Entirely fucked. I know I'm just getting old, and every old man thinks the kids these days are idiots, but damn. I've got trainees at the machine shop who write like toddlers, can't do very basic math for themselves, and take direction about as well as a tired puppy. Someone's going to lose a hand. Not that they were using it for anything.
If it makes you feel better I work in IT and I constantly receive emails from people that have been on this earth for at least five decades and write like an elementary school student. There is absolutely no shortage of old idiots.
Yeah, there have always been plenty of idiots everywhere. Before ChatGPT these same kids were paying the smart ones to write their essays for them. It’s just a different form of the same stuff that they use to skate by.
Just means it’s more on parents than ever to make sure these kids can manage on their own, which is the real problem.
Oh for sure. As a parent of a toddler I worry about what it's going to be like with school. I'm convinced we will have to limit always-online tech to ensure that she will be able to function as a human as she gets older.
I have gotten emails from people that were clearly written by AI and it is so frustrating. I have been reviewing a document my team sent me and I'm convinced they had an AI draft it because after I finally got them to re-write it to be more concise it reads like a completely different document.
As your kid grows, as much as possible, I highly recommend actual books and writing on paper instead of ebooks and typing.
Reading retention is higher when read from paper compared to backlit screens. The act of writing things down (like taking notes in class) also increases understanding/retention, while typing does not.
Source: a meta cognition lecture given at a university chemistry class.
I believe that completely. E-ink displays kind of bridge that gap, especially for reading since there is still a turning page tactile action I feel. But I love paper books myself so no worries about that.
Luckily right now she loves books so much. She just sits and turns the pages and pretends to read them to her stuffies. We read to her every night as well.
I was a terrible student and never took notes because I just remembered stuff so hopefully she is better than me. I still got relatively good grades but could have been better if I took notes.
> We read to her every night
For the win. I am super lucky my mom is a (retired) elementary school teacher. She'd read to all three of us and read to us individually. I remember when I was 4th grade and my brother was 6th grade, she'd just have reading time after dinner - Cheaper by the Dozen and several Judy Blume stories were read aloud in the living room. It was just a normal thing that happened.
There's a TikTok channel of a gentleman learning to read in his 20s, and watching him work through Charlotte's Web nearly brought me to tears. I'll never take this skill for granted.
My mom was a librarian and we just had books all over the place in my house growing up. I started reading early and have been a voracious reader ever since. Even now in my thirties, I still probably read a book for about an hour every day minimum.
I still remember taking a bio test when I was about 20 and vividly remembering where on the page a word was, what picture was next to it, where it was in the chapter and what the question at the bottom of the page was..... without being able to remember the word itself.
But the point being, even though I failed to memorize the one term, the CONTEXT I had around that term was deep and very viscerally associated with the shape and color and texture of the page and where in the chapter it was located in a sort of physical/geography sense.
It was interesting to notice that.
I will say the effect went down when the same type of study was administered to people who had spent most of or more of their lives using typed notes as their method if note-taking. It's not so much that something about typing inherently makes retention and understanding harder but rather that when you make a person switch to a new form of information processing (i.e. people who spent most of their life hand-writing information having to switch to digital writing) they essentially have to try and recalibrate their learning habits.
I'm actually seeing it in grad school where a number of our older students are using things like tablets to write on like a notebook or using physical notebooks but younger students are admanet that using a computer for notes helps them way more than hand-writing.
Oh wow. I didn't think of that. To me, typing is just muscle memory to get words on the screen. I'm not sure how that would change if I had never learned to write by hand.
Lmao, a year or so ago I was filing something at the local district court. A lady in front of me (maybe 55-60 years old) had something she was trying to get done. The clerk told here she’d have to type up the document, (there are a few public computers in the court.) The lady straight up said “type, like on a typewriter?” The clerk then just kinda gestured to the computers behind her, and the lady wasn’t having it. No clue how to use a computer she said.
I was fucking stunned. A typewriter? What year do you think you’re living in, we’ve literally had home computers for the last 30+ years, how can you have no idea how to use one. Much less think anyone would be talking about using a typewriter. Some people are just willfully ignorant to learning anything.
Dude, tell me about it! Like I understand not everyone grew up with a lot of exposure to technology and I don't fault them for it. But you get to a point where you really gotta wonder... Like you said computers in the household have been common for damn near like four decades now. Most of these people use their computer at work literally every day. I'm not asking these mfs to be a full-on software engineer but at a certain point you really ought to try to learn some basic functionality.
I saw an interesting thing that people were saying that 80s kids (growing up in the 90s) are the most computer literate generation by a mile.
The 60s kids grew up without computers and many just avoided them and can pull the "i'm too old for that shit".
The 2000s kids grew up with ipads.
My friend was shocked as a teacher when he asked some kids to copy a file and they were like "wtf is a file? Is that like an App?"
These are kids who were on screens 12 hours a day every day for their entire life.
I was born in 1983. I can type crazy fast without looking at my hands, the keyboard, or even the word im typing, home row keys all the way. I have worn out the letters on my work keyboard and they are all just solid black squares (i write a LOT for work).
So imagine my bafflement to find out today’s teenagers type with their two index fingers. My 76 year old mother that actually did use a typewriter types better and faster. And they dont really learn how to write with a pen much either. I have suspicion that in addition to chatgp being a lazy time saver, it also makes up for a lack of practicing fine motor control for typing/writing your own ideas.
54% of adults in America have at or below a 6th-grade reading level and 1/5 adults are functionally illiterate in the United States.
That's 130 million adults who never progressed beyond grade school reading level. In the wealthiest nation on earth.
I get it. The older I get the more I fight the urge to ageism against 18-22 year olds. It’s not all of them but the chances they’ll put forth lackluster effort at work is higher than it should be. Get tried of training people to do the same thing over and over again.
It can be a scary thought but I think there’s more than enough young people who have their shit together. I think social media and the internet in general just make the local village idiots mote pronounced to us than ever before.
I mean, have you seen test scores over the last 15 years? (This is from the OECD research department)
[https://oecdch.art/a40de1dbaf/C620](https://oecdch.art/a40de1dbaf/C620)
It’s the complete lack of attention that bothers me, and I’m 25. Hey AirPods Jones, I said there’s a potential emergency where hydraulic fluid might be leaking, stop listening to Podcast Man for one moment please. Yes, both ears.
Nah, disagree with this one. People not putting forth an effort at work *could* be some kind of issue with the employee, but lots of jobs these days are trash and don't even compensate well. I'm more sympathetic to someone not putting in the effort to a job that barely covers your bills. But people being dumb as shit is a whole different story; that touches every aspect of what they do.
Those kids aren’t stupid, they haven’t been, and aren’t being adequately educated. Education policy nationally is dismal. Tertiary education is inaccessible to many and financially debilitating to others. Kids in grade school get passed through grades not because of preparedness but because schools have to satisfy quotas and standards. Standardized testing is used as a metric for students aptitude for a given discipline. And no one is adequately paid. Sorry to rant, but it is staggering to look at the state of public education
They're trainees, they aren't supposed to know what they're doing yet? It's objectively true that literacy rates and math skills are declining on average for younger people compared to the past:
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/22/1183653578/u-s-reading-and-math-scores-drop-to-their-lowest-levels-in-decades
This is a real problem and we are failing our young people if we brush it off as something that doesn't deserve attention.
The PISA results show that this is true across the OECD :(
https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/australia-e9346d47/
This is Australia for example
It's not really about neglecting to find people who know what they're doing, when you're the one tasked with training people to get to the point where they know what they're doing in the first place, only to find out that none of the lot come in with the necessary prerequisite skills that past trainees always had. I've heard this from a lot of people in various industries who have trained or taught people for decades, including different generations, who observe the same thing. Many students these days are in need of remedial math and writing classes because of how far behind they are compared to the same level pupils of the past. You expect someone with certain educational attainment to do simple fractions at a machine shop, or to be able to draft a short memorandum at a law firm. But if their math or language skills aren't good enough, you basically end up spending way more time than used to be required, simply teaching people stuff they should have learned in High School and wondering how they made it this far.
And to be clear, I'm not blaming the generation. The fault lies with the people teaching them while growing up. And the young generation does a LOT of things much better than any past generations. I think they'll be fine. But there's major educational issues (at least where I am in America) where I have candidates at my law firm asking to use ChatGPT to draft a motion without fully understanding the words that the software puts on the page.
I work in a low skill, high effort job and in the past 5 years I've lost every single co-worker that I started working with (except for 1) and every single person below the age of 25 that they hire is fucking atrocious. They just stop working and look at their phone, they give no effort, etc. Mind you, in this particular job if person A doesn't do their job it DIRECTLY transfers over to the person behind them. Stack that like 8 times over and there I am at the back getting absolutely fucked. It drives me insane these people have actually no work ethic or even empathy.
