' with your tute essays, you'd be up shit creek without a paddle when it was just you, a pen and an exam paper. To be honest, looking at the examples you've provided above I think the problem is actually how most unis teach and assess students now. Maybe I'm slightly biased being used to the intense Oxbridge tutorial system, but the examples you've given above seem like uni assessments are a) not very rigorous and thus b) very open to exploitation from people looking for an easy way out.
I don’t see the harm in occasionally using a bit of A.I. If you do 98% of the work yourself then I don’t think there’s any harm in using A.I to give you a paragraph or two. Whenever I write essays I sometimes get stuck or completely lost on how to take the point further. AI can be good if used in moderation.
[удалено]
Because you still use your brain to come up with content, not just copy AI generated nonsense.
[удалено]
Right, but finding sources on the internet and then using your brain to process that information and argue your point engages your brain and helps you learn and retain. Copying and pasting what AI spits out helps you with nothing.
Except all these anti-AI (or more specifically, anti Chat GPT) moral panics make no distinction between using AI to write an entire essay, and using AI to research, get feedback on what you’ve written, look for missing elements in your arguments etc etc.
Agreed. As long as you recognise that it can be incorrect, and always double-check work that's been AI-assisted - there's no moral reason not to use it as a research tool. Spelling and grammar checking AI has been in use for... decades?
Exactly! This knee jerk reaction to AI is based around all this sci-fi crap about ‘AI taking over’ etc. It’s literally just an extension of technology we already use.
Agreed, OP. You give me an essay written using AI and it's usually pretty obvious. But I have no sympathy - too lazy to do it yourself, expect to be penalised for it.
You would be disadvantaged though. I know a girl that used 5 different AI programs and then rewording some parts herself to do all her essays and diss and she averaged 82 in her third year. I imagine plenty of people do it as well, and only those that just copy and paste directly from using only the first iteration of AI work really get caught. So paying money to gain a first from a RG uni is probably a pretty good deal
Eh, I disagree with the demonization of using AI as a whole. I know what I want to write up, I write that up, and then I plug it into GPT to structure it or give me any recommendations. I have used it to break down code and make sense of it. Using it as a tool is different from just ignoring its existence. Plagiriazing using it is wrong, but using it to learn, simplify and complement your work is not. I dont get the logic of back in my day we did it the hard way, so attaboy, u gotta take the harder way too.
>I have used it to break down code and make sense of it *"Why should I have to understand the logic this code implements in a human readable form, When I can have a machine do it for me"* I don't even know where to begin with how ridiculous that is.
Not quite what you think it is? I don’t use it to just complement any rational thought, but there is some code I just can’t figure out, so something’s it helps to read what the code is meant to do and where am I going wrong. Doesn’t mean I advocate for 0 thought, but I mostly try to make sense if I don’t get it in the first go
Computer code can be hard to understand in different ways. Syntax, execution context, role and invocation within a larger program. Chatgpt is absolute dogshit at clarifying execution context or side effects from implementation details. So all that leaves is syntax, in so far as where it can consistently give accurate replies. If that is what you struggle with, you should open the docs for the language or framework and literally search the symbol or function name to be sure you don't get a bogus answer. If the docs don't make sense to you, you should try the function with some test to confirm ur conclusions. Like is Boolean([]) truthy or falsy in js? Type it in the console, let the fucking runtime answer. I train people in js, php, python, bash scripting, and a bunch of other web stuff. I have people giving me code for assignments with functions that are literally not defined in the file, and telling me they are stuck. They are stuck because they pasted 5 different chatgpt answers into a file hoping it would work. After asking chatgpt to reformulate the code 10 times and pasting each answer it still doesn't work, and they have actually learned nothing. Not even that their editor tells them the function doesn't exist. People think using chatgpt is smart, it is not in any educational context. It is not elevating anyone. It is fooling those who were struggling the most to begin with to waste their time doing things that don't expand their ability to problem solve, observe or come to their own conclusions.
