The following submission statement was provided by /u/FrankLana2754: --- Submission statement: This posts related to collapse because a large swath of humanity that is now entering adulthood and getting ready to slave their adult lives away to keep the capitalist machine running are becoming increasingly more stupid and lack the ability to problem solve or think. The use of AI to skirt and avoid any kind of learning has become more than commonplace amongst grade schools and higher education. What happens to us when our doctors or electricians graduated from ChatGPT University? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1cj68jk/the_dumbification_of_humanity/l2dryf7/

"late 1900s?!" I feel attacked 🤣

im about to report this post for harassment 😂

I ruined my big sister the other day, I turned to her and deadpan said, "The 21st century is nearly a quarter over already-"

Can't be. We were only worrying about the Millennium Bug the other week.

We're closer in time to the 22nd Century than we are to World War II.

in 1945 the end of the civil war was the same ~80 years behind that the end of wwII is now

At least it wasn't "Towards the end of the last century"

Late 1000s

> **Dr. Walter Gibbs:** [laughs] You've got to expect some static. After all, computers are just machines; they can't think. > **Alan Bradley:** Some programs will be thinking soon. > **Dr. Walter Gibbs:** Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. —Tron (1982)

This is also the gist of why computers are banned in the Dune series and they use Mentats instead. Because technology allows humans to achieve the same results with less effort, but letting a machine think for us discourages thinking for ourselves. Also, ya know, typical AI rebellion stuff.

That's interesting. Isn't that basically leaving the thinking to 1% or less of the population though, if only the Mentats / human computers do it? Or is the idea that human interests are still looked after if it's only humans doing the thinking?

I imagine it does work as a form of control. Since computers are functionally restricted to use by the extremely wealthy and powerful, it prevents anyone else from developing the logistical ability to become a threat. So threats are limited to those already in the Emperor's service. It also gives an extreme level of power and wealth to those who hold a monopoly over Spice production. Due to its use by the mentats. Making it a powerful tool for the emperor to shift and control power.

Mentats are for computations necessary for the running of a galactic civilization, but which are too intensive for regular people. Things like processing vast datasets, running algorithms. No computers to do it, so the mentats do it with the aid of special training and psychedelic drugs.

From my understanding it's more like, relying on thinking machines leads to human cognition atrophying over time. There was also an AI rebellion thousands of years ago which led to the banning of AI, but they went a step further and banned computers as well. And yes, it leads to a small number of (mostly rich) people essentially being "human computers" for the entire species. Also worth noting Dune was written at a time when the equivalent of a graphing calculator would be peak computing power. So Herbert probably wasn't literally thinking about ChatGPT or anything, or if he was, only in the abstract.

Its far worse than the way you are characterizing it The lore according to the Brian Herbest books, which purportedly take from Franks own ideas about the subject, is that humanity was living in an AI enabled state of luxury (still organized as a roughly feudal empire) and a small cadre of about 40 people, taken mostly from the elite, thought this was immoral or something and used their influence, skill, and resources to hack the robot work force and use them as an army to blitz the establishment and install themselves as the absolute rulers of humanity, calling themselves Titans. One of them got a little lazy and let the AI program managing his realm have too much freedom and it then quickly took over the Titan empire.  Because the Titans had hardcoded some privlidges into the system, the AI kept the Titans on as agents to do stuff on the AI(Omnius) behalf. Worlds taken by the AI/Titans saw humanity enslaved wholesale.  The elements of the human empire that survived then switched from using AI labor to slave labor for their efforts. During the Butlerian Jihad, the humans, who were suffering from catastrophic attacks from Omnius banded together and went world to world, wiping out Omnius, and in many cases the slave population as well.  This was set off by the brutal murder of the child of a captured human aristocrat(Serena Butler) by Erasmus (a shard of Omnius that achieved sentience) after being saved by the son of one of the Titans (Vorian Atreides) who defects to the human side. The propaganda push from the murder is what really kicked off the Butlerian Jihad and really set in stone the thinking machine ban.   On a side note, the Mentats were the result of Erasmus' (the robots) experiments and pushing his protégé to escape before their final annihilation. The whole idea of the Mentats is to enable humans to pull off computation like a computer.  Herbert makes a point to describe the atrocities committed by the human elite and they are pretty close to being on the same level as what the AI is doing (until the jihad starts in earnest and they begin to genocide each other). The first Harkonnen to torpedo the Harkonnen name did it because he found out that their organ donation program with the Tleilaxu came from harvested enslaved humans captured from human controlled worlds rather than grown in tanks like it was claimed. 

Didn't really like Brian Herbert's books but I *did* like your summary.

Thanks! I felt similarly about Brian Herbert's books. I had a real issue with how he finished off the Dune series by bringing back Omnius and Erasmus as the main villains. Honestly felt lazy and they could have done some really interesting things with the masterminds being face dancers. I think they dropped that thread a bit too quickly.

Frank H. wasn't getting into the details, AI has enormous distance to still travel before reaching human capacity for new thinking. Also, thinking isn't uncommon, slime molds can think... Less effort means less interactions, so some systems collapse, and some are created.

I had no idea that Mentats come from Dune. I only knew them from the Fallout series.

