I have realized a lot of posts on here mostly criticizing the data collection of people to train A.I, but I don’t think A.I upon itself is bad, because A.I- like software development- has many ways of implementations: Software can either control the user, or the user can control the software, and also like software development, some software might be for negative purposes while others may be for better purposes, so saying “Fuck Software” just because of software that controls the user feels pretty unfair, and I know A.I might be used for replacing jobs, but that has happened many times before, and it is mostly a positive move forward like with the internet. Now, I’m not trying to start a big ass debate on how A.I = Good, because as mentioned before, I believe that A.I is as good as its uses are. All I want to know from this post is why you hate A.I as a general topic. I’m currently writing a research paper on this topic, so I would like some opinion.
I didn’t hate AI (or LLMs whatever) at first, but after becoming a teacher I REALLY FUCKING HATE AI.
99% of my students use AI to cheat on any work I give them. They’ll literally paste my assignment into ChatGPT and paste ChatGPT’s response back to me. Yes, I’ve had to change how I calculate grades.
The other super annoying part of AI is that I often have to un-teach the slop that comes from AI. Too often it’s wrong, I have to unteach the wrong parts, and try to get students to remember the right way. OR, if it’s not technically wrong, it’s often wildly over-complicated and convoluted, and again I have to fight the AI to get students to remember the simple, plain way.
The other thing I’ve heard from peers, is that parents are also using ChatGPT to try to get things from schools. For example, some student was caught cheating, got in trouble, but the parent was trying to use some lawyer-sounding ChatGPT argument to get the kid out of trouble. (They’ve met the parent before and the email seems wildly out of character.) Or in another instance, a parent sent another lawyer-sounding ChatGPT email to the school asking for unreasonable accomodations, demanding software that doesn’t even make sense for the university major.
I solved a similar problem when teaching EFL (students just pasting assignments written in Chinese into a translator) by making them read select paragraphs out loud to me. You can rapidly spot the people who have no idea what the words they’re reading mean (or in my case are even pronounced on top of that!) and …
Well, cheating gets you 0.
We used to be too scared to tell our parents if we got in trouble, we’d always get in so much shit for it. (And this was late 90s/early 00s, it’s not like we were getting beatings).
What’s up with parents trying to get their kids out of trouble instead of going ham on them.
My kids’ teacher had a great teaching moment. He had the kids write an outline, use ChatGPT to write an essay from their outline, then he graded them on their corrections to the generated text