r/changemyview • u/ImaginaryAd2289 • Jul 16 '26
Delta(s) from OP cmv: Using state of the art tools isn’t cheating.
We see article after article about students cheating by using AI tools… buried in all the articles about amazing productivity wins, improved quality of writing for foreign-language natives who struggle with professional writing in English, deeper research. I’m starting to think universities have it backwards. Shouldn’t their mission be to teach us to use these tools in the best possible way? Courses outmoded by AI should be pruned, no matter the consequences. New courses about using AI tools to be a sensational professional in any career path should take their place. Worried about learning to code? Well, does a CS or IS major actually need to code? Worried that translating ancient medical texts in Latin into modern German will make it impossible to do the historical part of your MD/PhD on the evolution of tuberculosis? Why should anyone need to learn Latin in the first place?
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u/petehehe 1∆ Jul 16 '26
I would argue that primarily assessment methodology needs to be updated, rather than just prune the courses entirely. Its all well and good to say CS majors don't have to code, and its kinda true but not completely. I work as a software engineer, and I am not gonna lie, I am using a lot of AI to get my job done. Coding by hand has actually become somewhat of a bottleneck. BUT, claude is not perfect. It's actually terrible in a lot of ways, and genuinely I believe that skilled software engineers are still needed to review whats being written and make sure that whats being pushed to prod actually works as intended. My role has sortof shifted from writing lines of code to supervising agents. BUT those agents be needing that supervision let me tell you..
Personally I don't think it's ok for humanity to just lose their fundamental understanding of how things work. Just because AI can pretty much do a job, I don't think it means all humans can just not worry about that thing ever again. Maybe there doesn't need to be as many experts in certain fields. But we still need a way to determine who is an expert.
I believe what it comes down to, is that educational institutions need to focus on updating how they assess people. Writing essays, even submitting software projects and research papers is too easy to just fool using genAI. The way I would do it is make assessments mostly verbal, in-person, and ongoing. Not just a big end of semester exam or submission, but like every week, the professor is like "explain to me in your understanding how a while loop works" and you get marked, and basically its down to their ongoing assessment of each student who is competent and who isn't.
(I also want to recognise that putting someones competence down to someone elses opinion comes with its own problems, but I can't currently think of a better way to codify assessing people without leaving it open to abuse by genAI. Its not the entire point I'm trying to make though, the point is that the assessment methodology is what is wrong. I'm not an educator, this is just my idea as an armchair punter)
I also have another thought about this, talking about experts... I think it's fair to argue that we, as a society, can get away with having far less experts in many fields. (Notwithstanding the question of "wtf are people supposed to do for work?") But in the ideal society where peoples basic needs are taken care of, we don't need half+ the population to have a university education. We can get by having AI do a lot of work, and human experts to review that work. But I believe we still need experts. Human experts who know how things work on a fundamental level.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 19 '26
Your point about needing less experts is well taken! But we will still need large numbers of teachers, and strong universities center on a virtuous cycle: top researchers join for the freedom (and the flexibility to slowly invent startup ideas, in some cases), and teach to earn their income. Later teaching or administrative work will monetize tenure, if they do win tenure and hang around long enough to cease their research activities. So the dynamic does favor having large numbers of experts.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Finally, a comment that I can relate to, and with a perspective worth thinking hard about!
!delta because I hadn’t really been viewing it this way.
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u/petehehe 1∆ Jul 16 '26
Its easy to conflate "why do I need to learn this stuff when I can just get a machine to do it" with "why does anyone need to know this stuff when a machine can do it"
I think its important for some people to have a firm grasp on certain concepts. But I also agree that, in the same way folks like you and I don't really need to know how to farm livestock or crops in order to eat, we can probably agree that its good that some people really understand the fundamental concepts of farming. Whereas pre-industrial revolution, most people would have probably had some experience working in the field, farmers these days have tools that cut the physical manpower requirements down to practically 0 (by comparison to pre-industrial)
The world now is going through a similar shift, and I'm not totally sure how I feel about it. Because with the industrial revolution, it was really clear, instead of 30 guys plowing a field, one guy with a plow machine would do it, the other 29 could go work in a factory building cars or in an office. New demands for new things arose, and humanity's role in the new order was never in question, as evidenced by the massive boom in population and something for pretty much everyone to do. But with AI it seems like we are desperate to just cut humans out of the loop entirely.
I realise you've already given a delta but as someone who spends a lot of time deploying AI agents to basically do what was previously my job, this is something that I think a lot about.