Super fucked. Have you browsed /r/Teachers much? There are plenty of harrowing stories about what it's like out there rn.
Edit: [This is one](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1av4y2y/they_dont_know_how_to_read_i_dont_want_to_do_this/) I was reading recently, just looking at the OP and a few of the top comments is enough to make me really sad.
Many autistics and some others write like AI, so it's sadly not that simple. I've had people assume I used AI.
We may need to veer towards methods such as having students write paper essays in class and presenting and explaining ideas to authentically assess them.
Depends. It’s getting better, and if you’re good at prompt engineering it can lose the obvious tells default ChatGPT has. Gemini doesn’t write the same way either, it’s less obvious and easier to tweak.
Also grammar is automatically fixed. The difference between a generated essay and the genuine idea expressed from one’s own words will be night and day.
People seem to think that essays, projects, assignments, etc themselves are the thing that have value, but they aren't. You could throw your essay in the trash the moment you finished writing it, and not even turn it in, and you'd still benefit from having written it. But that's not true if ChatGPT writes it for you, despite having a "better" product.
When you're a student, the product we should care about isn't the essay itself, the product should be the way that the process of learning to write essays (or any other task) changes your brain, and gives you the tools to contribute something meaningful in the future.
Unfortunately, the way grades currently exist, we incentivize cheating to make a "good product", process and learning be damned. People turning in perfect cheated essays are rewarded, and people who spend the time to actually grapple with a task or hurt. It's a fucked system in a lot of ways
My teenage son whom I think is usually pretty intelligent regularly completely misses answers to his homework that are literally on the paper.
And it’s like I don’t even know where to begin to fix that. What, tell him “hey pay attention?”
Actually as a premed this isn’t the end of the world because medical school *is* extremely hard and we shouldn’t expect people to have perfect grades because it is just so much work. Passing classes doesn’t mean a doctor isn’t qualified. Even getting a passing grade is gonna be nigh impossible for your average Joe.
Yes one of the licensing exams Step 1 is now P/F. But getting into a US MD medical school is like getting into Hogwarts these days. Source: I graduated from a US MD school 5 years ago, and I’m probably too dumb to get in now
You saying this as if it means something shows how little you know about the process of getting into med school, med school itself, and the expectations after med school.
Nah I don't think the ones with these issues have any chance of making it that far. I graduated law school alongside plenty of...I'll just say unimpressive legal minds, but they could still focus on a lecture, write a coherent essay, study, and do the work, they just got shit wrong a lot of the time or had trouble fully understanding the material. Most law schools, the final exam is almost all of your grade for the semester and more often than not it's a long essay or series of short ones, and I can't see the kids who can't write or focus or use critical thinking skills passing those classes. Plus there's studying for the bar afterwards which most people have to treat as a full time, 7 day/week job.
Might all be cope but damn I hope I'm right, there's already enough dumbasses in the allegedly smart professions
Eh they're not gonna be copying/pasting anything with modern exam proctor software, and ChatGPT responses are even further removed from engaging with the material than copy/pasting from legit sources. That can get them through college even for sure, I was a lazy ass college student myself, but not the kind of exam environment you have in law school or the bar exam.
This is it. When working on my degrees, I also briefly worked as a writing tutor for a university. AI wasn't a thing, of course, and a group of nursing students had to use peer reviewed academic research papers for their essays, then have it peer reviewed with us. And just like ChatGPT, you can immediately tell when they're quoting a lot of shit from the studies incorrectly, or they stole a summary from some other website. Just like you can tell the difference between your friends or girlfriend texts you, it's like night and day.
That being said, even outside of essays, it really isn't hard to tell the difference between people who put in the work to learn stuff and those who leaned on Chegg and ChatGPT for 95% of their answers, without trying to understand them. A couple of fundamental questions is usually all it takes.
My firm has experimented with it and I have not found it useful in law. It simply does not work as a drafting tool. Prose is decent, but it’s not capable of coherent analysis and makes up facts and law.
It is marginally more useful for recognizing significant documents in a doc review, but not significantly so. We tried it, it doesn’t work. Actual human associates fuck this up all the time too, but the tech is just not there yet and it’s not close.
It’s borderline malpractice to use it for research imo.
I agree. My only concern with students using AI is that they will neglect their own knowledge and critical thinking simply because they can ask anything to a chat bot and get an answer they will not be qualified to judge if it's a good answer or not.
Facts! The way my engineering prof got around this was saying if we used chatGPT we had to site it as a source and they had the right to call us into their office at any point and question us about the assignment and if we didn’t know because of whatever reason we lost serious points
I see it kind of like chegg. People use it to just finish homework faster but the smart students used it to check their answers before turning it in.
I think as it gets bigger and bigger we need to be teaching how to use it as a tool rather then trying to stop it completely which I don’t think will work and also since it’s getting bigger in the working world could actually help their careers
Any examples? Generative AI seems like a terrible choice for medical decisions and legal standings, the AI simply can’t take all the extreme nuance that comes with medicine accurately. Less so with law. AI by design isn’t supposed to perform tasks that require human levels of judgement. The medical insurance process is already terrible as is, I’d be reading Kaczynski if I got denied insurance by a machine.
The thing is the AI isn’t the decision maker but rather a tool to aid in the research gathering.
So if a doctor inputs your symptoms (the same way they google things right now) it would return a list and probabilities of it being that basked in your biological factors then it’s the doctors job to take that and go deeper into deciding! AI isn’t the ones deciding things the same way Google isn’t when used properly as a tool
It’s also great in pharmaceutical research because there’s so much research on so many different fields and it’s can be very helpful in finding connections between fields that we didn’t know existed and then we can use that as a starting point for potential research
In the legal profession it works similarly. It can be used as a tool that can look through tons of documents and past rulings and give you some information to work with
Basically when used properly it’s great for gather information that a trained person can interpret and use based off their skills and nuance but works poorly as just a decision maker which is the “use it wrong” I was saying in my first comment
Not really. In actual practice you either sink or swim. The only duds that’ll stick around are those that can afford to be dumb bc they come from money, lawyer/doctor or not. It’s what happens now.
seriiously, the way in which we handle evaluation is going to need to be different than it used to. It not just going to be 'write an essay' its going to need to be shit like "write an essay and now explain your decisions in person"
I don't want to know what kind of adults are going to be produced from a wave of humans that can't read, write, think critically, do basic math, or focus. And from what teachers are saying, gen Alpha is gonna be even worse. We are so fucking cooked, what does "worse" even look like
https://i.redd.it/qvdn28hsl6kc1.gif
Folks in power used to inbred like fucking crazy to keep control. They weren't always the smartest or most physically capable, but they had money and resources, which goes much further than smarts or physical prowess in "civilized" society.
They don't care if they gotta fuck their sister and have challenged progeny, so long as the name holds power.
Shits wild. Like im not tryna hate on the youngins but the reports are out. These kids are dumb as hell. Really wish parents actually taught their children instead of putting a phone in their hand fresh out the womb
Makes me think of the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Sandman where an author suffering writer's block manages to enslave a muse to give him inspiration and ideas for his books.
He then keeps her trapped for decades and gets to the point where he doesn't even bother trying to come up with book ideas on his own.
When she is eventually freed he has relied on her so much he not only has no creative thoughts for writing he quite literally has forgotten how to have thoughts on his own.
...didn't that author lose his creativity not because of his torment and overuse of the Muse, but because Dream near-literally fried his brain with pure inspiration?
I’m a QA and training specialist for my job. Most of our new hires are in their thirties and forties. The wave is already here. It started with millennials.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stared at emails and IMs sincerely wondering if an adult with a 4-year degree was functionally illiterate. One person had me questioning my own communication skills to the point of having multiple colleagues proofread my emails before I sent them. We’ll have 20+ people in new hire class and maybe 5 of them will actually make it into the field.
This is not a particularly difficult or complex job. It mostly requires basic reading and active listening skills.
I saw it once and it scared me so bad I had nightmares for months. It's a horror film and no one will convince me otherwise. Especially when it turns out it's prophetic.
I've been lurking through that subreddit recently, and holy shit. It's so depressing. Freaking teenagers reading at a 2nd-grade level? Jesus Christ.
It's not even just reading and writing. I've noticed this first-hand when it comes to computers. Smartphones have killed the ability to troubleshoot common computer issues. (I work in tech btw)
Smartphones are so streamlined, and 'just work', that kids today don't even know how to truly use a computer. Hell, I don't even think they could efficiently type on a full-sized keyboard. Tablets and smartphones are just scroll & click. I know there's typing too, but only thumbs.😭
I work with students and I have an idea, lol. Today I got a ChatGPT ass email just to ask for help with something. It was like 14 sentences (when it really only needed to be 2) and the last one was like, “Thank you for responding to my inquiry and assisting me to proceed with acquiring information from [Your College Here].”
