'I have an A because I use Chat': What UC students say about using AI -- and whether it's cheating (SF Chronicle)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/ai-cheating-college-students-22211011.php

-snip-

Two of the 12 students interviewed at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State said they abstained from AI altogether, citing the technology’s excessive use of water and energy in one case, and an unwillingness to “lose my voice” in the other. Four students said they used it only for legitimate, tutoring purposes — to explain math and science complexities or to quiz themselves — and never to do their work for them.

But six said they use AI to do some or most of their work, with some insisting that this isn’t cheating. Others said that it is. Some criticized professors for prohibiting AI, while others claimed their instructors don’t actually want them to do the assigned reading and are fine with AI-generated summaries.

-snip-

She’ll have a “big sploosh of ideas,” which she types into Chat. “I’ll be like, can you condense my ideas into a few sentences? And it will. I’ll usually copy what it says. I’ll consider it mine because they’re my ideas,” she said.

At San Francisco State, a student majoring in speech and language said she couldn’t remember the last book she had read for school, though she had recently been assigned at least three.

-snip-

Much more at the link.

A spokesman for CSU - which has deals with OpenAI and other AI companies and has called itself the "nation’s first and largest AI-empowered university system" - berated the paper for "promoting a narrative" that students are cheating with AI, which he says undermines the "responsible, ethical ways" students use AI.

What BS. People like that are crippling education.

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Wouldn't the lack of expertise b/c of AI come out

during their dissertations?

[appmanga]

2. Wow...

I’ll usually copy what it says. I’ll consider it mine because they’re my ideas”

So Fred Smollens is the inventor of the automobile because he had the idea, Ford, Olds, Daimler, et al, did the work?

Do these people just not get it? It's the execution, not simply the ideas. There's a reason philosophers don't get rich.

[highplainsdem]

6. The AI companies tell users that having any sort of basic, vague idea is all that matters to make what

AI generates the user's own "work" - and if the clueless AI user doesn't have even a basic, vague idea, the AI companies to tell them to ask the chatbot for ideas, and simply choosing one of those ideas can make it the user's own idea.

That sort of BS reasoning is behind, for instance, every bit of AI slop art you see. AI image generators spit out multiple different images simultaneously in response to a prompt, and the user chooses from them or asks for more options to choose from, and that supposedly makes them artists.

It's all idiocy and pretense.

[exboyfil]

7. Attribution for AI

Interesting concept. I have started to use it to do some deep investigation in engineering issues. Still working on the attribution piece of it. I am also a verify kind of guy so, while it knew the original engineering approach to the issue I am considering, I am not taking it as Gospel.

[highplainsdem]

10. Best not to use it at all. There's already plenty of evidence it both dumbs users down and skews their

judgment without them realizing how much it's influenced them. And AI use can be addictive, especially because of the sycophancy.

[Moostache]

3. A fundamental misunderstanding and misrepresentation of "education" is at the heart of this all...

Education is a process, an experience, a way of training mind and body to new things that it cannot or has not previously been able to do. The goal of a college degree is not grades or GPA or the easy way to 'finish' an assignment without investing time into it - the true currency of education is TIME. Spending time - through reading, thinking, practicing, experiencing and DOING THINGS - are the cornerstones of education.

If the only reason one attends college is to get a piece of paper that declares them learned in a subject, then that is a waste of time and money and ultimately useless for self-improvement, skills-attainment or becoming actual experts in a given field. People USED to know this inherently and respected the experts for the time and effort it took to attain such status and standing. Not any more...

Now, the GOP and its race to the bottom - from Reagan to Bush I to Bush II to Palin to Fox News to Trump - has successfully fooled people into doubting expertise, denigrating effort and practice required to become a real expert and set fire to the whole world at the same time.

If you use AI instead of train your mind, you have failed at education and university and denigrated yourself as an opportunistic whore. Your soul's price was easily obtained, bought and paid for. Only those who truly understand the purpose of education can actually benefit themselves AND society with the fruits of such labor. Believing that AI or anything else external to the mind and self will "do it for us" and "make life easier" does not understand the first thing about why such thinking is a prison and that they are voluntarily locking themselves into it.

[patphil]

11. Yes, the purpose of education is self-enrichment. It's a growth process, an expansion of your personal scope of being.

The journey is the destination. The degree is simply an acknowledgement of the effort you expended to get there.
AI cheats the user of all that experience, and ultimately diminishes the user's potential for personal growth.
It's the easy way out, but doesn't have the payoff of satisfaction in a job well done.
We end up with shallow thinkers who are only able to function in shallow water.

[Klarkashton]

4. That's not learning by doing it's watching TV.

[exboyfil]

5. AI is moronic at times

It keeps making the same mistakes over and over again. If used you need to probe further. Always have it lay out the assumptions and references that are used. Verify those references!!! I have sought several references that I ultimately found did not exist.