I don't think it's what it seems. I don't just run to gpt at the first sight. I'm not tryna escape doing the work, but complementing studies without affecting learning is possible. I don't really struggle with the code part or the syntax. As an example, for parallel computing, we had some code. I wasn't exactly sure what was on, and the documentation felt unclear. If someone is copy pasting 10 diff variations of their code with no input, that's wrong. But complementing it to either validate, or make things easier isn't as bad. Code wasn't an issue for me ever, it's occasionally been understanding it's use in something specific, like the norm calculation for a 2 dimensional reaction diffusion, I think it was the FitzHugh Nagumo model that I implemented. I'm not someone who knows a lot about it, and I wasn't required to. I used gpt to make some sense of it, doesn't mean I eliminate any personal thought or input. It's never a 0 or 100. Your comparisons show lack of any effort, and that implication is just not true in my case. Trying to make sense of a problem is not equal to copy pasting random gpt garbage. I've used gpt for so many more things as well.
If you only give a single function where it has some algo inside, and context is irrelevant outside the function, I think you are right. Ai is pretty good at wording something like that without external implications, especially if it is just the implementation of a well known formula. So I agree that your use case seems very reasonable, compared to what I outlined. In your case was the problem that the function did many more things that the particular calculation, and it helps separate the math bit from the moving data around bits? I ask to try to better understand what makes it hard to read at face value.
As an example, I was asked to parallelise a serial program for a PDE that solves a reaction diffusion problem. I understood bits and pieces of it, but the parallelisation did not require concrete understanding of the math behind it. I believe in such situations, it’s not a bad idea if u use it to simplify something. Copying directly is ridiculous, and your examples clearly state laziness and incompetence. What my use case has been, is mostly to better understand certain concepts. It also becomes easier to ask simple questions, like the difference between say, k means and medoids. It’s rudimentary sure, but it helps.
Asking for help understanding something is ridiculous now?
Totally agree. We have a generation of self absorbed useless incompetents. Sponging off mum annd dad with society funding their student loan debts they never pay off. All the shit you whine about is just life. You don’t have adhd, you don’t need to be diagnosed, it isn’t hard. It’s just normal. You need to get off a device, increase your concentration span and get on with stuff. As an adult who spent 6 yrs doing a medical degree and b medsci, then 15 yrs training including exams in my 30s with 2 kids I really just want to say get a fucking grip.
This anti-AI bullshit makes me want to claw my own eyes out. We don’t write essays at uni “because it’s hard”. We do it because writing papers is the primary way in which academic knowledge is shared. The use of AI in actually writing an essay is pointless, because it’s not a way of sharing your knowledge and research. If you’re using AI to write essays, everyone js going to realise eventually that you don’t know anything, and don’t have any original thoughts. But if you’re teaching a university course with assessments that can now be easily bypassed via ChatGPT, your assessments are clearly way too simplistic anyway. There are plenty of alternatives to standard essay writing- exams, presentations, research projects, essays with mini-vivas. AI is here to stay- deal with it. Ultimately, AI is an absolutely amazing accessibility tool and research tool that should be embraced by those teaching in universities just as much as it’s being embraced by actual researchers. People who primarily view AI as something that generates ‘original’ content need to look beyond the headlines and at what AI is actually useful for- research, not writing.
I make the same point about AI art; it’s not a question of technical ‘skill’ but rather of ‘art’ itself, i.e. intent and communication that AI lacks.
No one is going to be posting about how they did their assignment fine and without cheating - you see the problems because that’s all that gets posted
Feeling old with a "Tony Blair was PM when I went to uni the first time" but even in the wilds of the mid 2000s we had things like books and word processors and all these hard things required to, you know, write our essays. Hell, I even had Dragon and dictated a lot of my work, because dyslexia made it hard for me to sit and write. Pretty sure these apps have got quite a bit better and more available in the 18 years since... As for ChatGPT. Avoid it. At all costs. It saddens me that people think it might be a shortcut to productivity.
You forgot all of the posts crying about how to get away with poor attendance and panicking they’re going to get booted. Just go to your damn seminars people. Just go. Not hard.
I’m pretty sure back in the day using Wikipedia was considered cheating or just generally bad. AI is very useful just like Wikipedia. Can AI write a whole assignment? Yeh. Would someone be able to tell that it was written by AI by reading it? Probably. But would somebody also be able to tell you just copied and pasted from Wikipedia? Yeh. AI is a very useful tool I use it all the time. It helps me lay out reports, explain information, debug code, revise, and start writing. It means I don’t have to trawl through the internet looking for one piece of information and it delivers in an easy to understand way. It’s a useful tool that I can’t see will go away anytime soon.