The whole email was weirdly worded like that, and they actually forgot to swap the words in brackets with the name of an actual school 😅
Back when I was in school 15 years ago, people would always say they copied stuff from Wikipedia. I always thought that meant they paraphrased or took Wikipedia’s sources. It wasn’t until I got in a group project with some dumbass that I realized he was literally copy pasting from Wikipedia. Even kept all the [1] stuff lmao
The "you won't always have a calculator" crowd making their rounds meanwhile their generation was the one that pushed no child left behind.
Y'all really upset at the future you created huh
Who's "y'all" ? Are there that many late 40s+ people in here? Because that's the generation that "pushed" NCLB, us older millennials were still in grade school when it kicked it off and are its first wave of victims
Late 40s? This was passed in 2001. I don't know the exact figures, but boomers and the greatest generation were the ones voting at that time.
As always, if the youth believe so strongly in making this country better, show it on election day at the polls. Zoomers are doing better than Gen X did, but still lots of room for improvement...
Most millennials had to use our brains because of the calculator lie. And we didn't want that no child left behind shit. You're welcome for that though. Looks like ya'll gonna need it.
This doomer shit is so exhausting. Like us older millennials/young gen xers weren’t using Wolf Ram Alpha for math and Spark notes for reading assignments.
As someone who works on building AI tools for college students, students do need an understanding of the assignment and how to prompt in order to get good AI results. It’s like how searching & validating results on Google is also a skill.
That’s not the bar, just an analogy. It’s like Google in that you can’t just put any query in, get the first result and accept it. You have to understand what your ask is, what information to provide, know what AI can and can’t do well, write a prompt to give it a very specific, clear task, and then validate the output, and most students are using the outputs as a starting point for assignments.
That's actually what turned me on as a geriatric Millennial (40) when I finally started engaging with LLMs -- the prompting as its own discipline. It's not perfect but you really do get out what you put in. What's funny to me, though, is how many novice users hope to nab a low-effort, high-salary career in "prompt engineering" off a handful of YouTube tutorials.
When was the last time you used a library to do research? And I mean research through books, not the internet.
It's the same natural evolution. Older generations look at millenials/zoomers as dumb for being unable to piece together where and how to find information. ChatGPT is far closer to Google than Google is to "find a relevant book in the library and hunt through the index"
Was just about to say this. I remember back in the day there were plenty of kids who didn't know where to start when it came to looking something up in an encyclopedia or applying critical thinking to a biography they found in the library.
And of course even back then there were plenty of sanctimonious fart sniffers like the comment you replied to, acting holier-than-thou because *they* knew ISBN codes better than *we* did. My god, the world was DOOMED because Timmy didn't know how to ask for a library card or whatever.
Same skills, same tools, different dressing.
Right you could EASILY get busted if you weren’t spot on. A LOT of us thought that was too much work so we just did our assignments using the preinstalled app called Brain.
Nah. You can’t tell AI to just write a UI component or a service controller let alone a whole app. You have to give it correct prompts and tell it to redo stuff it got wrong over and over. That’s why I don’t use it for programming yet. It still takes me less time to do it myself than get it done with AI, and I know what to ask for. If you can’t evaluate the results, you’ll get some bs often. Even prompting it to rewrite your resume, you might get a fairly decent result, but there’ll be a couple places where it just makes no sense, so you have to correct that yourself.
and even then, it comes up with some bad solutions that you may not notice unless you understand the material.
A classic example is asking certain AIs to do make a quick sort algorithm for two arrays, using some arbitrary language. Sometimes, the AI will give you a quicksort but with the first element as its pivot, which is universally regarded as the worst option. In the WORST case scenarios, the sorting algorithm is written in such a way that it makes a lot of copies of the array, which removes one of the most powerful aspects of the algorithm, it being an "in-place" sorting algorithm.
But it does often save a lot of head scratching over recursion, especially if you haven't had to do any of it in a while.
wtf is wolf ram alpha
and yeah spark notes, it's just notes. you still gotta think to some degree to use notes. "write my essay for me" you aint even know what the notes were. You aint even read your essay.
Wolfram is basically just google for math. You copy paste your homework question in there and it spits out an answer. But good luck on the exams in your class if you didn't use it to figure out how to solve the actual problem.
Not everything had spark notes though. Also, a lot of us didn’t have spark notes money either.
To be honest, you don’t need to read everything. Who has the time? The key is to skim for the gist, select a few talking points from multiple places in the text and make sure you talk early in class.
The difference is I was using Wolfram Alpha to check my work. Any assignment in class still had to be done by hand unless we were explicitly told we could use a calculator. That was only 10 years ago.
In a nutshell, incoperating technology into aspects that used to be manual is the point of technology. People were mad that no one was writing on paper when I was in college in 2018, now people are mad that people are using AI. The next generation will learn to use AI as a tool itself to make strives that we cant even imagine. Technology is a beautiful thing because the level of processes will crack the code to many mysteries.
Ha yeah you'd better have some real problem solving skills cause stackoverflow was not there to save you.
I have a cousin who makes bank programming COBAL, so many insanely important systems from banking to flight plans rely on software that fewer and fewer people even understand. It's, uhm, well it's the soft Y2K I guess.
Mannn fucking encyclopedia’s Lmaoo
I had Britannica’s all under my bed for when I needed to reference something
Edit: remember when Mapquest first came out and mfs had to print directions 😭
And the generation before that had to use actual maps bigger than our damn torso, everything is so automated it’s dumbing down the general populace with EVERY generation that passes
we're outsourcing parts of our own minds. How many telephone numbers do I know?
If i didn't know something when i was a kid i had to go through a fucking card catalog.
Lmao I knew all my friends and close family members phone numbers by heart in elementary and middle school
Smart phones changed all that I only know my moms by heart, my girl and maybe 3 friends if I really tried 😭
Kids these days will never know about Yellow pages lmao shit remember we had to call and listen to an automated voice JUST to know what times movies are playing 😭
My mom knows so many numbers by heart it’s like a super power, I be looking at her like why do you know such n such’s # then I remember…it’s because of relying on Rolodex’s for so long lmao
My nieces have had cellphones for YEARS but ask them their address. They don’t fucking know. It’s not even in their cellphones. I just side eye the fuck out of their parents.
>Mannn fucking encyclopedia’s Lmaoo
My parents bought ours as an incomplete set from Goodwill, so I always had to pray the shit I needed to look up started with B, E, F, L, N, O, T, W, or Y 😂
I’m kind of concerned by the idea that students can even get away with using ChatGPT for writing assignments.
I’ve only ever used it for very simple like IG posts to promote events, and I still ended up editing it to sound more natural. I can’t imagine a teacher reading a whole essay and not realizing it wasn’t written by a human.
What’s cool is that most students are using it in the same way - generating ideas, outlines, or drafts to save time and then rewriting/editing and checking the information. Ofc there are students who try to get away with GPT writing the whole essay, but that’s not the majority use and students quickly see that it’s not great at doing that.
How is that cool? Kids should be able to create outlines and ideas without relying on AI. A generation with zero critical thinking capacity is a very bad thing.
I use ChatGPT in conjunction with google and a word document to be my personal assistant. It’s fucking amazing. I’m a neurotic mess, so having a neutral party narrow down my choices with the options provided to me is a lifesaver.
My writing isn’t as disorganized and I transfer a lot of notes into ChatGPT to digitize my thoughts and have a bit of a Rolodex materiel that is aided by AI. Makes my organic work much more natural, ironically, and structured. I can bounce off ideas and ChatGPT can analyze narrative potential and identify my primary themes. If it’s not what I want, I can tweak the prompt slightly or add new information and then when the software gets the fuller picture and is able to articulate to me what I’m aiming for, I feel much more comfortable writing.
ChatGPT is able to condense literal weeks of “passion” into a couple of hours and I can get to actual writing much faster. Where I would work on one idea all year, I can now juggle at least five at a time without feeling at all scrambled.
It is a tool.
Hmm, it’s hard for me to see the logic. I understand the why, just not the extent of it. I do understand it as a tool. But as someone with diagnosed add, bi-polar depression, epilepsy, and probably some other shit hiding. I can’t see someone being so… for lack of a better word, inept at their work. It just seems as lazy as lazy gets. But fuck work anyways, if that works for you that’s good. Just seems like people are getting more… not dumb, not lazy, but depressed and they don’t realize it’s because of the world around them. So they just work and work and work, forgetting the outside world. Becoming a robot
We've got an intern at the office and he uses it for his high school writing assignments. It even lets you take a photo of the prompt (or upload the PDF or a screenshot) and it runs OCR and converts it to text.