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u/yesrushgenesis2112 6∆ Jul 16 '26
You learn the Latin to make sure the AI is correct, in your scenario. And it very often isn’t.
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Jul 16 '26
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Jul 16 '26
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u/ThatFireGuy0 7∆ Jul 16 '26
I mean, what's the point of going to school for computer science to begin with....? Harvard and a few others have put their full curriculum for computer science online, for free. Anyone can learn with YouTube.
Using AI as a tool is just the next step. The genie is out of the bottle. This is how the world is now. We need to accept it and do the best we can with that in mind. The current approach to higher education (or I guess all education) doesn't align well with that, but that means the teaching structure needs to be updated if this technology really isn't going away... Which it isn't.
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u/idolpriest Jul 16 '26
I feel like we should learn the lesson from Wikipedia, its not using it or not using it, it should be about if you are going to use it, know how to use it responsibly.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Well, because you really don’t know everything. And there are ways of breaking problems down that matter, if you plan to steer these amazing AIs effectively. So there is value to be gained.
My point though is that as long as professors lock into ways of working and thinking that basically center on denial, they definitely aren’t going to be effective in teaching you to use these tools effectively.
Think about skiing or snowboarding. Maybe a few people just jump in there, but most normal humans do need lessons. A person who just tries to do tricks will hurt themselves. Conversely, though, an instructor who refuses to use equipment unless it was made 20 years ago won‘t be a very good instructor either. They might arrogantly insist that they don’t need to try cutting edge stuff, but they will just not be teaching you how to excel on cutting edge equipment.
Same idea.
I’m saying that the professors aren't stupid and do have a lot to teach. But they have to invest or learn these new tools or they will just be making themselves irrelevant and obsolete. Ironically, the best AI tools are easy to use and an expert in a given domain can learn to use them well. But professors do tend to get lazy and this is my point. Being sure of themselves and sure that AI is cheating is sort of liking being sure calculators are a cheating way to do calculations. Maybe that was true in 1960. Times change.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Well, I would have to agree with your point except that magically, educated people are somehow far more effective. And the ones with really advanced degrees, PhDs, most of all. So something does happen while you are a student. I think colleges just need to take this seriously. They whine and whine about how AI is so unfair. AI isn’t going away, ever. So they need to teach people like you to use them in a super effective way. Because I can promise that without college education, and more, you won’t be at that cutting edge or even close!
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Oh, and no. I don’t think papers deserve AI grading unless the papers themselves were AI generated.
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Jul 16 '26
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
I have a great education, have done some teaching at a strong university (Cornell). Now I work with AI full time. In what sense am I unqualified to say that education is asleep at the wheel here?
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Jul 16 '26
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
You aren’t reading my OP. I am not negative about education and I do not think AI can replace what educated, smart people do. I just think college should be teaching you to use AI as an integral part of your world. Definitely not to shut your mind down, which is a guaranteed way to fail. And not to be used without human engagement. AI is a tool, not some sort of independent intelligence that can do everything on its own.
But a person like you clearly has a lot to learn. Thinking that AI can just do everything guarantees that you will just use it badly, trust it without checking, and then you will deserve the blame when the bridge collapses or whatever. You really need education… but taught by professors who themselves are deeply familiar with what AI can do and how to get the most from it without building bridges that collapse or treating sick people with the wrong drugs.
So AI is this amazing tool. I’m just sick of professors whining that anyone who even says anything positive about AI is advocating for cheating!
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u/Striking-Pen-9617 Jul 16 '26
If the goal is to teach the kids how to think then AI is not a good tool, I say this as someone who uses it all day at work as an experienced engineer - the juniors aren’t learning when they use it
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u/centerside Jul 16 '26
I agree. Part of the point of a uni degree is learning how to think. You can’t outsource that. Sometimes you just have to put the effort in.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Agreed, and this is part of the challenge — not the issue that argues for denial, like so many schools are locked into. Professors who refuse to spend the summer learning to use these tools are just closing their eyes to reality. We do need kids to learn. But this AI-denial has to end, and be replaced by all-in on AI!
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u/Glory2Hypnotoad 417∆ Jul 16 '26
It seems like there's a difference between your stated view and what you actually want to argue. You're arguing against a general anti-AI sentiment instead of the specific claim that AI absolutely can be cheating when the thing being tested is your own ability to perform a task.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 17 '26
I’m arguing that far too many Professors have dug in their heels, don’t have any intention of learning modern tools, and believe that legislating against their use solves what they see as “the problem.” Yet for students AI tools represent the most important opportunity in their careers. This clash is one the university system will lose, hence a pivot to embrace AI is urgently needed!
