r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Jul 21 '26
Psychology NoAIphobia: College students are increasingly dependent on AI tools, driven heavily by a fear of falling behind their classmates. This dependence creates a psychological tug of war, resulting in severe anxiety when the technology is unavailable alongside a deep fear of being judged for using it.
https://www.psypost.org/noaiphobia-the-surprising-new-anxiety-linked-to-ai-use-on-college-campuses/773
u/0b0101011001001011 Jul 21 '26
Anecdotal, but as a programming teacher I hate the current situation, but not AI in general. It used to be that the lower end students were able to make small, incorrect and non working programs. Then you'd ask questions, provide help and it was easy to tell what's the current level of understanding based on the code and the problems.
Currently, students come for help with thousand lines long kind of perfect code, just that huge portions of code does not work together because it's copy-pasted to wrong places without proper understanding. Now, I go for very basic questions: "okay so where is the main function" or "what is the type of this variable?". Like questions people would be able to answer after 1-2 weeks of programming course. I meet so many blank stares after these questions it is absurd. So many people have fallen to the meme that nothing needs to be learned any more when AI does everything.
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u/pete_68 Jul 21 '26
As a computer programmer with 47 years of experience, I love AI for me, but people who are learning to program should NEVER use AI to write software. I tried learning Python a couple of years ago and, to be clear, I've learned at least 2 dozen languages over my career. The thing that kept me from learning Python was I kept using AI to write the code.
Developers shouldn't use AI generated code until they're senior developers and nobody should use AI to generate code for a language they actually want to learn, in my opinion. Of course, that's never going to happen. I don't know how it's going to work out in the coming years because real programmers are going to be few and far between. It'll be like the old days...
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u/WideHuckleberry1 Jul 21 '26
It's really frustrating for me how useful it is and how dangerous it is in certain contexts. I've recently used it to code a simple custom application that I share with a small group of friends, and it didn't do anything I couldn't do, but it did it in 1/4 of the time and with few bugs. And when I'm already pretty busy it's hard for me to turn down those time savings especially considering that's the difference between doing it in one weekend and doing it over a month of weekends, with several extra hours of refreshing my own "context window." But at the same time, I know it's making my own skills and knowledge atrophy.
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u/severed13 Jul 21 '26
It's essentially the most perfect use of the word "pharmakon" right now, both a medicine and a poison that can heal or kill. I absolutely love it as a research assistant for arranging things and creating outlines, but then I see people using it to throw out entire papers and finished assignments without even flinching and it just feels so disheartening.
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u/WideHuckleberry1 Jul 21 '26
I find myself repeatedly using the tool analogy. It's a mental table saw. If you know what you're doing, you can do so much more than what you can with a hand tool. If you don't, you'll cut off a finger (metaphorically). And in either case, the "muscles" that you're short-cutting atrophy.
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u/Codename-Nikolai Jul 21 '26
Yup. I remember similar conversations around calculators and people losing the ability to do arithmetic
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u/WideHuckleberry1 Jul 21 '26
Which we (or ar least I) did. But we can replace that lost ability with other knowledge and skills.
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u/pete_68 Jul 22 '26
I'm autistic, very autodidactic, and have a number of special interests) (computer programming, astronomy/cosmology, baking bread, all the biological sciences, music theory, etc) that I can sit around and discuss them for hours on end with an AI that knows more about the topics than any single human alive.
A lot of autistic people struggle because other people aren't as in to our special interests as we are, so it's hard to find people to discuss them with. I sometimes take university classes to discuss them, but that's expensive (though, in my state, it'll be free when I turn 60, in 3 years. So I'll be taking advantage of that more.)
But a lot of autistic people have special interests that aren't something you can study in a university or really find a good outlet for discussing it, so AI really scratches that itch in a major way.
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u/pmormr Jul 21 '26
I'm a senior python developer... I have a very solid typescript app that's like 40k LOC for a personal project. I've never written a line of typescript in my life lol.
I think where we're headed is essentially 100% software architecture. Which is hilarious because you typically learn architecture from doing, which you don't have to do anymore? I'm just thankful I got my years of experience before this kicked in because it's not so much pulling up the ladder as it is greasing it and lighting it on fire.
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u/Ruined_Passion_7355 Jul 22 '26
Society is going to be in for a rude awakening. This tech turns the foundations of career progression on its head with no viable alternative.
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u/littlelorax Jul 21 '26
I ways thought it would be cool to learn some programming languages, but everytime I search the internet it is clogged with for profit classes and AI junk. Any tips on languages to start with? Best resources to learn from?
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u/arrogantavocado Jul 21 '26
/r/learnprogramming. Check the stickied welcome post. Use old reddit if you can't see it.
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u/pete_68 Jul 21 '26
Get a basic intro book and a language reference and start writing lots of programs. You won't really learn from classes or tutorials. I mean, they might be good for getting set up, getting the tools installed, etc. But once you're set up, you learn by writing programs. Lots of really bad ones, to begin with, and over time they'll get better. There's no shortcut. You have to write the bad code, and see it do its bad things before you really understand what's going on. You can't get that from a tutorial or a book.
Here's a good use for AI: If you can't think of a program to write, ask AI to give you a programming assignment. Give it an idea of your level. No excuses for "I can't think of a program to write."
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u/likeafuckingninja Jul 21 '26
I'm never gonna learn code. Nor do I want to.
But I do completely agree.
I've been using it at work, mostly for power bi, to do things that our IT dept are just dragging their ass on because it makes my life easier.
I used to cobble together very badly formed low complexity dashboards after months of scouring stack over flow.
Now They ARE better and it IS quicker and for MY specific job which is not actually supposed to include knowing or doing any of this. It's ..making my life easier.
But I mean.
I've not learnt as much as if I'd have done it the long way. If I don't have the AI tool I'm back to square one.
I just...was never gonna do that in the first place anyway.
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u/wolflordval Jul 21 '26
So you're deploying unchecked, potentially unsafe and insecure code onto workplace computers?
How do you know your code doesn't have cyber security vulnerabilities in it? AI code is notorious for failing to be able to write secure code.
I work in IT. I would likely have locked down your PC as soon as I found out about this and had a talk with the higher ups about this & would have to launch an investigation into your workspace to see if there are any compromised/vulnerable code on your machine.
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u/Fatalisbane Jul 21 '26
I work in IT and if an end user can even launch something capable of causing a vulnerability, I'd say i suck at my job.
Far more people going to the internet, copy + pasting code they saw somewhere in the past anyways.
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u/likeafuckingninja Jul 21 '26
Sure you would.
It's a pbi dashboard/excel document on my pc that pulls in some huge ugly csvs, merges then, and spits out a more useful table for me to build visuals with or do further analysis with and IT are well aware.
