If caught using AI, fail the student. Students are supposed to do their own work. Copying and pasting from ChatGPT does not count. If it turns out later that a graduate used AI, cancel the degree.

I agree with the plan to ban students from using AI but wait ...

Look at how much AI is used in every other environment that we all work in and use, if we're going to ban the students then let's BAN Google and all AI applications.

Academic standards don’t always reflect real world situations to begin with. In most classes I’ve taken, reusing a paper or other assignment that one researched and wrote entirely on their own, even if it fits the criteria, is still considered plagiarism. The only exceptions (my own experience only) were when, as a photography student, professors allowed students to “reuse” some of their own work, say, making a better print out of something one submitted for a class on composition. In the real world, reuse of work would only matter if there were rights issues..

In the university I have just retired from - and in many others - "self plagiarism" isn't a thing, because plagiarism is defined as the unacknowledged use of the work of another for credit. Reusing material is generally against the rules (you can't submit the same PhD thesis at multiple institutions, for example) bu that's a different matter and not plagiarism.

why do you want to punish me for using 'AI' sir, when your whole fucking course 9K-a-year online course is written by 'AI'?

I'm okay with them using an AI so long as it isn't obvious. Then, it's just a tool they have used to help them. I mean, we don't complain when it's written on computer rather than by quill, right? Maybe using it can help aid them better organise their thoughts?

However, when it is obviously the work of an AI (and having played with ChatGPT, there seems to be a repetitive nature to what it outputs even if it uses slightly different words each time) then, yes, hard fail the student if they're not capable of sitting in front of the professor and writing something coherent by hand.

If an AI gets homework right then that is fine by me - the student must have generated several versions and understood the subject well enough to rejected the bad ones. Rejecting homework because one LLM says another LLM generated it is problematic. There is a high false positive rate which gets even higher when testing work that predates LLMs and has been used as training data.

(The way to profit from a gold rush is to sell shovels.)

It's real world job training.

53% ? Bit low in my opinion. Would have thought at least 80% for Undergrads.

Some of them have to realize that the homework answers generated by an LMM have a decent chance of being wrong. If you're going to cheat, there are ways to cheat that aren't as much of a throw of the dice. Sure, they take longer and may be more difficult, but if you're bothering to cheat, presumably you want to get something out of it and LMM cheating isn't guaranteed to get you anything.

As with Nutella and Reese's pieces, I do find that M&M cheating can be a bit of a crapshoot ... Smarties on the other hand ... works every time!

When calculators were a novelty, I am sure had ElReg existed then we would have read the same article, just reading "over half of undergrads in UK are using calculators".

and before that "are using beads"

and before that "are using fingers"

Artificial Imbecilence is just a tool. It will normalise and then we will be shouting at the next thing.

Embrace it. That's what progress looks like.

No, it isn't.

If I was a maths student and needed to demonstrate that I understood the material I was supposed to learn, then damn right I'd get failed for using a calculator.

This is why they don't allow them into a selection of pure maths exams. You're supposed to demonstrate that you are capable of not only solving the problem posed, but - and far more importantly - that you know why the answer is what it is. As every school teacher ever will have said at some point "Did not show working. 0/10"

When I got a calculator at school I showed my dad, and he gave me a calculation (what's a third of the diameter of a 13.25 inch circle?) to show him the answer while using his slide rule to get the results. He showed me the answer on his slide rule much faster than I could get an answer with the calculator. I laughed when my second calculation was accurate :-)

If using calculator you got the wrong result, then most likely you didn't understand it.

I am sure though there would be people just fat fingering they calculator and writing anything it spits out to their exam paper.

Unless the test specifically says "divide those two numbers using long division method. To compute intermediate results use grid method for multiplication, partial sums for addition and decomposition for subtraction. You cannot use your fingers, beads or any other device apart from your brain to aid calculations".

Don't see how it is helpful to force it more than once. Calculator just saves times you spend on hokey cokey.

It's the same with LLM. Surely you have to read what it spits out, understand it and judge whether it is worth being incorporated in your work. You can then redirect your cognitive resources to parts of the work that would need it more. It's like having an assistant that you can delegate the busy work to. Surely we should be teaching efficiency, resourcefulness and productivity too.

