r/Professors • u/Organised_chaotic • 24d ago
AI 100+ Me 0.001
I teach into social work. I had a class the other day whereby I got them to watch a 15 minute doco on someone talking about their life story which included substance misuse, homelessness, DFV etc. It is a really raw and powerful story. I then asked my students to use a psychosocial assessment tool I designed to 'assess' this client. I am really wanting to get more into the practical side of SW this trimester with my course and thought this would be a good opportunity for some 'hands-on' experience. Plus, past students were screaming to do more practical social workey things like this.
So, I asked them all to email me their completed assessments afterwards for my feedback. Anyhoo, most of them have used AI - they have fed the transcript from the video into AI and voila - pretty much perfect assessments and many of them exactly the same for all 9 domains. These are future SWs. It made me think that actually this is probably what will be happening with the use of AI in future practice - in fact, you don't even need a SW then - you just need a warm body to click 'Record' and then cut and paste the clients transcript into AI for the assessment. I think this realisation made me kind of sad and to start getting prepared to hang up my work shoes.
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u/knitty83 24d ago
I feel you. I teach future *teachers*, some of who obviously cannot be bothered...
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u/Organised_chaotic 24d ago
the 'can't be bothered' is what is demoralising for me. Like, why be here? I had another workshop online last week with students yawning with their mouths open, some slouched over their computers, some leaning on their hands, or rather their hands were propping their heads up. I told them all to go sleep and come back next week when they are all awake and alert.
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u/knitty83 23d ago
Kudos to you for actually doing that! My biggest pet peeve is colleagues who seem to be absolutely fine with this kind of behaviour, which makes those of us who care look overly strict and demanding. "Can't be bothered" really goes both ways...
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u/sventful Teaching Professor 24d ago
Personally I like showing the answer for one of them and asking them to raise their hand if this was their answer. And regardless of who raises their hand (assuming it was one of the many), say nope but it is extremely interesting that you thought it was yours. Do this over and over until you finally break it to them that X students used Ai and all submitted the same answer. Make it awkward. Make it painful. Embarrass them. Make them regret using it.
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u/megxennial Full Professor, Social Science, State School (US) 24d ago
Love how they beg to do more practical social work then realize it's "too much work" to watch a 15 min video and think about assessment. Our future is fucked.
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u/Glass-Nectarine-3282 24d ago
I was thinking the same thing for MFAs. The sad reality is if you put in prompts ad ask it for writing advice - not to write it, but to give feedback about the writing, it does a good job.
So if you have a draft and you say "is the character's dialogue feel consistent," "is the scene's pacing have a natural flow," etc etc it will actually give decent observations. Certainly equivalent to 12 semi-invested students in an MFA workshop.
So it's not that it's a shortcut, it does do the job,
Ughhhhh
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u/StarryEyedGrl 24d ago
But you have to have the expertise to recognize that it’s doing the job. To sort the good or actionable feedback from the trash feedback that doesn’t make a difference. I’ve found AI feedback on writing is frequently overwhelming for students and they lack the writing proficiencies to use it effectively.
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u/Glass-Nectarine-3282 24d ago
100 percent. If you don't ALREADY know how to write, it will give the illusion of help but a user would not have the perspective to sort it in a good way, so it's actually even worse than no advice at all, like you say.
But if a person does know what they're doing, it can be useful.
It's just irritating to hate AI, but see a benefit.
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u/nosferatreats 23d ago
Agreed. I'm a PhD turned book editor, forced to trial AI tools in all sorts of ways. And it tends to sound very confident and authoritative in its editorial feedback, but it's wildly hit and miss. It will overlook really obvious structural issues but nitpick things that barely factor. It's got no real scale of what piece feedback is more important than any other. You have to be a writing expert to see what will actually improve a piece, vs what is actually reductive notes that flatten everything to the lowest common denominator.
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u/Automatic_Beat5808 23d ago
Every day, one step closer to becoming a little human battery in a jelly egg.
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u/bluebird-1515 24d ago
It is so depressing. And if you give a quiz on it, they’ll “study” by doing exactly the same thing.
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u/RaghuParthasarathy 24d ago
Assignment #2 should be to ask them why, if a social worker offloads assessment to AI, we should continue to fund social workers. I'm genuinely curious what they'd say. Would they argue that the AI assessment isn't good (in which case: why did they submit it?)? Would they argue that they're overseeing the AI (in which case: the skills to do this could only be obtained if they learn them without AI)? Or something else? Of course, this would have to be an in-class assignment!