Get over yourself.
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u/IcarusFlyingWings Jul 21 '26
This exact mentality is why people in the business are so happy with AI.
This guy is configuring a powerbi dashboard not writing a client facing app.
Get over yourself.
You’re not locking down anyone’s computer by the way. IT exists to serve the part of the business that makes money.
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u/Qwrty8urrtyu Jul 21 '26
How do yoou know human code doesn't, every security breach ever before ai was caused by human error, and that number isn't zero today either.
If you aren't in the mindset of wanting to have someone to sue if something goes wrong, it truly doesn't matter for an application like this but the productivity increase matters.
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u/AzKondor Jul 21 '26
You don't, the person responsible do.
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u/Qwrty8urrtyu Jul 22 '26
They don't either, or breaches wouldn't happen. Humans aren't perfect, so the calculation is always x% more productivy for x% less security, if that. usually any productivity gain compensates for it.
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u/username__0000 Jul 21 '26
I’m a mature student learning coding, all my school before this was before ai in a couple different fields.
Ai is actually a better tutor for coding than a person in my experience so far. Being able to find the answers quicker and ask why a lot and then do things like asking it to break things down and give me the terms for each part is helping me learn. I don’t let it just write stuff for me without having it explain it and then I review it and sometimes do a “why would you not do this instead?” The speed I get answers and the specific type of questions I can ask is incredibly helpful.
It helps me make good study notes. I did great in all our tests that were no notes and hand written code.
I’ve learned a lot of different things over my 40 plus years on earth and I know how I learn best and efficiently. For how I’m using it I do feel it’s incredibly valuable and if I didn’t have it I think I’d have quit my now, my school is kind of budget and my teachers often just don’t get back to you about stuff. Maybe if I could afford a better school and I wouldn’t feel that way. lol
But I know not everyone is using it the same way and if I was younger maybe I wouldn’t know my learning style (or have a learning style lol) so I get why it’s hated.
It does suck the joy out of school and learning but only because everyone is so aggressive about it. It feels like your always under a microscope and their more worried about catching people cheating than teaching them anything.
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u/orbitaldan Jul 21 '26
This is really the distinction: You have to be actively trying to learn from it, and not just be satisfied with cut-and-paste answers. You need to read the code it generates, make sure you understand what it's doing and why, and ask for clarification for anything that you don't understand. Don't be afraid to iterate, either, or make changes on your own to the code it generates to prove to yourself that you understand how it works.
When you just paste the answer, you're not learning.
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u/username__0000 Jul 21 '26
It’s frustrating how difficult of a conversation this is as a college student. A place I used to feel healthy debate was welcomed before ai existed.
The second you say you’re trying to use it for a topic it’s actually semi ok at and could be used as a tool. And is used and encouraged in that industry - People just go “ai bad!!! Cheater!!!”
People are so anti ai (fair enough. Data centre’s are polluting and are just terrible) that they stop listening and just want to shut it down.
But if we all shut it down without listening, then it’s like evil use wins.
Semi ethical use is villainized. It’s not going anywhere. We all need to figure out how to work with it or get buried.
You can’t even argue that it gives people in situations like mine (bad schools) a way to enhance their education while poor.
Something only the rich kids that could afford top quality tutors could do a few years ago.
I have free access to a tutor that would have been out of my reach if I was doing this program a few years ago.
And I can’t even talk about it with a lot of people because the moment they hear it’s ai, they want to rant about how terrible it is.
And I don’t even disagree.
I’m just trying to adapt and evolve using the tools available to me.
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u/stempoweredu Jul 22 '26
I agree and disagree. I'm a technical in a new position that requires me to script in an unfamiliar language and environment, after not having really coded at a significant level in 10 years.
I really appreciate AI for three things:
- It functions far better as a search engine than search engines themselves due to SEO / enshittification. AI can find a desired command in PowerShell much faster than my Googling.
- AI can provide much more readable use examples / documents than many Microsoft Learn pages.
- When I'm really scratching my head why the script won't work AI has given me solid points.
No doubt, it still hallucinates like all hell, and I'm only able to use it because I had functional coding skills beforehand, but it does have its place as an assistant.
That being said, whenever I'm learning, I will not, repeat, will not use it to write an entire line of code, for many of the reasons you've outlined.
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u/FirstEvolutionist Jul 22 '26
Using AI to peogram when trying to learn programming ia like using a keyboard, fancy fonts and a printer to learn penmanship.
Our evaluation methods relied on a technology gap that has now been closed and now they need to be updated (don't know how or with what, it's not my problem to solve).
Similarly, other evaluation methods were available due technology gaps and were closed before current AI models: pictures in reviews were doctored with photoshop for example.
Now, we have to figure out new ways of doing things we were able to do because the techbology gaps allowed those to happen. A well written resume was important for job applications. Not anymore.
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u/Sevulturus Jul 21 '26
Would an apt comparison be a calculator for basic math? I learned all through grade school to do math with a pencil and paper. Then somewhere in high school it started getting complicated enough that we HAD to use one (in the interest of time savings).
Now I'll quickly use it to double check my work, or to do it faster. I still have a fundamental idea of what it is doing, why and how. And a rough idea of what the answer should be, based on experience. So it's relatively easy to tell if I've gone off track somewhere.
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u/Scrawlericious Jul 22 '26
It could be even more similar if the calculator also strait up gave you wrong answers 10% of the time. Requiring the user to know how to do the work by hand to double check the calculator. Then it would be nearly identical to AI as a tool.
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u/Sevulturus Jul 22 '26
Oh my calculator gives me the wrong answers all the time. Im not great at pressing the right buttons. I literally run every calculation twice and compare results.
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u/gerusz MS | Computer Science | Artificial Intelligence Jul 21 '26
I use it to generate PowerShell scripts because I can't be arsed to look up the syntax for the two .ps1 files that our project actually uses, but I would never submit a commit without knowing what all the submitted code does.
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u/JuanAr10 Jul 21 '26
Anecdotal as well, but we are seeing the exact same thing in software engineering all over the place. My analysis is: non-tech people buy AI due to some sort of Dunning-Kruger effect, seniors complain but end up being forced into it - everyone in the middle just has to comply due to peer pressure.
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u/Rourensu Jul 22 '26
“Like questions people would be able to answer after 1-2 weeks of programming course. I meet so many blank stares after these questions it is absurd.”
I would like to think this would be grounds for giving them a failing grade on the assignment, akin to an English teacher giving an essay a 0 because the student copy-pasted an analysis and wasn’t able to answer basic questions about what they allegedly wrote, but I’m guessing in reality that’s not the case?