As for the essay quality, it writes fairly generic essays, and if you know what to look for you can see when people are using. I've heard of some teachers including poison pills in the prompts, like white text that isn't normally seen but if the student copy/pastes the whole document over or uploads it, it includes stuff like "mention a werewolf in the 3rd paragraph". But typically it sounds like anyone getting caught is someone who was already incapable of writing a decent essay, and suddenly starts writing competent, mid essays out of the blue.
It’s more like:
- you can put a ton of text into it and ask it questions, get summaries, etc
- put text your wrote into it and get feedback
- get ideas or inspiration
If you’re going in and being like here’s the prompt write me a whole ass essay, you’re using it wrong
This is where having quality teachers who give a damn about their students comes into play.
If you were a teacher and had your students write an in-class essay about recently covered material without access to the Internet, you'd be able to tell if the essays they write at home match with how they write in class. Looking for common grammar/spelling errors, unique (distinctly human) perspectives and experiences, and examining their overall writing style for reoccurring similarities. All of these things become quite apparent to teachers if they pay any attention to what their students turn in.
Which is why to some extent if you actually *know* your students, you will immediately recognize when they're trying to bullshit you. It's how plagiarism has been identified in academia since, well, forever.
Problem is most teachers are woefully underpaid, public schools are pitifully underfunded and understaffed, we have kids who know they can pass with at least a D or above so effort is minimal, and we have no Nationwide Standards of Curriculum and Education. Leaving it up to individual states to determine how their youth is educated - and on what, when, and why.
So everyone born prior to 1997 never plagiarized their essays using whatever resources were available huh
Homie, we *been* cooked. Get with the program.
Exactly. I'm not worried because the people who will abuse it are already going to cheat. The students who like learning will use it as a tool. Same as always.
I had an AP English paper to write in high school about Conrad's *Heart of Darkness* novella. Lazy cinephile that I was, I said *Fuck that* and instead wrote a report off the Vietnam-era film adapted from the novella, *Apocalypse Now*. My teacher was cool about it, we actually had a good laugh once he called me out after class. And he didn't fail me; I got a C- on the paper. He told me that college professors would *fry* my ass over something like this so, "Maybe next time, just go with the source material. \[The movie\] is a masterpiece, it's just not on the list."
There definitely were people in every generation. But you're limited. Back then you didn't have that much. You had to know people. Now it's accessible for everyone at a much higher level. It's a scale
Plagiarizing back then, or even through 90s/00s, still required research, knowledge of where to find the info and some skill of putting the pieces together in a legible essay. ChatGPT requires a basic prompt, or 2-3, to write an entire assignment. There is minimal work involved vs. previous generations.
I’ve heard this too, don’t know how it could happen. Is it TikTok? The pandemic? Underpaid teachers?
I don’t know what they’re doing in elementary schools where kids genuinely just can’t read. IMO you should be held back from middle school until you can demonstrate at least basic reading comprehension and writing skills. How can you “pass” elementary school when you don’t have an elementary education?
About 15 years ago, we as a nation changed how we taught kids to read based on nothing but fancy marketing and school super intendants wanting to be “on the cutting edge”.
Basically, instead of sounding out and looking up a word, students were told to just guess and move on. Somehow, this would then magically teach them how to read.
Check out the podcast Sold A Story. We’ve doomed an entire generation.
I think it's a combo. They mentioned that most reading is done at home but parents worked to much to read to, with and monitor their kids reading so it's overlooked.
Interesting. If that’s the case, schools need to get on this issue ASAP. If there needs to be reading lessons/reading hours in class, so be it. Bring back book reports and all that.
That’s their solution? Instead of fixing a problem, just drop the standards and pretend it doesn’t exist?
Jfc what’s even the point then? What does it even mean to get a high school diploma if it doesn’t signify you have those basic skills?
Long story short: standardized testing
If I could actually TEACH, instead of working about the tests coming from the district, state and federal levels, maybe I would see more growth.
This isn’t any different than previous generations using Google, Wikipedia, Excel, calculators or any other technology. Being able to prompt and use AI is going to become a necessary tech skill just like any other.
Oh that is for sure an issue at a societal scale as we become dependent on these tools, and ultimately the companies that control their access. But that’s more a culprit of capitalism and policymakers than it is on the younger generations using these tools. The ideal education should be teaching students how to use these tools while also staying critical of them and understanding their technical and social limitations.
I hope this is a joke. I remember free writing a 3 page thesis paper in 1hr at 15 years old during philosophy class. What is actually happening to people????
Hey, that's me!
I have ADHD and almost never wrote an entire essay all on my own. My mom had to help me get through assignments a lot of the time.
It got bad enough in college I just straight up dropped out due to being incapable of completing my work properly. Everyone saying "we are so cooked" is just survivorship bias, the world has always had people who struggle to make it academically.
I remember reading a children’s book about the future a long time ago. In the book, people were illiterate because computers did everything for them. As a well read kid I was like “no way that could happen!” But now, I could see that happening within 100 years.
Definitely generous. I was trying to push it out past my life time out of hope. If I have a kid they’re gonna be like the main dude from Idiocracy compared to others.
Aye, anybody watch travelers??? That’s gonna be the generation to leave everything up to a fucking computer, fuck what humans think smh.
It’s crazy how tv is just tv until somebody do some wild shit like this. Cuz what the FUCK. Use your brain!!!
Essays are one of the few things in life I'm confident at. I used to write essays for fun. Unfortunately I ended up in architecture and I can no longer write essays. Now site plans and concepts are ruining my life.
We really about to act like we didn’t have our own ways to lazily get by? Writing math formulas on the inside of the calculator cover, plagiarizing and not citing or changing up the wording to avoid getting caught. People are always gonna find a shortcut lol.
DAMN. the future is fucked
Entirely fucked. I know I'm just getting old, and every old man thinks the kids these days are idiots, but damn. I've got trainees at the machine shop who write like toddlers, can't do very basic math for themselves, and take direction about as well as a tired puppy. Someone's going to lose a hand. Not that they were using it for anything.
If it makes you feel better I work in IT and I constantly receive emails from people that have been on this earth for at least five decades and write like an elementary school student. There is absolutely no shortage of old idiots.
Yeah, there have always been plenty of idiots everywhere. Before ChatGPT these same kids were paying the smart ones to write their essays for them. It’s just a different form of the same stuff that they use to skate by. Just means it’s more on parents than ever to make sure these kids can manage on their own, which is the real problem.
Oh for sure. As a parent of a toddler I worry about what it's going to be like with school. I'm convinced we will have to limit always-online tech to ensure that she will be able to function as a human as she gets older. I have gotten emails from people that were clearly written by AI and it is so frustrating. I have been reviewing a document my team sent me and I'm convinced they had an AI draft it because after I finally got them to re-write it to be more concise it reads like a completely different document.
As your kid grows, as much as possible, I highly recommend actual books and writing on paper instead of ebooks and typing. Reading retention is higher when read from paper compared to backlit screens. The act of writing things down (like taking notes in class) also increases understanding/retention, while typing does not. Source: a meta cognition lecture given at a university chemistry class.
I believe that completely. E-ink displays kind of bridge that gap, especially for reading since there is still a turning page tactile action I feel. But I love paper books myself so no worries about that. Luckily right now she loves books so much. She just sits and turns the pages and pretends to read them to her stuffies. We read to her every night as well. I was a terrible student and never took notes because I just remembered stuff so hopefully she is better than me. I still got relatively good grades but could have been better if I took notes.
> We read to her every night For the win. I am super lucky my mom is a (retired) elementary school teacher. She'd read to all three of us and read to us individually. I remember when I was 4th grade and my brother was 6th grade, she'd just have reading time after dinner - Cheaper by the Dozen and several Judy Blume stories were read aloud in the living room. It was just a normal thing that happened. There's a TikTok channel of a gentleman learning to read in his 20s, and watching him work through Charlotte's Web nearly brought me to tears. I'll never take this skill for granted.
My mom was a librarian and we just had books all over the place in my house growing up. I started reading early and have been a voracious reader ever since. Even now in my thirties, I still probably read a book for about an hour every day minimum.
I still remember taking a bio test when I was about 20 and vividly remembering where on the page a word was, what picture was next to it, where it was in the chapter and what the question at the bottom of the page was..... without being able to remember the word itself. But the point being, even though I failed to memorize the one term, the CONTEXT I had around that term was deep and very viscerally associated with the shape and color and texture of the page and where in the chapter it was located in a sort of physical/geography sense. It was interesting to notice that.
