Relentless advancement to produce new gen of 
seppos
I asked Wendy if I could read the paper she turned in, and when I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: “To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?” Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”
i stopped caring about “academic integrity” when i noticed not only were the TAs using LLMs to make assignments, but somehow my homework load went from 10-20 hours a week to 40-60 hours a week because not only the TA did not understood how much work a question takes anymore, but that now every coding assignment was loaded down with mandatory bullshit reports where you have to explain your code line by line and parameter by parameter.
when you tell people for at least a decade that college degrees are useless, grades are useless, the things they teach you are useless and the only thing higher education is good for is networking and social life, don’t be surprised when people start focusing on those areas.
Is it bad that I find this somewhat comforting on a personal level?
I’m half-considering continuing my education mostly to get the STEM degree porky wants, but I worry I’m too stupid for it or won’t be able to figure everything out before the test so even if I pass I won’t be getting the As, the bare minimum to even have my job applications considered. But if so many people are cheating, then I’m not as inferior as I may think.
Something that is very annoying is that AI is being blamed for the problems that education under capitalism has been facing for decades. Poor reading comprehension has been an issue for decades. We have a system that not only teaches people to hate learning, but where everyone is too tired and time poor to learn, or even teach.
Fuck AI, but don’t use technology as a scapegoat for systemic problems, it only amplifies what is already there.
Technology has been ingrained to the system. Largely due to capitalism. School districts were sold on the idea that every kid needed a chromebook to learn, a decade+ later we are seeing the increase in technology in classrooms hasn’t helped. Those additional devices and licenses to use their software aren’t cheap and impact class sizes and # of staff that can be hired.
my friend described it as a logical endpoint of the commodification of education, which i think i agree with. degree being seen as simply a visa to the corporate world has been a problem since long before AI proliferation. of course students don’t care and just want the piece of paper. the great failing of contemporary liberal education is that it totally fails to instil a love of learning (and often actually instils a dislike of it). undergrads are treated so poorly by institutions it’s no surprise most of them usually end up in the mindset of “do as little work as possible, fuck this awful system”.
Said it before, but the porks view education as a problem to be solved. Just like how they view abundant housing, walkable, green cities and towns, and even a working class with the ability to do some consumer spending. This is totally alien to this pig-like society and they needed to solve it as fast as humanly possible.
If I ever do a master’s I have vowed to apply to foreign universities first and GTFO.
the great failing of contemporary liberal education is that it totally fails to instil a love of learning (and often actually instils a dislike of i
important to note this failing starts way before college, i think it would be unreasonable to expect universities to be able to fix this when school from 5-18 sucks so much shit in the vast majority of the country
I forgot how much I loved learning, that I only was able to feel it again after almost a decade outside of school. I think the last time I remembered feeling the joys of learning was in 4th or 5th grade when there was a class on astronomy
totally agree!
I totally agree. I’m very glad that my education and the way I pursued it didn’t completely erase my send of why I was learning (to more fully inhabit the world, to live a more examined life, etc etc), but I recognize that I was privileged to have that luxury. The total commodification of education is absolutely the default path forward in this society.
I ain’t gonna read all that but some quotes are hilarious
When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
Lee explained to me that by showing the world AI could be used to cheat during a remote job interview, he had pushed the tech industry to evolve the same way AI was forcing higher education to evolve.
AI frontiersman pushing the envelope of technology by building the torment nexus
we can’t really imagine living without it.
It’s been like a year or 2 of this shit being this accessible. Like common, Wtf.
20% of aware lifetime
Yeah, you can’t give students a done-at-home essay as an assessment any longer, that’s just asking for AI slop and setting the students up for failure. Students can’t be trusted to avoid the temptation of AI, even the good ones from time to time. Over the past couple of years I’ve had to completely rethink every assessment I give. Essays are useless now. In-class tests and exams are ok, but students struggle with these more than they did a few years ago as they are less practiced at thinking through the written word. In-class presentations work pretty well, if you have a few restrictions. Keeping the time limits short so they stay focused and do not use vague and verbose AI writing helps, limiting the amount of text in slides or number or slides or even just banning slides entirely can also help to reduce slop. But most importantly, have a lengthy question and answer period at the end. This is where the students will actually demonstrate their own understanding as they need to actually know the material themselves to get through even very simple questions. If a student only used AI to write a presentation script even “what did you think about the book?” is a tough question for them. Usually one of the students will try using AI but will very visibly crash and burn in front of the whole class during the Q&A. The public shaming that results usually serves as a good warning to the rest.
only problem is that public speaking is a skill. kinda sucks to have your skill in public speaking affecting your grade in an unrelated subject.