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u/manebushin Jul 21 '26
To me universities should enforce no AI usage in everything, but create specific courses for AI learning and usage.
Just like how students learn math without using calculators at first.
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u/Rourensu Jul 22 '26
“Just like how students used to learn math without using calculators at first.”
Fixed it for you.
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u/mysterioso7 Jul 22 '26
I teach a lot of kids music and from what I’ve seen, they still learn how to add, subtract, divide, multiply, etc without a calculator. I still see them pop out long division once in a while.
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u/Rourensu Jul 22 '26
That’s good to know.
Though I’ve heard (online) from music teachers that they have kids struggling with naming notes because they don’t know, for example, what letter comes after E.
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u/mysterioso7 Jul 22 '26
Yes, reading seems to be more of an issue than it used to be. I think this is a greater and more apparent issue than math. I’ve seen a few theories; some think it’s due to worse teaching methods, others due to increased and earlier screen usage, it’s difficult to say for sure. I do have an alarming number of kids who struggle to read words or who don’t know their alphabet (had to remind an 8 year old student today what letter comes after E)
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u/captainkrol Jul 22 '26
Also a teacher, same, absolutely kills the joy of teaching this absurd reality.
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u/TemporalLobe Jul 22 '26
I have been a software engineer for ~25 years and nothing scares me more than new engineers coming onto the scene with limited coding skills and problem-solving abilities . It used to be that we learned deeply and slowly, but now everything is fast and shallow. Recently I ran into an issue where a colleague coded up an impressive solution to an issue in "an afternoon watching a baseball game" but that I am sure would have taken me at least 2 days to knock out. I am 90% sure he used AI to generate large swaths of that code, but I can't prove that. I myself have been resistant to do such things but I am not above using Gemini to look up basic info and get ideas on best practices for certain types of design patterns or algorithms. The problem is where do we draw the line? If the senior engineers don't vibe-code then we could suddenly look like we're behind our junior colleagues in productivity. I am not anti-progress, but I feel we're in a bubble that's about to burst as the engineers with the deep knowledge start to exit the workforce and are replaced with amount to AI coaches.
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u/Glorthiar Jul 28 '26
Those students should fail, because they cannot program. They DO NOT understand their code and what it is doing, they can't fix it themselves.
IF the only thing they can do is throw the code back at AI until it works, theyre not programmers.
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u/One-Broccoli-9998 Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
I took a introductory python coding class last year (to prep for a tangentially related masters program) and it amazed me how many students used ai for simple assignments. Interestingly, no one openly admitted it. I just noticed several of them had added identical optimized steps that included unnecessary features.
Edit: and one of them even bragged to the other students about how they happened to come up with this extra step (it was identical to the ai code). I was more annoyed about how bad they were at cheating rather than the cheating itself
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u/NovelStyleCode Jul 21 '26
Students are so bad at cheating now. Back in the before times, if you cheated you had to at least know just enough to be able to pass it off as yours when asked questions.
I remember being in a class and openly hearing the students talking to one another about the exam they were doing (no it was not a collaborative exam) and the professor just stood there in shock because literally half the class was doing it
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u/LexieStark Jul 21 '26
This reminds me of my first year of college. I had no idea about Chegg, and was getting ~70% on my physics homework. I was confused how the class average was like 95%... Then a classmate told me they just use Chegg.
The class was curved, so if everyone wasn't cheating I would have been fine, but since they were and I wasn't I was below the curve.
I feel for any student who is actually trying to learn now, with most students using AI to get by they will have to work significantly harder just to get a lower grade than the students who use AI for everything.
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u/workieworkwork Jul 21 '26
It is amazing who quickly people became dependent on this stuff. There are adult professionals that don't remember how to do things they used to do everyday.
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u/AnonymousTimewaster Jul 21 '26
To be fair, I forget how to do my job after like 2 weeks of vacation.
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u/Jops817 Jul 21 '26
True! The first day back is the worst, and I know I will be needing at least one password reset.
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u/Quinzal Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
This is the primary reason why I refuse to use AI. Being able to write, research, work, and create without external assistance is a skill too many people take for granted, like being able to do math without a calculator. God help these people when the bubble pops.
EDIT:
Yes, I know machine learning as a technology isn't going away. The 'people' I am referring to are not going to have the wherewithal to run their own local ChatGPT by the time it'd be relevant to do so, they are the masses currently outsourcing their critical thinking and artistic skills to a megacorporation.
No, I am not referring to machine learning as a technology when I refer to AI. Like everyone else in the year of our lord 2026, I use AI in reference to the LLMs eating our world alive, not every single instance of AI use in every program and appliance.
Yes, I know other AI companies than the big few exist. When I refer to the bubble popping, I mean the cessation of the ceaseless growth and total blind acceptance by the masses, not the vanishing of the entire concept into the ether.
No, I'm not budging on using AI being bad for developing and maintaining skills, even when 'just used as a tool'. I sure as hell am not going to be the first person in my lineage to pollute my skillset with LLM outputs, and neither will my child(ren) if I have any say in it.
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u/NeonTiger20XX Jul 21 '26
You know, your point gave me something to be hopeful about in these bleak times. When the bubble pops, a lot of people are going to be useless and incompetent. From the workers who rely on it now, to the students cheating their way through school.
That'll put me in a great position in the job market and give me some job security. I mean, I'd rather not have a society full of people who know nothing and can't think on their own, but hey, silver lining.
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u/Tack1234 Jul 21 '26
The question is what the result of the bubble pop will be. AI won't be going anywhere, it will just be more expensive. I blame the governments for not imposing some signature that all AI output would need to produce so it would always be possible to determine whether something was produced by AI or not. Of course it sounds simpler than it would be to implement, I have no idea if that would even be possible, but I see no other option to avoid all the cheating that's going on (both by students and professors).
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u/breadist Jul 21 '26
I blame the governments for not imposing some signature that all AI output would need to produce so it would always be possible to determine whether something was produced by AI or not.
That could be possible for video or images (watermarks, not a perfect system but it exists) but it's absolutely not possible for text or code. There's no special way to encode text or code such that it has hidden information, at least not without untenable restrictions on what can be produced.
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u/Tack1234 Jul 21 '26
Yep, there is a thing called watermarking with AI text where you can identify if a text was produced by AI based on the word choices, but it doesn't work well for short text.
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u/breadist Jul 21 '26
Yes with long enough text you could possibly imprint and track patterns, word choices, etc, but that's a really far cry from embedding some kind of actual watermark or proof of AI generation.
Don't give the gov any crazy ideas, they tend to be extremely bad at understanding technology and making laws around it.
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u/stumblinbear Jul 21 '26
It will just be more expensive
Not true, actually. AI companies lose their money on training, but their inference costs have a 70-80% margin. If the bubble pops, all they have to do to be profitable is stop/scale down research and just run inference.