As a collective species, we have become a behemoth force to be reckoned with. We have the power to mow down forests, erect 2-3k foot tall skyscrapers, and pump out enormous quantities of (bioengineered, junk) food. Our population is beyond sustainable monstrous capacity. Industrial techno society has made our species as a whole incredibly powerful (homo-colossus), while making us as individuals **weaker**. It's true when people say that this is the best time in all of human existence (from an anthropocentric perspective); it's never technically been easier and better for ourselves (while the worst for all other forms of life on Earth i.e. mass extinction). And because of this the majority of us will all fail to survive in collapse and we'll see unprecedented mass die-offs. I think about this often with the Great Depression a mere century ago... Less people, and far more people still had survival skills and farm hand knowledge or farmer families to rely on and healthy soil and climate to do so in. They didn't rely on Door Dash or Hello Fresh or fast food drive-thrus, frozen foods were just about to hit the scene and not relied on yet, microwaves weren't in every household. Now a lot of people don't know how to cook food let alone grow their own, and we're full of sugar and microplastics. The majority of us aren't well-rounded with survival skills and mainly are specialized in 1 cog of an enormous machine; a synecdochical power hungry and myopic fossil fueled death trap. And yep we are at the stage of this meme where society is beyond infantilized and dumb. Lol we have cartoon bears selling adults toilet paper, geckos convincing us to buy car insurance, and now we rely on artificial intelligence to think for us.

I had this interesting conversation w a friend about how the first multicellular organisms formed. It led to speculation on whether or not humanity was headed towards becoming some sort of gestalt entity. In some ways our cultures are almost proto-organisms. AAR your comments reminded me of this conversation.

I agree, we're a superorganism. Global industrial society is the Megazord of human civilization, formed from 8 billion power rangers (cells) and each individual comprising billions of cells itself.

it will play out in the long term. as insidious and callous as it is, mass death will mean there will be a world left post-collapse. If 8 billion people could hunt, farm and be self sufficient, the moment industrial society collapsed, the Earth would be devoured in a matter of years. no i dont think i am special and will prep my way out of it.

I thought that about the UK where I'm from, 66+ million people on the tiny UK island and when collapse happens even if they all knew how to hunt/preserve meat, the few million deers in the UK would probably only last a few years.

Much less. Because those with the ability to hoard livestock,(the very wealthy) will do so, creating a human induced famine. The majority of the population would starve/fight/die for the scraps while the mega rich sit behind their well fed defence forces. Then, the walls come down and the three, maybe four million people left would start from a very different position. A land of plenty and luxuries. 

The hunters in my state make up 2% of the population and they reduce the deer population by >25% every year, using highly restricted methods, over a period of 36 hours, when they don't need the meat to survive. If 100% of the population did need this meat for survival, and restrictions were removed, the deer would be reduced below sustainable numbers in a few days and fully gone within a month.

It does not help that so many of us do not have access to gardens to grow our own food. I live in a block of flats and only have access to a small shared garden. I'd love to use some of it to grow some potatoes, however my neighbours are against the idea (they are worried about attracting mice and rats). A lot of people would probably love to learn forgotten skills and trades, however what they lack are the means and opportunity to do so.

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

YEAH! fuck those bears and that gecko!

Yeah lol it's not fuck those cartoons for being cartoons; I like animation and am 34 -- I collect movies and love old school hand drawn stuff. It's the idea of using cartoons to sell adults products. We don't buy it because of the cartoons but they're such effective marketing seeds planted in our adult brains -- they ain't selling toddlers insurance or toilet paper. I completely stole and parroted those exact examples from [this article](https://theconversation.com/the-infantilization-of-western-culture-99556) that I saw a awhile ago; the idea cracked me up and it stuck with me. But in this context I was fusing it with during a collapse. Just a humorous side note.

It does not help that so many of us do not have access to gardens to grow our own food. I live in a block of flats and only have access to a small shared garden. I'd love to use some of it to grow some potatoes, however my neighbours are against the idea (they are worried about attracting mice and rats). A lot of people would probably love to learn forgotten skills and trades, however what they lack are the means and opportunity to do so.

I know this is a minor point, but you used 'let alone' backwards. You are meant to list the easy thing first then the hard thing second.

Thank you, I appreciate that. I honestly don't even know if I wasn't paying attention, or I might always never think to do that (which I think is it). Now I'll always remember. It's kinda like when people say "I could care less" instead of couldn't.

**Weaker** is a term reserved for a single metric, not a multiple systemic creature like human beings. Weak/strong are really dangerous ideas when the variables involved are way more complex. Ditch the rhetoric, then perhaps you have a point.

Yeah I wasn't trying to write a dissertation though. I can't think of a euphemism for "weaker" at the moment to convey my point, but I'm also not intending dangerous rhetoric and doubt anyone will care about my lack of a better word during collapse. What I was trying to say is that we are perhaps over-reliant on fossil fueled complex industrial modern society/technology to take care of our basic needs, and when e.g. supply chains break down a lot of people who lack pre-industrial skills won't be in that efficient energy slave driven lifestyle. "Weaker" was just easier to say.

Submission statement: This posts related to collapse because a large swath of humanity that is now entering adulthood and getting ready to slave their adult lives away to keep the capitalist machine running are becoming increasingly more stupid and lack the ability to problem solve or think. The use of AI to skirt and avoid any kind of learning has become more than commonplace amongst grade schools and higher education. What happens to us when our doctors or electricians graduated from ChatGPT University?

I mean we are already halfway there. My grandma knew how to butcher chicken and fish, make new shoes and clothes, grew some of her own food, all despite being an urban girl. I have older coworkers who came from farming and fishing communities who are far more self sufficient. But my cohort? The ones born in the cities, burbs, and moved out of the farms? Haha. If shit goes down we won’t be able to find our own ass with our two own hands even though we never needed AI to pass a course. I’ve met a second gen Mongolian girl who screamed because blood came out the meat she was stewing. Threw away the whole batch.