I always get the sneaky suspicion that I am training it with my questions. My company has oked its use, and it is definitely "book smart". It does fall apart at the same point that I do (really need to test and analyze this).

If we plan to continue with retail education (where the professor just gets online graded assignment, many multiple choice or fill in the blank), then it will be a problem. And of course essay writing even though I think I could smell out an essay created by AI (that isn't the say that what the hard work of gathering references and interpreting references hasn't been short circuited by AI). I would recommend profs go back to pen and pencil in a proctored environment (alternatively dumb terminals to complete essays).

My prof for my engineering class didn't have an issue with us using AI (It was part of what he was trying to evaluate). Again it was idiotic in attempting to write code for a specialized finite element code (ADPL). Still it is great for getting blocks of output written (always laborious since ADPL seems to be on a foundation of FORTRAN).

My prof has only one class a semester with 20 or so Jr. to graduate student level engineering students so he can get away with traditional engineering tests. Not sure what you would do if you had to grade 300 tests now days. Even though my FIL did that for years carrying 2-3 classes (2 when he was head). He also taught the Mandatory Elective Math course that most students not in math or sciences had to take (I would cut my throat before I had to do something like that).

[Bettie]

8. Wow...when I was in college, I'd have a 'big sploosh of ideas" and then,

I'd write them down (no computers yet) on note cards, organize them and decide what to use and not use.

Then, I'd clean it up, set it aside for 24 hours, and re read it to verify it was coherent.

Finally, after all that, typing, on a typewriter.

My AI was asking a friend to read a paper to ensure I wasn't too much in my own head.

I guess my point is that our brains CAN condense thoughts and we need to exercise that part.

[patphil]

9. Using AI sure beats doing hard, time consuming work. It allows you to produce results with very little thought at all!

Using AI to assemble your ideas into coherent sentences tells me the person isn't able to do that themselves.
It sure beats thinking, and writing draft after draft until the result looks like you actually understand your work.
How do you defend a paper when you haven't actually brought it forth from within, with your own conscious effort?

And this will only get worse. At the rate things are going, colleges will be graduating students who don't know anything about the courses they took.
There was a science fiction book, I think it was Neuromancer, where people had hand held devices that they could consult for advice. It would tell them what to do, and provide them with information.
That's where we are now, with AI as an advisor.
Where we're going is for AI to be a substitute for your personal understanding of the world. It has potential to create a new version of humanity, one where people are absolutely ignorant of truth, and only knows what the AI tells them.
Current programing of the populace by unethical leaders, and a compliant media, are nothing compared with the ability of AI to "mainline" the entire population with fake news, fake facts, fake history; essentially a reality that has been shaped and packaged like the "Matrix" series.
This is the beginning of the end of humanity as the primary intelligent species on planet Earth. Where it ends, no one knows, but it don't look good.

[crud]

12. I just started using AI

to create product shots for protein shakes. I'm a graphic designer and I have the photoshop skills developed over my career to create the product shots using stock photos, or my own photos, illustration and color manipulation depicting the flavors...chocolate chip, strawberry banana, etc.

The AI generated images look very similar to the one's I have created. It may have actually utilized some of my images to do this...along with millions of other images from professional photographers and illustrators.

I take/took a lot of pride in the skills that I developed over the years. I've had an okay time of it, career wise.

My point is this. At least in my field of expertise, it is here and I have to deal with it to be competitive. I'm having clients with no graphic experience sending me AI generated images that they want to print, or incorporate into their pieces.

It's not going away. We have to use it right, but ignoring it won't work. The colleges should figure out a way to incorporate it without making us morons.

Letting students figure it out is probably not the best way.

[highplainsdem]

14. I wouldn't bet on generative AI not going away. Using it has been fairly cheap or even free because

it's been subsidized by AI companies taking tremendous losses to get new users hooked. They can no longer afford that and prices are already rising sharply and/or usage is being throttled by some AI companies, while others are keeping prices low only by taking a financial loss with almost every use and depending on venture capital to keep them afloat.

But the cost will rise, and the hallucinations will always be there, and generative AI will increasingly look like a stupid investment.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/ais-economics-dont-make-sense/

And using AI can and should be made socially unacceptable. That's happening now.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221210695

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221158554

[anciano]

16. Excellent post.....

and I agree that it is here to stay. AI technology, including genAI, is the new reality of our modern world.

[EYESORE 9001]

13. Back in the dark days before the advent of the World Wide Web

there existed means of transferring data via ARPANET, which I used to obtain research papers from other schools. Even though the content was 100% human-generated, I still felt a twinge of guilt for obtaining my source material in such a ‘intellectually lazy’ way. Some may scoff, but people have become dependent on this slop as a substitute for thinking.

[DiverDave]

15. Cheating.

Plain and simple.