It describes writing a paper thusly: "The assignment itself is a MacGuffin, with the shelf life of sour cream and an economic value that rounds to zero dollars."
That's actually one of the reasons I posted a bunch of my college papers here. I worked hard on those papers back in the 90s! If I could wring out a handful more readers by making blog posts of them, dang it, that's a way to turn the sour cream into honey... and they found honey in the pyramids that was still edible.
The part of the essay that everybody is quoting is this part:
Earlier this semester, an NYU professor told me how he had AI-proofed his assignments, only to have the students complain that the work was too hard. When he told them those were standard assignments, just worded so current AI would fail to answer them, they said he was interfering with their “learning styles.” A student asked for an extension, on the grounds that ChatGPT was down the day the assignment was due. Another said, about work on a problem set, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” And another, when asked about their largely AI-written work, replied “Everyone is doing it.” Those are stories from a 15-minute conversation with a single professor.
"You're not always going to have a machine god in your pocket" seems a silly thing to say.
Back in 2023, I mentioned how my friends' 14-year-old (at the time) was delighted to show us how he could make the AI spit out 800 words on The Underground Railroad.
Now, to be fair, I rarely have to do stuff that involves The Underground Railroad. Like, the kiddo's AI-written essay glanced at from across the room was the last time I had a real interaction with the concept. When it comes to being able to sit down and write multi-paragraph essays, well, I suppose that I do that sort of thing all the time and benefitted from decades of doing it and then doing it again and then doing it again.
I like to think that I'm good enough at it to break the syntactical rules in ways that engage the reader rather than alienate the reader (allowing the semantic content to do that).
And I don't know whether I actually benefitted from getting good (or good enough) at it or whether it's like how I learned to drive a stick or write cursive.
We'd have to see the people get weeded out to *REALLY* feel that.
(That said, I'm kind of suspicious that this sort of thing was made illegal by Griggs v. Duke Power Co, but he was an architect-kinda guy applying for something architecture-adjacent so I'm pretty sure that they could get this as being related to job duties.)
1 week ago
Andrew has an episode devoted to this article. Check it out.
1 week ago
I've told this story before but, hell, I'll tell it again.
A friend of mine applied for a job back in the early oughts and they gave him one of those $5 Lego kits to assemble. Just a simple little structure and a minifig.
"You want me to build this?", he asked. "Yes", the interviewer said.
They included the instructions and everything. He just laid out the instructions, built the structure, and presented the final product to the guy.
The interviewer nodded and started disassembling the lego set and putting it back in the box.
"You'd be surprised by how many people this weeds out", he told my bud.
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The Chronicles of Higher Education has a cri de coeur: Is AI Enhancing Education or Replacing It?
It describes writing a paper thusly: "The assignment itself is a MacGuffin, with the shelf life of sour cream and an economic value that rounds to zero dollars."
That's actually one of the reasons I posted a bunch of my college papers here. I worked hard on those papers back in the 90s! If I could wring out a handful more readers by making blog posts of them, dang it, that's a way to turn the sour cream into honey... and they found honey in the pyramids that was still edible.
The part of the essay that everybody is quoting is this part:
"You're not always going to have a machine god in your pocket" seems a silly thing to say.
We can always look at the Lego test.
Surely that's something that we can't imagine having significantly different numbers for success/failure (say, within 5% of each other), right?
Back in 2023, I mentioned how my friends' 14-year-old (at the time) was delighted to show us how he could make the AI spit out 800 words on The Underground Railroad.
Now, to be fair, I rarely have to do stuff that involves The Underground Railroad. Like, the kiddo's AI-written essay glanced at from across the room was the last time I had a real interaction with the concept. When it comes to being able to sit down and write multi-paragraph essays, well, I suppose that I do that sort of thing all the time and benefitted from decades of doing it and then doing it again and then doing it again.
I like to think that I'm good enough at it to break the syntactical rules in ways that engage the reader rather than alienate the reader (allowing the semantic content to do that).
And I don't know whether I actually benefitted from getting good (or good enough) at it or whether it's like how I learned to drive a stick or write cursive.
I suspect that part of the whole AI Apocalypse will result in employers having to put together Lego tests for prospective employees.
"We just want to see if you can read a document, summarize it, and write three lines of code based on its instructions."
"But I have a degree in reading documents, summarization, and coding."
Huh. You'd think that that'd be appealing.
"Staff recommends you do the thing that I talked about in my dorm room at 3 in the morning."
"Staff recommends you outsource this to a contracting company owned by my brother-in-law."
"Testing or measuring procedures cannot be determinative in employment decisions unless they have some connection to the job."
We'd have to see the people get weeded out to *REALLY* feel that.
(That said, I'm kind of suspicious that this sort of thing was made illegal by Griggs v. Duke Power Co, but he was an architect-kinda guy applying for something architecture-adjacent so I'm pretty sure that they could get this as being related to job duties.)
Andrew has an episode devoted to this article. Check it out.
I've told this story before but, hell, I'll tell it again.
A friend of mine applied for a job back in the early oughts and they gave him one of those $5 Lego kits to assemble. Just a simple little structure and a minifig.
"You want me to build this?", he asked. "Yes", the interviewer said.
They included the instructions and everything. He just laid out the instructions, built the structure, and presented the final product to the guy.
The interviewer nodded and started disassembling the lego set and putting it back in the box.
"You'd be surprised by how many people this weeds out", he told my bud.