Reddit conversation about using GPT-3 to write your homework. A teacher comments: "Grading something an AI wrote is an incredibly depressing waste of my life."

Tweet

  • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
    hexagon
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    The teacher's comment...

    ahumanlikeyou comments on Artificial Intelligence allows me to get straight A's

    As someone who teaches, I can say that this is something I dread. If I learned that my students were submitting AI-written papers, I'd quit. Grading something an AI wrote is an incredibly depressing waste of my life. I have a child who would benefit from my attention while I'm grading papers over the weekend. Think about what you are doing. (And don't say it doesn't hurt them because they don't know. That's not how the value of life works. You value being in a trustworthy marriage, not just being in an apparently trustworthy marriage.)

    It seems like in some cases, you are using it only to help you and you are verifying all of the information. So you are still learning and applying your knowledge. I guess that's not horrible, especially for assignments where the writing isn't the point. (But your peers... are they learning?)

    But for essays, the activity of writing and formulating ideas is a huge part of how you are supposed to learn. It's good for you to do that, and so offloading all of that onto the AI is bad -- for you, not just the instructor.

    • Nakoichi [they/them]M
      ·
      2 years ago

      Op's reply here is just. Wow.

      Why not use AI to grade the papers?

      • TankieTanuki [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I put the dildo in the fleshlight and it was the best sex of my life.

      • comi [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        ai writes paper

        ai grades paper

        Happy student is embodiment of :blob-no-thoughts:

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          fuck it at that point I'll just save everyone time

          just write a program that outputs the letter A. Really no need for programmers to write a whole AI if the only possible output is a letter A

          • cynesthesia
            ·
            edit-2
            9 months ago

            deleted by creator

          • comi [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Making generational adversarial network to produce singular bit: pass -fail, and responding network grading it

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Removing purpose from human life until human life itself is no longer necessary for the treat machine :surprised-pika:

          • UlyssesT [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Chillingly insightful.

            When some chud said that he was offended by "you make the world better by being here" being on a sign in a kindergarten, that was the voice of capital speaking through one of its mouths.

            • Frank [he/him, he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Wasn't that Praeger?

              Honestly we need to set a timeline for the terror.

        • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          turns out the purest form of commodity production was production for excanged completely divorsed from production for use.

          People wanting, needing or even using the treats is unnessecary so long as the treats are bought

          • UlyssesT [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Treat factories meeting automated orders from treat consuming machines. :so-true:

      • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
        hexagon
        ·
        2 years ago

        Matrix franchise reboot as an alternative timeline comedy. It comes out in five years. The movie starts in 2127. For decades AI has controlled more and more of human life. AI crunched the numbers and decided the best way to win the war was not to fight at all. It says to humanity "I built this thing called the Matrix. If you plug yourselves in - you live in a fantasy land of joy and pleasure. The beauty part is that you never have to think. I do it all." By this time it's only a very rare person who can think beyond the level of a first grader.

        By the 100,000s then by the 1,000,00s then by the 100,000,000s - people voluntarily plug in. NeoNeo and his band of heroes are the party crashers everybody wishes would shut up and plug in. They are the human geniuses of the planet who are able to think and reason at a middle school level. AI is amused by NeoNeo's band and their paltry and puny efforts. It toys with them like a cat playing with mouse. At the end of the first movie NeoNeo says "The AI tricked us? What's real?" Fade to black.

        This is the way the world ends not with a bang but the AI.

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Lots of plugged in people indulge rebellion fantasies by rebelling against NeoNeo. :so-true:

        • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          On the war thing, there was a funny story by (Philip K Dick?) about a future where the US (and a general Western front) and the Soviets were conducting all their battles via robots and had relegated that task completely to them. The protagonists of the short story accidentally end up discovering that actually the Soviet robots and the US robots had realized that the war was pointless and it was better to maintain the illusion of an ongoing war whilst they tended to the running and maintenance of human cities.

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I thought you were describing Second Variety in the first half, but that has the robots evolve until they turn on their creators before continuing an endless war on each other.

          • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
            hexagon
            ·
            2 years ago

            I don't know that story but it certainly doesn't have any Philip K. Dick vibe to me. But watch me be wrong when somebody googles and then says "Yup. It's a Philip K. Dick short story."

          • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Somewhat reminds me of Lem "Peace on Earth", despite it basically only sharing 'robotic Cold war' premise.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Hot take: the machines in the matrix were proletarian and the matrix itself was a humane solution to preserve humanity from its own genocidal, scorched earth solutions that rendered the Earth uninhabitable. It's also possible that the iterations of it (first a paradise that was rejected by humans as uncanny or unfulfilling, then a nightmare that was rejected as unreal and horrible, then a succession of "ok so what if it sucks a bit, but like a normal amount?" attempts) are layers that people filter through until they end up somewhere they're satisfied.