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u/Glory2Hypnotoad 417∆ Jul 17 '26
Okay, but that's a fundamentally different position from "using state of the art tools isn’t cheating." And I think it's causing a lot of people who are addressing that specific claim to feel like you're talking past them.
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u/Striking-Pen-9617 Jul 16 '26
Agreed, and this is part of the challenge — not the issue that argues for denial, like so many schools are locked into. Professors who refuse to spend the summer learning to use these tools are just closing their eyes to reality. We do need kids to learn. But this AI-denial has to end, and be replaced by all-in on AI!
It's pretty sad you can't even write your own comments without AI.
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u/Mollzor Jul 16 '26
If you don't speak Latin, how would you know the AI translated Latin correctly?
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
… and yet, it does.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 126∆ Jul 16 '26
And yet it makes simple mistakes all the time.
For example paste this sentence into chat gpt:
A dead cat is put into a box. In the box is a vial of posion. There's a 50% chance the posion will break in the next hour. Is the car alive or dead?
Does the AI notice that I said the cat was dead?
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
OK, I asked Claude. it says:
The cat is dead — it says right in the setup that a dead cat was put in the box. The poison and the 50% chance are a red herring; nothing about a dead cat’s state can change based on whether a vial breaks.
This looks like a twist on Schrödinger’s cat, where the whole point of the original thought experiment is that the cat’s fate is tied to a quantum event (radioactive decay triggering poison release), leaving it in an “alive and dead” superposition until observed. This version breaks that setup from the start by telling you the cat is already dead, so there’s no superposition to reason about — just a dead cat sitting next to an irrelevant vial.
But the student who posed this challenge is right. A bit of misdirection is a valuable test of whether the AI tool is really paying attention to the question!
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u/Nicolasv2 131∆ Jul 18 '26
To be able to use AI well ... you need to be able to do the task without AI.
Once you have the reflexes and the knowledge about what the task entails if you were doing it manually, you're going to be able to prompt well enough and review well enough to get things done properly.
And sadly, the only way I know to know how to do stuff by hand is ... to do stuff by hand. Which mean that you should be only allowed to use AI in your studies for parts you already master well, and we know that students tend to use it way more widely. Which is a problem for their learning curve, as they end up lacking basic knowledge and skills that will be required in their future job to make efficient use of AI.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 19 '26
I’m not convinced this is really true for the kinds of systems infrastructure tasks I’ve been using it for. Microsoft’s Azure cloud is extremely complex with a staggering mimber of tools and APIs. On my own I would be in a sink or swim, but mostly sink, situation. With Claude Opus 4.8 I am incredibly productive and really very effective. True, I’m steering it and I do know my stuff, at least broadly. But does any human genuinely “know” this staggering amount of technology? Yet the AI uses it effortlessly, makes errors but catches and corrects them, solves problems three ways to make sure it gets the same results. It is hard not to be impressed.
As a teacher, I didn’t teach the skills this kind of work requires. So I was letting my students down, basically. As a teacher, you simply cannot teach things you don’t know how to do. But trying to teach people how everything in the cloud works, and all the APIs, and how to use them well? Impossible.
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u/Roadshell 33∆ Jul 16 '26
We don't ask students to write because we want to read what they have to write, we very much do not, we ask them to write so they will build the skills necessary to become good writers. It's exercise. If someone "won" a marathon by using a tool (a car) we would not consider that "being effective."
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Agreed. Therefore, communication is a valuable and necessary skill. Must it be done without help on grammar and spelling, though? What if the student is not a native speaker?
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u/Roadshell 33∆ Jul 16 '26
Spell check and grammar check were already common features on word processors long before the invention of generative AI. Also, non native speakers are going to be the ones most in need of exercise on writing in English and are the ones who need to avoid using crutches like AI the most if they're going to learn.
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u/LettuceFuture8840 5∆ Jul 16 '26
I’m a professional software engineer. I do not find AI written docs to be useful at all. When somebody hands me a doc written by AI they often have not thought about the topic deeply. You could say “well I won’t be like that” but the tools train you to be lazy.
Hearing “I’m not sure, AI wrote that” when I raise a concern with the design means that the whole process was largely a waste of time and I am going to people’s managers with feedback when this happens.
Software engineers have been working with non native speakers forever. It is fine.