Any form of assessment has this issue regarding whichever medium happens to be employed. That why you generally need a few different types of assessments and not just one big one.
Yeah and also the question is “what did you think of the book?” Is super subjective. “It was informative I guess? What part of the book do you want me to address?”
Yeah that’s the idea, to get them to show their own thoughts about it.
It was pretty cool I guess.
Wow I learned so much.
And if they give vague non-answers like that you press them for details. What was so cool about it, what were some of the things you learnt, etc.
Alright, I see what you’re going for. Sorry for being snippy.
I think it might be part of me being on the spectrum where I get antsy around any sort of ambiguity.
I have a hypothesis that college can solve this problem by “inversing” lectures and homework.
edit: sounds like a lot of places do this already so that’s cool.
Have your students watch lectures and do reading on their own time. Hell, they can ask ChatGPT to summarize it for them if “it’s just a tool” and they want to use it! But everything that gets a grade should be done in class. You will write the essay by hand, you will do the math with no more powerful a calculator than a TI-83, you will give a presentation to show that you understand the material. Book is open, accommodations for special needs are available, and the teacher is here to help and give guidance and clarification, but internet connections are banned.
Buuuuut
American colleges would never do this becauseensuring that your graduates actually learn things was never the point.everything that gets a grade should be done in class
I’m a language teacher at a European high school, and this is what we’ve been doing for almost three years now. All graded writing happens at school with limited internet access, and (almost) all verbal assessments are conversation based with no aids. Most subjects have also moved away from homework entirely.
It takes up a lot of time that could be spent teaching, but I actually think it’s more fair to the students than what we did before.
I’ve had a few flipped classes and I’ve preferred the traditional method.
You will write the essay by hand
i would have failed out of highschool/college if i was forced to write everything by hand, i think i have some mild form of disgraphia or something like that but it takes me at least 10x as long to write something by hand as it does to type for me, not even just with how fast i can type compared to how i write but it’s a fucking nightmare trying to collect my thoughts when im handwriting a paper. also if im making my handwriting actually legible for other people it takes even longer.
Your accommodation is a typewriter
You will write the essay by hand,
oh fuck no. at least give me a selectric
I think i generally agree with this, although this seems like it basically removes the need to actually look for sources yourself, which feels like it’s an important thing to learn to do. That said i don’t think i have a better idea so
Ideally I think researching and critically evaluating your sources should be taught and reinforced well before college, but from what I’ve heard from my friends who went to high school in the States (I’m American but I lucked out in this regard) attending an American High School is like being one of the feral children in Logan’s Run.
My art degree (and AFAIK anywhere else you go) did this. You produce all of your work in class with extra time spent at home to finish (usually 2 hours per hour spent in class). Classes were 3~4 hours each session. It makes it impossible to commission someone else unless you have them also go to your classes for you.
Also made it rough scheduling multiple studio classes each term. Usually 2 studio classes and 1 or 2 lectures. Every once in a while I’d put 3 studios all on the same days, which meant 12 hour “workdays,” a day between to do any homework, but I got 4-day weekends each week with no homework. The real killer was finals where it was like 60 hours worth of projects between 3 classes in a single week, which is the main reason I didn’t do this very often.
Surprised more degree programs don’t use this model. I think some of the performing arts do similar class setups along with medical degrees, but that’s it.
That was my immediate thought as well but that’s assuming colleges even actually care lol
Its been the joke that college is just a way to purchase a degree. Now it’s literally that. The kids still gotta pay for it, which means for capital there’s been zero change
As someone who struggles with self-discipline for assignments at home I like this
Same. All my classes where I got As were classes like this, or classes where they gave us all the homework at the top and I was able to essentially ignore the lecture and do the work at my own pace during class.