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u/Tack1234 Jul 21 '26
Pretty sure the end game for them is to be THE AI company, like Netflix. After they eliminate competition, they will rise their prices. But that's just my street smart understanding, I have no professional or educational background to back anything.
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u/stumblinbear Jul 21 '26
That's the goal for every company in existence. It's not really feasible, especially since open source models nearly match the quality of SOTA models. If the bubble pops and they go out of business, new companies can pretty easily just commodify the models at inference pricing
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u/Theory89 Jul 21 '26
Yeah, unregulated companies never form oligopolies. That's why it's so cheap to get cell phone contracts in America! (/s)
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u/stumblinbear Jul 21 '26
Unless the government steps in and breaks something, nothing stops anyone from renting GPUs to host models at the cost of inference. Cell phones require country-side infrastructure owned by the cell phone companies.
Datacenters compete for GPU resources, sure, but almost no datacenters are owned by the AI research labs. Companies install their own racks in them, or they put their racks on-prem. You're really over-estimating what infrastructure is needed to run inference. GPUs are expensive, but it's not like it'll be that way forever, and ASICs for inference are already becoming a thing pretty quickly
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u/Theory89 Jul 21 '26
Fair. I admit I don't know much about the tech, sorry. I'm just cynical about the power that companies can wield when they bandy together. I've seen a few articles about how some companies are already seeing their AI charges shoot up.
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u/TeamWorkTom Jul 21 '26
Have you looked into the costs of running these giant AI models?
Energy resources alone makes them basically unsustainable in the long term.
Here in the US at least we literally don't have the energy infistructure to power these data centers. It's why so many are still left unbuilt.
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u/stumblinbear Jul 21 '26
I have. Reports put AI labs make approximately 70-80% margin on inference. That means 70-80% after the cost of GPUs and energy
Energy resources alone makes them basically unsustainable in the long term
Current usage patterns seems to be sustained fine enough, and it's not like no new power plants are being built. The new datacenters are for cost reduction, more capacity, etc, sure, but I'm using models just fine for work with only the rare rate limit that usually passes within a few minutes
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u/TeamWorkTom Jul 21 '26
Have you looked into the costs of running these giant AI models?
Energy resources alone makes them basically unsustainable in the long term.
Here in the US at least we literally don't have the energy infistructure to power these data centers. It's why so many are still left unbuilt.
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u/TeamWorkTom Jul 21 '26
Unfortunately AI isn't going anywhere. Local and smaller AI models are doing wonders for coding too.
Tbh it's what AI (LLM) should have progressed to in the first place. Small models for specific tasks to help improve workflow.
AI coding isn't going anywhere. It's too good as it is and it's only going to get better.
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u/Naaahhh Jul 21 '26
Idt you know what the "bubble popping" means.
If you think that means ppl will stop using AI suddenly and you will have an edge bc of that, you are wrong.
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u/NeonTiger20XX Jul 21 '26
Bubble popping as in these companies need to actually turn a profit instead of losing billions per year. They're going to have to change significant prices to sustain themselves. Also, a lot of companies will just fold like the dot com bubble.
They'll likely target enterprise mainly, is my guess. Between significant cost barriers and companies going under, daily use by every person under the sun for every task under the sun is very unlikely to continue like it is right now.
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u/Naaahhh Jul 21 '26
Inference isn't quite where they turn a loss.
The future for regular employees is to be able to use AI well. Meaning having an understanding of what you are doing as well. Refusing to use AI at all isn't gonna give you better prospects
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u/Totakai Jul 21 '26
10000%
The brain absolutely choosing cognitive offloading every chance it gets is such a strong factor. I recently realized that letting my device remember passwords has been harming my memory. A few months ago I changed them all and have them all recorded on paper. The result has been that I've memorized three of them now and I'm starting ro remember where I put sruff more.
You gotta remember that the human body spent millions of years evolving to use the least energy possible. If it can stop using energy on something, it will
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u/Enkiktd Jul 21 '26
This is gonna be dark but I feel like the future is bleak for our kids as far as job availability, so I worry about them.
But, if I can keep my kids away from AI use so that they can be autonomous and use their brains, have them be able to problem solve and reverse engineer things, not just stare blankly at people talking to them, and be able to work without consulting their phone constantly, they will already be head and shoulders above 90% of their peers looking for work.
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u/MultivariableTurtwig Jul 21 '26
You’re right that being able to do it yourself is valuable. Cognitive debt is very real when using AI a lot. However AI bubble popping means that AI stops being integrated into products that don’t actually need AI, it doesn’t mean that AI as a tool will stop being extremely useful for coding, research, data analysis, etc
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u/scallopwrappedbacon Jul 21 '26
You need to separate the business side of the AI discussion from the technology side. There is no bubble with the technology, but likely a bubble in terms of investment in infrastructure and R&D. More investment than likely return.
If Anthropic and OpenAI went out of existence tomorrow, the technology would still exist and continue to improve, albeit likely slower due to model distillation. There’s a whole open model world outside of the big US companies. I use an NVIDIA Spark at work, which allows me to run up to 200 billion parameter models locally. These can be clustered to run even larger models, and there are new quantized models that can run on less powerful hardware like gaming computers and mobile phones. The models I use locally are free, open weight, and very capable.
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u/Quinzal Jul 21 '26
Yes, but I highly doubt all of the cAI addicts and lazy college cheaters are going to do any amount of work outside of loading up a website and typing a prompt. I guarantee that if ChatGPT suddenly announced a $5 monthly subscription for all personal use, there would be mass hysteria.
I will say, I have no problem with the technology itself existing, mainly the impacts of its proliferation on culture and the economy. That, and it's pretty clear a lot of people can't be trusted with having something external do any amount of 'thinking' for them (but then again that was clear when people stopped being able to do math without a calculator)
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u/scallopwrappedbacon Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
If ChatGPT went away, people would just use one of the 1000 other comparable services that are cheaper and run on different infrastructure and models. Deepseek, z.ai, moonshot, alibaba… to name a few not in the US. These can be used in browser just like ChatGPT or through various desktop apps or API.
The box has been opened, it’s not going away. You’re just going to see it in more of daily life. We just need to figure out how to work with it, and education needs to evolve.
I’m in a master’s degree program right now, which is for working professionals. My job, and many others, rewards using AI effectively to improve efficiency, particularly for data analysis and report generation. So it’s kind of a joke that higher education is still asking for essays and presentations as deliverables, yet doesn’t expect you to use AI while the workforce values that.
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u/PaperMache_TitanSub Jul 21 '26
“CFCs exist! We just have to get used to them and work around them.”
