this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Fuck AI

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A Massachusetts couple claims that their son's high school attempted to derail his future by giving him detention and a bad grade on an assignment he wrote using generative AI.

An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.

In what appears to be the first case of its kind, at least in Massachusetts, a couple has sued their local school district after it disciplined their son for using generative AI tools on a history project. Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments and that the punishment visited upon their son for using an AI tool—he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.

Yeah, I'm 100% with the school on this one.

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[–] Pyflixia@kbin.melroy.org 25 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

Dude, the fact that the student has to use AI tools to get by, does not mean he's going to be a success story in life. It just means he's going to find shortcuts and exploits to make things easier over everyone else that had to do things the natural way. This is no different than someone using calculators in math tests where it's not allowed. This is no different than someone simply peeking over another's work and copying down. Using AI generative tools to gain an advantage is in the same ballpark.

So these entitled parents and that entitled student can go get fucked. I hope these universities see this and recognize that this student is a borderline cheater and hopefully deny him anyways if this gets overturned.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 14 points 22 hours ago

I'd say more than borderline cheater but yeah.

[–] Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 7 points 22 hours ago (3 children)

In my 20+ year career (god I'm old) every time I felt like I was cheating I was praised for figuring out a faster way to do it.

Granted, the point of education is to learn something and having an AI spit out an essay means you've failed at demonstrating your knowledge.

But let's not pretend that using shortcuts isn't rewarded outside of school.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 4 points 20 hours ago

...if you get a tough job, one that is hard, and you haven’t got a way to make it easy, put a lazy man on it, and after 10 days he will have an easy way to do it, and you perfect that way and you will have it in pretty good shape.

Clarence E. Bleicher

[–] snowsuit2654@lemmy.blahaj.zone -3 points 16 hours ago

Is generative AI going to be the calculator of the future? Seems probable, but I don't know of course.

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[–] klemptor@startrek.website 18 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Great job parents, now your kid will learn nothing from this teachable moment.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 16 points 22 hours ago

Kid learns nothing by cheating on the assignment.

Well, at least the bad grade and detention will be a teachable moment.

Parents: Hold my daytime wine.

[–] eran_morad@lemmy.world 17 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

These fucking dickbrain parents. What do they think, they win the lawsuit and Stanford doesn’t realize the kid took a shortcut?

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 5 points 18 hours ago

Then they’ll sue Stanford.

[–] lowleveldata@lemmy.world 11 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

why send your kid to school tho if you think they can just solve everything by AI

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 10 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Don't give them any ideas.

Because everything is awful, I fully expect to see "homeschooled by AI" within the next 2-3 years.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 9 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago) (3 children)

When I was a kid, we had a period of some repetitive math work I got sick of. So I wrote a TI-84 program to automate it, even showing its work I would write down.

I wasn't really supposed to do that, but my teacher had no problem with this. I clearly understood the work, and its not just punching the equation into WolframAlpha.

It would be awesome if there was an AI "equivalent" to that. Like some really primitive offline LLM you were allowed to use in school for basic automation and assistance, but requires a lot of work to set up and is totally useless without it in. I can already envision ways to set this up with BERT or Llama 3B.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 9 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

It would be awesome if there was an AI "equivalent" to that

It's called your brain / learning. That's why you're there. If the specifics of the curriculum are too tedious, that's on the school to address.

Learning how to parse and comprehend information to find an answer is just as important as the answer.

[–] ZDL@ttrpg.network 4 points 19 hours ago

If the specifics of the curriculum are too tedious, that’s on the school to address.

This! This right here. So many school curricula are designed by people who seem to despise children and want to make them suffer that I wonder why we bother with schools at all sometimes.

(Of course I also refer to Chinese high schools as institutionalized child abuse, so what do I know?)

[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 4 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

to be fair, understanding something well enough to automate it probably requires learning it in the first place. Like obviously an AI that just tells you the answer isnt going to get you anywhere, but it sounds more like the user you were replying to was suggesting an AI limited enough that it couldnt really tell you the answer to something, unless you yourself went through the effort to teach it that concept first. Im not sure how doable this is in practice, My suspicion is that to actually be able to be useful in that regard, the AI would have to be fairly advanced and just pretend to not understand a concept until adequately "taught" by the student, if only to be able to tell if it was taught accurately and tell the student that they got it wrong and need to try again, rather than reinforce an incomplete or wrong understanding, and that theres a risk that current AI used for this could instead be "tricked" by clever wording into revealing answers that its supposed to act like it doesnt know yet (on top of the existing issues with AI spitting out false information by making associations that it shouldnt actually make), but if someone actually made such a thing successfully, I could see it helping with some subjects. I'm reminded of my college physics professors who would both let my class bring a full page of notes and the class textbook to refer to during tests- under the reasoning that a person who didnt understand how to use the formulas in the text wouldnt be able to actually apply them, but someone who did but misremembered a formula would have the ability to look them up again in the real world. These were by far some of the toughest tests I ever had. Half of the credit was also from being given a copy of the test to do again for a week as homework, where we were as a class encouraged to collaborate and teach eachother how so solve the problems given, again on the logic that explaining something to someone else helped teach the explainer that thing too.

[–] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

You worded this much better than I could.

Yes I was thinking of two directions:

  • A "smarter" AI, though I think a better term would be "customized," specifically tailored to only help with knowledge that the student already "learned" in the context.

  • A "dumb" AI thats too unreliable to use for lazy ChatGPT style answers, but can be a primitive assistant to bounce ideas off of or help with phrasing, wording, formatting and basic tasks that are too onerous or trivial for a human/student to help with.

Not many people are familiar with the latter because, well, they only use uncached ChatGPT, but I find small LLMs to already be useful as a kind of autocomplete or sanity check when my brain is stuck (much like it was without my TI84 BASIC program), and the experience is totally different because the response is instant (as the context is cached on your machine).

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[–] halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago

I wasn't really supposed to do that, but my teacher had no problem with this. I clearly understood the work, and its not just punching the equation into WolframAlpha.

This is the way it should be. If you created the program on your own, as opposed to copying it from elsewhere, you had to know how to do the work correctly in the first place. You've already demonstrated that you understand the process beyond just being able to solve a single equation. You then aren't wasting time "learning" something you've already learned just to finish an otherwise arbitrary number of problems.

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[–] jjjalljs@ttrpg.network 9 points 22 hours ago

Think the kid derailed his own future by not following the instructions/norms

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de -2 points 14 hours ago

I hope him and his parents get bullied.

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