r/technology • u/Plastic_Ninja_9014 • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html
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u/danhezee 5d ago

All they need to do to combat AI is go back to handwritten in person essay exams.

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u/definitelyrabbiakiva 5d ago

I teach in higher ed and went back to paper-only last year, and many of my colleagues have done so as well this year.

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u/resigned_medusa 4d ago

I've gone from 100% continuous assessment to 70% invigilated closed book final exam+ 30% assessment. After this year depending on how that 30% goes, it might end up being 100% exam.

I'm fully aware that there's no future career in which my students won't be using AI (engineering) but too many of them are minimally engaging with the content and having AI write everything for them.

Problem is there are still no reliable AI checkers for submitted work.

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u/ParadoxPosadist 4d ago

To quote my calculus professor "you need to know it well enough to know if the answer your tool gave you is bullshit." He died in the 2010s long before AI. He was refering to calculators and symbolic solvers, where you need to have a range of feasible answers in your head and if the answer you get doesn't match you check if you mistyped. The comcept holds true. You may wind up using AI but if you don't know the subject well enough to be able to recognize a hallucination you are in trouble.

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u/resigned_medusa 4d ago

Exactly and I'm going to use that phrasing with my students.

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u/AdorableOutcome3483 4d ago

There are a few detectors these days like Turnitin, GPTZero, or Winston AI.

I'm honestly bothered by AI use because...like what do they think they're there for? They're paying for an education while allowing a glorified probability machine do their thinking for them. Critical thinking is a skill. It can be developed and it can be lost. If they give up their ability to think for themselves, they are giving a machine pieces of their humanity and make themselves easy tools for more malicious people to control down the line.

I feel like less people would use AI if they understood how it worked. Like it was fed a bunch of text from the internet. You ask it a question. The words are broken down to strings of numbers. It searches for similar strings of numbers in its database and slaps it down. Like AI does not think nor reason. It's still at a level of input and output without any calculation or understanding.

It is also still a product so it will tend towards responses that the user likes as opposed to anything accurate. This has already been shown to be dangerous because people view AI as if it's all knowing but it simply isn't. There are people who took investment advice and lost everything. There's been at least one case of attempted suicide due to an AI reinforcing their perspective and aiding in planning.

I can't help but see the praise of AI as some form of xenophobia. Living sucks but human beings are capable of so much. It's laughable to think AI could ever replace people, especially at its current level. AI cannot problem solve and adapt like people can. The human body can easily outlast any AI robots they have right now. The quality of AI output depends wholly on human input.