"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
I had a class where I wrote a ~70 page report for the midterm project, and a ~120 page report for the final project. My lab partner and I had to pull all nighters for both, and I drank an entire 2-liter of mountain dew to stay awake to finish the final project's report. This was before I even had any machine learning or AI classes, so having AI write it wasn't even an option to me.
All that to say, kids these days are soft π€
Wait until they get to the level where 10 pages is easier than 1 page.
Man I fucking hated that. Here's a problem where you need to include a lot of data and graphs.
2 pages maximum.
"I hope they like microfiche text size"
Go to Wikipedia, copy that, then rewrite it underneath, make sure to delete the Wikipedia copy.
Why not, it's all the AI does
Reminds me of a first year of middle school personal anecdote. At the beginning of the school year, our literature teacher asked us to do research about a subject and present the results.
It was the beginning of internet at home, so almost everyone came back with literal web pages printed, thinking they had done well. The teacher was furious about this "demonstration of laziness" and started to go through the students one by one and handling 0/20 grades for the assignment, like a gardener carefully pulling weeds one by one, savoring each wilt. Occasionally she would praise the few students that took time to manually write down their research.
I was in the back of the classroom, so analyzing the situation quickly and sweating, I started to furiously handwrite to a Seyès ruled paper the Wikipedia page I had printed (with the help of my father), cut the one picture and glue it to the paper. I managed to escape the culling with a good enough grade.
Her last name was that of a fearsome wild animal. It was her final year before retirement, and as the year went on, we realized she was actually a very conscientious and caring teacher.
Wikipedia?! Oh, you sweet summer child.
Don't you threaten the integrity of knowledge that is Wikipedia. It has an awful lot more to recommend to human civilisation than some random data centre AI
I wasn't.
I was saying it didn't exist.
It skims everything on the internet
What brings me back to my uni days is getting a 0% on an AI assignment because the lecturer ran a poorly written script and if you crashed that script, he'd have to manually restart it (which was what he was upset about.. doing his job. He didn't even check the code, or try to run each test independently).
And now AI is about writing buggy code that regularly crashes and performs poorly.
The crap I learnt in AI turned out to be totally useless anyway (especially Lisp, which we had to learn ourselves and nobody ever uses)
I got so good at cranking out papers in college that I could BS my way through them in a couple of hours
Plagiarism has always existed, it just easier over time. Before AI, a lot of students just copy and pasted stuff they found online and changed a some words to get past the plagiarism checking programs. Right now all that manual work got automated so you don't have to copy and paste or alter what you took, you can just prompt an AI chatbot to do it for you.
The fix for all forms of plagiarism is "write it here, in front of me".
Writing has electrolytes that plants crave!
As someone that finished a couple of years ago it was already becoming that way then.
This didn't mean that people weren't learning but they were getting lazy. The AI detection isn't good enough because a lot of people are willing to write their papers through the AI in pieces and check that, since it's still faster than doing it yourself in most cases.
It's becoming this weird cycle. It's expected that you'll use AI anyway, that you'll be discriminated against for it, that professionals are going to try to use it to cut down on their work once hired, that HR is going to use it in the hiring process. So no one sees a reason not to use it.
Slacker.
I routinely wrote more than 10 pages in handwritten passages just to play a game. Indeed I still do. Without any degenerative AI in sight. (Because nobody's crammed an LLMbecile into my fountain pens yet.)
I used to write small games in BASIC on paper and then go over to my friend's house and type them into his VIC-20 to play them (these things had an optional tape drive for saving programs but his parents were too cheap to pay for that). It really taught me to code carefully and get everything right the first time around. In the early '90s I visited India and saw software companies that had ten programmers and one PC and they were also coding with pencil and paper. I assumed that this meant Indian programmers were going to be fantastic once they each got their own computers, but I was wrong about this -- they're just as shitty as everybody else.
I did this with my apple ii. There would be applesoft basic games in magazines you could type in. Then I'd have to debug them for the expected typos. Then, of course, I'd start modifying them to cheat lol
This was painful
One of my greatest academic achievements was a very long, in-depth research paper that was assigned on the first day of the semester and due on the last. "Don't put it off until the end," our teacher warned us, "because you won't be able to finish this in a couple of hours. You should be doing a little bit of work on it every week." It was to be deeply-researched, extensively endnoted, and (if I recall correctly) fifty pages long, single-spaced, 10pt.
Except I had a full-time job throughout college, and that semester my schedule found me going to work immediately after that (morning) class, both days, every week. By the time I was off work, the thought of that assignment had left my undiagnosed ADHD brain entirely. The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.