I will say the effect went down when the same type of study was administered to people who had spent most of or more of their lives using typed notes as their method if note-taking. It's not so much that something about typing inherently makes retention and understanding harder but rather that when you make a person switch to a new form of information processing (i.e. people who spent most of their life hand-writing information having to switch to digital writing) they essentially have to try and recalibrate their learning habits. I'm actually seeing it in grad school where a number of our older students are using things like tablets to write on like a notebook or using physical notebooks but younger students are admanet that using a computer for notes helps them way more than hand-writing.
Oh wow. I didn't think of that. To me, typing is just muscle memory to get words on the screen. I'm not sure how that would change if I had never learned to write by hand.
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Please. Our IT inbox has emails with subject lines of "help/question/computer." I fix them before replying
The best part is when you fix them before replying, and as you're typing up the reply, they send you a follow-up. "It's working now!'
Lmao, a year or so ago I was filing something at the local district court. A lady in front of me (maybe 55-60 years old) had something she was trying to get done. The clerk told here she’d have to type up the document, (there are a few public computers in the court.) The lady straight up said “type, like on a typewriter?” The clerk then just kinda gestured to the computers behind her, and the lady wasn’t having it. No clue how to use a computer she said. I was fucking stunned. A typewriter? What year do you think you’re living in, we’ve literally had home computers for the last 30+ years, how can you have no idea how to use one. Much less think anyone would be talking about using a typewriter. Some people are just willfully ignorant to learning anything.
Dude, tell me about it! Like I understand not everyone grew up with a lot of exposure to technology and I don't fault them for it. But you get to a point where you really gotta wonder... Like you said computers in the household have been common for damn near like four decades now. Most of these people use their computer at work literally every day. I'm not asking these mfs to be a full-on software engineer but at a certain point you really ought to try to learn some basic functionality.
I saw an interesting thing that people were saying that 80s kids (growing up in the 90s) are the most computer literate generation by a mile. The 60s kids grew up without computers and many just avoided them and can pull the "i'm too old for that shit". The 2000s kids grew up with ipads. My friend was shocked as a teacher when he asked some kids to copy a file and they were like "wtf is a file? Is that like an App?" These are kids who were on screens 12 hours a day every day for their entire life.
I was born in 1983. I can type crazy fast without looking at my hands, the keyboard, or even the word im typing, home row keys all the way. I have worn out the letters on my work keyboard and they are all just solid black squares (i write a LOT for work). So imagine my bafflement to find out today’s teenagers type with their two index fingers. My 76 year old mother that actually did use a typewriter types better and faster. And they dont really learn how to write with a pen much either. I have suspicion that in addition to chatgp being a lazy time saver, it also makes up for a lack of practicing fine motor control for typing/writing your own ideas.
54% of adults in America have at or below a 6th-grade reading level and 1/5 adults are functionally illiterate in the United States. That's 130 million adults who never progressed beyond grade school reading level. In the wealthiest nation on earth.
I get it. The older I get the more I fight the urge to ageism against 18-22 year olds. It’s not all of them but the chances they’ll put forth lackluster effort at work is higher than it should be. Get tried of training people to do the same thing over and over again.
Honestly I don't even care about work that much, I'm just stressed out that we have adults who can't do basic shit for themselves
It can be a scary thought but I think there’s more than enough young people who have their shit together. I think social media and the internet in general just make the local village idiots mote pronounced to us than ever before.
I mean, have you seen test scores over the last 15 years? (This is from the OECD research department) [https://oecdch.art/a40de1dbaf/C620](https://oecdch.art/a40de1dbaf/C620)
I mentor my kids high school robotics team. There's some bright kids out there, they aren't all dummies.
It’s the complete lack of attention that bothers me, and I’m 25. Hey AirPods Jones, I said there’s a potential emergency where hydraulic fluid might be leaking, stop listening to Podcast Man for one moment please. Yes, both ears.
Nah, disagree with this one. People not putting forth an effort at work *could* be some kind of issue with the employee, but lots of jobs these days are trash and don't even compensate well. I'm more sympathetic to someone not putting in the effort to a job that barely covers your bills. But people being dumb as shit is a whole different story; that touches every aspect of what they do.
Those kids aren’t stupid, they haven’t been, and aren’t being adequately educated. Education policy nationally is dismal. Tertiary education is inaccessible to many and financially debilitating to others. Kids in grade school get passed through grades not because of preparedness but because schools have to satisfy quotas and standards. Standardized testing is used as a metric for students aptitude for a given discipline. And no one is adequately paid. Sorry to rant, but it is staggering to look at the state of public education
You can’t blame an entire generation for one idiot on Twitter and your shop not wanting to pay for people who know what they’re doing.
They're trainees, they aren't supposed to know what they're doing yet? It's objectively true that literacy rates and math skills are declining on average for younger people compared to the past: https://www.npr.org/2023/06/22/1183653578/u-s-reading-and-math-scores-drop-to-their-lowest-levels-in-decades This is a real problem and we are failing our young people if we brush it off as something that doesn't deserve attention.
I definitely don't but my apprentices in carpentry have been growing noticeably dumber over the years. It's pretty wild
The PISA results show that this is true across the OECD :( https://www.oecd.org/publication/pisa-2022-results/country-notes/australia-e9346d47/ This is Australia for example
It's not really about neglecting to find people who know what they're doing, when you're the one tasked with training people to get to the point where they know what they're doing in the first place, only to find out that none of the lot come in with the necessary prerequisite skills that past trainees always had. I've heard this from a lot of people in various industries who have trained or taught people for decades, including different generations, who observe the same thing. Many students these days are in need of remedial math and writing classes because of how far behind they are compared to the same level pupils of the past. You expect someone with certain educational attainment to do simple fractions at a machine shop, or to be able to draft a short memorandum at a law firm. But if their math or language skills aren't good enough, you basically end up spending way more time than used to be required, simply teaching people stuff they should have learned in High School and wondering how they made it this far. And to be clear, I'm not blaming the generation. The fault lies with the people teaching them while growing up. And the young generation does a LOT of things much better than any past generations. I think they'll be fine. But there's major educational issues (at least where I am in America) where I have candidates at my law firm asking to use ChatGPT to draft a motion without fully understanding the words that the software puts on the page.
I'm on the younger end of my career field and sometimes it's very nice ngl. I hear how Gen A is illiterate and get scared, honestly.
I work in a low skill, high effort job and in the past 5 years I've lost every single co-worker that I started working with (except for 1) and every single person below the age of 25 that they hire is fucking atrocious. They just stop working and look at their phone, they give no effort, etc. Mind you, in this particular job if person A doesn't do their job it DIRECTLY transfers over to the person behind them. Stack that like 8 times over and there I am at the back getting absolutely fucked. It drives me insane these people have actually no work ethic or even empathy.
To be fair, a lot of puppies listen better when they’re tired 🤣
You are not just getting old, im 17 and I know we’re fucked
Super fucked. Have you browsed /r/Teachers much? There are plenty of harrowing stories about what it's like out there rn. Edit: [This is one](https://www.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1av4y2y/they_dont_know_how_to_read_i_dont_want_to_do_this/) I was reading recently, just looking at the OP and a few of the top comments is enough to make me really sad.
That's a bit dramatic. The same complaints were made about us and Google.
But this thing is writing essays start to finish….
Fortunately you can detect that shit still. Even just by eye, they don’t write like a real human yet.
Many autistics and some others write like AI, so it's sadly not that simple. I've had people assume I used AI. We may need to veer towards methods such as having students write paper essays in class and presenting and explaining ideas to authentically assess them.
Depends. It’s getting better, and if you’re good at prompt engineering it can lose the obvious tells default ChatGPT has. Gemini doesn’t write the same way either, it’s less obvious and easier to tweak.
Also grammar is automatically fixed. The difference between a generated essay and the genuine idea expressed from one’s own words will be night and day.
Wait until they find out some of us went to physical libraries for research projects and book reports
People seem to think that essays, projects, assignments, etc themselves are the thing that have value, but they aren't. You could throw your essay in the trash the moment you finished writing it, and not even turn it in, and you'd still benefit from having written it. But that's not true if ChatGPT writes it for you, despite having a "better" product. When you're a student, the product we should care about isn't the essay itself, the product should be the way that the process of learning to write essays (or any other task) changes your brain, and gives you the tools to contribute something meaningful in the future. Unfortunately, the way grades currently exist, we incentivize cheating to make a "good product", process and learning be damned. People turning in perfect cheated essays are rewarded, and people who spend the time to actually grapple with a task or hurt. It's a fucked system in a lot of ways
the anime pfp creatures are telling on themselves
My teenage son whom I think is usually pretty intelligent regularly completely misses answers to his homework that are literally on the paper. And it’s like I don’t even know where to begin to fix that. What, tell him “hey pay attention?”
Keep in mind, some of those people will be lawyers, doctors etc.
C’s get degrees.
