To teach in the time of ChatGPT is to know pain

LLM use is the most demoralizing problem I’ve faced as a college instructor.

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[doubleyewdee]

Does work require you to understand what you're doing? SOME work does, in theory, like coding, where you need to be able to fix it if there are issues, and if you know nothing it will be much harder.

My day job is coding (I ... work on AI infrastructure, I come in peace )

Even in that vein the work itself varies wildly in terms of how much I need to concern myself with the quality, veracity, and suitability of the LLM output.

I rewrote our (sadly bespoke) infra-as-code template tooling/mini-DSL over the last ~month to fix several longstanding issues, improve performance, enhance the user experience during validation, etc. I did use Opus 4.6 a great deal in this effort, particularly at the beginning, but by the end I had touched ~95% of all net new code in some fashion. It's very awesome to watch an LLM just blit out an entirely correct AST parser and consumer while you go get a cup of coffee. It does feel transformational to the career. Of course, I then reviewed it, found a variety of testing gaps, found areas where my specification was either wrong or ambiguous, etc. Thorough reviews are the order of the day here.

On the other hand, I just slapped together a thing for my team to do some API calls to keep our CI path filters for build validations synched across N branches and M build tasks (embarassing that I find myself having to write such a banal, seemingly commonly desirable tool). That code needed considerably less hands-on, deep inspection. For one thing, it's a much simpler subject matter. That aforementioned template tooling runs on many thousands of CI runs every day, plus developer workstations, and of course we use it in many different ways. Getting another 5% performance gain from it matters. Keeping strict compatibility with the labyrinthine nigh-unreadable previous implementation is paramount. The tool that runs once every couple months on my MacBook to update our path filters? Completely different measures for quality.

I have a lot of empathy for the educators fighting the LLM insurgency because, genuinely, they're doing what they should be. However, I also have a lot of empathy for the people for whom education in a specific subject matter is perceived more as an obstacle they must surmount rather than an opportunity for growth. So much of my own schooling genuinely felt pointless at the time and, frankly, a lot of it was pointless in hindsight. Mandatory classes in things which, to this day, have never served me. Being dragooned into a typing class when I was already outpacing the instructor and every other student was absurd. Dragging myself through classes where the desired outcome was not improving my ability to apply gained knowledge but rather to recite memorized things or repeat application of the same formulae is an experience that many students have felt. The teachers are not to blame here, they're working inside a system with perverse objectives that work against the core concept of educating students. However, the students can't be blamed for looking around at this and thinking to themselves "why should I give a solitary shit about this if the AI gets me back to things I find meaning in faster"?

And yes, kids love absurd, seemingly imbecilic and infantile crap. I just don't think that's especially novel. I loved (and still do love) things which are almost certainly not what you'd classify a "good use of one's time." I think having the space to be inefficient and a bit feckless at times is an empowering and necessary part of growing up, and of being a human in general. Foisting a culture of "24x7 grindset" upon people leaves many people ... dissatisfied, to say the least.

Our society in places seems structured to pulverize people in the mill of grading, testing, ensuring an immaculate and entirely full dawn-to-dusk schedule of "things which will look good on your entrance exam," or "professional networking and socialization," or whatever mechanism to "prove" one is a "useful member of society," and to me it's no wonder those same people for whom these things are just not their passion are going to use any and every available tool to lose less of themselves to these sometimes soulless, unfulfilling drudgeries.

So, would I use an LLM in a mandatory class for which I have no passion? Hell yeah. All day, every day. Would I be more inclined to either discard the LLM, or try and do things I enjoy by hand for a subject which I'm passionate about? Yes, at least ... yes if I had the actual opportunity in my life to devote the required time.

 

[doubleyewdee]

I appreciate your up-front admission of willingness to use LLMs to cheat in a mandatory, passionless class -- I used the word "cheat" to emphasize the downside of cheating yourself of education in that class's subject. You do not want or need that subject because it's not your career or passion. I suppose that is typical of most students, especially young ones who are forced to be in school.

The point of these non-mandatory classes is broadening your view of the world. It's likely that AI will continue to undercut this forced broadening, and students will exclusively train towards their career. CompSci majors will know coding and architecture but not literature. Physicists will know physics and math but not botany. Designers will know art and design history but not anthropology. This type of focus is already common, but those who might have broadened their world will be intellectually smaller and more boring. Given that executives have time and again said they prefer to hire people with broad horizons and experiences, the business world will be less creative. It will be sad for civilization but those young students will be happy to not take those broadening subjects or to cheat their way thru them!

My life experience has taught me that mandatory, passionless work neither enriches me nor endears me to that subject matter. You can sit a person down in front of a task which they do not enjoy, and tell them their livelihood depends on them completing it, and they will indeed usually complete it to whatever term of satisfaction you give. Will they be enriched for it? I'm not so sure.

