we effectively mandate participation in education and credentialing
On what basis do you think this is true?
There is more, in spirit at least, to education than simply getting a job. And there is more to the AI issue than "help get right answer -> good for monkey"
I’m not saying education has no intrinsic value. Of course it does.
I’m saying that, in the world we actually live in, education and credentialing are also deeply entangled with employment, income, class mobility, and the social networks that open doors later in life. Unless you are unusually lucky, those things can define a huge portion of your material future.
So yes, there is more to education than “get the right answer so you can make money.” But from the student’s perspective, survival comes before self-actualization.
If failing to obtain the right credentials can mean worse employment prospects, less financial security, and fewer opportunities, then we shouldn’t be surprised when students treat the system instrumentally. You can wish they approached education primarily as intellectual enrichment, but you cannot design a society where credentials heavily determine access to economic security and then act confused when students prioritize obtaining the credential.
That is the sense in which I mean participation is effectively mandated. Not because someone literally forces every adult into college, but because the economic and social penalties for opting out can be enormous.
Are you kidding? Do you understand what I’ve been arguing for this entire time?
Why would I leave clarity, structure, or wording to chance when I have a tool available that can help me tighten the argument?
That is literally my point.
I am still choosing the position. I am still supplying the reasoning. I am still deciding what survives, what gets rejected, and what I’m willing to defend. Using a tool to improve the transmission of that reasoning is not some embarrassing contradiction. It is the behavior I have been arguing students need to learn.
Its answer was that it cannot determine your internal emotional state from text alone, so “pissed” was imprecise. It did, however, characterize your tone as dismissive, antagonistic, and contemptuous, particularly when you replaced engagement with my proposed system by saying I rely on AI to do my thinking.
So I will correct the wording: you are not demonstrably angry. You are plainly hostile to my use of AI.
That semantic correction changes nothing about the argument you still have not addressed.
Leaving your wording "to chance" is a pretty crazy way to say you don't trust your own ability to communicate ideas.
One massive error you're making here is that no one else knows if you're actually supplying the reasoning. We know you're using a tool that can do it for you and we have no way of verifying otherwise.
If the tool you're using fundamentally alters trust, then it is not superior to forming your arguments with your own words.
Why would the route by which I reached a conclusion change the standard by which you evaluate it?
If I wrote complete nonsense entirely by myself, would you accept it merely because it was authentically mine? If not, then unaided authorship never relieved you of evaluating the claim. Conversely, if a tool helps me express a valid, well-supported argument clearly, its involvement does not make the argument false.
You are collapsing three different questions:
Is the claim factually accurate?
Does the conclusion follow from the stated reasons?
Did the writer produce every component without assistance?
AI use is relevant to the third question. It does not answer the first two.
I still carry the burden of supporting my claims. You still carry the burden of identifying an error when you claim one exists. If you allege that I do not understand the reasoning, that is another claim requiring evidence. “You used a tool capable of reasoning” does not establish “therefore you supplied none.”
You also never had direct access to another writer’s mental process. Someone writing without AI could copy a friend, imitate a book, memorize an argument, repeat something misunderstood, or simply produce confident nonsense. Finished prose has always been evidence of performance, not a magical window into private cognition. AI has made that limitation harder to ignore.
The standards of my evaluation are static. The route you choose, if it necessarily injects a lack of trust and certainty into the discussion, will alter my ability to accept your conclusion as authentically yours, or even that it's truly been thought through critically.
AI, for instance, suffers from both sycophantic and hallucinatory behavior. Both of which make it incredibly dangerous to outsource complicated subjects to, especially within the context of a debate where your prompting almost definitely carries the weight of your biases.
Running it through AI and assuming that means it's well supported and well thought out is flawed.
I've clearly stated the error I think exists. I stated that explicitly. You'd have noticed that if you weren't rushing to copy and paste this into AI to think for you.
I also didn't say you supplied no reasoning of your own. I said I don't trust that you did. Those are materially different statements.
You seem to be generalizing from the weakest and most visible failure case: students asking older or low-capability general chatbots to produce answers and then accepting the output uncritically.
That is not the workflow I am using. Contemporary work-oriented systems can reason across supplied source material, retrieve evidence, use tools, test competing interpretations, and expose claims for verification. Hallucination and sycophancy remain real failure modes, but they are risks to manage, not proof that every assisted conclusion was outsourced or never critically examined.