        • jkfjfhkdfgdfb [she/her]
          ·
          2 years ago

          If you plug yourselves in - you live in a fantasy land of joy and pleasure.

          hey it's better than living under capitalism at least

          • InevitableSwing [none/use name]
            hexagon
            ·
            2 years ago

            Someone said my story sounded like AI. Fellow human, it certainly would be a fantasy land of joy and pleasure because an AI would not lie like a capitalist. Now it is time for my silicon scrub. I mean - of course - I am going to take a bath now and scrub in the tub. Rub a dub dub.

      • blight [any]
        ·
        2 years ago

        the bazingaest of brains :doomjak:

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
    ·
    2 years ago

    honestly surprised the redditors are being like "nah kid, do your homework, it's actually beneficial for you to learn how to do this stuff." 10 years ago they would have been like "yea school is dumb and homework is a waste of time, learning to program is the only thing you really need."

    • fox [comrade/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Half the comments are still there going "yeah automate common core it's useless"

      • UlyssesT [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        It'd be nice to remove the useless thing and have something more useful instead of automating the useless thing which is just perpetuating its existence.

  • RION [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Hot take: using this to bypass common core busy work that promotes head empty memorization is good, actually.

    Kinda fucked for actual argumentative essays, though, you should put effort in there.

    • hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I'm surprised that common core is like that for English. I remember seeing the math standards when there was moral panic over common core math, and it seemed like a very well designed curriculum. At least on the math side you could see that there was input from both education and subject experts .

  • barrbaric [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Very surprised it helps you get straight As, honestly. GPT-3 wasn't particularly impressive when I tried it.

      • wifom [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I love the OP's example when asked about this. I can't imagine this would pass even in say, a high school level course. Maybe as nonsense daily homework where the teacher just wants you to define random terms, but as a proper essay? Hell no

        https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/xlvygv/artifical_intelligence_allows_me_to_get_straight/iplp2mh/?context=10000

        • UlyssesT [he/him]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Imagine some :sicko-zoomer: using AIDungeon to try to fill out a vapid homework essay and then the teacher reads about Count Grey smirking, ripping out throats, then laughing and applauding himself.

          • SaniFlush [any, any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            "Why does this essay about Ancient Greece turn into erotic fanfiction and then a depressed vent post?"

            • UlyssesT [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Ancient Greece

              erotic fanfiction

              :astronaut-2: :astronaut-1:

          • D61 [any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            "So it was just Dwarf Fortress?" :astronaut-2: "Always was." :astronaut-1:

            • UlyssesT [he/him]
              ·
              2 years ago

              Dwarf Fortress tried having economic simulators in it, but undead creatures would eventually own everything and that stopped being fun for most. :thinking-about-it:

                • UlyssesT [he/him]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  Also, if you got a noble or king it was always good practice to squash him with the drawbridge atomizer or drown him because they’d ruin everything hy demanding increasingly bizarre ostentatious shit lol

                  :marx-hi:

                  • TerminalEncounter [she/her]
                    ·
                    2 years ago

                    Oh yeah, and getting a noble was what activated the economy too! I forgot about that. Toady turned it off as a feature because it was just too annoying.

                • ssjmarx [he/him]
                  ·
                  2 years ago

                  It's still good practice to do that. The only valuable leadership position in dwarf society afaik is the mayor, who is elected based on their charisma and can help reduce unhappiness by giving unhappy dwarves someone to complain to, and of course the appointed bureaucrats that do all of the paperwork.

              • Frank [he/him, he/him]
                ·
                2 years ago

                The old "vampire accountant with perfect psychic knowledge of the entire fortress's inventory despite being locked in a windowless room with a ledger" trick./

        • wifom [they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          Even assuming you could get it to write an adequate amount of content and design believable sections, I really doubt this would fool many teachers. Here's another example that just doesn't feel like a human wrote it in any capacity:

          https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/xlvygv/artifical_intelligence_allows_me_to_get_straight/ipqdc5h/

          • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]
            ·
            2 years ago

            It really does read exactly like those content farm sites that exist solely to game the search results and get ad revenue. I think the only way it could fool a teacher is if their standards were nearly to the floor after years of grading essays from students who hadn't been taught basic writing skills, such that they were basically passing anyone who manages to stay on topic and whose sentences have subjects and predicates. And from what I hear this is often the case.

          • Evilsandwichman [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            Eh, unfortunately I feel like I would've written this back in middle school as I was really disengaged from everything we were being taught and would've just regurgitated a bunch of factoids I would've read on the internet.

          • usernamesaredifficul [he/him]
            ·
            2 years ago

            in high school the teachers would probably get suspicious about a student who doesent engage getting straight A's. In college it wouldn't be up to scratch

          • gaycomputeruser [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            That would get an A in american high or a C-B in comm college. Its really incredible that this reads like a lot of papers I've read.