The calculator does a specific task and it is easy to decide whether having that task delegated is acceptable. If it's a child doing arithmetic tests, it is not. If it's a university student doing calculus, a calculator that can automate the insertion of terms into a formula the student derived is fine, but a program that automatically derives it is not. In the workplace, that program is probably fine as well.

An LLM is sufficiently capable that it could do a number of tasks, nearly all of which are not acceptable. The comparison to an assistant is valuable here: in school, you don't get to have an assistant. I did not get to write my code, then pay someone to write the documentation for me because I couldn't be bothered to do it myself and the graders didn't look too hard at it; I had to write that myself because that's what the assignment was.

My school allowed the use of calculators. My mother made me do all my homework without it, which was arduous because I suck at maths.

The reason why was to give me a good enough basic understanding of maths that I can approximate the sort of answer I'm expecting even if I then use the calculator to get the actual result. So 3 times 9 equaling 297, rather than just blindly writing it down as the answer, I can think "hang on, three tens are thirty, no way that's right" and save myself the embarrassment of getting it badly wrong due to not spotting having pressed the 9 key twice.

I still suck at maths, but the ability to "sort of roughly know" what the answer should be has come in useful a number of times (including in a shop where an amount was entered into the card reader without the decimal point - erk!).

I find it hard to imagine any sort of pure maths exam in which a calculator would be of the slightest use for anything except basic arithmetic.

But when you are learning how to do basic arithmetic, and your progress gets tested, the teacher doesn't let you use a calculator. Despite having computers, we still teach kids how to make sums with pen and paper. Students are allowed to use calculators only in contexts where basic arithmetic is not the thing being tested.

Similarly, if the thing being tested is your ability to write an essay, then you should not be using a LLM to do it. You can use a LLM if and when your ability to generate quality text is not the thing being tested.

This isn't old people screaming at the new thing; it's how the fundamental concept of "testing" works. The tools you're allowed to use isn't a problem of what's new versus what's old; it's a problem of what is being tested versus what is not being tested. You can't use a tool that automates the test's target objective.

Also, note that delegating writing to LLMs is a lot more problematic than delegating calculation to computers. There are several good reasons for that, not the least of which is that while a calculator is extremely reliable in its outputs, LLMs are anything but. You need to learn how to write, even if you're going to use a LLM to do it for you, because you'll need to be good enough to be able to verify the LLM's output. I may trust an engineer who can't do long division and just uses a calculator, depending on his/her other skills, but I can't trust a lawyer who can't write and just uses a LLM.

if the thing being tested is your ability to write an essay, then you should not be using a LLM to do it.

Why? Taking aside pigeonholing, it's like telling the decorator mate you can't use that fancy brush you have, here, have my grandads brush. Then come back hour later. Oh you poor sod, they didn't teach you how to paint, eh?

I guess when we teach programming, the first few years students should be using punch cards?

" I guess when we teach programming, the first few years students should be using punch cards? "

Maybe software wouldn't be such a bloated pile of barely interacting bugs if they had to begin with punch cards?

^^^ This

I'm not clear on your point here. You seem to be flipping between describing scenarios where someone is learning , scenarios where someone is being tested , and scenarios where someone is working professionally .

The applicability of automation is extremely different between these scenarios.

If the decorator is coming to paint my house because I need my house painted, they should use whatever tool gets the job done most efficiently. I am not here to test them, I just want my house painted.

If the decorator is learning how to use a brush, or being tested on their ability to use a brush, then they should use a brush.

If the decorator is learning how to use the fancy tool, or being tested on their ability to use the fancy tool, then they should use the fancy tool.

I don't feel that distinction to be a difficult one to make. A professional and a student are doing two very different things. Someone doing their job is a poor simile for a student learning how to do it.

Re the punch card example, it seems like another bad simile. Punch cards are obsolete. Writing isn't. Unless you're trying to say that writing is obsolete? Because of LLMs? That seems frankly untenable.

I am not here to test them, I just want my house painted.