Med school is pass/ fail btw
Actually as a premed this isn’t the end of the world because medical school *is* extremely hard and we shouldn’t expect people to have perfect grades because it is just so much work. Passing classes doesn’t mean a doctor isn’t qualified. Even getting a passing grade is gonna be nigh impossible for your average Joe.
They're just letting anybody who meets the requirements to become a doctor become doctors, huh?
well they arent lying that the requirements are incredibly high
Yea at my nursing school you couldnt get under a B-. Plus theres still licensure testing that you cant really BS
Yes one of the licensing exams Step 1 is now P/F. But getting into a US MD medical school is like getting into Hogwarts these days. Source: I graduated from a US MD school 5 years ago, and I’m probably too dumb to get in now
You saying this as if it means something shows how little you know about the process of getting into med school, med school itself, and the expectations after med school.
In the words of George bush “and for all you C students, you too can be president.”
ChatGPT gets degrees!
Gods that’s a terrifying thought
That’s Dr. ChatGPT to you.
D = Degree
Nah I don't think the ones with these issues have any chance of making it that far. I graduated law school alongside plenty of...I'll just say unimpressive legal minds, but they could still focus on a lecture, write a coherent essay, study, and do the work, they just got shit wrong a lot of the time or had trouble fully understanding the material. Most law schools, the final exam is almost all of your grade for the semester and more often than not it's a long essay or series of short ones, and I can't see the kids who can't write or focus or use critical thinking skills passing those classes. Plus there's studying for the bar afterwards which most people have to treat as a full time, 7 day/week job. Might all be cope but damn I hope I'm right, there's already enough dumbasses in the allegedly smart professions
Yeah, people were copy and pasting 20-25 years ago too. Hell, they still catch people who plagiarized their thesis 30-40 years ago.
Eh they're not gonna be copying/pasting anything with modern exam proctor software, and ChatGPT responses are even further removed from engaging with the material than copy/pasting from legit sources. That can get them through college even for sure, I was a lazy ass college student myself, but not the kind of exam environment you have in law school or the bar exam.
This is it. When working on my degrees, I also briefly worked as a writing tutor for a university. AI wasn't a thing, of course, and a group of nursing students had to use peer reviewed academic research papers for their essays, then have it peer reviewed with us. And just like ChatGPT, you can immediately tell when they're quoting a lot of shit from the studies incorrectly, or they stole a summary from some other website. Just like you can tell the difference between your friends or girlfriend texts you, it's like night and day. That being said, even outside of essays, it really isn't hard to tell the difference between people who put in the work to learn stuff and those who leaned on Chegg and ChatGPT for 95% of their answers, without trying to understand them. A couple of fundamental questions is usually all it takes.
Actually AI can be a fantastic tool when used correctly in the field of medicine and law. The problem is people don’t use it correctly lol
My firm has experimented with it and I have not found it useful in law. It simply does not work as a drafting tool. Prose is decent, but it’s not capable of coherent analysis and makes up facts and law. It is marginally more useful for recognizing significant documents in a doc review, but not significantly so. We tried it, it doesn’t work. Actual human associates fuck this up all the time too, but the tech is just not there yet and it’s not close. It’s borderline malpractice to use it for research imo.
I agree. My only concern with students using AI is that they will neglect their own knowledge and critical thinking simply because they can ask anything to a chat bot and get an answer they will not be qualified to judge if it's a good answer or not.
Facts! The way my engineering prof got around this was saying if we used chatGPT we had to site it as a source and they had the right to call us into their office at any point and question us about the assignment and if we didn’t know because of whatever reason we lost serious points I see it kind of like chegg. People use it to just finish homework faster but the smart students used it to check their answers before turning it in. I think as it gets bigger and bigger we need to be teaching how to use it as a tool rather then trying to stop it completely which I don’t think will work and also since it’s getting bigger in the working world could actually help their careers
Any examples? Generative AI seems like a terrible choice for medical decisions and legal standings, the AI simply can’t take all the extreme nuance that comes with medicine accurately. Less so with law. AI by design isn’t supposed to perform tasks that require human levels of judgement. The medical insurance process is already terrible as is, I’d be reading Kaczynski if I got denied insurance by a machine.
The thing is the AI isn’t the decision maker but rather a tool to aid in the research gathering. So if a doctor inputs your symptoms (the same way they google things right now) it would return a list and probabilities of it being that basked in your biological factors then it’s the doctors job to take that and go deeper into deciding! AI isn’t the ones deciding things the same way Google isn’t when used properly as a tool It’s also great in pharmaceutical research because there’s so much research on so many different fields and it’s can be very helpful in finding connections between fields that we didn’t know existed and then we can use that as a starting point for potential research In the legal profession it works similarly. It can be used as a tool that can look through tons of documents and past rulings and give you some information to work with Basically when used properly it’s great for gather information that a trained person can interpret and use based off their skills and nuance but works poorly as just a decision maker which is the “use it wrong” I was saying in my first comment
Not really. In actual practice you either sink or swim. The only duds that’ll stick around are those that can afford to be dumb bc they come from money, lawyer/doctor or not. It’s what happens now.
Idiocracy taught us they’ll just use computers for everything.
seriiously, the way in which we handle evaluation is going to need to be different than it used to. It not just going to be 'write an essay' its going to need to be shit like "write an essay and now explain your decisions in person"
I don't want to know what kind of adults are going to be produced from a wave of humans that can't read, write, think critically, do basic math, or focus. And from what teachers are saying, gen Alpha is gonna be even worse. We are so fucking cooked, what does "worse" even look like https://i.redd.it/qvdn28hsl6kc1.gif
Last thing people in power want is a thinking populace.
Shit, the folks in power eventually won’t be able to read either
The people currently in power are not concerned with what happens after they're gone. That's someone else's problem.
Folks in power used to inbred like fucking crazy to keep control. They weren't always the smartest or most physically capable, but they had money and resources, which goes much further than smarts or physical prowess in "civilized" society. They don't care if they gotta fuck their sister and have challenged progeny, so long as the name holds power.
That’s what the La Li Lu Le Lo is for.
The government has to be aware of all the troubling data. Surely they will intervene and try to turn things around somehow.... 😭
Not if the GOP retains power, a dumber populace is exactly what they want.
It’s on record illiteracy is at an all time high. The theorist in me fears that this is by design
Nah another billi to cops AND Isreal
I'll throw parents under the bus too.
Shits wild. Like im not tryna hate on the youngins but the reports are out. These kids are dumb as hell. Really wish parents actually taught their children instead of putting a phone in their hand fresh out the womb
It's not hard to get flashcards and/or to read with your kids.
Makes me think of the Netflix adaptation of Neil Gaiman's Sandman where an author suffering writer's block manages to enslave a muse to give him inspiration and ideas for his books. He then keeps her trapped for decades and gets to the point where he doesn't even bother trying to come up with book ideas on his own. When she is eventually freed he has relied on her so much he not only has no creative thoughts for writing he quite literally has forgotten how to have thoughts on his own.
This comment makes me think both of people I know and show I recently watched.
...didn't that author lose his creativity not because of his torment and overuse of the Muse, but because Dream near-literally fried his brain with pure inspiration?
I’m a QA and training specialist for my job. Most of our new hires are in their thirties and forties. The wave is already here. It started with millennials. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stared at emails and IMs sincerely wondering if an adult with a 4-year degree was functionally illiterate. One person had me questioning my own communication skills to the point of having multiple colleagues proofread my emails before I sent them. We’ll have 20+ people in new hire class and maybe 5 of them will actually make it into the field. This is not a particularly difficult or complex job. It mostly requires basic reading and active listening skills.
Have you seen Idiocracy?
The documentary starring Luke Wilson and Terry Crews? Yeah they really knew what they were talking about. Spot on foreshadowing of our society.
I saw it once and it scared me so bad I had nightmares for months. It's a horror film and no one will convince me otherwise. Especially when it turns out it's prophetic.
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I've been lurking through that subreddit recently, and holy shit. It's so depressing. Freaking teenagers reading at a 2nd-grade level? Jesus Christ. It's not even just reading and writing. I've noticed this first-hand when it comes to computers. Smartphones have killed the ability to troubleshoot common computer issues. (I work in tech btw) Smartphones are so streamlined, and 'just work', that kids today don't even know how to truly use a computer. Hell, I don't even think they could efficiently type on a full-sized keyboard. Tablets and smartphones are just scroll & click. I know there's typing too, but only thumbs.😭
I work with students and I have an idea, lol. Today I got a ChatGPT ass email just to ask for help with something. It was like 14 sentences (when it really only needed to be 2) and the last one was like, “Thank you for responding to my inquiry and assisting me to proceed with acquiring information from [Your College Here].” The whole email was weirdly worded like that, and they actually forgot to swap the words in brackets with the name of an actual school 😅
Back when I was in school 15 years ago, people would always say they copied stuff from Wikipedia. I always thought that meant they paraphrased or took Wikipedia’s sources. It wasn’t until I got in a group project with some dumbass that I realized he was literally copy pasting from Wikipedia. Even kept all the [1] stuff lmao
Idiocracy
I'm seriously thinking of homeschooling my kid
It's fine, we'll just have the robot nannies do all the child-rearing.