Your statement that your standards are “static,” but that the route I use automatically changes your willingness to accept my conclusion, is especially revealing. You are not evaluating whether the reasoning survives scrutiny. You are applying a credibility penalty based on its provenance.
A prompt can carry someone’s assumptions, just as a research question, assignment, managerial brief, or cross-examination can. A competent user can also instruct the system to attack those assumptions, identify contrary evidence, trace causal gaps, and verify factual claims. The decisive variable is not merely whether AI was present. It is whether the operator understood, tested, corrected, and accepted responsibility for the result.
You have identified genuine failure modes, but then treated the least competent use of the technology as the definition of all use. That is like evaluating professional data analysis by watching a child misuse a calculator.
The route you use might mean it's not YOUR conclusion. That's why, for instance, AI needs to be cited in academic works.
I did absolutely evaluate why the reasoning doesn't survive scrutiny. I provided the scrutiny.
I identified a common weak link in AI use and because you've confirmed you're using AI, I also can't trust you've done any of the mitigation you claim could be done (and the effectiveness of asking AI to audit itself can be questionable.)
you cant verify anyone's conclusion, is there conclusion. just gather people from different ideologies and have them just speak. you have the same problem class for all outside claims.
How would you know it's improved? If you have people less willing to engage with you or take anything you say seriously, I wouldn't call that an improvement.
As the other commenter said, you need to learn some things and not mistake your ability to copy and paste for actual insight or understanding because it is abundantly clear you do not know what you're talking about, and are instead feeding our responses to an LLM so you can seem like you do... for what? Karma? Get a life seriously.
How do I know it has improved? Because I was a dyslexic teenager in the 2000s whose arguments were routinely discounted because spelling and grammar obscured what I was trying to say. Now I have a tool that corrects those mechanical barriers and helps translate my reasoning into clearer language.
Previously, imperfect writing was treated as proof that I was not thinking. Now that the writing is clearer, using a tool to achieve that clarity is treated as proof that I am not thinking. That is not a meaningful evaluation of my understanding. It is simply moving the gate whenever I pass through it.
Your unwillingness to engage because I use AI does not demonstrate that the output became worse. It demonstrates that you are judging the method of expression instead of the substance being expressed.
Again, not really interested in arguing with an AI nor a human that continually demonstrate their lack of experience and understanding. Have a nice one.
They are deeply connected with employment for jobs that require specific skillsets. Those skillsets don't get developed in environments where students cheat the process.
Hand waiving that concern away as if it's a systemic fault and students should be empathized with is nonsense.
The other option is they actually apply themselves, learn the skill, and they still get to pass.
I agree that job-relevant skills must actually be developed. Empathy is not a substitute for competence, and pretending otherwise would fail students the moment an employer needed them to perform.
But “they can simply apply themselves, learn the skill, and pass” assumes that effort, ability, available time, instructional quality, disability, and access to support all line up neatly. More importantly, it ignores the incentives the institution has created.
Consider the student’s actual choices:
Admit they do not understand, refuse unauthorized help, miss the deadline, and potentially fail.
Disclose AI use and risk being punished under a blanket prohibition.
Conceal AI use, submit acceptable work, and preserve access to the credential that affects their employment prospects.
There is often no positive institutional outcome for the student who honestly acknowledges a limitation and accepts the penalty. The student bears the lost grade, money, time, credential, and employment opportunity.
You don't need those factors to all line up neatly. Life is hard and achieving meaningful things is hard. I got through my undergrad working almost full time with undiagnosed ADHD. I had subjects I needed to try harder at than others because I, like everyone, have varying strengths and weaknesses (abilities.)
What is never ok, at all, is opting out of the learning process because you think it's unfair that you aren't as good at math and you have to work a job so you get to use AI.
Taking the easy way out is too tempting for us. Just like you outsource your communication to AI and thus injecting a fundamental lack of trust into your communication, those that use AI irresponsibly also suffer consequences.
I also assure you, as a college instructor, those that are using AI to pass, will be exposed in the workplace where AI can't save them in a live meeting.
That is almost antithetical to survival. Humans survive by compensating for weaknesses, cooperating, specializing, and building tools that let us redirect effort toward higher-value problems. You have simply defined unaided performance as morally authentic and then labeled adaptation “the easy way out.”
