Last week I talked about a serious young teacher quitting her job because of A.I. and how said excrescence was affecting her students.
Here’s another take on the same topic, courtesy of Insty (thankee, Squire):
“We’re talking about an entire generation of learning perhaps significantly undermined here,” said Green, the Santa Clara tech ethicist. “It’s short-circuiting the learning process, and it’s happening fast.”
Perhaps?
From a student:
“I think there is beauty in trying to plan your essay. You learn a lot. You have to think, Oh, what can I write in this paragraph? Or What should my thesis be? ” But she’d rather get good grades. “An essay with ChatGPT, it’s like it just gives you straight up what you have to follow. You just don’t really have to think that much.”
As for the teachers:
“Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate, both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”
“How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?”
Well, yeah. Perhaps [gasp!] not all kids are college material. And I think this A.I. cheating thing is proving the point.
And then, from the teechurs:
“Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now,” he said. “This is not what we signed up for.” Williams, and other educators I spoke to, described AI’s takeover as a full-blown existential crisis.
Of course, this whole situation is fixable — there’s always a solution to a problem of this nature — but don’t expect the current crop of teachers to figure it out. Especially if it takes actual hard work and thought.
Small wonder their students are screwed up and hopeless.
Read the whole article. It’s worth it.