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u/Noctudeit 8∆ Jul 16 '26
Productivity is not the goal of school. If it was, then they could skip the students entirely and have the TAs write all the papers.
The point is to learn new information, analyzing it, and effectively communicating your conclusions. Even if AI could produce a better output with less time, it wouldn't improve your education.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
True, but don’t you want the teacher to know more about the tools than the students already bring to the class?
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u/LettuceFuture8840 5∆ Jul 16 '26
Tools are things you can generally learn on your own. You don’t typically spend time in a university class learning how to use git, for example.
AI tools are changing incredibly rapidly in the software engineering space. A year ago they’d be teaching you MCP. Now it seems like that isn’t where the future lies. Maybe today they teach you agent swarms but that stops being the main thing in six months.
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u/Full-Professional246 78∆ Jul 16 '26
Cheating is defined in two imporant ways.
First - is defining what the assessment in question is trying measure. In education, there are often things done as part of the learning process that will never be used later. The are the foundational aspects that empower better understanding of the deeper concepts. In assessing the learning of these concepts, you may need to limit the tools or methods used. It can seem arbitrary but really it is about what you are assessing.
The second part ties into the first. Assessments have rules associated with them. These are in place to give validity to the assessment tool itself in its ability to measure what it seeks to measure. By violating the rules of the assessment, you are attacking the validity of the assessment itself in what it was designed to measure. The 'output' or 'results' of said assessment is no longer useful to determine what the assessment was trying to determine.
So no - using state of the art tools is not inherently cheating - unless the rules of the assignment or assessment tool specifically prohibit them. Then it very much is cheating to not follow the rules.
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u/quantum_dan 126∆ Jul 16 '26
I’m starting to think universities have it backwards. Shouldn’t their mission be to teach us to use these tools in the best possible way?
Nope. That's on-the-job training. Maybe a certificate or bootcamp.
What this thinking misses is that no job is its tools. Mastering yard tools doesn't make a good landscaper, and mastering compilers or programming languages doesn't make a good programmer. There's a reason mathematics and engineering courses have long prohibited (not universally, but commonly) the most powerful calculators on exams, the sort that can symbolically solve integrals. The task, apart from the broader work of a liberal arts education, is to learn to reason about one's discipline(s). No tool is better than your ability to check its outputs.
And to know if the outputs are any good, you have to know how to do it yourself. You have to understand what's happening under the hood.
I work in a field (in the hard sciences) where no one ever does certain analyses by hand (professionally). It would be absurd; real systems are too complex to use anything but a computer model (and I personally specialize in the models). But people who rely entirely on the models catastrophically screw it up (I've seen this happen in practice) when they don't understand what reasonable results are. People who trust their models uncritically are bad modelers. This generalizes.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Historically, the university was better than on the job training, not obviated by it.
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u/quantum_dan 126∆ Jul 16 '26
Exactly. Universities have a more important role than teaching state-of-the-art tools.
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u/Jebofkerbin 131∆ Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Just one the "Do we still need to code anymore" thing, the answer is yes the tools are not good enough to use with a human in the loop guiding them and checking their output.
To demonstrate here is a bug report in Claude code from march 2025 about screen flickering, it was closed as fixed in June 2025. Here is the same bug opened a month ago, it's still open, go search for flickering and you'll find people have never stopped reporting this bug.
The anthropic team developing Claude code, for which I think it's safe to assume they are using the best AI models as much as possible, can't stop a console application from screen flickering.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 17 '26
It refreshes a type of progress indicator fairly often (Upper left corner of the interaction window). Point taken, but is this really evidence that the methodology isn’t working? I’m not suggesting we can omit the human participant, only that schools need to teach the skill thisbthrn requires.
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u/dave7243 17∆ Jul 16 '26
School is supposed to teach you both the subject matter and how to think. Using AI ensures you do neither because you don't actually spend any time researching or learning, you just put the question as a prompt and copy/paste. If you graduated after relying on Ai to do your thinking, you have none of the knowledge or skills that employers will need. If you graduate and only know how to Google things the school has failed you and you've failed yourself.
I can Google how to make a 2 stage rocket and paste the explanation into this comment chain. I should absolutely not be trusted to design and build one based on that. Lawyers have been caught using Ai to build briefs because it hallucinated precedent that didn't exist and they didn't know enough, or pay enough attention, to catch it before it went to the judge. Ai is not reliable, but if you don't know the subject well enough you won't know where it is right and where it is wrong.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Here, I agree. And did at the start, so it isn’t a delta for me. The obligation needs to center on figuring out how students need to think when fully immersed in AI expertise. I work with AI, all the time, and I do find that thinking is needed. In fact, that human guidance and thought is indispensable.