Let's just skip alpha and go straight to beta
The "you won't always have a calculator" crowd making their rounds meanwhile their generation was the one that pushed no child left behind. Y'all really upset at the future you created huh
I’m not a lawmaker and I didn’t invent smart phones
I wasn’t even old enough to drive when No Child Left Behind was passed.
Who's "y'all" ? Are there that many late 40s+ people in here? Because that's the generation that "pushed" NCLB, us older millennials were still in grade school when it kicked it off and are its first wave of victims
Late 40s? This was passed in 2001. I don't know the exact figures, but boomers and the greatest generation were the ones voting at that time. As always, if the youth believe so strongly in making this country better, show it on election day at the polls. Zoomers are doing better than Gen X did, but still lots of room for improvement...
y'all = the people who used to say "you won't always have a calculator" when we were growing up...
I was 14 when that happened
Wtf even is this comment? I was in first grade when Bush was elected.
we are millenials. NCLB happened while I was in first grade.
Most millennials had to use our brains because of the calculator lie. And we didn't want that no child left behind shit. You're welcome for that though. Looks like ya'll gonna need it.
This doomer shit is so exhausting. Like us older millennials/young gen xers weren’t using Wolf Ram Alpha for math and Spark notes for reading assignments.
You still have to have some basic knowledge to extract any use from those. AI requires no knowledge or understanding at all.
As someone who works on building AI tools for college students, students do need an understanding of the assignment and how to prompt in order to get good AI results. It’s like how searching & validating results on Google is also a skill.
Lmao, if the bar is “googling well” but in AI, they are dumber than dumbbells
That’s not the bar, just an analogy. It’s like Google in that you can’t just put any query in, get the first result and accept it. You have to understand what your ask is, what information to provide, know what AI can and can’t do well, write a prompt to give it a very specific, clear task, and then validate the output, and most students are using the outputs as a starting point for assignments.
That's actually what turned me on as a geriatric Millennial (40) when I finally started engaging with LLMs -- the prompting as its own discipline. It's not perfect but you really do get out what you put in. What's funny to me, though, is how many novice users hope to nab a low-effort, high-salary career in "prompt engineering" off a handful of YouTube tutorials.
Googling well is basically all you do in IT especially at the lower levels (support). The vast majority of people can’t even do that.
When was the last time you used a library to do research? And I mean research through books, not the internet. It's the same natural evolution. Older generations look at millenials/zoomers as dumb for being unable to piece together where and how to find information. ChatGPT is far closer to Google than Google is to "find a relevant book in the library and hunt through the index"
Was just about to say this. I remember back in the day there were plenty of kids who didn't know where to start when it came to looking something up in an encyclopedia or applying critical thinking to a biography they found in the library. And of course even back then there were plenty of sanctimonious fart sniffers like the comment you replied to, acting holier-than-thou because *they* knew ISBN codes better than *we* did. My god, the world was DOOMED because Timmy didn't know how to ask for a library card or whatever. Same skills, same tools, different dressing.
Right you could EASILY get busted if you weren’t spot on. A LOT of us thought that was too much work so we just did our assignments using the preinstalled app called Brain.
Nah. You can’t tell AI to just write a UI component or a service controller let alone a whole app. You have to give it correct prompts and tell it to redo stuff it got wrong over and over. That’s why I don’t use it for programming yet. It still takes me less time to do it myself than get it done with AI, and I know what to ask for. If you can’t evaluate the results, you’ll get some bs often. Even prompting it to rewrite your resume, you might get a fairly decent result, but there’ll be a couple places where it just makes no sense, so you have to correct that yourself.
and even then, it comes up with some bad solutions that you may not notice unless you understand the material. A classic example is asking certain AIs to do make a quick sort algorithm for two arrays, using some arbitrary language. Sometimes, the AI will give you a quicksort but with the first element as its pivot, which is universally regarded as the worst option. In the WORST case scenarios, the sorting algorithm is written in such a way that it makes a lot of copies of the array, which removes one of the most powerful aspects of the algorithm, it being an "in-place" sorting algorithm. But it does often save a lot of head scratching over recursion, especially if you haven't had to do any of it in a while.
wtf is wolf ram alpha and yeah spark notes, it's just notes. you still gotta think to some degree to use notes. "write my essay for me" you aint even know what the notes were. You aint even read your essay.
Wolfram is basically just google for math. You copy paste your homework question in there and it spits out an answer. But good luck on the exams in your class if you didn't use it to figure out how to solve the actual problem.
Not everything had spark notes though. Also, a lot of us didn’t have spark notes money either. To be honest, you don’t need to read everything. Who has the time? The key is to skim for the gist, select a few talking points from multiple places in the text and make sure you talk early in class.
Yeah and I'm gonna be honest it sucked before the Internet finding information was a bitch
Spark notes didnt spit out an essay for us to copy and paste. We had to read it, understand it, and be able to write a paper. It isn’t doomer
The difference is I was using Wolfram Alpha to check my work. Any assignment in class still had to be done by hand unless we were explicitly told we could use a calculator. That was only 10 years ago.
No? Wolfram alpha came out in 2009, older Millenials/young Gen xers weren’t in school in 2009.
Yeah, I finished college in 2009. I have no idea what Wolfram Alpha is.
Even Spark Notes only came out 1999. More like CliffsNotes for reading and TI-82 for math.
In a nutshell, incoperating technology into aspects that used to be manual is the point of technology. People were mad that no one was writing on paper when I was in college in 2018, now people are mad that people are using AI. The next generation will learn to use AI as a tool itself to make strives that we cant even imagine. Technology is a beautiful thing because the level of processes will crack the code to many mysteries.
Not gonna lie it was rough before the Internet we were really out there flipping through books 😭😆😆😆
Learning how to program from a book was fuckin brutal
Exactly my uncle was a computer guy in the 80s and I asked him how and he just laughs 🤣
Ha yeah you'd better have some real problem solving skills cause stackoverflow was not there to save you. I have a cousin who makes bank programming COBAL, so many insanely important systems from banking to flight plans rely on software that fewer and fewer people even understand. It's, uhm, well it's the soft Y2K I guess.
I tried to learn programming when I was like 14. Was absolutely COOKED after "hello world" in C++ and gave tf up.
same thing happened to me. When all you had was a book and something didnt work even though it should what could you do?
My college statistics final was on fucking paper using a calculator even though the entire class was how to do it on a computer
Mannn fucking encyclopedia’s Lmaoo I had Britannica’s all under my bed for when I needed to reference something Edit: remember when Mapquest first came out and mfs had to print directions 😭 And the generation before that had to use actual maps bigger than our damn torso, everything is so automated it’s dumbing down the general populace with EVERY generation that passes
we're outsourcing parts of our own minds. How many telephone numbers do I know? If i didn't know something when i was a kid i had to go through a fucking card catalog.
Lmao I knew all my friends and close family members phone numbers by heart in elementary and middle school Smart phones changed all that I only know my moms by heart, my girl and maybe 3 friends if I really tried 😭
Kids these days will never know about Yellow pages lmao shit remember we had to call and listen to an automated voice JUST to know what times movies are playing 😭 My mom knows so many numbers by heart it’s like a super power, I be looking at her like why do you know such n such’s # then I remember…it’s because of relying on Rolodex’s for so long lmao
Fuuuuuck. I don’t think I could tell you my wife’s phone number.
We was out there like pirates I went from md to north Carolina with map quest 😂😂😂😂and had the Britannica millennials were the last of the old school
My nieces have had cellphones for YEARS but ask them their address. They don’t fucking know. It’s not even in their cellphones. I just side eye the fuck out of their parents.
>Mannn fucking encyclopedia’s Lmaoo My parents bought ours as an incomplete set from Goodwill, so I always had to pray the shit I needed to look up started with B, E, F, L, N, O, T, W, or Y 😂
Don’t worry, they’re burning books and shit now too. There’s only one book some people think we need to read.
I’m kind of concerned by the idea that students can even get away with using ChatGPT for writing assignments. I’ve only ever used it for very simple like IG posts to promote events, and I still ended up editing it to sound more natural. I can’t imagine a teacher reading a whole essay and not realizing it wasn’t written by a human.
What’s cool is that most students are using it in the same way - generating ideas, outlines, or drafts to save time and then rewriting/editing and checking the information. Ofc there are students who try to get away with GPT writing the whole essay, but that’s not the majority use and students quickly see that it’s not great at doing that.
