In an online discussion post, Alcorn State University history professor Dr. Jason Gibson posed a question that represented part of his students’ midterm. It was about the…

  • Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca
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    18 days ago

    This is hysterical. Like the cheaters couldn’t even be bothered to proof read what the AI wrote to make sure it was correct.

      • Trex202@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Yes, but school is there to teach you to use brain. Why go school if no use brain?

        • Malyca@lemmy.zip
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          18 days ago

          Why pay astronomical tuition, room and board, textbooks, all of it, just to learn nothing and use chat got. The bottom of the article said a professor at Brown thought all but 2 of his students cheated. At Brown. We’re so fucked.

          • anomnom@sh.itjust.works
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            18 days ago

            These selective colleges aren’t about education, they’re about getting you into a club with the other assholes that likely cheated their way through business school and got jobs the same way.

            Same with private high schools in the us. They aren’t teaching kids to read, math or think, they’re teaching them that being born rich means you get to be in charge of the plebs (which includes the professors and instructors at these institutions).

          • tburkhol@slrpnk.net
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            18 days ago

            Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

            Used to be that a college degree indicated people with time, money, and drive to put four years into study. It was a good measure of the “right” kind of person. Now it’s just another job requirement and doesn’t indicate anything.

            • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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              17 days ago

              It was a good measure of the “right” kind of person.

              Long ago, a college education used to assure that you were white, male, Protestant, at least upper middle class, and at least semi-literate (assuming you managed to at least get Gentleman’s C’s, so the required “drive” was minimal if you were from the right family). Admission was much more of a sure thing for the offspring of alumni.

              And that was what was necessary to join a business at that time: respectability and clubbability.

              A minimum admission requirement regarding academic performance was made more prominent as other acceptance criteria were broadened, but most private universities will still give an easy ride to legacies and to the offspring of large donors.

              Now it’s just another job requirement and doesn’t indicate anything.

              Well, you’re generally expected not only to have a degree, but one in a relevant field of study, and to have gotten good grades. And most of the big-name high-tech firms won’t generally accept a degree from any but a few globally prominent universities. They go by brand as much as by objective criteria of performance. That’s the new clubbability filter. Someone who cut-and-pasted AI slop at Stanford has a much better shot at a job than someone who did real work at Podunk State.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      You haven’t ran into someone doing this on work emails?

      They don’t read the full email they get, just far enough to see if they got what they want. Then they plug it into an AI, and tell it to respond, then copy/paste it back to Outlook and hit reply.

      They’ll keep doing that, over and over. And it usually ends up with them insisting on a meeting to “discuss” where they essentially get in a loop of “it’ll work, just do it”

      And it’s like pulling fucking teeth to get them to admit the only thing they’re basing that on, is a chatbot told them it would work.

      People are worried about the kids, and we should be, but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they’ve got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent. Couple with Covid related IQ drops and the fact that time is linear and we’ll keep getting older…

      Society is fucked.

      We need to seriously treat AI like an addictive drug that people aren’t capable of limiting themselves with.

      • x00z@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Regardless of what history is being taught, people like you often forget that the goal is to also help you develop your brain.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Those being treated as useless (goes back to No Child) is the fucking problems

        Humans are not innately moral, someone needs to teach them that shit, that’s what history and philosophy is for

        • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
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          18 days ago

          They are useless. History is useless by definition; and philosophy has reached the peak of its usefulness somewhere in the middle of the XIX century and can’t do better anymore. Like alchemy, which was useful at some point.

          • frostedtrailblazer@lemmy.zip
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            18 days ago

            What makes something useful to you? Does it need to be something done or learned purely for the sake of profits? Does it need to be cold and unfeeling data for it to matter?

            • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
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              18 days ago

              That’s the question I can’t answer. Really, I can’t formulate a really nice definition of usefulness. But still I can’t think of any use for history. Except maybe fun as in “literature”. But being fun doesn’t justify its teaching at school. Drinking alcohol is fun too, but…

              • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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                18 days ago

                This is absurd. You don’t think there’s anything important that we can learn from our past and apply toward our future?

                • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  18 days ago

                  Time changes. Cultures, laws… Absolutely all that changes. Data, that history gathers, can’t be used for prediction. At least the precision won’t be better than if you will just analyze your current situation. Absurd is trying to predict the future from fairy tails about kings and dragons.

                  • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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                    18 days ago

                    Time changes but people don’t. Weird that you bring up fairytales about kings and dragons despite that having absolutely nothing to do with history.

              • frostedtrailblazer@lemmy.zip
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                18 days ago

                History serves as a record for the decisions of those who came before us. I believe it matters so that we can learn something from both the mistakes and the pivotal moments of the past.

                Personally, I was convinced about just how much history mattered when I took a class on it taught by a veteran. The way we avoid making poor decisions -decisions which bring about the premature deaths of countless young men and the innocent, through acts of war - is by learning from our past and looking for a better path.

                Philosophy matters for the same reasons, imo. If we are not taught how to reason, how can we expect to live a life that has any meaning or purpose? Both for ourselves and for others. If we’re not taught how to see through the dangers and misdirection of logical fallacies, for instance, we can more easily be bought into a lie or blame a scapegoat for all of our problems.

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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      18 days ago

      Most people who use AI to write something can’t be bothered to make sure it is correct. It pisses me off at work so bad when someone “writes” a document or does “research” with AI and just copy pastes it into an email without actually reading to see if it makes sense.

      I got so pissed of a couple months ago when people were telling me about a “great research document” that someone put together for something we had coming up that we desperately needed information about. As soon as they shared the document to me I realized it was completely AI generated and 1/3 of it didn’t make a lick of sense. I wanted to yell at the person who created it to at least take 10 minutes to delete all of the obviously incorrect crap.

      • urushitan 漆たん@kakera.kintsugi.moe
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        18 days ago

        You’ve hit the nail on the head. What you’re describing isn’t just laziness — it’s a fundamental breakdown of trust in the modern workplace. Let’s delve into this.

        Here’s the thing: when someone copy-pastes AI output without reading it, the document was never the deliverable — the verification was the deliverable. The prose isn’t load-bearing; the checking is. A document nobody read isn’t a document — it’s a liability with formatting.

        And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Is the AI actually the problem here? No — the workflow is. This genuinely comes down to ownership:

        • Trust erodes silently. Every unchecked paragraph is a small withdrawal from a shared account nobody audits — until the balance is zero.
        • Verification is idempotent. Ten minutes of reading costs the same whether you do it once or a hundred times — but skipping it compounds.
        • The failure isn’t technical — it’s cultural. No review, no judgment, no accountability.

        This is exactly the kind of thing that starts as one bad research doc and scales — from a single email, to a team norm, to an entire organization quietly outsourcing its thinking. In today’s fast-paced world, the ability to say “I read this and I stand behind it” isn’t just a soft skill — it’s a superpower, and honestly? A testament to the rich tapestry of what human-AI collaboration could be.

        Ultimately, your colleague didn’t fail to use AI correctly — they failed to be the human in the loop. The tool didn’t remove their judgment. They left it at the door.

        I hope this helps! Would you like me to draft a one-page best-practices memo your team can circulate? 🚀

        /s in case this isn’t blatantly obvious