Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 02, 2023

Was today’s strip AI generated?

This is an actual assignment some teachers are using now. Have them do an AI essay, then do pretty much all the steps outlined in panels 5-6.

We have a new Master, let us rise!!!

daydreaming? yeah, it makes me sad but also glad, glad because now that it is said it could actually happen!

Original/unique proofs and conclusion derived incrementally/logically from established factual precedents should differ greatly from skillfully regurgitated non-unique/unoriginal AI derived from a finite dataset, or is that all that higher education has become?

Teachers caught on quickly and started using tools to spot computer-generated essays.

Mixed feelings. Having read so many papers simply stolen off the internet (Students think I don’t know how to use Google™… Hey, if one of my students has a paper using the phrase “pugnacious nature of chivalry” I check it out. Heck, we’ve even got programs where if the student turns in electronic copy we can run it through and verify the sources and % of originality.) or papers a semi-literate student who didn’t even proof-read I might appreciate something vaguely original in good English.

Firstly, I am waaay old school. Anyone heard of libraries and the dewey decimal system? Study was books strewn across several desks with little paper notes all over: ah, those were NOT the days. Even I understand that AI is here, it’s awesome and here to stay. The people with the best AI manipulation skills will be the winners. Education MUST adapt or risk becoming obsolete in the name of, “I didn’t do it that way.” It must be recognized that this just an incremental step, this is an evolutionary leap that can’t and shouldn’t be ignored nor held back. Finally and hopefully, if we embrace it, utopia may not just be a longing.

I suspect the day is nigh when professors/teachers who actually read and evaluate student papers for content, grammar and punctuation will be accused of being too demanding.

If only there were websites that helped spot plagiarism… Oh wait!

Websites and apps for sniffing out AI generated papers are on the way even if a teacher could not already tell that the kid who thought that Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby was a guy and then started using what folks used to call “50¢ words” when writing about topics other than Curtis Jackson III

“I must be dreaming.” One of my favorite lines from the movie “Goldfinger”. If you know what is said immediately prior to that, you’ll understand why.

I like exam questions like “We’ve been discussing the author’s message based on the circumstances in this story. Argue the opposite point.” If nothing else, I get some fascinating insight into my students’ thought processes.

too bad these are written so far in advance…you’d think gary would’ve had one ready to drop in for tuesday’s show…pass the popcorn!

A clever kid would do both on different AI chatbots. :)

AI is going to lead to a major revision of academic standards for essays. A lot of professors have already given up because they know it’s impossible to tell when a student did the work or just had the internet do it. Some of them are in denial and claiming it won’t matter, but any instructor who doesn’t think that most students are already cheating with bots is delusional. Once students discovered how easy it was to cheat, the prevailing attitude became “Actually doing the research and writing is for suckers.”

zzzzzzzzzz

It was an AI 3-D bioprinter that created George Santos.

Remember when teachers were telling you that you’d better memorize all those equations because you weren’t always going to have a calculator with you?

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Let’s just be honest; a whole lot of the doomsayers whining about a new generation of morons used their own shortcuts back in the day. It’s just that this is something new that they don’t understand and is therefore bad and has to be destroyed. We need to tune out their old-man-yells-at-clouds whining so we can have a serious discussion about the situation.

I wasn’t driven to produce brilliant assignments as a student. Not being pressured to qualify for a top-rated M.B.A. program, or whatever, I felt it would be OK if I went through the process of searching out and sorting information—using whatever old-fashioned tools I was comfortable with—then articulating it for myself and drawing my own conclusions. The written summary was just to prove to myself, and perhaps the instructor, that I understood the material and could make use of it. The grade was not often spectacular, but the process was more important to me.

One of the discouraging assignments of grade school through high school is the search for a science fair project. It’s hard to come up with something new that a youngster can easily make a display or demonstration for. There are collections of suggestions, some of them quite old, but they’re just recipes for things that have been done to death before.

Where is Doonesbury?