yavor-atanasov

Gen Z definitely didn’t invent cheating, but LLMs brought qualitative difference and scale. That changes the properties of the system.

During my university most courses had a good mixture of take-home assignments/projects and in-class exams. Yes, people could always cheat either through plagiarism (usually easily caught) or at the extreme by getting someone else to do the work (which I have never personally seen).

Anecdotal data around me shows:

* outright paper/assignment generation via LLM

* using chatGPT as a “professor” proofreading and polishing course work before submission (arguably good use but depends on the personal effort)

* avoiding reading by asking chatGPT for summaries

* using chatGPT to help explain various concepts (this is a good example of using LLMs as a source for learning…accepting that occasionally they can lie)

In a small classroom where a good teacher-student interaction happens, I guess it’s easier to catch people cheating. But some universities (maybe most) have massive classes where a professor may never have an actual conversation with some students. That context makes cheating harder to detect.

I accept my outlook on this may be a bit bleaker (hopefully), but saying it’s business as usual is at the other extreme.

This thread made me think of education (as in schools). To paraphrase:

“Don’t post generated/AI-edited assignments. School is for conversation between humans”

AI can be a great tool for learning, but also can pollute or completely hijack the medium for human interaction and learning.

Having HN flooded with AI generated content will be sad as I like reading it, but losing that same fight at schools will be detrimental.

Recently upgraded my iPhone 11 to 16 (mostly because battery was not great anymore). I've turned off all of the gen AI stuff and enjoy the longer battery life and a better camera. I'm not an gen AI skeptic - I use it in other contexts (e.g. CoPilot, chatGPT). I just don't find Apple's current AI experiments that appealing really (e.g. emojis?? really?). I guess gradually they'll find the natural fit of these technologies in places where they actually bring value. At the moment it just feels like a salespitch to justify the over spec-ed phones we keep buying.

We like creating decentralised technologies to then graviate around centralised services built on top. The Internet was meant to be decentralised (it still is in terms of the protocols that make it work), but then we ended up consuming very much centralised services. Bitcoin's decentralised in terms of technology, but then we are centralising in terms of exchanges, wallets etc.

I guess the decentralisation aspects of a given technology just means it's a resilient building block. And since the only way we make sense of things nowadays is through markets, it's inevitable we starting building and consuming centralised services.

I'm not saying centralisation is good or bad btw, but I do share the irony in your reply, mostly because I find it funny when a new tech is being sold as new way of doing something in a decentralised way.