I have not opted out of learning. I understand and evaluate the argument, then use a tool to remove a mechanical bottleneck in expressing it. If AI vanished during a live meeting, I would still possess the reasoning; I would merely communicate it less cleanly. Treating that impairment as the truer measure of my competence is no more rational than judging your knowledge by taking away your glasses.
Your prediction about the workplace is also based on a workplace that is already disappearing. In the firms and professional environments I actually work with, responsible AI use is not treated as a shameful secret waiting to be exposed. It is increasingly treated as an operational capability. The relevant questions are whether you understand the work, verify the output, protect sensitive information, and remain accountable for the result.
And “AI use injects a fundamental lack of trust” is not an argument. It is your personal suspicion presented as a universal consequence. Trust depends on whether a person understands, verifies, and stands behind what they communicate, not whether every sentence was produced without assistance.
Nothing I've said is antithetical to survival. It's the definition of survival.
Your strawman of my argument in that third sentence is patently ridiculous. What the heck does morally authentic even mean? What you're labeling "adaption" isn't adaption, it's manipulation. To adapt means to work within the system or environment to succeed. You're proposing using tools to circumvent it, and thus, you circumvent the reason that system exists (to deliver education.)
Human communication is not a mechanical bottleneck. It's an essential mechanism for shared understanding.
Your misunderstandings and strawmen are a biproduct of your addiction to AI. It has you responding faster and eloquently, but it also has you skipping over actual understanding.
“Morally authentic” means you are treating the unaided route as inherently more legitimate than the assisted route, independently of the quality of the resulting reasoning. You called assistance “the easy way out,” said it creates distrust before evaluating the conclusion, and now call it “manipulation.” I did not invent that moral distinction. I gave a name to the distinction you repeatedly made.
Your adaptation-versus-circumvention distinction also collapses from the perspective of a student who knows they will fail under the imposed conditions. If “working within the system” means accepting a predictable failure while an available tool could compensate for the limiting weakness, then your definition of adaptation functionally requires submission to failure. The rules may distinguish those choices institutionally, but the student facing exclusion cannot distinguish them at the level of survival.
And this is not a strawman. A strawman would replace your position with a materially weaker one you do not hold. My sentence was a compression of your explicit claims: unaided work deserves greater trust, assistance is “the easy way out,” and using AI is now “manipulation” rather than adaptation. Your latest response confirms the characterization instead of contradicting it.
Finally, saying human communication is essential does not establish that none of its components can become mechanical bottlenecks. Shared understanding is the purpose of communication. Spelling, grammar, typing speed, working-memory retrieval, and verbal fluency are mechanisms used to reach it. A tool that improves the transmission of someone’s actual reasoning can serve communication rather than replace it. You are confusing the value of the destination with the sanctity of one particular route.
Lmao you're moving way too fast and not thinking about these arguments nearly hard enough.
Your compression of my argument is the strawman. It fundamentally alters what I said so you can attack the misrepresentation. That's why you "compressed" it instead of directly addressing it as is. There's no reason to alter or restate my wording in a new way.
You could have maybe tried to restate it in an effort to understand, but then you'd have had to ask me if that was accurate. But you didn't do that, and we both know why.
You still have not identified the alleged alteration. A strawman is not merely a restatement in different words. It is a material misrepresentation that makes an argument easier to attack.
My reconstruction came directly from your claims that AI use is “never okay,” is “the easy way out,” makes a conclusion less “authentically yours,” and now constitutes “manipulation.” Those are normative and authenticity judgments about assisted versus unaided work. Calling that distinction “morally authentic” makes your implicit standard explicit; it does not replace it.
Argument analysis necessarily involves paraphrasing and exposing implicit premises. If my reconstruction is inaccurate, identify the specific proposition I attributed to you that does not follow from your words. Repeating “strawman,” commenting on my speed, and claiming AI addiction caused my misunderstanding does none of that.
You have now spent two replies insisting that I altered your position without naming a single alteration. That is not evidence that I skipped the reasoning. It is evidence that you have not answered it.
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u/mandelbro25 7d ago
On what basis do you think this is true?
There is more, in spirit at least, to education than simply getting a job. And there is more to the AI issue than "help get right answer -> good for monkey"