There have always been students that cheat themselves out of learning. It may even be the majority. It’s best to focus on the ones who have a genuine desire to learn.
While I see your point, these people do benefit greatly from great teachers! (They’d do well in either case but do even better in the right environment).
I think a bigger problem is in programs where you have group projects. You can't really be the sole person who's against using LLMs and in favour of doing 'the right thing'. Unlike what some people think there's little difference in terms of raw intelligence or ability to get rewarded by the system in the 'cheater' group vs the 'non-cheater' group.
You ever hear the state if you owe the bank a 1000$ you have a problem, and if you owe the bank 100,000,000$ they have a problem? I think if a majority of students end up without basic skills the genius students will have problem. Will LLMs do that i don't think so but if you think its an acceptable outcome thats also not okay.
You can't just handwave the fact that we're requiring what probably amounts to two orders of magnitude more discipline and self control out of students than we've ever done before. The educational system will collapse under this.
I'm not seeing how it requires any more self control than not copying another student's work or asking them for the answer. It's basically the same thing. We're also talking about adults here. They understand if they're cheating.
The difference is huge. Put yourself in the shoes of a student.
The student you're copying from won't be sitting next to you for the rest of your career. The LLM probably will be, and you'll be probably expected to use it, so why not use it here as well?
All your peers are doing it too, and look at all the cool things they're doing while you're struggling with the basics. And what if the LLMs keep improving at a high rate? What if being able to use them efficiently turns out to be a more important skill than what you're being taught anyways?
Because you're paying a lot of money and opportunity cost to learn how to do something. No one needs the assignment. It's there for you to learn. You were given the assignment for you. Any adult should be able to understand this. We're not talking about 7 year olds asking why they need to learn to multiply when a calculator can do it better than them. These are 20 year olds. If they don't have the maturity for this, a university should not be accepting them.
Being able to use LLMs efficiently isn't a specific skill. It's a reflection of your ability to articulate what you want, which is a reflection of your understanding of the world, which is what you're in school to build. Terence Tao can get an LLM to do math better than I can. I can probably get one to build software better than he can.
And you can still use one to do cool things like your peers. Just not your assignments, the purpose of which is literally to teach you the basics that you're struggling with and that you're there to learn in the first place.
This is like why don't you copy out of the back of the book or look up proofs on the internet. It's all there, but doing that completely misses the point of why you're there.
This only makes any sense if youre happy dropping most folks from higher education.
You want adults to be very disciplined and rational. That sounds great but are most of the adults in your own life experience at this level? They certainly aren't for me (I'm not sure I am at this level).
If I recall correctly, there was a mandatory ENGR 101 class that all of the different engineering fields had to take at my school, and on the first day, the lecturer said somewhere around half (might've been more, might've been fewer, I don't remember anymore) of the students in the hall were not going to complete the degree. So yeah, most folks dropping sounds about right.
And it's not even about discipline; it's lying. If you're not going to do the work, just don't do the work. Don't turn it in. Pretty much every syllabus ever says that turning in work you did not do is grounds for failing the class and possibly expulsion.
And why would we want to pass these people through? Then when they come interview with someone like me, I'm still going to find out within like a minute of talking to them that they didn't actually learn anything, and they won't get hired. Do I want to work with somebody incompetent? No. Do I want to work with somebody dishonest? Definitely no. Those both make my job more difficult to have around. So then they end up with a bunch of debt complaining about how they don't have a job.
> To not bury your head in the sand hoping this will go away, because it won't.
Eh? As Greg K-H mentioned in that video from a few days back about how very disappointing Fable was when compared to its astronomical hype, LLMs that one can run locally are quite good enough for a great many tasks... including bug hunting in the Linux kernel. And -as LLM boosters keep saying- they're only keep getting better, right?
We absolutely should be telling people to stop using the LLMs from the major LLM manufacturers. Those manufacturers have spent so many billions of dollars on this project, made so many promises that they're going to have no way to keep, and now that they're running into resistance, [0] they're holding all of humanity hostage unless they're permitted to get intimately involved in the creation of new laws and regulations especially for them. [2]
Even if one only considers their recent threats to humanity, it's clear that these are not companies that deserve any of our hard-earned money.