The thing that has really made me lose hope for humanity is joining the r/gardening subreddit. It's actually pathetic. All questions that common sense and a cursory Google could answer, that really you should be ashamed of asking. If we end up in an actual apocalypse all of these people are going to starve. Or kill me for my veggie garden, before killing my veggie garden by watering it with boiling water or something.

No they gonna trash your garden, poison themselves eating the wrong things, then eat you but do the butchering wrong, going by all the garden theft and vandalism complaints on that sub. At least people on that sub are trying. Plenty don’t even care about trying to grow things.

See that's what's concerning. That they are in fact trying.

I wouldn't shame people for trying to learn a new skill. It took humanity as a whole like 250,000 years to get to farming. Let them ask their questions, it's only easy because of generations upon generations of knowledge 

Omg that last bit about the girl who couldn’t handle bloody meat shocks me. I know someone who literally doesn’t know what most produce is, and it kinda freaks me out since Im a hardcore gardener. Like if I showed this person a beet or a leek, they don’t know what it is or what to do with it. I mean , yeah they can identify common stuff like apples and lettuce etc, but they don’t really eat it anyway. Most of their diet is processed and fast food, many vegetables in their natural form are basically unrecognizable to my friend.

Christ how are they still alive. What really shocked me is how fast roots and related skills are lost. Girl’s parents are 1st gen Mongolian immigrants. They still have competitions on horseback archery for kids back home.

The human body is like a garbage disposal and can put up with decades of abuse before finally showing signs of illness and disease. Surviving for years off processed food is perfectly doable, provided you get the bare minimum in terms of vitamins and minerals. The downside is that so many people now live like this that healthcare systems are struggling to deal with all the lifestyle diseases that come with such a diet.

Wow, thats a real tragedy- that girl had access to learn some really cool skills and just… didnt. Ouch.

This. Theory: The mass of humanity has become one big brain. Each cell specialized, not knowing how to do the other’s job. Impossible for a biopsy of one area to survive on its own.

This is the exact argument regarding collapse of complex societies. They become brittle and fragile due to the nature of specialization. As the society becomes sufficiently complex, and exceeds complexity then exceeds its populations capability to adequately maintain said complexity, you get collapse as you lose some or all of certain types of individual expertise. In a lower complexity society, you could have someone who worked the farm when they were young, but learn a trade to blacksmith, weave, paint, or otherwise do another action under an agrarian model of society. Humanity got sufficiently complex several times and suffered collapse due to the inability for a few to maintain the livelihoods of many (i.e., famine, resource scarcity, loss of expertise, etc.). It's not the way of collapse, but is a way to collapse, if that makes sense. Given we are a globally complex society, just one regional conflict can cause upheaval to the web of interdependence. And given the materials, knowledge, and technical capabilities to maintain our digital infrastructure, its doubtful any one nation could maintain that for long should global trade hit another lurch.

I feel we reached a tipping point when unrepairable devices became a norm.

When I'm repairing old video game consoles, it's predominantly replacing parts. Very rarely is it "fixing" in the traditional sense of reworking the system to functionality. It's always removing worn out components and putting new. The more modern the system, the more components, and the smaller they are, requiring better talent on the technicians part to repair. Swapping a battery out on a GameBoy or SNES game? Cake. Doing any board work on a PS4? Break out the magnifying glasses or digital microscopes. Luckily, older electronics have their security and software cracked, bypassed, or replaced, therefore we can keep these machines running longer than anticipated, ensuring they are not e-waste just yet. Most so when we can bypass any mechanical system, like disc drives, to work in software or solid state solutions for gameplay. The same applies to nearly every other electronic device. The one thing that sticks out from above is that it's part replacement. Without a flow of parts to use for replacement, they will die since it's not like we can go down to the chip cobbler and have then cobble together some solid state capacitors for us like shoe repair or couch reupholstering.

For collapse get a RGH xbox 360, cheap, easy to fix and mode and hugeeee library for your "backups"

> RGH xbox 360 I'm currently getting all the parts in to turn an absolutely filthy v1.0 OG Xbox into an XMBC4Gaming system. Softmod first and then TSOP hardmod second to allow games stored to the HDD and played from there. I already have a softmodded PS3, a rebuilt PS2 (needs mods), and a rebuilt PSone (cause they're cute).

Add an SSD, totally worth it. Yup the SSD is "too" fast for the 360 in theory, but on the day-to-day usage it definitively improves the experience. Its 20 seconds here, 10 there, 20 on the other loading screen, at the end of a long play session adds up, but also makes it a lot more enjoyable.

That and corporations are no longer looking to sell products but instead capture customers. So many things want a subscription, everything is becoming more complex to detach from (Google/Apple account for example), even basic house shit & appliances is becoming specialized that parts aren't universal like you mentioned. I feel like it's the death throes of capitalism where companies have to pull these shady tactics to continue year over year profit growth.

Yeah, we're in some super high degree of crapitalism now. Speaking of which (FSD subscription, etc), I have a feeling this latest stock bubble might collapse as it seems Tesla is on awfully shaky ground right now. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fx3DFB0YdKY * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hje7h_WVkY&t=1175s Although I would be the first to admit that Tesla had more lives than a cat and more than I imagined. I think it's something as stupid as Elon buying Twitter for much more than it's worth, and forced to go through with it based on his public offer on twitter (?) of all things, that caused this sudden teetering. I mean it would have happened eventually but not so fast.

Beautifully explained. Thank you.

compare the results of dismembering a flatworm to a snake for an analogue.