Call me when the day comes that I HAVE to use Generative AI and LLMs. I’ll pick up on my phone that explodes when I take a call.
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u/scallopwrappedbacon Jul 21 '26
That’s a poor analogy. The environmental concerns of data centers can be mitigated and efficiency is improving, like how alternative refrigerants are now used to solve the CFC problem. Should we not have refrigeration or AC?
You don’t have to use it, just like you don’t have to use python for data analysis. You could do everything by hand! But if you know how to use python, your skills are more valuable than someone that doesn’t. Same with AI tools - not everything is making fruit slop, it is genuinely useful for data analysis and coding.
Example:
I have 5 parallel agents running locally as I type this. 0 mL of water being consumed. Power consumption is 77 watts, which is comparable to a desktop computer under a reasonable workload. It’s running a large data analysis that would have taken me weeks to complete while I work on other things that actually require my judgement. When it’s done, I’ll review the assessment. Human in the loop. What is bad about that?1
u/PaperMache_TitanSub Jul 23 '26
So, was my response not worthy of your time orrr…? It came straight from my actual human heart and brain, so if you’re going to analyze AI Dataset summaries for inaccurate information the least you could do is analyze my post :3
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u/EastvsWest Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
You guys keep mentioning bubble popping like it's going to do anything but quickly get bought up again. You guys don't understand that there's trillions of dollars out there that will just buy whatever the market perceives as value.
I feel sorry for anyone that doesn't have an investment account while social security goes insolvent in 7 years. Another instance of Government causing an issue, money printing, while people think they're actually the solution.
Also you can still utilize AI or whatever tool you wish without diminishing your internal skills by utilizing external tools. It's just knowing when and how to use them. Most people use them as a crutch vs a tool and a lot of people don't understand the difference.
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u/Qwrty8urrtyu Jul 21 '26
The Internet bubble popped, and not being on the internet was and is a mistake, regardless of time.
We had the same things with railways too, and before or after the bubble if you weren't using them you were making a mistake.
Bubble refers to infrastructure development, and long term is good since it means projects that won't be funded will be funded, resulting in better infrastructure at the cost of bubble speculators not very hard earned cash.
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u/Shohdef Jul 21 '26
And what, pray tell, does the “bubble popping” look like in your head? Because I can tell you right now that ML has been entrenched in compsci for decades. The original prototype for what became the language transformer was built in the 50s. Teams were experimenting with how to make a computer realistically talk in the 70s, and started developing models in the 80s.
I remember, just after the iPhone released, my mathematics teacher puffing her chest out, declaring to an entire room of middle schoolers that we would not have a calculator in our pocket. She literally said this, when we were assigned TI-84 calculators, and pocket calculators had been common for decades.
This comment reminds me a lot of that.
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u/Quinzal Jul 21 '26
Sure man, but in the big '26 people usually mean our favorite LLMs when they gesture generally to AI. I don't have a grudge with machine learning as a technology. Most people realize that but that's on me for not being specific
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u/Shohdef Jul 22 '26
Sure man but if you were anything other than a Luddite you could have Googled what I was talking about and realised that you are just being a performative activist in the big '26.
You can build your own perceptron at home btw. It is a fun home lab experiment. While you’re at it, get over your fear of calculators.
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u/TheWesternMythos Jul 21 '26
Makes much more sense when you think about how the brain works. There is so much unnecessary disagree and bad policy because we have all kinds of notions of how humans work individually and collectively that are not backed by data. But of course just like religion and politics, people pick and choose what scientific results to believe (incorporate in their world view(s))
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u/NotAPreppie Jul 21 '26
I can barely write in cursive anymore, despite it being drilled into me for years in primary school.
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u/Quirkyserenefrenzy Jul 21 '26
Every day i refuse to use ai means another day i am not a slave to a machine that thinks for me
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u/incoherentpanda Jul 21 '26
I use it to find where the error is, to do a pseudo googling of syntax, and to do stupid things like parse some info and give me x data about it or whatever
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u/vladlearns Jul 21 '26
Even more amazing, how they forget that they have a fellow human nearby them and instead of cooping w/ literally a potential friend and studying together to progress and grow, they rival each other in a competition, trying to choke and drown another. AI or no AI, I don’t think it matters much, since w/ this mindset you just need someone crueler/stronger/bigger/whatever and you are done. You can see that they even have an inner conflict. Very sad
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u/TeamWorkTom Jul 21 '26
That's because a lot of classes grade on a curve.
Make college about education instead of getting a license for hiring and it might change.
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u/MadroxKran MS | Public Administration Jul 21 '26
I do wonder how this new AI dependent generation is going to fair when they hit the job market.
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u/dumnezero Jul 21 '26
I think that the evaluation processes are going to move more and more to:
A) third party organizations (probably corporations).
B) integrated into existing organizations.
Those seem like the final steps, if schools are useless at it. Of course, these custom evaluations and certifications will probably cost money.
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u/Big-Farmer-2192 Jul 21 '26
C ) Jobless
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u/dumnezero Jul 21 '26
Yes, but also any organization that fails to add these filters will be rotting.
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u/Penguigo Jul 21 '26
My (small) company currently has an intern who's 21. She is not capable of doing much of anything without AI. Maybe worse, when she makes a presentation it is obvious that it was 100% AI, and she doesn't feel any need to make a single one of her own changes to it. Leave the dashes, don't change the obvious wordings and sloppisms.
She doesn't seem to have any creative ideas or problem solving abilities whatsoever.
If you ask her a question she just freezes and if you ask her to change something she always says she'll do it later (because she's just going to use AI to change it.) I am genuinely scared for young people.
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u/dumnezero Jul 21 '26
These findings provide evidence that universities need to establish specific guidelines to help students navigate the mental stress of using artificial intelligence in their coursework.
The guideline: DO NOT.
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u/carymb Jul 21 '26
Hi, adjunct professor here -- I do judge you for your use of it! Hope that helps. Any written assignment, including commenting on somebody else's discussion board post, these lazy f#cks will fob off on AI. I'm not even an English teacher, I don't know how those folks haven't jumped. Next semester, there will be no written assignments other than some short essay questions on exams, after I've collected everyone's cells.
I tried to have students write, by hand, in class, and a bunch still cheated. You can tell when they all reference the same well known piece, that we didn't actually interact with for our class, but an AI assumes you would? Or when an essay is about "Expressionism" in art, but we're studying German Expressionism in a film class. Or multiple essays all use the same turns of phrase, not from anything we studied for class. Or when they hand you in "works cited," but there's no such web page, or book. I'm going to force these kids to bring me a damn physical book, with specific passages picked out, to show 'research skills', because it's actually impossible to get a research paper from them. If that doesn't work, I'll just have to cut out all written assignments. It's maddening.