The very best argument for these kinds of things is that life does involve rote, dull, rigorous work to get through, so one must learn to grit their teeth and bear these things. I "learned" that a lot in school, in fact. What I did not learn, and not due to any cheating (my motto was more "I'm just not going to do this" or "I will invest in getting exactly a passing grade and nothing more"), was that it was somehow good to have a big stack of these experiences, and that it would somehow be better for my mental health to browbeat myself for hours or days on end completing tasks which held no purpose or value for me.

Very, very few people have the luxury of being able to focus exclusively on their education, or to focus solely on making it through these sorts of classes or work that they find uninteresting, uninspiring, or actively unpleasant to be in. They also need to work. Or they need to do the "pre-work" that is a lot of schooling in the US such as "extracurriculars" which young people are told are simply mandatory for them to "make it in the world." Forget whether they enjoy it or not, forget whether these things are rewarding, you're told up and down that you simply must do these things whether or not you might find them somewhere between dull and loathsome because otherwise you're ... not going to eat. You will be a pariah, a millstone dragging down your peers, a loser.

This is a big part of why people will gravitate to these shortcuts. Because the thing is, while it sounds nice to say "time is the great equalizer," it's not actually true. Time which is genuinely usable for secondary pursuits (such as deep diving into tangential educational subjects which you're required to participate in on some level but in no way enjoy) varies heavily from person to person. The time I had to focus on school work at home was less than many of my peers due to abuse issues and living in an unsafe home. That said, the time I had was also more than some of my other peers. If I could accomplish the work with a tool in less time than without, yes I would do that. I skimmed books that I didn't enjoy in order to produce book reports. I did math the way it worked for me and then went back and "showed my work" in the way the instructor demanded if that's what it took. People, it turns out, quite like tools, and quite like convenience. Getting people to voluntarily discard tool use for their own betterment requires genuine work on the part of the entity pushing for that. It requires something to be given in return, in the case of a class someone would rather LLM their way through, that's either more actual time to do the work "correctly" or more engaging material or something else.

Painting all of this with a binary and broad brush is doing a great disservice to the people on the other end of the education experience from the teachers. "It's too bad you're willing to be lazy," which is more or less how your reply came across to me, is quite lacking in empathy, ungrounded in the reality many people experience. There are many factors involved in why someone chooses to not do the assignments precisely as instructed. Sure, you can just say "that's cheating," but to me that's tantamount to levying identical scorn to a person who steals food for sustenance as to someone who has all they need and more and still robs those in less fortunate situations.

 

[doubleyewdee]

Here’s the deal. You don’t need to go to college. Nobody does. Whilst it’s true that a lot of university and public policy types have forgotten that, I haven’t.

This is not at all what young people are told. Acting like it is doesn't make it true, nor does it help young people who could never have the worldly experience to reach this conclusion on their own when making life-altering, potentially financially ruinous decisions about their future.

I'm happy to do my part of the work to change the social contract, but where we are right now is far removed from a common acceptance (in the US) that college is this wholly optional pursuit of pure higher education rather than a gambit to gain social status.

College is supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to separate the people who want to think from the people who don’t. That was the original social contract and I’m perfectly fine re-enforcing that. If it turns out that certain swaths of the employer class who long ago found out sorting these people to the top of the hiring pool was useful still find it useful, I’m also fine with that. If they don’t, welp, I can’t stop them. But I kinda suspect they will.

Ah yes, count me in the "people who do not want to think" cohort since I did not attend college, I suppose. Certainly nothing else came in to play there! If you elect not to attend college you are simply an unthinking dullard upon whom scorn should be heaped by your intellectual betters, I suppose.

The "social contract" for university attendance has never been exclusively about this bright-line divide you're portraying. People have, for centuries, attended universities through cause of familial mandate, avoidance of military service, and myriad other reasons entirely divorced from unencumbered pursuit of thought for the sake of it. Certainly some people are there purely for the thinking, but I'm skeptical that this has hewed anywhere near a uniform population of students with that cause at any time in the last several centuries.

You yourself have laid out a case for ongoing financial incentives for those in this supposed "wanting to think" segment of humanity to attend college which undermines the more noble ideal of purely academic pursuit. Which means an ongoing system in which you incentivize attendees who do or do not particularly "want to think," but rather simply conclude that getting through a period of mandatory thinking of a certain type would enrich them monetarily and so elect to embark on this work in the pursuit of having to think less later in life by virtue of having greater financial flexibility. A kind of thought, I suppose, though I'm not sure it rises to filtering out those true thinkers from the chaff that you're envisioning.