Treating homework and quizzes as participation credit and only grading tests is fairly common in US universities. Probably a minority, but still common.
My university does “flipped” lectures/homework for a lot of the engineering courses and yeah it’s pretty dope a lot of the time, it’s an efficient way to do things… but it also means some students just don’t show up, and the professors tend not to like that (for a synchronous course).
but it also means some students just don’t show up, and the professors tend not to like that
TBH I hated when attendance was graded in college because I just did the course work instead of going to class most of the time. Engineering schools tend to have the worst teachers.
Yeah same, they tend to justify it as “professional development” but the thing is… the lesson is redundant because most of us have had jobs already lol
Yeah it was crazy to get labor disciplined by people who’s only real time tables (they mostly make their own schedule, some day by day) were having to talk to a room of 20 year olds for an hour. Y’all don’t even go to work every day M-F.
Agreed, there were a few classes that was just the professor reading ad lip the scripts already uploaded online.
I had a professor that tried this and didn’t work out. To be fair though, one of the issues I had was that it was the only class structured like this so it made it a pain when taking 5 other courses alongside this inverted course
Buuuuut American colleges would never do this because ensuring that your graduates actually learn things was never the point.
It starts earlier. What you described is not possible because the system in both collegiate levels and in K-12 has been shrinking educator labor rather than expanding it.
Flipped classrooms are good and some of the best classes i’ve ever had were flipped.
I probably can’t write my name without a keyboard, not enough dexterity in the paws, but I agree with the calculators, in fact I’d say no calculators at all, if your test requires logarithms a log table should be provided.
a log table should be provided.
I did flight school with a slide rule twentyish years ago, so I would be at home with this.
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Sorry to the teachers. But this is what the US deserves. Just an ouroboros of credential-seeking first-worlder faillchildren future-labor-aristocrats shooting their own brains out until every person working in a technical field in the US is a Russian immigrant.
Let the people defunding education reap what they sow. They’ll keep their complacent and uncurious population, but it might have side-effects!
I think it was on this machine kills, but they talked about the rise of AI use is correlated to the fall of computer literacy. Specifically with big tech rise causing less visibility in how the products we use work and more reliance on ease of use. I think they talked about kids not even knowing how file systems work since everything is an app.
This can be solved when we bring back torrents
oh god the thing where people don’t know what files and folders are is so goddamn frustrating. motherfucker you should not need a youtube video showing you how to drag a file from an archive into a folder to mod a videogame.
But if you’ve never done it before it isnt as intuitive. My first computer ran dos. If anything, I think in middle school they should start with a really simple os, something resembling the technology in its bare bones. Year after year, learn the systems increased complexity so the understanding of how a computer works is full to its current standard.
You can’t write a dissertation unless you know the alphabet.
i figured that shit out when i was 6 or 7 years old without explicit instruction. before the obfuscation of phone apps you would have to lack any and all curiosity to not be right-clicking on everything in windows.
interface design should’ve been educating users instead of making a black box usable by toddlers.
Something I try to remind myself when I’m helping the tech illiterate is that not everybody had a family PC in the living room growing up. It can be a struggle sometimes.
yeah i mean i’m not asking people to edit ini files, just click through a menu and then drag and drop.
The problem is our system isn’t designed to educate people on anything other than to become wage cattle as fast as possible.
[Animal cruelty]
spoiler
Reminds me of how chickens are bred to grow in fast forward so they get to laying age faster, the chicken dies young because of this, so they just replace it with another chicken. They don’t want to waste money on training the next chickens how to forrage, that’s not their role in our society. They’re a commodity, just like the general public is to capitalists.
The actual problem every one of these articles is whinging about is that AI completely destroys the economy of scale of education. Which I frankly do not care about, schooling has been first on the austerity plan since the apex of the US empire. Larger class sizes, teaching how to pass standardized testing, lack of support for disability, lack of funding, hollowed out curricula, reliance on adjunct faculty, reliance on TA’s, etc. This has all been a race to the bottom to make education as cheap as possible without a real regard for quality. Governments and administrators extracted as much labor as possible out of educators, they’ve thinned their ranks. Along comes this stupid little statistical parrot box and now these morons who have been making this system as fragile and shitty as possible while directing as much money to the top heavy administrators can reap what they’ve sown.