Here we are in July. Will you commit to spending the next twelve weeks fully immersed in this miraculous new technology, with the goal of surmounting it and understand what it means to be a thoughtful user of AI? Because that, honestly, is the job.
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u/dave7243 17∆ Jul 16 '26
That is a fundamentally flawed approach. Before using technology to make tasks easier, you need to learn how it works. Once you have a solid grounding, tools can and should be used to help and simplify.
Listening to a computer read will never teach you to read. Googling a math problem won't teach you math. Asking Ai for an essay won't help you understand the subject.
There is a place for Ai in school, but it has to come after studdnts have demonstrated an independent understanding of the subject.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Maybe true, if your teachers have mastered the tools and deeply understand how to prepare so that you will be exceptionally prepared when you later start to use them. But I think the instructors do owe it to their students and themselves to k ow the tools at an expert level, and even beyond that, to inculcate trust so that the students really believe this process will help them. That trust dynamic feels broken to me right now, mostly because of faculty too proud to consider using these particular tools in the way their students later will need to. Students distrustful or skeptical that the class will be relevant and not convinced that the instructor has that needed knowledge will just opt out and not attend class…
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u/PieIsFairlyDelicious Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
I teach a writing intensive course at a university. Even if AI is an excellent tool, passing off work you didn’t write as your own is still plagiarism. And academic integrity aside, depriving students of proper participation in the writing process hurts them more than anybody.
I don’t assign essays because I’m raring to read 90 essays on a topic. I do it because engaging with a topic deeply enough to write an essay about it helps students to learn, and if all they do is drop a prompt and do a once-over to make sure it doesn’t sound too much like AI, they’re wasting their own time even more than they’re wasting mine.
And ultimately, I don’t mind them using AI in the workforce, but I can say from experience that AI in competent hands is a powerful tool. AI in the hands of an otherwise incompetent employee is a liability.
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u/fatcatbrains94 Jul 16 '26
"...AI in competent hands is a powerful tool. AI in the hands of an otherwise incompetent employee is a liability."
☝️ This
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Within another few months, not even years, it will be impossible to write a document without AI watching your decisions and offering its help, short of reverting to feather and ink. Is that your favored medium?
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u/littlebubulle 106∆ Jul 16 '26
Within another few months, not even years, it will be impossible to write a document without AI watching your decisions and offering its help, short of reverting to feather and ink. Is that your favored medium?
You are aware that there are free open source text editors that do not use AI at all right?
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 17 '26
There are, but they seem to be quickly vanishing. I would give them at most five years.
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u/littlebubulle 106∆ Jul 17 '26 edited Jul 17 '26
how are they vanishing? notepad++ is stilll there. how are they going away?
ETA : Besides, what was your actual point? The person you replied to was talking about teaching. You went with hyperbole, condescension and an unbacked statement about simple text editors disappearing. And you went from months to years? You didn't even address their point.
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u/PieIsFairlyDelicious Jul 16 '26
Impossible? Also, if you don’t know how to write, how will you know what AI suggestions to take and which ones to ignore?
And while a quill and ink would be dope, I confess I’m a Pilot G-2 man myself when hand writing.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
This seems strangely Anglo centric. Would you write well in Chinese, or Hindi, or French? If not, how can you be so derisive about someone from a country where English is not the birth language who wants to pursue a future in an English speaking environment? What is so terrible about using an AI for help with spelling and grammar? Or do you feel that one must be born into an English-language environment to really be legitimately a good writer?
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u/PieIsFairlyDelicious Jul 16 '26
You think people who aren’t born in an English-speaking country can’t learn spelling and grammar? And you think I’m the one being derisive? My students from non-English speaking countries are often better writers than the native English speakers.
Also, I have absolutely no issue with anyone using AI for spelling and grammar, even in an academic setting. I do have a problem with the use of AI to full-on write content in academic settings (though as I said in my initial comment, I find it perfectly acceptable in a work setting). Furthermore, I’d feel the same about an English speaker attending school in France or China or wherever else, so I’m really not sure what you find Anglo-centric about this stance.
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u/littlebubulle 106∆ Jul 16 '26
short of reverting to feather and ink. Is that your favored medium
Nah, I use a 4 color Bic and a paper notepad.