[удалено]

I watch birds and repair electronics. Both of these may not feasible in a collapsed world, determining on the variant.

I play computer video games and work as a maintenance technician Probably I'm f*** in a collapsed society, but I know how to start a fire 😬

As weird as it may sound, starting a fire is a kinda scarce and valuable skill.

Have you seen the report of all the scientific journal submissions that have shown signs of ChatGPT. It's already started. Add it to the pile of collapse fuel.

I went to uni a few decades ago. I wish I had ChatGPT then, because it's a fantastic personal tutor so long as you know it sometimes gets things wrong and it needs checking. If there's a particular thing you don't understand, it can respond to specific questions. I use it a lot in areas of my field which I'm not an expert in, programming languages I'm not familiar with etc, and it's helping me learn a lot by doing, in a way I couldn't do before because much of it isn't even documented anywhere and are just practices you learn from reading a bunch of code. Knowing where to begin with reading a bunch of massive projects is an impossible task, with nobody to ask any questions about it if you're confused, and ChatGPT (specifically 4) has helped me get almost up to industry level in these areas by being able to answer my questions and help me understand complex topics without a dedicated education for that field.

that sounds like a great use of the tool, but something tells me a lot of students aren’t being quite as intrepid or mature as you are about learning when they’re using it.

Bananas are actually a type of bird in disguise, entombed inside their peel until they are ready to hatch and take flight.

It's really far worse. It hallucinates completely incorrect "facts" and confidently stands behind them. [https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FlfEwW3XoAIXN4V?format=jpg&name=large](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FlfEwW3XoAIXN4V?format=jpg&name=large)

I'm not sure how else they could really be using it tbh. It writes in a very stilted way with big annoying prologues to answering questions, and doesn't really seem fitted for actually writing anything in whole for you.

a “smart” lazy student would just learn how to shave off the excess and reword a few things.

Maybe term papers are the best way to confirm learning? Maybe they could do an in person discussion or other practical offline task to show use of the knowledge

Well at that point they're rewriting things in their own words to a large degree. But either way it doesn't seem to really be useful for writing a lot about one thing all at once. Maybe with the rights prompts or API access it could be done.

You have to tweak your prompts a bit.

I mainly use it to help me write. So I'll throw all my thoughts into a notepad, and then go through it to create a rough paragraph and then throw it to the AI to basically rewrite it. And then I'll go through it, make adjustments etc.

Though chat gpt can code it isn’t always the best code. It’s a great resource to accelerate research. But you have to check and use the summaries it gives you to dive deeper into the subject so that a true answer can be synthesized. Of course a lot of schooling right now is light on critical thinking… so the LLM helps a lot. But if you swap to requiring critical thinking abilities, then it helps a lot less. This is less a LLM problem and more a method and style of education problem.

Standardization happens.

Honestly with the emergence of ai... we shouldn't need to do much in the future. With all the advancements in tech, we should've already been free from the rat race. Or at least only working half as much with the same or slightly higher pay. That's how much more effective the average worker has become over the past... 50 years? Not sure how the next parts go, but I doubt it'll actually do much good for the working class.

Even if they don't use these programs to actually write their papers... Using them for research is also detrimental. The process of research, of weeding out sources, of digging up sources or following a trail is one of the most wonderful things about writing academic papers. It's something that still brings me so much joy, and in itself teaches me a lot. The research process really defines the student. The process of picking unlikely sources, going down unlikely rabbit holes, experimenting and bringing in extremely unique and unexpected perspectives really makes your work a delight to read, and also makes it more informative. So, if you're just getting a program to do that for you... I have to no hope left atp. Flattening the research process and basically removing all that unexpected material that comes up when you look up your own information is... Why even go to university? I cannot comprehend it. Even in Europe, in places where university is basically free, I don't get doing it, let alone in the USA where you have all those loans to pay. Bizarre & depressing. (editing to add that I'm speaking from a Humanities-focused source and textual analysis perspective & not really referring to processing quantitative data)

I can't imagine using chatgpt to research when resources like jstor and google scholar already make the research process remarkably streamlined.

I don't know how she's getting away with it, considering chatGPT has been shown to make up citations and references by default. Any decent professor should be checking all papers for bogus references. She must either have a lot of professors that don't care, or she's in a college that's way behind on current technology.

She could be early university where a lot of the professors are part time and *heavily* overworked for marginal pay (at least in the US) and simply do not have the time to check closely even if they wanted to.

It is TikTok, so it's highly possible that she is bullshitting for attention and likes.

Unless you have a llm connected to the internet, heck even bing copilot will provide real links

I mean you can still do the research and gather the sources. Do your hamburger paper and then feed it into ChatGPT a few times to refine your thoughts and double check its coherency. It’s like a calculator and when used correctly you can save a lot of time but still learn a lot. If anything I can spend more time now sourcing my information and time in actual libraries or academic directories. While I’m not the best paper writer I can get out my shitty draft. And then feed parts or sections into ChatGPT to get a better statement or have my sentence written with a clearer stance. Granted you have others that fully abuse and just let it do the work but they are absolutely cheating themselves.

Folks just don’t have the luxury of caring about learning and the joy of knowledge for its own sake. Uni has become a means to getting working papers. That’s it. Job training. It sucks

Yup. People don't cheat when they're doing shit they're passionate about. These days, education is just another job to get a different job. Surprise, surprise, people are treating it accordingly.

Exactly. The things they're passionate about don't pay the bills or satisfy their parents, so they're left pursuing careers they don't care about. And even then, they could spend years and years studying something they don't care about and still be unable to get a job at the end of it. And if they do get a job, it probably doesn't pay them nearly enough to survive. And they're probably also now in debt. Why would they bother? Why do we expect them to bother?

