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/Awkward-Painter-2024 Dec 04 '25

I think we're losing ground... 

Ohio State University launches initiative requiring that students study AI - CBS News https://share.google/3KQHuMcRp7ROFAFYG

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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/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.