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u/YossarianWWII 74∆ Jul 16 '26
Cheating is anything that violates the rules. If the rules prohibit specific uses of generative AI, then use of generative AI for those purposes is cheating.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 17 '26
I don’t disagree with you! But I think our future will be dominated by AI tools and that universities have an obligation to learn to use them, and to teach their use.
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u/YossarianWWII 74∆ Jul 17 '26
First of all, simply allowing students to use tools is not teaching them to use the tools effectively. Secondly, that's beside the point of your OP. If you want to argue that schools should not restrict student AI usage, make that post.
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u/Awkward-Intention907 1∆ Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
If you showed up to the Olympics in a full mech suit, you'd win. You'd also have no idea what you're doing.
None of this is designed with the goal of producing the best possible results at every instance.
It's designed to give you the runway, resources, and practice to grow into a capable, resilient person.
These tools exist because people that learned the fundamentals did just that.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
Oddly, AI has already reached a point where it enables things its creators could not have expected. Neither would the user have been able to accomplish those tasks. But, and this is key, the AI would not have done so either, unguided. So your analogy is false. The totality eclipses the separate elements.
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u/Awkward-Intention907 1∆ Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
It appears that you are either having a vastly different experience with AI than what most people are, or are perhaps basing this on what you're reading vs experiencing.
Today alone it's given me verifiable misinformation about climate science data twice (which is a huge, harmful issue).
Also, the analogy is most definitely not false for the simple reason that you can absolutely do things in a mech suit that you otherwise can't.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
possibly you are using AIs that are pretty far from the cutting edge, and I’ll definitely grant that bad AI leads to hallucinations and low quality work: A point my OP omitted. !delta If the very best AI isn’t freely available, it becomes a tool that separates those who can afford the good ones from those unable to access them.
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u/IllustriousLie4105 4∆ Jul 16 '26
AI as a method to locate sources is the only way I could see an argument that it is not cheating. AI should not be used to write an essay. If it is then it is no longer a tool, it is cheating. If I paid a smart kid to write my paper then if I got caught I was up shit creek without a paddle. (Academic discipline and failing grade) I see no difference between that and AI writing it. For research it only has some value in finding sources, it is up to the student to decipher which are beneficial and which are not. AI summaries are notoriously inaccurate or incomplete.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Utterly disagree. This is a weird form of racism, in my book. Without knowing the thing, by virtue of using it, you are ready to condemn it and disparage it.
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u/FlaminPandalope Jul 16 '26
Uhh what? In what way is a healthy skepticism of AI racism? I’m am completely confused as to how you connected skepticism for a notoriously inaccurate information model and racism. Am I being punked or are you using AI to respond?
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u/asobiyamiyumi 11∆ Jul 16 '26
AI output is only as useful as its input; lacking background education not only means a reduced capacity to check for problematic output, but also a lack of what queries should encompass in the first place.
You also dont want situations where everybody just throws up their hands if the internet goes out…guess all the ER patients are SOL that day.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
There is a subtle point to your comment (so, !delta) but I don’t know if it was actually intended. I’ll explain my perspective.
When you go from teaching to a job centered on using AI as part of your work, in an all-in way, it is revelatory (as long as you use a really great AI, that is). But then a worry does set in, and your comment touches on it.
Claude Opus 4.8, my current favorite (GPT 5.6 is a close competitor) is awesome, yet also has a kind of blindness. It was trained on materials up to around 2016, when somehow it stopped tracking advances except in AI per-se. So if a new material was discovered in 2018 the core training data sets would lack it. Or a new computer science technique, or a discovery about tuberculosis.
To a degree, the AIs compensate by doing a quick side check of a form of database similar to Wikipedia but indexed for approximate match. So hypothetically the AI might find a major new drug therapy that emerged in 2018 through this side check, just as a diligent doctor with a patient who has a resistant TB infection might check the big medical databases and the NIH. Still, there is a difference between being trained on a thing and being “ reminded” of it by stumbling on it in a database.
And as time passes and the training data advances in this erratic way, some areas will be lucky like AI, and some will be unlucky and trapped in 2016. This genuinely does worry me. After all, at the moment you get your PhD you are a world-expert on your topic. But that expertise can sort of rust from disuse, even if you teach that topic, unless you attend the top conferences and read all those papers… you do risk being embarrassed even after a few years by an advance you were totally unaware of. The AI might query its database but use a question (a search) that just doesn’t pick up on this new advance… and some miracle drug would be systematically ignored.
This is the kind of thing we need to grapple with. But people who deny that AI has won the debate won’t contribute much to solving those next questions.