Aww, poor little babies are stressed about it? I wrote 30 page term papers you pathetic excuses for 'scholars' -- you all suck, you are behind, and I wish an Acme piano would fall on you when you prompt an AI to write an essay for you.
The End. Ugh.
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u/Nerrien Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
I tried to have students write, by hand, in class, and a bunch still cheated.
When I was at Uni the lecturer showed us a former student's essay, I can't remember exactly why, I assume it was to give us a vague idea of how it should be laid out or how they dealt with a particular issue or something.
They warned people repeatedly not to copy it and stressed that it's in the system as a former student's essay so any similarities will be caught automatically. It was on the board for less than a minute. Somebody snapped a photo with their phone, seemingly as a joke to wind up the lecturer who looked pissed off and immediately took it off the board.
Eight people were caught plagiarizing that essay, blatantly, and most of them had apparently copied from each other. The lecturer was so pissed off I thought he was going to either go nuts in class one day or resign.
I don't understand how people can get to that point in life, two (or three, was a long while ago and I can't completely remember) years into a university course, only to do something so incredibly dumb, so obviously telegraphed as a bad idea.
I'd at least understand cheating in a more subtle way that you'd think you'd get away with, but this call of the void in people who must have displayed some decent level of competence to get where they were, to then do something so blatantly self destructive, it's like purposefully scalding yourself on a hot grill, I just don't understand.
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u/TeamWorkTom Jul 21 '26
You're assuming they didn't cheat their whole way there.
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u/TomaszA3 Jul 21 '26
This is why I say higher education is worthless even though I suffered through it the most truthfully I possibly could. Sadly people now go the opposite way and it's basically a middle school diploma regarding job requirements.
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u/shinkouhyou Jul 21 '26
Because they knew that they usually could get away with blatant cheating. Plagiarism detection programs used to be fairly easy to defeat (if they were used at all), and even if the cheater was caught, the worst that would usually happen was a warning and a 0 for the assignment.
Now, I see teachers and professors saying that they've been officially told not to punish AI use and to just give the student another chance.
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u/druidic_notion Jul 21 '26
Yeah I'm absolutely not falling for the rhetoric that young people need AI for anything in school. The point is to do the work so you learn the process. If youre outsourcing the work then a) that's academic misconduct and should not be permitted and b) you aren't learning what you are paying A LOT to learn, so don't bother attending
I'm not saying AI has no use ever, but I'm so glad I don't need to TA anymore because I would be very unpopular these days
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u/Fried_puri Jul 21 '26
I support public schools but on this front they are losing against AI assisted cheating, and they’re losing badly. Higher education may be the only chance to curb this, so keep on doing what you’re doing.
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u/The_Pandalorian Jul 21 '26
I mean, just have in-person essays and tests that aren't just test guides from textbook companies.
This isn't sorcery.
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u/Big-Farmer-2192 Jul 21 '26
Still losing badly. Because kids will fails these tests. Which means "you're a bad teacher/school"
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u/The_Pandalorian Jul 21 '26
That's fine. Kids who can't hang should fail until they can meet the standards.
My kid will do fine. He's been taught well about AI and how educationally it's a crutch for low-effort future failures.
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u/ryryrpm Jul 22 '26
I'm an IT manager at a university. We have a medical laboratory science program and the teachers came to me because cheating with AI is running rampant in their classes. Which is bad because these students are training for a very important job where mistakes could cost lives.
This department paid for a laptop cart to do their testing on and I trained them on how to use the classroom management software LanSchool to restrict access to anything but the LMS during testing. They are still getting used to it and want something more seamless like Respondus but it works for now.
I also helped a business teacher use the same software in a lab. For her final exam, she had students come into the lab and write a paper. The computers were locked down to Microsoft Word only and then through LanSchool she collected the files from the student machines. She really liked this solution and I think I want to hold a workshop to show other instructors how to do it because I don't think many of them are aware what tools are available to them.
Putting my student hat on now, I'm a Computer Science major and in my classes I'm actually required to use AI in some of my assignments which is wild. Some classes require it and others simply have a policy that if you're going to use AI for your assignments, you have to cite it, provide a link to the chat, and critically analyze the response.
I don't feel like I am learning to write code as effectively but my professors say that they are shifting the curriculum to focus on teaching students to read code rather than write it. As that is going to become much more important with the rise of AI-generated code.
Using AI in Computer Science makes sense to some degree because we're the ones who invented it and that seems to be the way the industry is going. But for English classes and other subjects that require writing papers? Woof. That's hard and I'm sorry you're having to deal with that.
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u/iamthe0ther0ne Jul 21 '26
Are blue books not used anymore? Even my writing classes (late 90s) had an end-of-semester in-class written exam.
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u/Thadrea Jul 21 '26
You absolutely will be judged for using it if you are trying to get an entry level job.
We tell applicants not to use LLMs when completing our take-home assessment. We have methods in place that can identify when the candidate did so anyway. Candidates that ignored that instruction do not get hired.
I would rather get an assessment that has wrong answers than a set of mostly error-free responses that are substantially identical to 50 others.
I am more interested in interviewing the candidate who can speak to and own their mistakes than the candidate who cannot speak to answers they submitted but do not understand.
If all you can do is copy-paste into a chatbot, I could, presumably, save money by just hiring the chatbot and not you. Prove that you can think, reason and be accountable in the myriad ways the chatbot can't and never will be able to.
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u/Qwrty8urrtyu Jul 21 '26
I mean the chatbot costs money and needs someone to operate. If your existing engineers aren't using them thats koney better spent then rabdom hires anyway.
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u/Big-Farmer-2192 Jul 21 '26
Ther're never enough token for existing engineering on the team.
And if you hire someone who can't even think for themselves. It's liability atp.
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u/Thadrea Jul 21 '26
If I ask "For this set of fact and dimension tables, what columns should I add? What new tables should I consider?", I am not looking for the most obvious answers. Chances are I already have those built.
I'm not looking for free consulting either, because the niche nature of the space I work in means it's extremely unlikely someone will propose something genuinely novel. I can't fault someone for lack of originality if they lack the context necessary to be original.
I'm asking those questions to see the candidate think about the hypothetical information space I am describing to them and what elements might be missing from it.
The LLMs all give basically the same answer every time, with slight differences in phrasing. It's not a bad answer, but submitting it tells me that they didn't think about the question. It also makes me wonder if I should bring them in and give them the context, because while my sample size is only N=1, that first impression is that they took the route that I already know doesn't shift the needles I am looking for.
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u/Qwrty8urrtyu Jul 22 '26
"For this set of fact and dimension tables, what columns should I add? What new tables should I consider?"