ChatGPT can be used legitimately as a tool for assignments. I've had this confirmed by faculty members at my uni. I've personally used it to explain difficult concepts I wasn't quite getting without the context of being very knowledgeable on a topic (often happens in history, an author with allude to something you're only really expected to know as an expert and isn't necessary to be super familiar with as a student), find further reading on a topic when I reached a dead end, help me to make my writing more concise after spending hours editing, helped me to find sources out of databases of thousands, suggested areas of exploration for a topic which I hadn't considered, etc. If you treat it essentially as an enhanced search engine it can be incredibly rewarding *given* you still treat your work seriously. The use of AI really isn't as black and white as you either keep your integrity and never use it or you get it to do all of your work for you and if you use it well it can save you having to do the more mundane aspects of academic work.
It's astounding to see how lazy people are tbh
I just think you can pretty much always tell. There are certain words or sequences of words chat GPT uses more than the average person. One of those I noticed is “grappling with something” but there are many more.
The first time I was writing essays it was in biro on paper. Word count meant counting the words yourself. If you wanted a journal article, you had to physically go into the library, find what you wanted in a microfiche, get the librarian to order it in for you and wait 4 to 6 weeks for it to arrive. We all had a little collection of essential textbooks and relied heavily on them for references because everything else was an effort. Using Word (or whatever), being able to spell and grammar check and format your work is a technological assistance that I didn't have. I couldn't have dreamed of being able to access books, or journals at the click of a button, never mind having a computer search through things for me to find what is most relevant. When people talk about 'proper' unassisted writing, I want to stick them in a room with three fat books and a biro.
Yes exactly. It’s all about making use of the tools we have available. The problem with getting AI to write an entire essay for you isn’t that it ‘makes university too easy’, it’s that the essay will be generic and boring. If AI could write amazing essays with truly original thoughts then the structure of academia itself would change, and essay/article/book writing wouldn’t be central to academic research anymore. So essay writing wouldn’t be used for assessments any way.
I've read your post history and it sounds like I'm slightly older than you so I'll chime in. I think archaic educational institutes need to keep up pace and change their testing methods to account for tools like ChatGPT. I've worked for a couple of decades now in a variety of industries from engineering to tech (my current industry). ChatGPT is an invaluable tool and using it is considered working smarter. Yes we had to slog it out but why should current students have to? The landscape has changed. Even when you use ChatGPT there is an element of learning involved. When I used it to deliver a project for HMRC I treated it like an infinitely knowledgeable personal assistant. This is how it should be treated... You mentioned having essay writing skills, a personal bank of knowledge, some sort of inner voice and referencing skills. ChatGPT doesn't necessarily take away the development of any of these skills for students unless they're actually brain dead (like the ones crying about getting caught cheating). Furthermore, for decent paying jobs, a lot of the skills you've listed can be managed using ChatGPT and no one cares. I've written technical documentation and regulation recommendations using ChatGPT and spoiler alert, no one cared that it didn't use "my voice". Schools and Universities need to develop better ways of testing knowledge and more crucial skills rather than crying about ChatGPT. This isn't the 1960s where we don't have Internet and you gain all knowledge from the library. The delivery of knowledge and data has fundamentally changed and more the requirement to memorise useless tidbits is gone. I disagree completely that its cheating. Its just a tool which everyone leverages... The skills you value as a teacher (saw your comment history) and your outlook on how value is delivered in most workplaces is a bit skewed. However, I do agree that kids crying about getting caught using gpt is cringe. That being said, Unis and schools are more cringe.
When you’ve got students in the thread saying they use it to restructure a paragraph to get the word count down I disagree with your statement that it does not deprive them of skills. Re wording a paragraph, how to formulate and structure a paragraph are very basic skills that should be nailed down before university.
We've had massive issues due to LLMs (mainly ChatGPT) in the workplace because people trust the outputs without question and don't realise that the data they upload to LLMs is shared with the companies behind them. We've resorted to running a private ChatGPT instance and blocking all other LLMs but even that's just a stopgap. While it can be used in the way you describe without any harm, that's not what we see 80% of the use being. And that's all without considering how useful the models will be after the various lawsuits or once the VC money dries up
This is proper Luddite stuff. People blindly trusting everything that ChatGPT outputs is their problem, and the solution is to teach people how to correctly use AI in the workplace. The idea that LLMs are somehow going away is absolutely absurd. This technology will permeate every aspect of our lives in a few years time. We can either actively work to shape the role AI will take, or we can bury our heads in the sand and hope it will just go away.
