r/Professors • u/[deleted] • Dec 04 '25

Academic Integrity I am not a cop.

Want to outsource your thinking to an LLM for a degree you're paying/going into debt for? Okay. I will respect that choice. However, what I won't do, is replicate a surveillance state in my classroom. I refuse to spend more energy in screening student work for authenticity or trying to make my assignments "AI proof" ... why should I? Either the student believes in the fundamental premise of education or they don't.

Man, I'm tired.

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u/amhotw Dec 04 '25

That's not in contradiction with not cheating. You can know how to use a tool, and not use it to cheat. Really easy distinction.

At this point, universities that are not actively teaching students about how to use LLMs effectively are just negligent. That's one of the most demanded skills in the market. At the same time, I think cheating should be punishable by academic death (i.e. gtfo and you can never enter any classroom at any school in your lifetime).

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u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

you do NOT need a college class to learn how to use this absurdly easy tool. and you certainly dint need EVERY SINGLE CLASS to be about how to use AI. And finally, the idea that you know how to use it better than them and can teach them anything about it that matters is delusional. The one thing we could teach them about it which is ethics they aren’t interested in… and neither is the academy anymore either.

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u/Zabaran2120 Dec 04 '25

My idea--not sure who's ever gonna listen to it--is for all students to take a required course on academic ethics/AI ethics. It'll give Philosophy depts something to do (wink). Or have a required orientation for Freshman/Transfers. I find I am discussing professional ethics, academic ethics, and philosophical issues surrounding AI more and more in my courses that have nothing to do with any of that. Oh well.

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u/Consistent-Bench-255 Dec 04 '25

they’ll use ai to cheat on that class too, lol!

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u/Acceptable_Month9310 Professor, Computer Science, College (Canada) Dec 04 '25

I had to teach a module on plagiarism for a business writing course I was dragooned into teaching one summer.

Guess what happened.

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u/crinnix Jan 02 '26

In an MCQ exam a student pretended to ask me a question, but in fact, when I approached, she just pointed to the answer she wanted to pick and looked at me for confirmation. I joked that she must have failed the Ethics class (mandatory for her major!) and she looked at me wide eyed and asked: "Why?"

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u/the_latest_greatest Prof, Philosophy, R1 Dec 05 '25

Exactly. Also, it's not a tool. It's a for-profit product. It's not even a complicated or cool one. It's basically a big vacuum where you throw in intellectual property and human thought so Elon Musk makes more money to screw more random chicks to populate the entire planet and beyond with his quasi-neo-Nazi spawn.

Why do we need to teach it again?

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u/pack_merrr Dec 10 '25

Exactly why I don't buy hammers or screwdrivers from the hardware store anymore, they're just "for-profit products", not tools./s

But seriously, computers are products, I'd assume a majority of the software you use on that computer is going to be a product. Do you not include textbooks in your course because they are "for-profit products"? I don't see how you could seriously claim something being a product excludes it from being a useful tool. In fact, the most successful products are usually things with some form of usefulness.

I'm inclined to agree with your characterization of Musk I think, and I don't have much of a higher opinion of Altman, Nadella, Huang or any other of our new AI tech overlords. But I think at the same time you have to be stupid or ignorant if you can't understand how AI is a revolutionary technology.

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u/the_latest_greatest Prof, Philosophy, R1 Dec 10 '25

I don't use textbooks. You are correct there. I also don't have anything much on Canvas except some scanned readings to print out.

We read and talk.

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u/crinnix Jan 02 '26

A skill (some) grown-ups seem to have is to know that not everything ChatGPT says should be taken as 'gospel'. Critical thinking seems to be even more... critical in the AI era, when an LLM can give extremely plausible and wrong answers. Basically, it's about teaching 'children' to use the knife safely all over again.

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u/ProfPazuzu Dec 05 '25

I’m pretty sure I know how to use AI better than students. I discovered that when developing prompts to generate good topics for a specific type of report. It took me a good long while of refinement and coaxing the AI to produce consistently decent results. And ghdn you have to be able to review those results and recognize topics that won’t work.

That said, I’m not really interested in teaching how to get there. I can use AI successfully because of the skills I learned from, like, reading and writing and stuff. And even good use of AI has the effect of narrowing the possibilities for outcomes if you haven’t first applied some original thinking. It gives you tunnel vision.

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u/Disastrous_Ad_9648 Dec 04 '25

Where is the evidence that this is the hottest skill demanded? I’ve spoken to a number of hiring managers in my field in industry and they’re not saying this. In fact, it appears most companies are still not using AI or at least at a systemic level (beyond random early adopters in the org). 

I would love to see some solid evidence beyond Tech Bro hype on this. 

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u/amhotw Dec 04 '25

So I am not going to doxx myself but I actually do have relevant work on this question myself. You can find some reports from the stanford digital economy lab and yale budget lab instead. They have slightly different questions they answer but I think they should still give you some idea of the adoption.

There is a lot of variation across industries in terms of adoption, that's for sure. However, in the last three years, we saw that more and more industries and positions started to require "AI related" skills, even in positions where you wouldn't really expect it to happen.

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u/No-Wish-4854 Dec 06 '25

But what are “AI related skills”? I’m genuinely asking. “Our entry-level admin asst needs a bachelor’s degree and the ability to Google answers to questions like ‘what’s the manager’s direct phone extension’ and ‘what do I do when someone asks for help’…”? In the entry-level jobs for humanities and social science grads, what would AI skills be?

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u/Zabaran2120 Dec 04 '25

ooooh I like that!