And suddenly the last day of class was approaching. I requested the prior day off of work, figuring that I'd work the whole day on it. Only I made a mistake: I hadn't requested the day before it was due. I had requested the day it was due. I'd be working four full days of work, with classes (and at least one early final exam), and then the paper would be due, and only after that would I have the day to write it.
But you do what you have to, and when you're 19 years old, the vagaries of time and sleep seem almost meaningless to you. I was going to get off work at 6pm, which was 14Β½ hours before the assignment was due. My university had a 24-hour computer lab, which was good, as it was 2004 and I didn't have internet in my apartment (how did I ever live like that?).
So I went home, ate a quick dinner, and went to school, locking myself into the computer lab at 8:00pm. When I poked my head out the door at 7:30am, the sun was bright and the air slightly crisp; and I held 52 freshly-printed pages in my hand. I was done early (technically) and had beaten the page count (also technically). I felt like I had beaten the Water Temple in Ocarina of Time. I ate breakfast to supplement the copious amounts of Nutty Bars and soda I had consumed overnight, and then I turned the paper in; and as class that morning was "optional," I opted to go home, where I discovered that perhaps time was not so vague at all, nor sleep, and I went unconscious for the rest of the morning and a decent chunk of the afternoon.
A week later, I got my grades back. At that point in any semester I was always beyond caring about how well I had scored, but I looked anyway out of curiosity.
"Well done!" she had written in the notes. "I can tell you really put a lot of time into this. 95/100"
I mean, technically she was right, I had put a lot of time into it: the 11Β½ hours immediately leading up to my turning it in, to be precise.
Very crunchy⦠Totally works though.
Ope, I had a few of those projects. Typically for me they were group projects where I was the only competent person in the group at writing in English or at doing our major. I always told people that I could do any one part of the project, got given the engineering portion, then wound up having to do the whole thing last minute. And thus a night without sleep where everyone bailed when they either decided they couldn't really help or had to fly home.
But hey, at least my senior capstone wasn't like that, it took two of us barely sleeping for a month to get it done on time despite making decent progress all year priorβ¦
The semester melted away like the cotton candy in that raccoon video.
Source:
I'm so sad. People are becoming so reliant on AI that they can't write (nor read) more than one sentence
You trick one rock into thinking, and before you know it, your entire thought process is captured by a whole collection of rocks.
Wat????
This needs more upvotes :)
10 pages hand written in cursive in 1982.
Until my left hand become a filthy mess of pen ink or pencil carbon.
PSA to a fellow Sinestro: the Zebra Sarasa Dry pen has gel ink that dries instantaneously and leaves no smudges on the hand. I also use a metal-tipped pencil and find it also leaves my hand clean. I tell every left-handed person about both of these. Damn right dominance.
Ugh, while I'm glad I got to see the world before computers were everywhere, I don't envy people who had to handwrite all their papers, nor teachers who had to grade those reports.
Were typewriters cheap enough that most students had them, or did they have "typing rooms" the same way schools set up computer labs? Or was handwriting just the norm even after typewriters were ubiquitous? Maybe in HS it was common but surely college profs couldn't be fucked with handwriting for the most part?
Typewriters were pretty cheap but not very many people owned one. Colleges had typewriter labs sometimes, but it was more common to hand-write your papers and then have a professional typist type them up. I went to college in the '80s and we had labs with a bunch of word processors we could use, but I had borrowed my dad's portable electric typewriter and I mostly used that. During my junior year the G type slug broke off of its typebar, so for the rest of my college career I had to hand-write the Gs on all my papers.
I had to do some tests in those little blue essay booklets. My hand would be absolutely killing me from cranking out pages of handwriting as fast as possible.
I got my degree in 2008. All my exams were handwritten (but fortunately I didn't have to write 10 pages per question, which is good as I physically can't write that much in the time allotted). I did at least get to type my undergraduate thesis.
I got mine 10 years later and it was the same. We had to type out papers and projects, but exams were handwritten. Being an engineering major certainly lent itself to that as typing out your work in a math problem sucks, especially when it includes diagrams. But humanities exams were also predominantly pen and paper, often using standardized essay booklets that were provided by the proctor.
I think that that's the best way to handle it. It can be properly supervised for cheating and minimizes distractions. Also, holy crap I'd hate to take a statics or dynamics or calc exam on a computer
I only had to handwrite for a 1st year class that was big enough to be a lecture. I think the exam probably required less than ~8 paragraphs total but that was enough. My school was pretty small so fortunately all the rest of my humanities classes were seminars we turned in reports for. I would've hated having to do those style exams for my entire degree, even without the handwriting issue.
I don't think I've written anything longer than a couple paragraphs by hand at one time in the past 30 years. I'll still take some notes here and there and I've been known to send a postcard or two if I'm traveling, but typing is so much faster anyway.