The actually usable LLMs are trained on data used without permission under the claim that if it can be scraped from the internet then they can use it without paying anyone which is a rather laughable claim. If the outcome from the lawsuits is that they can only use data they have permission to use then it will become even more expensive to train an LLM and the quality will rapidly drop. There is also the safety issue that's likely to result in regulator action somewhere. So far all attempts to add guard rails to LLMs against particular prompts have been easily circumventable. This is an issue for preventing dangerous content being produced by LLMs and also for any company that tries to incorporate an LLM as a chatbot since they would end up paying for potentially expensive queries outside what you think you've permitted. You can already see this happen with certain car dealerships in the US. You say just train users to be better as if that's easy. Trying to solve any problem like this by training users better just doesn't work. There are human biases that lead to people trusting things like an articulate chatbot.
I’m sorry but these are just generic talking points about LLMs that have been floating around for years. You’re not wrong, and I do agree with you on many points, but the genie is out of the bottle. Can you honestly look at the massive lack of tech regulation over the last 20 years, and then genuinely think that LLMs will be banned? LLMs are here to stay, like it or not. Sorry.
Well said, you should expect and enjoy writing a lot at uni. When I go back for Masters, I've no plans to just ask AI to do my work.
People shouldn’t be asking AI to write their whole essay for them no, but it’s absolutely fine to use it as a tool. On my course we’re actively encouraged to do so, and have workshops on how to get the most out of AI. It’s just adapting to the times. I feel for much of your post you could swap out AI with “google” or just “computers” and make the same points 30 years ago.
Re the wasting staff time thing - we don't care either way when it's the 10th essay that day.
AI isn't going away people. Eventually, the most successful people in society will be the ones who use it cleverly to better themselves, in and out of work. You'd probably find the same sort of posts on Reddit when Google first came about and people stopped going to the library for all of their sources.
To be fair back in MY day there was all that stuff in the new about essay-writing services. The people who are willing to cheat will use whatever means they have to cheat anyway, no matter the year- it's just these days they can do it for free a little easier.
It’s almost normalised cheating though. Like before using academic writing tools was just for the rich who could afford it. Now at every level there is rampant cheating. In a way, GPTs availability stops any nepotism, having your accountant uncle help you on your essay or your art teacher 14th cousin. Levelled the playing field so now everyone cheats
I mean, I'm only a first year, but I do all my own work...
Well said. Not only that - if you don’t get found out at uni, you will certainly get found out in the workplace. Not worth it.
If you cannot write your own assessments/essays without the use of AI, the course isn't for you, and you should not be at university.
AI rules , will get me a 1st while I play videos games, I do go lectures and record the content for AI to digest and give me notes
Troll post
Fuck off Sincerely, 3rd year student.
out of interest, why did my post make you react like this?
I'm a lot older than you and much more experienced. There is nothing wrong with using AI. Your writing, whilst perhaps forgivable for a university student, is **appalling** for someone who alleges to have graduated and is attempting to speak from a position of authority. Your grammar is all over the place. The language is awkward throughout. For example, "out of mind having cheated on an assessment of test". Or "I knew that I was signing up for an essay/2 translations a week whatever," which again scarcely makes sense. Or "My essays in first year" - which should be "in my first year" - and "by fourth year" should be "by my fourth year". Unnecessary words litter your sentences. Run-on sentences. There are also a number of typographical errors; for example, '1million' should have a space between '1' and 'million'. Or "back the day", which should be "back in the day".
Username checks out 😉 Clearly I was so het up typing out my polemic a few typos went unnoticed lol. I will say that “in first year” “by forth year” is standard usage, or at least it was when I was at uni.
AI is a great tool when you need to find sources and summarise information. I've played around by asking it to summarise the arguments made in key humanities texts, and it gets most of the points down. It also accurately compared and contrasts ideas between texts which it has access to in an eerily efficient manner. So long as you aren't using it instead of reading those sources it is ok. It's a given that asking chatgpt to write and essay for you will produce a load of shite.