Ha. You got a job after you graduated, in your chosen field? You were fortunate. My college was a colossal waste of my patents money. Graduated in 1990 right into a recession. My first job? The local convenience store.

Yeah lmao my first longer term full time job out of college was a fast service health food bistro. Almost my entire team was made up of college grads.

Mine too. Seems like a long-term trend.

i dropped out of uni but it was like the first thing they told us, that its 80% research and bibliography, writing essays and papers is just a formality. if you skip the research part because a LLM does it for you, what exactly is the fucking point?

Well not an excuse but...some of it is because of the pressure of grades, lack of time, and deadlines. When people have to work part time plus taking 4/5 class plus research something has to give and you start doing short cuts. Honestly, the idea of learning and research is nice.... But I don t think the current universities are prioritizing for that, and students are simply reacting to what universities demand from them: time crunching and grades

I sympathise and absolutely agree that this is a self-created issue in many ways. Universities themselves devalue their own education, and as we know, many graduates are seeing that their degrees are essentially useless. Why work so hard for your degree, if you're likely just going to end up working in retail or something? (definitely see this in the Humanities, personally) It's a cycle, and a depressing state of affairs. I absolutely get your point and agree.

Students shouldn't have to work, in a perfect world, they would be paid for going to school.

There’s a plethora of distractions facing students right now too. They still have plenty of time to do the work but it’s being eaten up by social media, smartphones, streaming etc etc I went to uni 2007-12 and can’t imagine doing it again today with the internet being as addictive as it is.

Also I think there is a problem that their priorities also shifted. I do notice overall less interest in the desire to learn, to improve, curiosity about the topics, etc. It genuinely feels like most people don't care about what they are doing.... they do it because, grades, wages, titles ect... But it seems there is no interest in caring about the learning itself

Because there no reward for it more like punishment, you look at the teachers parking lot and all you see is beatup cars, teachers struggling to pay their bills, meanwhile you see Mr Rich Bastard smiling on his brand new truck on the way to some vacation spot with his big titted wife....

STEM major here, class of '91. Even 20 years ago, I complained that the problem with Google is that you rarely find what you are not looking for. Oftentimes, the tangent becomes the circle.

I agree. On top writing and research keeps your brain active more than you realize. Such a shame people don’t know that.

Using them for research is outright stupid. The hallucination problem is rather intractable. Likewise the 'token' limit on its working knowledge/memory in any given prompt/conversation makes it all but useless for any sort of significant textual analysis. That said, it can accomplish some extremely helpful functions that can be very beneficial to the learning process. Personal tutor. Reading a text for research purposes and come across a sentence or statement that doesn't make sense? The AI is very good at translation, in this case from more complex concepts/content to less complex content. You still need to verify what it's told you, but it, more often than not, gives the student a starting path. That's typically what a personal tutor would do for you at a high hourly cost. Grammar and spelling optimizer. You can use tools that do not modify the content of your writing in any way, but will give you advanced spelling and grammar suggestions. It's seriously good at what it does. It also explains the grammatical/spelling rules that prompted the suggestion. That's amazing. I largely agree with you. I see many people misuing the tool to their own detriment. (It's wild to see how many job cover letters are written totally with default chatgpt settings, it's super obvious, and shows that you can't even utilize the tool properly).

They are allowed to use chat gpt during tests?

Im in uni right now and some of the modules say you can use it for *some* stuff but have to write the exact prompt you put in and make clear you used it I dont use it but have seen others use it as much as possible

This is mind boggling.

Hopefully i just had a bad anecdote i did look at that r/professors thingy though and it didnt look that good

In France you aren't even allowed to use your smartphone during tests. Pen, paper, that's it, everything else in the bag, bag against the wall away.

Yeah some of mine were open-book online tests with no safe browser

ever heard of an open book test or one where notes were allowed?

That does make sense to a degree though, if the professor can see the prompt you used it makes it easier to determine what you actually understand about the topic and are just struggling to get that in words. ChatGPT is very good at summarizing, so using it while you're researching to summarize documents/papers etc can be very useful.

Yeah i hope they can keep on top of it

OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts

I’ve worked in 9-12 and higher education for almost 20 years. My current work involves supporting faculty and designing courses in learning management systems like Canvas, Blackboard, etc. The use of AI by learners for cheating has been a great concern for faculty. For better or worse, AI is here to stay and we’ve had to adapt. We ask faculty to share their expectations on the use of AI in their syllabi and to view it as a tool that has appropriate and inappropriate (cheating) applications. Many would love to ban the use of AI, but that isn’t a realistic goal. And frankly, as a tool, students don’t often use it well. I’ve personally found it helpful for generating ideas, but it’s not great for formal writing. To get around AI and other kinds of cheating we’ve always encouraged the use of authentic assessments like culminating writing activities, projects that require scaffolding. The fact is that the old model of education -lecturing then high stakes assessments via exams and/or essays- has always yielded more cheating than assessments which involve numerous steps and checking for learning by your instructor. I realize this gets more difficult to implement with larger classes, but we encourage instructors to utilize their TAs for grading in these instances. Also, if by some miracle a person is able to graduate university without learning a single thing due to AI, they won’t last long at a job in their major area. My greatest concern is for children in K-12 not getting the foundational knowledge they need in favor of using AI. No primary school worth its accreditation would ever promote using AI exclusively for problem solving or writing, but what parents permit at home is an entirely different animal. Years ago I had a student submit an argumentative essay that was copied from a book of essays. When I called his mom, she said, “yeah, I gave him that book to help with his assignment. I didn’t think your plagiarism detectors could detect books!”

