When AI Use Makes You Uncool (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 4/6)

[highplainsdem]

I posted a thread Sunday

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100221151067

about some college students becoming so dependent on AI that they have to ask AI for help just to talk in a classroom. That CNN article was published April 4.

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education came out two days later, with a different focus - this one on how use of AI is affecting students' opinions of, and trust in, other students.

Humanities majors like Wang are increasingly questioning the generative AI tools that are reshaping their generation’s academic experience, and in many cases shunning them altogether. They see AI use in the classroom as a character test. A marker of how seriously a student takes the labor of thinking.

-snip-

Madelyn Rowley has a hard time viewing classmates who use generative AI to complete their work as her “intellectual and academic peers.”

-snip-

Students tell Watkins, assistant director of academic innovation, that it’s hard for them to ignore classmates flitting between ChatGPT windows and programs that make that text sound more “human” before submitting assignments, he said. They also lament that they are “paying for a human being to work with them, not for an AI chatbot that they can use for free.”

-snip-

“I’m glad that I wasn’t using it in my freshman year because building that foundational knowledge is important without the use of AI,” said Kamya Raman, who’s studying applied math and computer science at Brown. “That’s something that you can’t really replace. It would definitely affect the foundations of your learning if you were to shortcut that initial learning curve.”

-snip-

This Chronicle article referred to another news story, from The Conversation last July:

https://theconversation.com/university-students-feel-anxious-confused-and-distrustful-about-ai-in-the-classroom-and-among-their-peers-258665

Students also described feelings of distrust and frustration toward peers they saw as overly reliant on AI. Some talked about asking classmates for help, only to find that they “just used ChatGPT” and hadn’t learned the material. Others pointed to group projects, where AI use was described as “a giant red flag” that made them “think less” of their peers.

These experiences feel unfair and uncomfortable for students. They can report their classmates for academic integrity violations – and enter yet another zone in which distrust mounts – or they can try to work with them, sometimes with resentment. “It ends up being more work for me,” a political science major said, “because it’s not only me doing my work by myself, it’s me double checking yours.”

[EdmondDantes_]

1. Amateurs. I'm uncool through my own hard work and natural talent

[highplainsdem]

3. If you do your own work, and have your own talent, you're always much cooler than anyone using AI

to pretend they did something.

I'm glad there are students who realize that, despite all the hype and pressure from the AI industry, their paid shills, and any others they've been able to delude or intimidate into thinking AI use is ever necessary, let alone worth all the harm AI does.

[msongs]

2. maybe more use of AI allows more wasted time on tik tok, something...important

[highplainsdem]

6. Probably sharing AI slop and continuing to dumb themselves down.

[Ilikepurple]

4. I'm not a fan of AI use, but group projects are fraught with enough hazards without AI

I think most collaborative projects, both academic and professional, are behind me, but it was one thing to have to trust the integrity of your colleagues but also the veracity of their “tools” and resultant work. The techbro theory that it’s better to test technologies in the real world early, rather than sit on them while gauging the limits of their function, especially as applied to AI. AI is probably going to go through some painful, perhaps catastrophic, growing pains where it’s ultimate use is far more limited and less practical when applied over time and industry wide. The pitfalls of cutting corners early are sometime too deep to fix as you go. I’m not just afraid for academics and the lack of development of critical thinking, but the both the localized and global effects of an increase in tolerance for mistakes that could have been avoided in the various professional disciplines.

[highplainsdem]

8. I suspect Sam Altman releasing ChatGPT when he did had much more to do with getting a jump on

the competition than testing their AI in the real world. And they found a perfect early market with students who wouldn't be likely to notice its mistakes.

Now the AI industry has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on a flawed type of AI that will probably always hallucinate. And they hope to get everyone to shift the blame for their AI's failures to humans prompting it wrong or not catching its mistakes.

[Ilikepurple]

13. I agree. By "real world testing" I meant skipping responsible research and development

Companies generally do this to cut corners, to get a competitive advantage, or to attract capital investment. I think all three are at play in the AI world. In my opinion, our legislators and judges have been proven to be behind the advance of novel technological industries or even product distribution methods. They often rely on the industries to set their own standards. Something I don’t agree with, but I’m a pro regulation sort of person. Not only is the AI the product untested, the systems designed to cover its shortcomings are also. It’s amazing the whole world jumped in head first mainly in fear of being left behind. I’ve heard some individual success stories in utilizing AI and am sure it will be helpful, ethics aside, in some applications, but I’m afraid it’ll do a lot of damage before its effects on both work product and worker competency are properly considered.

[Bettie]

5. That's where my kids are

they are all very much "I can do it myself or learn to, don't need AI".

[highplainsdem]

9. Good for your kids! That's the smartest approach.

[Bettie]

11. My husband is virulently anti AI

but, he's also a cranky old guy who thinks that people should think on their own and is annoyed by "AI Slop" videos especially.

I just find it....useless. I tried to use one to make a D&D character image for a game (I like to have a basic image of a character) and it came up with things that were so wrong it was both funny and sad. I went back to Pinterest to find an inspiration image, which works just fine, because we all usually have pictures for the first session to get an idea of the characters....boy, I just read that and it makes me sound like the biggest dork in the universe.

Yeah, that's probably true.

Oh, my kids also never really used social media except for Discord....and they are 25, 24, and 17.

[highplainsdem]

12. Your husband is right - people should think on their own (especially important now with authoritarian

threats) and AI slop is incredibly annoying.

And you're not a dork for liking D&D. I never got into it myself but a number of my friends did. One unfortunately to the point where it his hurt his grades for a while, but he got his addiction under control.

Your kids sound very smart about social media as well as AI.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. I've heard anecdotal reports of late elementary/middle schoolers saying "that's AI" as a general denegrating comment

in conversation.

[highplainsdem]

10. That's very encouraging!