[0] Some of that resistance comes from their ever-more-sharply-increasing cost to produce the next performance increment, some from folks asking the probing questions about their promises, claims, and business practices that should have been asked years ago, some from ongoing State AG's court cases in regards to their illegal conduct, and some from folks who -unsurprisingly- don't want enormous warehouses that suck up quite notable amounts of power [1] but provide dreadfully little revenue to the areas that house them in their communities, and still others who are starting to realize that benefits of cloud LLMs aren't worth the tradeoff of being unable to afford a new personal computer.
[1] Note carefully that I made no reference to water usage. The only counterargument you can make here is that 500MW -> 2GW is not a quite notable amount of power.
I am afraid that ship has already sailed, and we will have to live with the consequences.
At this point; I see no other scenario than having LLM doctors, LLM judges, etc. No matter the quality. We will get replaced. And if they do a worse job, nobody cares. If they do a better job, also nobody cares. Maybe you can pay more and get high effort model as your doctor.
These companies might not be the ones, my expectation is that they will be scrapped for their pieces, the losses distributed to the bagholders/taxpayers. But some version of them will.
This might be pure cyncisism with no positive value, but really I think we have no mechanisms left to stop going down on this trajectory.
Anyone else want their doctor to have access to LLMs? They need to verify, but to just cut them off from something with that much breadth seems insane.
I would prefer my doctor to have access to LLMs, just as I would prefer them to have access to google.
What I meant is different though. I fully expect to no longer have access to human doctors in a decade or two. Instead, LLMs will be the doctors. Likely government accredited ones. And my point is that in time, whether the LLM doctor is better or worse will not matter. Same with judges, same with the surveillance camera evaluators and private message examiners. I am saying we no longer have any mechanisms to stop these things from happening.
> They need to verify, but to just cut them off from something with that much breadth seems insane.
...homeboy here is behaving as if there aren't experts in this world who are paid to do and publish research and other experts who are paid to collate, analyze, vet, and publish that research for other domain experts to learn from. [0]
I'm fine with my doctor reading from expert-vetted documents. Hell, I'm more than fine with my doctor going through expert-vetted checklists; most of the time what's wrong with you can be easily figured by going through a few good checklists. I'm not fine with my doctor relying on a lossy-compressed database with a absentminded librarian that has a penchant for people-pleasing bolted on top.
I'm absolutely not against the use of ML systems in safety-critical domains like medicine, but I am absolutely against the use of LLMs in those domains.
[0] One might choose to retort with some variant of "But all that expert work is so expensive!". I would retort: "First, without that work the data fed into the LLM is catastrophically unreliable. Second, have you bothered to look at how much the major LLM manufacturers have spent over the past five years or so? I suspect that it's more money than has been spent on medical research 'meta analysis' over the past fifty years."
> At this point; I see no other scenario than having LLM doctors, LLM judges, etc. No matter the quality. We will get replaced. And if they do a worse job, nobody cares. If they do a better job, also nobody cares. Maybe you can pay more and get high effort model as your doctor.
Why should any of us pay more for reduced performance just so some capitalist can feel good about replacing a human with a machine? You know, the traditional premise of automation in manufacturing was that the outputs might be 80% as good as hand-crafted but 20% the price. Make that 120% the price and the whole equation changes!
Yes, but a little bit of lobbying and regulatory capture goes a long way.
At first, you provide the services for 20% the price and price out the competition. Also, human doctors also make mistakes, no? Do this long enough so that the long and costly process of educating physicians is no longer sustainable anymore. Then you regulate hard, after all, it is healthcare. Not anyone can and should just do it.
Then, once you are the only option left, jack up prices. We have seen this exact scenario play out many many times. This is just another version of it. And since trillions have already been burned, you can be sure that there will be a lot of desperation to make it happen.
To not bury your head in the sand hoping this will go away, because it won't.