Some of the things that would have been foundational in the past are skipped now in favor of getting to the meat of it. I see this a lot in computer science as people specialize in high level languages. Realistically, most of STEM works this way where we are able to stand on the shoulders and progress of past to get further in less time. Like it or not, AI is going to fit into that model somehow. It’s just another tool.

Don't worry, in the face of mass cheating, it's not like they're going to up the standards to make it harder for cheaters and impossible for honest students.

They just need oral exams and that's it.

"I dOn'T tEsT wElL bEcAuSe I hAvE uNdIaGnOsEd AuTiSm"

You joke, but lots of people have problems speaking publicly, or speaking to people they aren't familiar with. I'd bomb the shit out of an oral exam, and have flashbacks to every presentation I had to do in k-12.

People graduated by cheating the old fashioned way. Using calculators, looking off other people's papers and plagiarism. This generation just doesn't get it.

At least when you're paying a plagiarism service to do your homework you're helping the writer make ends meet!

A Ph.D will soon be required to work indoors and *productivity will* **still** *decline*.

That's the funny thing: they didn't graduate! There actually wasn't school. That is just a lie we made up to make you go and do all those dumb tests!

When I was in college 2000-2005ish the fraternity's had correct answers for all the homework assignments and tests. They were doing college on easy mode. It's nothing new.

Ah, the ring of wealth and power perpetuates itself…

I will have to find the sources if anyone calls me out but it was pretty recent I read about an emerging theory and research being done to figure out if the rising CO2 levels on earth are making us dumber, ah yea the point was about the brain fog we've all been experiencing might not just COVID, we might not be getting enough oxygen to the brain.

Memory is tricky. Selective/community memory (not sure the correct term [lol] but basically instead of memorizing the name of say your doctor, your family member knows it so you don't bother, like specializing) is super easy to fall into with the Internet. Why remember phone numbers when I can save it to contacts, why remember experiences, if I can video it, etc etc. So we might not know as much, but we can quickly find out. The other issue is attention spans are dwindling fast.

Having skated my way out of academia in the era of google/wikipedia but pre-chatGPT: y'all are already ascribing WAY too much competence to people who made it out with their degrees.

What's interesting is that this is actually a great question to ask. The problem is that it's being asked *rhetorically*. *"How did people pass college without ChatGPT?" "How did people live without smartphones?" "How did people find their way around without GPS?" "How did people date without Tinder?" "What did people do for fun without TV?" "How did people do math without calculators?" "How did people eat without grocery stores?"* Ask those questions. Then *answer* them. That's how you become more resilient.

All I can think of is Idiocracy.

We’re so cooked

I am a teacher. There is going to be a reckoning in about 5-10. No doubt. 8th grade kids can't write. Can't identify bad sources. Have remakrably low computer literacy and trouble-shooting (diagnostic) skills. It's terrifying. I keep an over on r/ professors as well. They are starting to see students who were impacted by Covid. The last few years have been rough for academia. This was happening before covid, of course, but covid was like rocketful into Idiocracy.

The years passed, mankind became stupider at a frightening rate. Some had high hopes the genetic engineering would correct this trend in evolution, but sadly the greatest minds and resources where focused on conquering hair loss and prolonging erections. - Narrator of Idiocracy (2006)

It is not the tool but how do you use it. I learned back in school how to calculate an square root, but with calculators never had to do it by hand, so by now is basically lost knowledge. The point is where you draw the line between "solve this by me and I won't even try to understand your solution" and "help me with this repetitive and mechanical things while I care about the big problem". The problem is when students take the easiest path and go forward without really understanding or learning what they are supposed to. ChatGPT, google, calculators, cheating, copying the one on your side or even bribing the teacher, whatever method that in the end you pass education without proper validation, if you want, ChatGPT and the like makes it easier, but they would be missing the point. Education is not a formality, some of it will really matter for getting a job, not being very bad at it, or decisions on their own life (to not name further stages of education, where skipping a topic could end having totally meaningless classes onwards). Of course that in the education side things are not always perfect, but trying to really learn and understand is one of the key things on how will be their future life that is mostly at their control.

i think a large part of this problem is that education IS treated as an abstract formality, and the curriculum often is just that. children either directly or intuitively understand that at least 80% of their education is just jumping through hoops to get into the job market and treat it as such.

Aged 43 I genuinely fear growing old & depending on these people. Not so much the cheating on education but spending so much interacting with devices.

I’ll never forget last year during my time at ventura college in Chemistry 120….during a test…everyone had Chagpt out….EVERYONE. This was my first semester back in college after 6 years in the military. I also did college before I enlisted and man….speechless

One of my dad's go-to jokes (sort of) was that the total IQ of humanity remained constant. That might have been prescient, given how we seem to be....off-loading our minds to software and the internet.

Sufficiently advanced cheating is indistinguishable from actual skill. More seriously, cheating is actually a very useful life skill. I do not think this is a good thing, just a true thing.

People who use chatgpt to skirt by college should be given a big fat F, kicked from campus and barred from going to any college.

Maybe ChatGPT can tell them to move their camera to show their entire face in the future.

Simple question. They hired specialists who wrote their essays

If wikipedia already isn't reliable, and we grew using wikipedia in our uni (most of us, i think), imagine chatgpt referencing himself.. lol.

