”Everyone is cheating their way through college” with GenAI. Who should bear the costs?
Society is once again left holding the bag
The big story making rounds today is New York Magazine’s Everyone is cheating their way through college, using GenAI, which concludes, inter alia, and probably correctly that
Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate…Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.
Nicholas Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, pulled out one of the choicest bits.
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Kevin Roose, who has positioned himself as champion and defender of the AI industry, threw college professors under the bus:
Thompson made the same point, but with less condescension.
Roose and Thompson both have a point. The curriculum does, obviously need a redesign. The status quo clearly no longer works. I (having retired from the academy since 2019) made one suggestion myself two years ago that I still stand by, but it is hardly a full solution to the scope of the problem:
In a tweet that got several million views, C. W. Howell used this technique with his students — and found that in something like 63 of 63 LLM-generated papers, alert students were able to discover hallucinations.
As a one-off it’s a great assignment.
But here’s the thing. We are going to do need a more thorough going redesign than that. And, crucially, there is a problem of scale. Term papers exist in part because they are an economically efficient way of teaching and evaluation large numbers of students. Or at least they were. Now they are basically worthless.
Term papers aren’t a great educational tool (lord knows I graded enough of them back in the day), but they did fulfill several functions, such as giving students practice writing and getting students to reflect on some body of work. They also provided a decent though imperfect basis for evaluating students at scall. GenAI has nuked all of this. In tiny classes (say 5 students) one could reach similar objectives entirely through in-class discussions, replacing the need for term papers, and cutting GenAI out of the loop. But that’s not going to work with a class of 100 or 500.
With enough money you can have TAs and smaller sections of say 20 students each, taught by teaching assistants, but with university budgets being slashed, few universities will have enough money to make that work.
You can’t cut funding to universities, signal to kids that using ChatGPT to write the papers is ok, and expect professors to save the day and the educational system without financial support.
If you want GenAI to succeed, and you want our children to be educated, you can’t just wave your hands and hope for the best.
The real issue is who bears the cost. The creators and distributors of GenAI, who have brought this huge problem to society? Or a bunch of underpaid, overworked college professors who may have dozens or hundreds of students?
The likely outcome here? College students from here on out will get little from their educations, professors will be overwhelmed, unable to adapt to the scale of what would be required to do individualized education with budgets that don’t really support that, and the Sam Altmans of the world will laugh their way to the bank.
Employers will struggle to find well-educated employees. Democracy, which thrives on having an educated citizenry, will crumble.
"In a tweet that I cannot readily find but that got several million views, a professor used this technique with his students."
That was me. I ended up deleting my twitter last year because everything going on there, so I don't think the tweet's around anymore. I wrote about it in Scientific American, however: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-educate-students-about-ai-make-them-use-it/
I appreciate the shout-out. And I agree it's not enough of a redesign to fully salvage the situation; it was just something I came up with on the fly as my class was being undone by ChatGPT. I didn't have much hope though, and I actually quit teaching after that semester and have mostly given up on higher education. Felt like fleeing a burning building.
These discussions about LLMs writing essays seem disconnected from reality.... Do the authors not realize that professors don't actually want these essays? They're not collecting them from students and then selling them on the street corner. No one wants to read them. In fact, we actually have to PAY the people who do read them (TAs) to compensate them from the value destruction that it causes.
Clearly, producing these essays is not the point of education. The reason we ask students to write them is that, for a human brain, the most efficient way to produce a good essay is to first understand the topic and then think critically about it. The classroom is a factory for producing human understanding and critical thinking skills. The essays, which have negative economic value, are actually a waste product.
The situation is as if someone saw a factory that was pumping waste into the river and decided to make a new factory that pumps waste into the river even faster and more cheaply, not noticing that the point of the factory was to produce bicycles not waste. If someone did that with a physical factory, they would get sued for polluting the river. It's a wonder that the same is not on the table here for those polluting the educational system.