I care for the educators who will be squeezed to “do something about this”, but as a society it’s time to pony up or fail at social reproduction over and over again. Smaller class ratios more individualized instruction and assessment, higher standards of proof of work. If the outcome is more teachers, higher pay, and better students it will be good that AI killed these cheap, impersonal, mechanized forms of education.
Kids don’t enjoy learning because we put them to work on themselves in a high stress educational assembly line. They’re alienated from their own development. And who wouldn’t be in a system where your entire first 18 years of life are just prepping you for a choice of how you’re going to gamble in the job market? Statistically most of their parents haven’t accumulated enough information to make a half way decent bet in that casino. Of course this is happening. This system rewards gambling and scamming your way through life.
Exactly, good education should create a willingness to learn and further ones education by its own merits. Not by scolding or “torturing” kids/YA into it. No, this does not mean there should be no discipline or “just doing what the kids want”.
GOOD post
Exactly, good education should create a willingness to learn and further ones education by its own merits. Not by scolding or “torturing” kids/YA into it. No, this does not mean there should be no discipline or “just doing what the kids want”.
Teachers in a capitalist system are there to reinforce that system, not create revolutionary free thinkers.
A friend of mine had her boyfriend go in and take an important test in her name when she was badly sick. No one cared or even noticed. College has always been fake. Its basically a paper saying you are wealthy and privileged enough to be hired by a Fortune 500. Lie as much as you can, fleece those shithole companies, say you have 50 degrees when you have none
Yeah cheating was rampant when I was in school. I remember in my physics class there was a group who had access to each midterm and final exam and would cheat. They wouldn’t share with anyone else and sure as shit weren’t going to say how they got ahold of the tests. Most of us were irritated because A) we actually did the work of learning the material; B) everything was graded on curve.
Professor was trying to figure out who they were, but you can’t just accuse people of something that could get them expelled just because they got a 91% on a test.
The same thing happened to me. Ironically I was foolish for not trying harder to be included in that “group”. When I complained at home, I got the “oh you did it all by your self and didnt need to cheat, be proud of that!” - My own family believes that some magical force will “reward” pure intentions and so keep being “good workers”. In the end the people that cheated graduated with honours and now earn more money than me. Life is rarely fair, until we make it so.
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They really did it. They made the world worse.
critical support to LLMs in the war on pointless bullshit homework
Gotta wonder what is gonna happen to these people when ChatGPT shuts down after investors pull out to salvage what’s left of their principal
They still get diploma and connect, they would be just the most boring cogs imaginable
No, I mean they’ve offloaded so much of their thinking onto this thing I genuinely think they will struggle to function
but that implies work requires a lot of thought, it really doesn’t majority of the time, just being accepted and shown the ropes.
that really depends on the job.
where a credential opens a door to a role in an organization requiring a balanced skillset and competency–as in say public/civil service–someone who cannot think through a problem and develop/implement a solution is going to be recognized as a “bad fit” among stakeholders and colleagues.
but yeah, if you’re just pushing emails and being a monkey for some loser petite bourgeois heir, then nothing really matters anyway because they will cut you lose to save a buck when they get caught by their uncle buying coke with petty cash. so, by all means, don’t waste any energy on personal edification when you can waste it on appearing to personally edify for what is certain to be a very enriching and totally not alienating future.
there are still actual jobs doing actual work that requires one to actually think using the context of their training, formal education and experience to deploy resources in a way that helps people. these roles are real and necessary and the lack of recognition for them in the US, by and large, is not some honest understanding of the deeper material reality. it is a cynical normalization of capitalist ideology, and the more young people with opportunities to learn buy into the frame, the more any potential collaborative future is cannibalized by The Ever Expanding Grift Maelstrom of now.
as in say public/civil service–someone
Most people in civil service jobs are already like this. Have you ever tried to get a building permit? The whole process is slap dash and bullshit in almost every jurisdiction. Because of this almost every contractor has a guy they pay to expedite permits. The process of that in every jurisdiction is that the guy who expedites your permits is the guy friends with everyone in the permit department. It’s thinly veiled corruption.