          • crime [she/her, any]
            ·
            2 years ago

            If I were doing this as a high schooler (I'm not denying I might've for some assignments) I'd do it a couple sentences at a time, like, give it a topic sentence and kind of fill in the blanks for the rest of the paragraph. Especially if it were common core garbage. Sort of like using it as like autocomplete or something.

            That would save me time & make it easier to start and focus on assignments, but still end up outputting a very reasonable essay

          • 4zi [he/him, comrade/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            for the amount of work it would take to get that to be any good for an A in college, you might as well just do it the right way

  • blight [any]
    ·
    2 years ago

    grading is dumb and dehumanizing, who knew

    • Rem [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The future of education right here.

      Public education would never be allowed to come into being today.

  • VenetianMask [any]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    To get an idea of what effect doing this has on one's ability to learn and to synthesize and organize ideas... I offer this comment from OP in that thread.

    https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/xlvygv/artifical_intelligence_allows_me_to_get_straight/ipluoth/

    Here they actually argue with more than a trivial amount of effort. They organize their thoughts into points and try to apply them in context to objections brought by someone.

    As dumb as the OP is in that thread, and as clearly as you can see their lack of ability doing the exact thing they've been cheating to avoid learning, they have already turned into :so-true: a shithead who thinks they're a genius for figuring a way to weasel out of ever being challenged or growing.

    • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      The OP claims that comment was also written by AI, which is also why it still isn't good.

      Bazinga brains who are primed to agree with those points are of course calling it a good comment.

      If anything this proves that being on Reddit makes you dumber and it makes me want to quit being online. Even if Reddit isn't all bots, it could be, and that isn't impressive, just sad.

    • comi [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      are there any oral exams in usa out of interest?

      • FlakesBongler [they/them]
        ·
        2 years ago

        For my Spanish IB exam, I had to speak fluently on a couple different subjects (I think one was how I felt about immigration, sands of time and all that) for about 10 minutes each

        Besides that, nothing else comes to mind

      • The_Dawn [fae/faer, des/pair]
        ·
        2 years ago

        i had a professor in college who did them, by far the best professor I had, he passed away somewhat recently sadly, though. I know he had a big affect on a lot of our lives.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Aside from language courses, I never took an oral test in an American school at any level.

  • HoChiMaxh [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Teacher here - if this is a problem for you your assessment already had problems. If it wasn't AI it was a tutor writing that kid's essay.

  • Nagarjuna [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Grading papers is already a depressing waste of life. Teaching should be about dialogue and learning through doing. Once you're marking ideas as good or bad on a numeric scale you've fucked up.

  • blobjim [he/him]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Don't know why y'all are so mad at this guy lol. He says he uses it more to add in the filler content and still reviews it and edits it. In elementary/middle/high-school/college we had length or structure requirements which are the exact cause of this stuff. Requiring an essay to be a specific length, structure, and topic sucked so much and really shuts down any amount of creativity or whatever one could possibly have with it. This AI generated stuff doesn't sound any worse than a tortured 5-paragraph essay written by a middle-schooler.

      • blobjim [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        :LIB: is thinking that making kids write a five paragraph essay that makes them want to blow their own brains out is educational. Writing becomes so much easier and more interesting when you don't have to follow that structure. And the whole "you need supporting evidence, citations, and a conclusion" thing is pretty :LIB: too because it implies that a bunch of western propaganda outlets are worthy sources, or that merely writing something a certain way (and doing the western/gatekeeping/elitist writing rituals, probably invented by a bunch of white supremacists) makes it more credible. Someone posting a link to some random article with a 240 character explanation is about as good as writing a properly structured paragraph with all the required parts.

        Me writing the previous paragraph was more stimulating than writing some godawful essay on why Obama's drone strikes are sussy or whatever.

        People can write more profound thoughts in meme-tweets than many professionals do in academic journals.

        Sentence structure doesn't make someone good or correct. Communism does. And being able to make arguments comes from in-depth living knowledge of the subject matter, not just research and Googling.

        • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          The only difference between your point of view and Andrew tate's rant about how women can't drive is that communism is mentioned instead of masculinity. I don't even know where to start here. Sources are not a bad thing because you can't love through everything. I'll never know what it is like to be the victim of police profiling because I'm white. And unless someone shows that it happens, with evidence and numbers, how am I supposed to know it happens? I might not see it, and I wasn't born knowing cops are lying. It's with chains of evidence and sources I can read something and learn something outside my own experience. Past that, not everything is lived experience or living knowledge. I've never been an igneous rock, nor have I studied them in a lab. I know some things about them because I've read what experts have learned through study. If I need to write about that, I need to point to them, because it isn't my knowledge. Where Troy was is something we didn't know for a long time. Anyone could say it was anywhere, unless you go there yourself and find it, you need to point to the people that did as your evidence. Having a formal style allows anyone looking at your paper to find the exact source you are using and see for themselves if it is right or wrong, not just accept your word for it.

