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Wasay Saeed's avatar

I'm a current student, so I've found your advice particularly profound, but inspiring.

AI is first of all, I—Intelligent. Whatever ChatGPT can do, a human can do too. Is there one human who will beat ChatGPT at everything? Absolutely not, but if I wanted someone to teach me about Software Engineering, I can bring up ChatGPT, or I could go to my friend in Software Engineering and he can offer a similar service.

ChatGPT is nothing new. If I wanted someone to do my assignment for me, I could just ask the smart kid to do it. I could search up the assignment on the internet.

So the principle of offloading your assignments, your learning, to something else isn't new. But it is a lot easier. If I looked it up on the internet, I'd know the info is sketchy, so I'd have to look it over, review it, reflect based on my own knowledge and adjust accordingly. With AI, it's good enough that I don't "really" have to check. (AI Hallucinations exist, but at the undergraduate level, most AI are serviceable). Then, we have a grave failure in the system.

I loved the point you made about allowing failure—allowing someone to create their own path, but without failure—without feedback, we're sleepwalking through life.

Using AI for assignments is obviously wrong, at the very least because it's dishonest, but if we've reached a point where AI can consistently do the work, then what's the point of learning the content? Maybe we should adjust the curricula to allow failure even with AI. Perhaps we can ask more ambitious questions? Instead of a single worksheet, we could ask someone to think of a larger system—using AI to solve debugging problems, but larger architectural decisions need to be made by you. Maybe we need to ask more of our students to the point where they do fail, at the frontier of AI's capabilities, and allow an opportunity for students to grow and develop. Some will fail, some will succeed, but like you said, we don't have minute, atomic control over everyone, nor should we want it.

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Alberto Romero's avatar

Thank you for these reflections Wasay!

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