You do a test. If they fail to paint your house well, they won't get paid (or get a mark if you will)

Writing isn't.

It soon may be though. But let's teach people legacy stuff.

If you're being tested on how to write an essay, you need to demonstrate that you can write it. If you're being taught to use a brush, you need to demonstrate that you can use a brush. That is different from later applications of the same. If you're being tested on painting something in general, you may get to choose a tool from a set of different ones to do the job, but if they're specifically testing your ability to use a basic brush, you may not get to use a different tool, even if you otherwise would want to.

For example, there were a couple occasions in my schooling where I was permitted to select the language in which I'd write a project, but mostly I did not. If I had asked to do so, I'd have likely gotten a response like "Of course you can write this string manipulation program faster and easier in Python than in C, but this class is taught in C and we want to give you something easy so you learn how to use C". It doesn't matter that, if I had a similar task in the workplace, I would almost certainly not use C unless performance was critical, because the point was not to have the program written, but for me to learn something.

I've recently had 150+ applications for a couple of roles. I started shortlisting and spotted some really good applications and was hopeful of recruiting people that seemed to really understand what I was looking for. Then I realised that approx. 30 applications were just rewrites of the job advert and the candidates job history didn't tally with the skillset.

I admire the chutzpah, and problem solving is part of the role but as a lowly IT manager it is hard enough to recruit the right people, AI is already making changes that we aren't prepared for. I've too many miles on the clock and have seen many changes to the landscape that haven't resulted in the armageddon scenarios predicted for them, but I am very concerned that the AI genie is already too far out of the bottle.

There are massive benefits to the technology but there are downsides too and we'd better start to get a good handle on managing these downsides soon.

it's a war, like with spamming. There's a mass-flooding, and there's phishing. And there's spear-phishing too. But hey, why not use 'AI' to automate even spear-phishing and increase your chances even more...

The concept of job application, apart from CV or candidate's promotional folder is quite funny.

I mean both candidate and hirer know that candidate wants to earn money and put food on the table and hirer wants the service.

But you need to have this dance - don't say that you just want to earn a good honest wage, instead, come up with platitudes how you are going to contribute to the company and why you think you will be fulfilled doing it blah blah

Most hirers don't read it anyway, just skim over. Some may read it while candidate is late to the interview or for laughs.

If there's an "AI goldrush" we should be in the business of providing shovels whisky and madams, not mining for AI.

That would probably look like fast internet, cheap reliable power and stable and not excessive regulatory system. Our internet is ok generally, power is a serious problem and regulations we will see.

nVidia has most of the shovels.

You may still get on it writing manuals how to use a shovel. You could employ AI to do that for you. Publish your books on Amazing and retire early into the sunset...

We all know there are decent lawyers & others that are just scum of the earth, the latter need to lose their jobs..

Those lawyers that use "AI" (where everyone knows they hallucinate "facts" that are non existent) & then cannot even do rudimentary fact checking (i.e. find the quoted case, check it is relevant to case they are dealing with) need to be disbarred (I bet they still charged exorbitant fees for inept AI use too)

I’m this particular case I would imagine the chap who had his malpractice lawsuit dismissed might have a thing or two to say about his lawyer…

[She] "said she relied on the software "to identify precedent that might support her arguments" without bothering to "read or otherwise confirm the validity of the decision she cited"

She deserves to be disbarred, as regardless of whether AI was involved, that statement shows a fundamental disregard for the protection her client's interests. The problem is her attitude, not her use of a chatbot, which is only symptomatic of that attitude.

Incidentally, the same applies in principle to students using chatbots to write their essays. They want the degree but aren't willing to make the effort to learn the subject or use their own brains. That turns the diploma into a certificate of ignorance, which is a disservice to those who are prepared to learn but get awarded the same devalued certificate.

A student of mine in a class where I teach Data Analytics asked "Why I should attend your class when ChatGPT is there?"

I real time demonstrated how ChatGPT hallucinates even for a simple calculation and have published an article in IEEE preprint:

https://www.techrxiv.org/doi/full/10.36227/techrxiv.24440440.v1

Or do they mean transparency between the companies and not with the public ?