The reality is that you’re describing an era that’s already flew by. Austerity, capitalist computerization, and political issues have hollowed out civil service in the US completely. Our federal revenue service, the thing that is a profit center for the whole government cannot for the life of it create a standard accessible digitized way to collect taxes without spending boatloads of money on contractors who make a half working system and suck maintenance fees out of it.
there is far more to civil service than rejecting your 3rd iteration of gazebo plans.
indeed, I have met many in civil service, having been in it for over a decade in more than one jurisdiction.
sorry your experience has been one inviting you to universal disdain for public facing personnel, but you might consider that if all you ever meet are assholes… you might just be the asshole.
schools, infrastructure, adult education… the list of valuable work to provide for communities stretches to the horizon, but I suppose with your totally-not-capitalist-and-actually-empirical perspective, public service is not for you.
I wouldn’t want someone who cheats through evaluations and hates public servants on my team of all day suckers that give a fuck. a cheating anti-government zealot is more of a resume for a high level political appointee of a MAGA official, which are really hot right now in the most underserved places in the US.
so, maybe you can make your mark and have a grand legacy, a great many political allies, and a life you can hang your hat on after looting some libraries or whatever.
Which AES country do you hail from that you’ve mostly experienced public service based on a Marxist Leninist party line instead of a decrepit capitalist austerity system? Here in Amerikkka that’s all we know and until the revolution comes that’s not changing no matter how many bright eyed and bushy tailed valedictorians throw themselves willingly into the pit. They’ll still be managing a payments clearing house whose sole purpose is to funnel tax money into private coffers. Even if you import cadres of bureaucrats from the glorious FALGSC of the future they’ll be fired, burned out and ineffective by the end of the week. Don’t kid yourself. It’s nice that you have a high standards of public service, but that’s just you, that’s not the United States.
I’m not inditing the people who decide to choose public service, I’m sure many of them have good intentions, but they work in a system that does not care about them or their humanitarian dreams. Teachers are the prime example of that. You think teachers want to be working in a system that fails children every single day? They don’t, but the reality is no matter how hard they try that’s what the system does on average. Not only that but they pay an average of $500-$1500 a year out of pocket in supplies for their own job, for other people’s kids, and for the pleasure of maybe just maybe affecting a single child’s life in a positive way. Through economic, moral, and psychological occupational hazards public service members are victims of this system too.
Pretending that reality is any other way is playing into the same systemic functions that keep public service workers underpaid and ineffectual. Yeah it’s “a higher calling”, but that intrinsic personal motivation of a public service worker should be secondary to the proper functioning of the state in service of its people. Our state functions primarily in service of capital. I don’t know what state you’re talking about.
So ultimately it doesn’t matter if your public service worker graduated from ChatGPT, Harvard or wherever. It doesn’t matter if they are doing it for the love of the game, or an ever dwindling paycheck. The system on average going to flatten all those differences away and keep the austerity train rolling. These things literally don’t matter because just like the private sector there’s always a boss in the chain that’s going to tell someone below them, “fuck your opinions, do what I tell you”, and that shit rolls down hill. My views on public services in the US are bad because that’s what I’ve experienced, and ultimately it doesn’t matter what I think because the system doesn’t care. I don’t have time to get to know the nicest guy down at the permit office and invite him out for beers. I have plenty of other horrifying interactions with various government agencies to get to, so I’ve quit trying to figure out how to get the fourth iteration of my gazebo plans approved.
This is the same in other western countries as well.
I was really talking more about psychological collapse
ChatGPT is just one of many models. There’s lots of other free commercial ones people can use like Claude and Gemini. But beyond that, people can now run AI locally and the really small but worse models (shorter memory, less training material) can run on lower end hardware. The genie is out of the bottle.
I think the probable answer is it won’t shut down. As more people depend on it more money will get thrown at it. It would be like the equivalent of the internet shutting down. Probably will get bailed out by the government