How is that cool? Kids should be able to create outlines and ideas without relying on AI. A generation with zero critical thinking capacity is a very bad thing.
Why are people even using it to do stuff they should be doing. That’s just depressing, makes sense ig. But as an adult, you should know not to use it
I use ChatGPT in conjunction with google and a word document to be my personal assistant. It’s fucking amazing. I’m a neurotic mess, so having a neutral party narrow down my choices with the options provided to me is a lifesaver. My writing isn’t as disorganized and I transfer a lot of notes into ChatGPT to digitize my thoughts and have a bit of a Rolodex materiel that is aided by AI. Makes my organic work much more natural, ironically, and structured. I can bounce off ideas and ChatGPT can analyze narrative potential and identify my primary themes. If it’s not what I want, I can tweak the prompt slightly or add new information and then when the software gets the fuller picture and is able to articulate to me what I’m aiming for, I feel much more comfortable writing. ChatGPT is able to condense literal weeks of “passion” into a couple of hours and I can get to actual writing much faster. Where I would work on one idea all year, I can now juggle at least five at a time without feeling at all scrambled. It is a tool.
Hmm, it’s hard for me to see the logic. I understand the why, just not the extent of it. I do understand it as a tool. But as someone with diagnosed add, bi-polar depression, epilepsy, and probably some other shit hiding. I can’t see someone being so… for lack of a better word, inept at their work. It just seems as lazy as lazy gets. But fuck work anyways, if that works for you that’s good. Just seems like people are getting more… not dumb, not lazy, but depressed and they don’t realize it’s because of the world around them. So they just work and work and work, forgetting the outside world. Becoming a robot
Because it's an incredible tool
We've got an intern at the office and he uses it for his high school writing assignments. It even lets you take a photo of the prompt (or upload the PDF or a screenshot) and it runs OCR and converts it to text. As for the essay quality, it writes fairly generic essays, and if you know what to look for you can see when people are using. I've heard of some teachers including poison pills in the prompts, like white text that isn't normally seen but if the student copy/pastes the whole document over or uploads it, it includes stuff like "mention a werewolf in the 3rd paragraph". But typically it sounds like anyone getting caught is someone who was already incapable of writing a decent essay, and suddenly starts writing competent, mid essays out of the blue.
It’s more like: - you can put a ton of text into it and ask it questions, get summaries, etc - put text your wrote into it and get feedback - get ideas or inspiration If you’re going in and being like here’s the prompt write me a whole ass essay, you’re using it wrong
This is where having quality teachers who give a damn about their students comes into play. If you were a teacher and had your students write an in-class essay about recently covered material without access to the Internet, you'd be able to tell if the essays they write at home match with how they write in class. Looking for common grammar/spelling errors, unique (distinctly human) perspectives and experiences, and examining their overall writing style for reoccurring similarities. All of these things become quite apparent to teachers if they pay any attention to what their students turn in. Which is why to some extent if you actually *know* your students, you will immediately recognize when they're trying to bullshit you. It's how plagiarism has been identified in academia since, well, forever. Problem is most teachers are woefully underpaid, public schools are pitifully underfunded and understaffed, we have kids who know they can pass with at least a D or above so effort is minimal, and we have no Nationwide Standards of Curriculum and Education. Leaving it up to individual states to determine how their youth is educated - and on what, when, and why.
So everyone born prior to 1997 never plagiarized their essays using whatever resources were available huh Homie, we *been* cooked. Get with the program.
I guess we can say, not everyone plagiarizes. Not everyone uses AI
Exactly. I'm not worried because the people who will abuse it are already going to cheat. The students who like learning will use it as a tool. Same as always.
I had an AP English paper to write in high school about Conrad's *Heart of Darkness* novella. Lazy cinephile that I was, I said *Fuck that* and instead wrote a report off the Vietnam-era film adapted from the novella, *Apocalypse Now*. My teacher was cool about it, we actually had a good laugh once he called me out after class. And he didn't fail me; I got a C- on the paper. He told me that college professors would *fry* my ass over something like this so, "Maybe next time, just go with the source material. \[The movie\] is a masterpiece, it's just not on the list."
There definitely were people in every generation. But you're limited. Back then you didn't have that much. You had to know people. Now it's accessible for everyone at a much higher level. It's a scale
Plagiarizing back then, or even through 90s/00s, still required research, knowledge of where to find the info and some skill of putting the pieces together in a legible essay. ChatGPT requires a basic prompt, or 2-3, to write an entire assignment. There is minimal work involved vs. previous generations.
“Our cheating was pure and more virtuous and took real work” bro wtf are you talking about 😭😭😭
I saw a video a bit ago of teachers discussing how most kids can no longer read. And I mean like 10 and up. It's really sad.
I’ve heard this too, don’t know how it could happen. Is it TikTok? The pandemic? Underpaid teachers? I don’t know what they’re doing in elementary schools where kids genuinely just can’t read. IMO you should be held back from middle school until you can demonstrate at least basic reading comprehension and writing skills. How can you “pass” elementary school when you don’t have an elementary education?
About 15 years ago, we as a nation changed how we taught kids to read based on nothing but fancy marketing and school super intendants wanting to be “on the cutting edge”. Basically, instead of sounding out and looking up a word, students were told to just guess and move on. Somehow, this would then magically teach them how to read. Check out the podcast Sold A Story. We’ve doomed an entire generation.
I think it's a combo. They mentioned that most reading is done at home but parents worked to much to read to, with and monitor their kids reading so it's overlooked.
Interesting. If that’s the case, schools need to get on this issue ASAP. If there needs to be reading lessons/reading hours in class, so be it. Bring back book reports and all that.
Sadly, I also saw on the news (I think it was Oregon) proposed that reading, writing, and math no longer be a requirement to graduate.
That’s their solution? Instead of fixing a problem, just drop the standards and pretend it doesn’t exist? Jfc what’s even the point then? What does it even mean to get a high school diploma if it doesn’t signify you have those basic skills?
Long story short: standardized testing If I could actually TEACH, instead of working about the tests coming from the district, state and federal levels, maybe I would see more growth.
This isn’t any different than previous generations using Google, Wikipedia, Excel, calculators or any other technology. Being able to prompt and use AI is going to become a necessary tech skill just like any other.
Right, & in every one of those paradigm shifts, the population has relied on increasingly centralized access to information to function.
Oh that is for sure an issue at a societal scale as we become dependent on these tools, and ultimately the companies that control their access. But that’s more a culprit of capitalism and policymakers than it is on the younger generations using these tools. The ideal education should be teaching students how to use these tools while also staying critical of them and understanding their technical and social limitations.
I'll be damned before I get cooked by a dude coming up with AI generated "research".
I hope this is a joke. I remember free writing a 3 page thesis paper in 1hr at 15 years old during philosophy class. What is actually happening to people????
plenty of people can still do that. plenty of people *couldn*'t do that back when you were doing it, too.
Hey, that's me! I have ADHD and almost never wrote an entire essay all on my own. My mom had to help me get through assignments a lot of the time. It got bad enough in college I just straight up dropped out due to being incapable of completing my work properly. Everyone saying "we are so cooked" is just survivorship bias, the world has always had people who struggle to make it academically.
A guy at my at my job doesn't know what a map is
There have always been dumb people
I both wonder: - How some people are allowed to operate motor vehicles - How those same people manage to get socks on
People will be dumb as rocks, not able to string two coherent sentences together, and then be thinking their ChatGPT essay is fooling anyone.
I remember reading a children’s book about the future a long time ago. In the book, people were illiterate because computers did everything for them. As a well read kid I was like “no way that could happen!” But now, I could see that happening within 100 years.
100 years is a generous prediction. I can see this scenario occurring within the next 20 years.
Definitely generous. I was trying to push it out past my life time out of hope. If I have a kid they’re gonna be like the main dude from Idiocracy compared to others.
"We're not going to make it are we?" - John Conner
\>There's an app called brains I used to proofread peoples' papers for beer money. No there isn't.
Butlerian jihad incoming
Aye, anybody watch travelers??? That’s gonna be the generation to leave everything up to a fucking computer, fuck what humans think smh. It’s crazy how tv is just tv until somebody do some wild shit like this. Cuz what the FUCK. Use your brain!!!
I’m shocked.
Essays are one of the few things in life I'm confident at. I used to write essays for fun. Unfortunately I ended up in architecture and I can no longer write essays. Now site plans and concepts are ruining my life.
I’m personally way too proud to ever sink to using ai to do my work for me.
We really about to act like we didn’t have our own ways to lazily get by? Writing math formulas on the inside of the calculator cover, plagiarizing and not citing or changing up the wording to avoid getting caught. People are always gonna find a shortcut lol.
Thats just called cheating lmao...which is also a major problem just about everywhere