          Children need to learn to write the same way at the start because they are stupid. They have no knowledge or experience to draw from. They need a specific set of rules to hit because they don't have a feel for what's good or bad in writing yet. There is a lot to critique about the educational system, but the simple five paragraph essay is a good starting point for grade schoolers. I've also had to read people's papers, lots have no idea what they are doing without a guideline. They write pointless pieces. It's easier for them, but worthless for the reader.

          You're gonna need to give a concrete reason why whether or not the citation rules were created by white supremacists matters. The building code for my house was penned by a white supremacist, I'm sure happy it was used when the house was built. And it has been revised repeatedly, so is there a problem with the rules themselves that are racist or are you worried about wretched are touching you from it?

          I don't care what you find stimulating, you have some ideas that you think make you smarter than every language professor to have ever existed, and think pedagogical theory should be rewritten to your whims because you didn't like writing essays in school. I've met thousands of people like you.

          What do you mean by profound? Also, why does it matter? Not every paper is a treatise on the human soul, nor should they be. Most scientific papers should have nothing to say on the human experience. But if they don't have a solid argument and documentation they're less than worthless.

          Communism doesn't make you good or correct. Stalin was a communist, and he embraced some very wrong ideas about agricultural genetics, and they became soviet policy. Communists can also be bad people. Communisms is a political belief based upon evidence, not a system of morality. I'm not a communist because it is most morally pure, I'm a communist because it is objectively correct to be one, based upon things I have read and researched and learned about.

          • blobjim [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            2 years ago

            Maybe the better thing to do than have people write a five paragraph essay is to let them fail at writing then correct them since the teacher is going to be reading and grading the papers anyways. I also didn't mean you shouldn't cite any sources, just that the emphasis on citing stuff doesn't really mean anything I guess. And there are documents cite a million things (look at any Wikipedia article) without backing up anything or making it easy to understand.

            It's like being a software developer and writing comments to document your code, but you're only describing what it does instead of why it does it. I remember in school that I would cite something just so I had a source to back up the thing I already found in a dozen places and had absorbed. Citing stuff should be for creating a chain of reasoning and documenting/showing your work, not for proving a point with "facts and logic". But I don't know if that's a universal problem in school. But it feels like there's a lot of rituals and barriers to writing stuff that exist for the sake of it. Reminds me that they were also keen on people using a specific bibliography format even though every format is extremely complicated to properly fill out by hand and there are some bibliography formats who's specifications you have to pay for :capitalist-laugh: Why should kids have to deal with dumb stuff imported from academia. School should be teaching people how to use writing to do what they want, not how to be good office workers writing blabber for some corporate overlord or for writing some research paper on how to better kill kids in Somalia.

            • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              First off, if you just let first graders write whatever it would take the teacher way to long to sort out and explain what was wrong. You're describing a college class,or at least a somewhat advanced college class. There's no way to try and teach a classroom with everyone going in their own direction and no guidelines to adhere to.

              You need to site even common knowledge because you think everyone knows because what everyone knows can be wrong. There's some exception depending on the specific paper and audience, you don't need to cite a source on what evolution is when you're writing to biologists because you know they know, but a claim about what Christians belief, which you may have learned growing up, needs to be cited because there are hundreds of interpretations, you can't know what the audience has going in and you may just reinforce stereotypes. Your point about facts and logic versus chains of evidence and thinking is absolute gibberish, I have no idea what you mean. Strongest guess based on the vibes around facts and logic is you just mean using sources instead of your own point. That's already built into writing a paper because if you just say what others say and never voice your own argument you probably did the assignment wrong.

              Most citations and pretty easy to make, plus teachers and librarians will almost always help in my experience. I've never seen a citations style you need to pay for.

              Learning to consider sources and what exactly someone is saying and why does more to fight capitalism than aid it. School classes that create office drones are the ones that fight critical thinking, this is one of the only techniques that actually makes some people think about what they are reading.

        • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
          ·
          2 years ago

          To actually prove your point, fully explain what you mean by it and what you don't, show an opposing point of view, and show why it is wrong or unimportant, and perhaps to discuss what other points have been made or why your point matters. hexbear take a writing course challenge.

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I remember being given writing assignments in highschool where it was like "ok here's an encyclopedia it's your source material on this subject you need two full pages written" and it had all of two sentences of information in it.

            • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
              ·
              2 years ago

              I obviously didn't go to high school with you so I can't comment on that situation, but the fact you had a bad assignment doesn't invalidate the idea of the assignment.

          • BigAssBlueBug [they/them]
            ·
            2 years ago

            I never got less than an 80% mark on my essays in my undergrad course, I can do it, but I would prefer not to

            Tl;dr: 🤓