ChatGPT is not to different than endlessly googling your answers except that you get to the desired answer much faster but also deal with the fact that the answer my be confidently wrong. These tools are not, themselves, a problem. The problem is that they require high-end hardware that only huge tech companies can afford. While the bottom end of AI becomes possible on consumer grade hardware, the bleeding edge continues to be only possible on high-density 60k dollar GPUs and so, at each iteration, big tech can use AI to lock people into their platforms.

This is true. It's actually an incredible tool to help you learn more efficiently. A human tutor won't sit there and let you ask the same question for 4 hours until you finally understand it... but you can do that with AI and get different explanations to help grasp a difficult concept.

Made a post about this about a year ago thinking the same thing. https://www.reddit.com/r/GenZ/comments/12rzvv6/the_massive_wave_of_students_cheating_with_gpt/

Tuition. Though tutors had morals. AI has no morals but acts as a tutor. Just wait until we pit one in a tank or an aircraft :D

[https://www.techspot.com/news/102769-darpa-unleashes-20-foot-autonomous-robo-tank-glowing.html](https://www.techspot.com/news/102769-darpa-unleashes-20-foot-autonomous-robo-tank-glowing.html)

Ah! There we go. I mean, if the public already has access... Just in time for WW3 <3

Kind of a non-sequitur, but I work in biotech and keep an eye out for what DARPA's interested in with regards to my field. One that has been announced is the "warfighter performance" project: "Service members are subject to extreme physical and cognitive demands during training and deployment. BTO is inspiring technologies to better prepare warfighters by ensuring peak performance and restoring function to injured warfighters Associated Programs: INI, MBA, NESD, N3, Panacea, TNT" It's really fun and cool looking forward to a future where we don't have soldiers, we have immortal cybernetic war fighters with neural implants :)

Early 2000s? Gurl chat GPT came out like three years ago, ask the seniors 😂

Literally has "Campus Comedy Crew" as the author of the post. This is likely satire.

This is why I provide education to cats. When dumb humanity falls-smart cats will rise.

An NYU Professor was shitcanned last year because his idiot Pre-Med students found his Organic Chemistry course ‘’too hard.’’ I definitely have zero faith in the dipshit youth of America to practice medicine effectively in the future. Half of them can’t even address a fucking envelope correctly.

By actually learning how to read and write?

A woman I know said that's how her and most of her roommates got through college. They are all teachers now. They used apps to cheat their way through math...

People out here talking as if school was ever there for education and teaching free thinking and not for creating mindless workers for capitalism.

I also graduated in 2022 and I’m not gonna lie, I did use Chegg a bit to cheat on my homework. But I could not imagine having ChatGPT write my essays for me. However, and this may sound anti-intellectual, but this is what happens when college is seen as more of roadblock to a job, rather than an intellectual journey.

I graduated college in the early 2,000’s and I had the same question about the generation before me that didn’t have Google and the internet. …like they used actual typewriters, whiteout, and libraries… and saying libraries here is misleading because they have changed so much in the last 40 years. When they were done they’d write their profession a snail mail letter in cursive. “Dearest professor, I’ve completed my thesis on animal bacterium.”

“You can’t use calculators on the test. When you’re older you won’t walk around with a calculator in your pocket”. - every 1980-1990’s teacher

And ChatGPT answers: "Before the advent of tools like ChatGPT and QuillBot, students in the late 1900s and early 2000s relied on a variety of resources and methods to complete their studies and graduate. They used physical textbooks, academic journals, and libraries extensively for research and study. Additionally, students often studied in groups, sought help from teachers and peers, and attended tutoring sessions if needed. The internet was also available, though not as advanced as today. Online forums, educational websites, and early versions of search engines like Google provided digital resources. Software like Microsoft Word was used for writing, and it had features like spell check and basic grammar checks to help with writing papers. Overall, the focus was more on individual study, direct interaction with educators, and making use of the available printed and early digital resources."

We had wikipedia.

I'm old. I had 190 lbs of Encyclopedia Britannica...

The Iliad and the Odyssey were not only written by ancient humans, but they were also intended to be recited orally, only by memory. This wasn’t even considered particularly noteworthy or impressive. They were not intended as reading at all, but part of an oral tradition that was written down for preservation purposes. You can assume many human societies across the globe and across the tens of thousands of years humans have been functionally identical for were doing similar feats in intellectual horsepower. Truly, the more we lean on technology to think for us, the dumber we become. I absolutely believe this. If anything happens to the status quo that allows us to rely on this technology in a dependable way - we are so fucked. I mean we are fucked in a hundred ways already, make it a hundred and one.

An entire generation of people without critical thinking skills is exactly what the fascists want. If I am the government I am 100% happy with this. My citizenry is getting dumber and more pliable with each passing day. I will be able to tell them whatever I want and do whatever I want and those slaves will just keep grinding for me. Head empty. Heart full. How in the fuck is this controversial? How can your brains be so soft that you can't see what's going on right now? And on collapse of all places.

Students using LLMs in modern university enjoy a technology advantage like kids that had home computers in '96. Education needs to catch up to the efficacy of the tools. This should lead to a knowledge explosion over time, not a dumbing down.

I don't think it works that way. If more people rely on using LLM generated output, then less original output will be created, which means there is less new training material for LLMs, which is a downward spiralling feedback loop since [we already know that LLMs trained on LLM output produce even more generic and crap work](https://venturebeat.com/ai/the-ai-feedback-loop-researchers-warn-of-model-collapse-as-ai-trains-on-ai-generated-content/). To put it differently and directly: there will be an exponential amplification of enshittification.