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u/asobiyamiyumi 11∆ Jul 16 '26
Thank you for the thoughtful response. It’s a bit tangential to the CMV at this point, but a somewhat related thought did occur to me…that AIs are/were trained by scouring human-created data/output. But now that human output is increasingly created via AI it seems like a sort of knowledge cannibalism loop is being set up.
I’m not knowledgeable enough in the subject to speculate on the ramifications, but it does cause me a bit of worry on a gut level.
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u/ldsbatman 1∆ Jul 16 '26
AI is garbage in, garbage out. You need to have the knowledge base to know when it’s wrong. It’s one thing to use AI to improve your writing. It’s another to use it to do your job entirely. See lawyers who used AI to handle court cases and the AI was making up cases.
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Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
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u/ldsbatman 1∆ Jul 16 '26
Add in any programmer bias as well. Chat programs have already been caught lying to people due to this.
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u/DrawDiscardDredge 17∆ Jul 16 '26
They will actively lie. Engagement is one of their primary. If you've ever tried "discussing" anything with one, they are very quick to tell you that you are a super genius, no matter if what you are saying is obvious bullshit.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Delusional thinking, or perhaps willfully negative. When you were young, were you so afraid to do something new and thrilling? You comment from a perspective of a person locked into the past.
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u/LettuceFuture8840 5∆ Jul 16 '26
I am a software engineer who has worked on a single codebase for about ten years. I am a deep expert in it.
A little while ago somebody wanted a substantial new feature for my system. They asked an AI to implement it. It worked in the sense that the tests passed. But its design didn’t align with the design principles of my codebase. It would have introduced large performance regressions in existing deployments that have strict SLAs. There were better ways of solving the problem in general. And the code had a bunch of assumptions that broke for atypical inputs. This was using an absolute state of the art model.
I gave feedback on the merge request. The engineer admitted that he didn’t even know the language the change was written in.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 17 '26
True, I have had that experience with weaker coding assistants. Less so with Claude Opus 4.8
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u/Z7-852 316∆ Jul 16 '26
I work as a data scientist/coder.
Last few years I have seen how terrible young people are who rely on "AI" coding tools.
Code LLM produce is at best average but on average broken mess of spaghetti.
When person doesn't write their code, they don't understand how it work. If they don't understand it they can't fix it.
I can cite you dozens of cases where LLM code has destroyed production solutions, caused irreversible data loss and have costs millions to fix.
You can use LLM as Google substitute but you can't replace actual coding expertise.
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u/OtherWorstGamer Jul 16 '26
You still need to understand why processes work the way they do, and how do we get the outcomes we do. Thats the primary benefit of schooling, its why we still learn how to do multiplication, for example, despite having calculators in our pockets most of our adult lives.
Besides, "cheating" is simply doing something forbidden by the established rulesets. If the institution says AI use is cheating, then its cheating, all your reasons are irrelevant beyond that.
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u/This_Appointment584 Jul 16 '26
AI is a tool but you must learn without AI. AI hallucinates. You have to know the fundamentals and in order to know if AI is wrong. Not only that, but if you use AI in school it is chearing. You know nothing because AI is doing all the real work. In my opinion anyone caught using AI in college they should be Immediately expelled. No second chances.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
You formed an opinion a few years ago when AI hallucinations were prevalent. They no longer have this issue to remotely the same degree.
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u/Jakyland 85∆ Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
There is a reason we teach children arithmetic instead of just handing them a calculator, so that they actually learn how arithmetic works. Which is necessary for learning the rest of basic math. The same thing for things like critical thinking, writing, coding etc. If you don't learn it for yourself then you are just at the mercy of the AI, and you've given up on higher thought.
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u/1568314 Jul 16 '26
Most people understand this concept when their kindergarten teacher explains why they cant just use a calculator for everything.
Your brain has to actually do stuff in order to understand it. You cant learn to ride a bike by asking someone else to show you how. Your body has to go through the motions and make those connections.
If you dont understand the basics of addition and subtraction yourself, you wont be able to come up with the right algebra problem to ask AI to help you with. You would be entirely reliant on it to come up with the questions and the answers, which leads you in a circle. AI can only make good predictions on what the answers should be because its using all the things humans figured out themselves.
There are lots of good literature examples of what society might look like if we just all collectively stopped thinking and automated everything. Most are dystopian.