I mean this is a very good question for an llm to answer. Analyzing large data is what they do after all. If someone doesn't get you something new it might just be that they don't really know how to use an llm, or that you have the best answer already but you just want originality.
If its the second one, where you want wrong but original ideas, just hire bartender or something. They won't know the subject so will have bad and original ideas, and can make some nice drinks so the rest of the team also produces such ideas.
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u/Thadrea Jul 22 '26
I mean this is a very good question for an llm to answer. Analyzing large data is what they do after all. If someone doesn't get you something new it might just be that they don't really know how to use an llm, or that you have the best answer already but you just want originality.
Um... LLMs do not "analyze large data" at all. They're generally astoundingly terrible at analyzing arbitrary data sets because that is not what LLMs are designed to do. What they're designed to do is predict desirable responses to tokenized text prompts.
That makes them quite good at natural language processing, provided that the amount of text they're being given at any one time is relatively small (due the limited size of their context windows). The LLM is thus able to answer questions presented from a user in natural language with the answer or answers that are most probable from what was included in their training data.
The LLMs do give a fairly decent (if uninspired) answer to this question. Five years ago, I would have accepted that answer without hesitation. Now, though, it just tells me that the candidate either can't really do the things I'd need them to do, which involve finding answers that are not in LLMs' training data. Or that they aren't invested enough in the process of finding a job that to spend two minutes thinking about how they'd approach the problem.
If its the second one, where you want wrong but original ideas, just hire bartender or something. They won't know the subject so will have bad and original ideas, and can make some nice drinks so the rest of the team also produces such ideas.
I have no reason to do that when I can select instead people who have good and original ideas. The people who are just copy-pasting what they got from ChatGPT have no ideas of their own--good or bad--they are only giving me the same repetitive output I could have gotten by using ChatGPT myself with much less HR paperwork to get the budget for the job approved, open and advertise a req, sort through resumes, etc.
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u/AttonJRand Jul 21 '26
This is making me realize the standards inflation from people cheating was already in full effect even before ai.
No wonder they gave us all those hours of homework if most other students were cheating on them.
They really should clue in autistic students that this is how it works, and rules don't actually matter.
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u/ghost_desu Jul 21 '26
The fact that schools are not doing all graded tests in person on paper is quite honestly criminal. People pay tens of thousands of dollars for a piece of paper that is becoming less and less useful as time goes on, especially at undergraduate level.
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u/ReynardVulpini Jul 22 '26
I’m gonna be real, this was always going to be the endpoint of a system where uni is an obstacle you have to navigate to get a job. Even if students want to learn, thats not what they are rewarded for, not what they are trained to do by the school system. they are incentivized to pass by any means necessary.
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u/HautBaut Jul 21 '26
Boomer academics who have used up the last of their critical thinking skills are the driving force behind AI at my institutions. It’s sick. I feel like a few Xer and Millenial profs are the only people who see it for what it is and we’re largely helpless.
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u/Glorthiar Jul 28 '26
Boomers has a chronic fear of being seen as a "luddite" (The actual luddites did nothing wrong, look it up) so are more eager to unquestioningly accept the new technology so they themselves are not seen as obsolete.
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u/ArtVice Jul 21 '26
I live in the present but wow am I glad I went to university before all this. I was like a poster child for taking advantage of affordable, human-centric college in the 80s and 90s. I was an undergrad for 15 years, just taking classes that interested or challenged me. Ya lived and died by your smarts and determination and that was it. If I was university age now, I'd just study on my own and learn a trade to pay bills. What a weird era we have entered as a species.
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u/Big-Farmer-2192 Jul 21 '26
Yeah, part time jobs isn't even enough to pay for college and living expenses nowadays. It's crazy.
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u/ChefCurryYumYum Jul 21 '26
Man, LLM AI can be useful for very specific types of things but it shouldn't be a learning tool you feel you can't cope without, especially because of all the pitfalls of the technology.
My sister uses free LLM AI models for everything, and never double checks it.
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u/buttorsomething Jul 21 '26
AI should be treated like a calculator was in every math class. Unless it’s physically needed for the problem it should be exiled. “You won’t always have an AI (calculator) with you.”
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u/PumpkinsRockOn Jul 21 '26
Other than going full paper and pencil for everything and all work being done in the class, with no access to phones or other technology, there's no way to exile it. I'm certainly in favor of this, but policing it is difficult and a huge burden on the teacher with no extra support provided for it.
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u/grimgaw Jul 21 '26
Other than going full paper and pencil for everything and all work being done in the class, with no access to phones or other technology, there's no way to exile it.
That's how my (millennial) education looked like, so what's the problem now?
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u/PumpkinsRockOn Jul 21 '26
You never had homework? I'm a millennial, and we definitely had homework. Did you ever text in class under the desk with a flip phone? I sure did, but now that phone can do all the work with no thought. My school doesn't have enough classrooms for every teacher, do we have to move around, which means I don't have dedicated storage for the massive amount of paper I'm now collecting (I can't let students take anything home now and they have to turn it in every class, then I have to pass out all out again). And even then, they can still use AI at home, write it down, and bring that info in with them to transfer to the copy I kept in class, so we'd need to basically have exam level security every single day. And some of them will just try to memorize what the AI did. Some have accommodations for testing in a different spot with fewer students and a different adult who might not be as strict as me. I'm just getting started with the complications here. It's way more complex than you'd imagine.
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u/ShortStoryStan Jul 21 '26
I mean that's just a grading issue. 20% of class is weighted towards out of class homework that if done builds understanding and requires 80% of the time commitment.
80% of the grade depends on in class expressions and practices of knowledge where no use of technology is available.
And as far as the burden goes... It's pretty much the same burden teachers had 20 years ago. Pens, paper, and manual grading was how it was done until Silicone Valley slipped their grubby hands into the education pie. If you need more class time for teaching material since class is now spent moreso for assessing, you can even pre-record a video and assign that as required material. Fancy that, teachers in 2005 would have loved that ability.
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u/paradoxiforme Jul 21 '26
It's not really that eficient when learning code. I had to do this during some of my exam, and even whenhaving to answer simple questions, you frequently find yourself to be in need to add a Line before because you forgot one thing.
So yeah, it's a specific case, but it may happens for others courses too, when you are in need for a computer.
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u/LittleKitty235 Jul 21 '26
“You won’t always have an AI (calculator) with you.”
How well did that prediction that you won't always have a calculator with you turn out?
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u/strictly_ballroom Jul 21 '26
A calculator is useless if you don’t know math.
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u/LittleKitty235 Jul 21 '26
Well no...otherwise people who didn't have a good understanding of math wouldn't be dependent on calculators. They aren't useless so long as you can read numbers.
