Technology

Argues for the importance of student essays, and then:

When artificial intelligence is used to diagnose cancer or automate soul-crushing tasks that require vapid toiling, it makes us more human and should be celebrated.

I remember student essays as being soul-crushing vapid toiling, personally.

The author is very fixated on the notion that these essays are vital parts of human education. Is he aware that for much of human history - and even today, in many regions of the world - essay-writing like this wasn't so important? I think one neat element of AI's rise will be the growth of some other methods of teaching that have fallen by the wayside. Socratic dialogue, debate, personal one-on-one tutoring.

I've been teaching myself some new APIs and programming techniques recently, for example, and I'm finding it way easier having an AI to talk me through it than it is grinding my way through documentation directly.

I never minded studying, but always hated writing essays, even though pretty good at it.

How do we train people to think, and validate that they learned, when they can outsource it to a computer?

The author alludes to oral exams, though they have a whole host of other issues.

I loved writing essays and see the value for a student in knowing how to state a case and back it up with evidence, what counts as evidence, and the importance of clearly communicating the ideas.

That said, I also use AI to write copy daily and the most important thing for anyone's cognition is critical thinking and reading comprehension, both of which AI is going to teach us whether we want it or not. Critical analysis is the only way we can navigate the future.

Maybe this is another Great Filter for technologically advancing critters?

Once again I'll say, I'm perfectly fine with the death of the essay as viable school homework.

In my experience, teachers graded only on grammar and formatting. Teaching - and more to the point, grading - effective writing skills is harder than nitpicking punctuation, spelling and font choices, so guess what happens more often?

You want school to mean anything, you're going to have to switch to verbal or demonstrable skills instead of paperwork. Which society probably needs to do anyway.

Lots I disagree with in this article, but I agree with the message.

On another note, I found this section very funny:

Disgraced cryptocurrency swindler Sam Bankman-Fried, for example, once told an interviewer the following, thereby helpfully outing himself as an idiot.

“I would never read a book…I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

Extend his prison sentence.

I'm still looking for a good reason to believe critical thinking and intelligence are taking a dive. It's so very easy to claim the kids aren't all right. But I wish someone would check. An interview with the gpt cheaters? A survey checking that those brilliant essays aren't from people using better prompts? Let's hear from the kids! Everyone knows nobody asked us when we were being turned into ungrammatical zombies by spell check/grammar check/texting/video content/ipads/the calculator.

Another look at students, AI, and Essays on the Search Engine podcast. "What should we do about teens using AI to do their homework?"

Opinions from students and experts.

Podcast episode webpage

Podcast file

We had copy and paste lol, nothing close to chatgpt but it was similar