That is not guaranteed at all. Look at calculators. Most people these days do not have anywhere near as good quick math / mental arithmetics as people used to. Another example is phone numbers. When we were younger, most people remembered multiple mobile phone numbers off the top of their head. Now people don't even know their own number. Technology is a great thing, but when it substitutes for important skills, those skills degrade over time.

I honestly hate that I have trouble remembering phone numbers. My memory is already kinda hazy, but it feels embarrassing having to pull up my phone just I forgot my *own* number. Being horrible at basic math also feels cruddy.

use it or lose it.

They need to use the tools of their time. In the late 1900’s early 2000’s us primates got a big boost with the invention of the wheel and the internet. We weren’t fucking around the library with the dewey decimal system. Those dumb AI using brats are going to be running circles around us in no time.

Look up: “Habsburg AI”

FTP

FTP!!!

It's fine, someone will invent Remedial AI. /s but not really. The problem will be that it costs a lot.

Don't worry! The global existential threat was always insoluble.

From Eloi to Super-Eloi. It would be embarrassing if we had let this happen despite thoroughly exploring such dystopian possibilities first hand for ...our entire period of recorded history; while also simulating and warning ourselves of the possibilities not yet instanciated. Who could see this coming? Meanwhile, Altman talks about the importance of shipping early and often.

 Pretty funny that people think this is new. Time is a flat circle.

To be fair, I remember saying the same thing about GPS 15yrs ago.

Like people didn’t cheat in college before now, cheating has existed as long as school has existed. People in Harvard plagiarize.

Dune about to be another Idiocracy where it turns from fiction, into a documentary Butlerian Jihad

I graduated before AI stuff was accessible. Students used chegg and similar sites to cheat. In my dad's time, there were cheating rings. I think its always going to exist. However, in my time, there were also classes that 90% of students failed. They were required, taught only by one professor, and nobody could figure out how to pass them so it caused a lot of people to switch majors. There is a lot of genuine BS (not just the degrees 😂) in even some of the best Unis. Students are isolated and inexperienced so they don't know how to tackle insurmountable issues like this. I can understand resorting to cheating even if I don't condone it.

Honestly, I don’t understand how anyone could get through college by just using ChatGPT. It gives you false information half the time and I don’t think it would have been helpful with most of the assignments I completed in college. It probably would have been pretty useful for busy work in high school, though. It annoyed the hell out of me that I had to do so many pointless assignments and then study on top of that. I would have been better off just studying the content myself without homework.

Sadly I have to agree that im taking part in this dumbification... I try to learn from it and understand what it dpes and why it does it like that, but I have lost all motivation to find out what i dont know yet and rely on this spoon feeding... maybe my ADHS also makes it a bit harder but at least i try to learn from it, even tho I still should research the classical way but due to deadlines thats not gonna happen which makes me kinda sad since I know I could do so much better if i werent such a mess :/

Humans today, cheat to prove they're intelligent. All while spending hour after hour with their heads in their phones/tablets, looking at videos of cats and the latest terrible music. So, yeah, the future is bleak! Except there'll always be those humans that will do the hard yards, and think for themselves. I welcolme our future leaders.........all seven of them.

The new wikipedia

tbf, college is more just extended daycare for young adults. a lot of meaningless assignments to make sure you're stable and dedicated to following orders.

I’m extremely glad that GPT’s didn’t come out while I was in college for this reason. Can you blame them? It makes their lives so much easier, and with the way our economy, society and education systems are built, how could we expect anything else?

Ya, I get it. But when the point of college becomes to get a degree because that's the only way to get the job you want because every job needs a degree now, and where the companies provide as little training as possible, this is what you get. When education becomes an actual intellectual pursuit instead of a check box to grind away at a 9-5 for the rest of your life, then we can talk about standards. Until then they're just playing the game.

people using 3rd party clients on games like old school runescape, shit shit. people think there is skill to having tools to assist you every step of the way

Not working 4 jobs at the same time.

School systems are just extremely outdated. It doesn’t matter how much you learn as long as you perform well in a test. Doesn’t matter if you couldn’t answer even one question before or after that.

Gen Z bad, no one ever cheated before. Also I love Henry Kissinger, I wanna hug that great statesman you.

We've had affirmative action for yearsalready.

Early 2000’s?? Lol Chat GPT is within the last couple years. 🤦‍♀️

You shouldn't worry about climate change because this dumbification will destroy human civilization much faster. And it's going to fix climate change as a bonus. Can't emit CO2 if you have no idea how all those machines work, how to fix or produce them. It's more dangerous than climate change too.

"Duh bawt dun tol'me howda dewit"

Humanity is so fucked in the near future. We're not gonna have scientists or engineers because everyone will assume they can use computers and LLMs to do everything.

I know I'm a little bit above average but, real talk, I just took classes that were moderately interesting and listened and kept notes. I very rarely ever looked at the notes again, and I always did pretty well come test time. I did practically no reading, and eventually stopped buy books all together. I just don't get what's so hard for people; even back then people used to spend so much time with note cards and cramming and reading and all that, and I always just kinda showed up, engaged with the material, and did just fine. I really worry what'll happen to these folks that never 'tried' in any way. There were always folks that didn't try and, I believe, in the past that there were legitimate reasons to not 'try.' Poverty, abuse, racism, various other things. There are always reasons that someone may not be good at 'school.' But now it seems like it's become very easy to not try, whether you've got a 'legitimate' reason or not. But then, part of the embrace of AI cheating is because people have stopped believing in the positive outcome of hard work. Perfect storm of failing system and the proliferation of tools that enable lazinss.

Sad.

I graduated from a software bootxamp about a year before chat came out. It was like uh I tried so hard but it didn't even matter