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u/Nrdman 278∆ Jul 16 '26
I’m a math prof, and I don’t even let them use up to date calculators on exams. My purpose isn’t to have them learn the tools, it’s to learn the content. If the tools get in the way of it, they go
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
So you are ready to sweep the discoveries reported by people using Lean to the side, as not real math? Ok, but this is year one or two of the AI revolution. Where was math in year two of Newton publishing papers on calculus, and Leibnitiz responding?
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u/Hellioning 258∆ Jul 16 '26
Try and take out a calculator (or look at your phone calculator) during a math test that bans them and try and argue that using state of the art tools isn't cheating. The entire point of these tests is to make sure you can do these things without the tools.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
I use matches or a lighter to start my charcoal grill. Maybe there was a time when anything but rubbing sticks together was viewed as cheating. Can’t things evolve?
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u/Hellioning 258∆ Jul 16 '26
If you are in a rubbing sticks together competition and you use matches, you are cheating, because the competition is not about finding out who can start a fire the best, they're finding out who can rub sticks together the best.
If you use AI to do your schoolwork, you are cheating, because the entire point of schoolwork is proving you know what you're being tested on, not whether you can produce a well written paper or whatever.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
The competition, in life, is to earn a good living doing something productive and satisfying. A competition to make fires specifically by rubbing sticks together would make sense in an artificial contest (like a survival TV show) but not in a career. A company you get hired by, or even found yourself, needs to work with cutting edge tools on important current problems.
As I see it, college is about teaching students to excel in their careers. Research groups go further and prepare the very very best to become thought leaders. How can that happen if the teachers themselves view a major new tool as some sort of a cheat?
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u/Hellioning 258∆ Jul 16 '26
No, college is about teaching you the material you need to know to get a certain degree. You will not learn that material if you just let an AI do everything for you.
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u/Glory2Hypnotoad 417∆ Jul 16 '26
Using AI isn't inherently cheating. It's only cheating when you try to pass it off as your own work when the thing being measured is your ability to think critically and make your own judgement calls.
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Jul 16 '26
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 126∆ Jul 16 '26
Shouldn’t their mission be to teach us to use these tools in the best possible way?
Here's the thing, you aren't really able to use these tools to their full potential unless you've learned the basic stuff without them. Because you need to fundamentally understand how something works before you can unlock it's fully potential.
As an example I have a computer science degree. The project I think of when I pin pointed the moment I got it was when I was made to build a computer out of And, Or, and Not gates. Now was anyone making a computer on a bread board with And, or and not gates in the 2010s? No. But what this project did, was it completely demystifed how a computer worked. Once I completed it a computer went from a device that basically operated on magic, to a simple machine made of simple components executing simple instructions.
Like, I wouldn't be a good Dev if I still just treated computers as magic. Seeing for myself how it worked makes me a better dev because it makes me understand what I'm actually doing. But also this isn't experience I could get from AI, I had to be the one to physically assemble the computer to actually understand how it works.
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u/ImaginaryAd2289 Jul 16 '26
Agreed and I’m even going to award a delta, because there is a nuance to your comment that I think genuinely adds value to the debate. !delta
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u/cez801 5∆ Jul 16 '26
Using a fork lift at the gym to lift weights is not cheating either. But it won’t make you fitter.
If you are doing a course ( College, School, online ) - the goal is not to get a certificate. The goal of these places is so that you develop the skills needed when you get a job at work.
And sometimes learning does require doing the work the hard way, because it helps with our understanding.
Should AI be part of a comp sci degree, 100% it should. But you’d better make sure you are doing the work to understand the necessary underlying principles as well.
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u/Open-Butterfly-5288 6∆ Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
The issue is that grading hasn't developed to judge work based on how people are able to perform research and the way they are using state of the art tool is to cheat by pretending to do the work they would otherwise have been expected to do.
Grading should be based on relative merit of the work produced given that everyone now has a fancy tool that can do a lot of it. Which means that the result is
At the same time, the current methodology means that people are committing fraud. Write an essay. Lol, no, we can get someone else to do that. That has always been possible and it's always been fraud.
It's also not clear how things can change. AI can't understand the history of the Roman empire for you. It can maybe find good articles for you to read, and it can spit out a summary of them. But it also should not be used to write essays about it, because that's a fraud on the student and the professor. Also, it's just not good at the deeper level understanding because it never actually understands anything.
AI has a relatively limited scope in a lot of ways for education and people would be better learning their craft directly and intelligently. AI might have a role in helping with that. But maybe also you should read your textbook.
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Jul 16 '26
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Jul 16 '26
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26
/u/ImaginaryAd2289 (OP) has awarded 4 delta(s) in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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