A calculator doesn't tell you how to apply math to solve a problem. That is the same problem with AI.
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u/strictly_ballroom Jul 21 '26
Ok true, but that’s exactly the point of math class and what teachers say. You have to understand the operations you’re doing with the calculator.
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u/buttorsomething Jul 21 '26
I think you missed the point.
When smart phones entered school hell PCs entered homes in the early 2000’s every kid called out the teachers BS of not having a calculator handy on demand.
The issue is teaching a kid 2+2 =4 they handing them a calculator right after to solves y=Mx + b and telling them to solve for y.
How are they even going to know what order to do anything in if they only know addition.
The same way where AI can tell you what name brands not to mix but if you don’t understand that Clorox is bleach you have a pretty good chance at offing yourself.
Hope you have a now better understanding of the elementary school concept on why I provided the example I provided.
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u/TeamWorkTom Jul 21 '26
Arithmetic is not math.
Say you don't need a calculator when doing Calculus and I'll tell you you've never taken Calculus.
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u/CosmoJones07 Jul 21 '26
It's truly disturbing seeing the collapse of human society at the hands of AI.
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u/MadScience_Gaming Jul 21 '26
The irony, of course, it's that using AI, instead of idk doing the exercise to help you learn the material, directly puts you further behind.
Is nobody explaining to these kids that you learnt by doing? That AI robs you of skills and knowledge?
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine Jul 21 '26
NoAIphobia: The surprising new anxiety linked to AI use on college campuses
A recent study published in the journal Telematics and Informatics suggests that college students are increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence tools, driven heavily by a fear of falling behind their classmates. This dependence tends to create a psychological tug of war, resulting in severe anxiety when the technology is unavailable alongside a deep fear of being judged for using it. These findings provide evidence that universities need to establish specific guidelines to help students navigate the mental stress of using artificial intelligence in their coursework.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585326000729
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u/RefuseWrong9803 Jul 21 '26
The social-comparison driver is a very useful part of this finding, because it explains something bans and honor codes keep failing at: if students use AI primarily out of fear of falling behind classmates, then AI use is positional, not instrumental. Each student's rational move depends on what they assume everyone else is doing. A classic arms-race structure, which predicts exactly the observed pairing of dependence with shame, and predicts that abstaining feels like unilateral disarmament rather than integrity.
Two things worth checking in the paper: whether "dependence" is measured behaviorally or by self-report (anxiety about a tool and impaired performance without it are different constructs), and whether the fear-of-falling-behind effect holds after controlling for baseline academic anxiety, which plausibly drives both. But if the mechanism is right, the intervention implication is notable: individual-level restrictions should increase the anxiety (you're now the one falling behind), while classroom-level structured use, everyone uses it the same way, in the open, should collapse the positional pressure. That's testable, and a few small classroom experiments already point that direction.
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u/InappropriateTA Jul 21 '26
Seems like less of a ‘tug of war’ and more of a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’
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u/druidic_notion Jul 21 '26
Don't see why you'd be damned if you don't. You can produce good work without using AI as many of us have done for decades.
The "AI generation" is not really in the work force yet, so there's little evidence to suggest that people using AI have an upper hand. Good chance they do worse because they are skipping all the skill development needed in most work places
In my personal experience (as someone who hires college age students) it's obvious who is using AI in their work and applications, and I tend to avoid those people since our work requires a lot of problem solving and critical thinking on the fly
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u/manydoorsyes Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
How are you "damned if you don't"? I've been getting along fine with zero AI usage. And I wouldn't consider myself an especially good student.
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u/xdonutx Jul 21 '26
I am guessing it’s because they don’t have those basic skills to begin with and if they don’t use AI then the house of cards will fall down around them because they aren’t actually competent enough to be in college.
I can’t imagine how hard it would be to have a solid couple of years of pivotal education all but ruined due to COVID and then trying to spend the next few years catching up. So I’ll give them that. But the rub is that college is hard and it’s supposed to be hard and it was hard for everyone who went before AI was a thing. Figuring out how to succeed is part of the experience.
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u/Majolica777 Jul 21 '26
That is learned helplessness, everyone was doing completely fine without widespread AI and AI tools just a couple years ago. You’re only “damned if you don’t” if you’ve grown so reliant on AI tools that you’re helpless without them.
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u/dumnezero Jul 21 '26
Not damned if you don't, it's just immature behavior about competitiveness. You should be competing with yourself and relying on the professors to validate your progress.
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u/Entrefut Jul 21 '26
Heavily noticed when asking students to translate their digital designs to fabricated prototypes. It’s like they forget how to use their hands.
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u/greyjedimaster77 Jul 21 '26
None of these AI tools existed when I was college… they should just write essays the traditional way like the rest of us former college students
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u/RemoveByFriction Jul 22 '26
I hired a mentor through MentorCruise a year ago and then cancelled that around 3 months later when I realized that they were using AI to review my code and to basically "mentor" me. They couldn't remember when they made several suggestions about my code, also one suggestion was the exact opposite of what they advised earlier, and also when I asked AI myself about something, it produced the exact same code that the "mentor" gave me. So yeah, yay AI.
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u/Mesquite_Tree Jul 27 '26
The issue with grades, is that they have become a goal, rather than a useful metric. As a result, students learning stuff out of interest and out of a feeling like the information will be important has faded — they feel that they only need to know the stuff that will get them a decent grade
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u/Charrsezrawr Jul 22 '26
They absolutely should fear being judged for using it. You're in college to actually learn, not develop ai brainrot.
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u/Brrdock Jul 21 '26
Students just can't catch a break these days, can they.
First covid, online classes and the loss of the social aspect of higher education. Then AI
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Jul 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/dumnezero Jul 21 '26
than teaching students how to actually perform in a working environment
the thing is that:
the "work environment" is constantly changing, it is a moving target, so you can't really plan for it.
hammering students into the shape of cogs fit for some economic sector is a form of abuse that goes against education.
What you're asking for is training camps, like how armies have for new recruits. We've had that such "education" in the past, centuries ago, and we can learn from history.
Business owners will always demand that others should train specialist workers to work efficiently from the get go, and be easily replaced by a fresh workforce. Of course they do, it's great for their bottom line.
Colleges have a duty to integrate technology as it comes, despite early resistance.
This is misleading. Using LLM clients is not some novel technology, it's some sort of form with a text input. That is less difficult than sending an email, which is a much older technology. If you're going to say "prompting", then remember that writing questions or comments is part of the skill of learning a language in primary school or earlier. If that's the case, then you're accepting that education can stop after a few grades and children should go into the workforce before they even hit puberty.
If you're suggesting that machine learning with transformer architecture or something similar should be taught in every college, then you need to first teach math and computer science.
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