I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

I read this and it struck a chord. A decade or more ago, a friend of mine teaching English in a major state university told me that he was getting lots of students who couldn&#x27;t seem to read a novel. They could read the words on the page, but they couldn&#x27;t focus enough to really understand it.<p>My experience is that writing things out always improves my understanding of the subject. It&#x27;s similar to forcing yourself to write a proof in mathematics, to verify your understanding. The formalism is hugely helpful.<p>If the result of chatgpt is even more kids skating through life without really picking up these skills... it may have tragic consequences. Learning to think well is the single most important thing I got from education. I would argue that improvements in human thinking -- via philosophy, logic, mathematics, the scientific method, and yes, literacy -- have made a huge difference in human lives over the past few thousand years.<p>Not that chatgpt would be the root cause. Chatgpt would just be a symptom of a much bigger problem.

As long as LLM companies can hang on for another 15 years or so, there will be an entire generation of humans who will be as utterly incapable of living without LLMs in the same way that most people in developed countries are incapable of growing their own food. Intellectual lock-in will be their moat.

I wonder what can be done. It&#x27;s terrifying to realize how dependent students are going to become on these tools. Too many people are just not willing to live with the discomfort that comes with learning something difficult, when the alternative is so readily accessible. Short term gain over long term gain, exemplified.

Technology has always brought fear of dumbing us down, but it rarely does. When the internet came along, people worried we&#x27;d stop remembering things. When Google Maps appeared, people thought we&#x27;d forget how to read maps.<p>Wait... I&#x27;m not sure anyone can read a map... maybe you&#x27;re right.

I don&#x27;t trust LLM&#x27;s to create novel ideas, and I&#x27;d never copy paste any AI output. Would I rework the output or maby use certain through processes, maby. But I&#x27;m not trusting an AI blindly, its a statistical capture of its training data not a magic wand.<p>That said, most professors still force students to write code on paper with no autocorrect, google, or even access to the reference documentation which seems counter productive. I remember when people were calling auto completing text editors cheating, yet despite how much we accept auto complete or how many professional developers use AI tools, were still forcing college students to use pen and paper and trying to memorize syntax and all the functions of a library, all because professors can&#x27;t be decent enough to even allow access to notes or the basic language or library docs.<p>The AI or the documentation isn&#x27;t going to solve your problems. Its enabling you to not memorize an entire language that you might not even work with in your career. Do I think their is people who can and will misuse the technology, yep you bet ya. But we need to stop forcing people to suffer due to the people who disregard the rules.<p>You can also tell a major difference between someone who just uses AI to write the essay or paper, and someone who uses it to develop better ideas or arguments and develop multiple ways of phrasing something. LLM&#x27;s are nothing new, just like how computer vision has been good for a long time.(see opencv, YOLO, and DARKNET)

I just went back to teaching! I’m hopeful that AI makes the classroom experience better for both students and instructors.

&gt; With the easy temptation of AI, many—possibly most—of my students were no longer willing to push through discomfort.<p>There&#x27;s been an important shift in education in the last 20 years: a push for lessons to be short, entertaining and unchallenging. When students struggle with tasks, in many cases they are just told not to do them.<p>LLMs are the next wave of this shift - what could be awesome tools for research and writing will become a crutch. It&#x27;s not so much an issue with LLMs as it is a shunning of any discomfort while learning in favour of amusement and enjoyment.

I&#x27;m excited for these kids, to be honest. My experience in the education system in the 90&#x27;s was a goddamn nightmare. I didn&#x27;t make it to the 9th grade. It just wasn&#x27;t designed for someone with my ADHD and chaotic situation at home. I didn&#x27;t care about most of the subjects they were teaching me, and I would get beaten regularly for doing poorly. I get hyper focused on things I care about, and that system provided very few things that I cared about. Today, I&#x27;m a senior DevOps engineer. Guess what I do care about?<p>And it&#x27;s not just that I only care about computers. I became an autodidact after I left school, and learned about the things that interested me, and only those things. I still got a great education and know a lot of things that provide value to society, and enrich others. It was just that the education system packaged my value as a human being into one big bundle that was graded in aggregate.<p>I have high hopes that our world&#x27;s societies can have such an amazing tool as their disposal that kids don&#x27;t feel like they have to cram the entirety of human existence into their brains for 12&#x2F;16&#x2F;18&#x2F;20 years or suffer the consequences of a failed life; that they can be productive through a creative use of the tools at their disposal, and feel accomplished even if their brains don&#x27;t work the same way as others&#x27;.<p>Not to mention the social benefits of having nearly instantaneous fact checking available, and building their opinions around it. Then, they can also be good people instead of allowing lazy idiot talking heads convince them that their situation is an immalleable doom spiral, locking them into a ecosystem of fear and idolatry that&#x27;s only return is manifest destiny.

&gt; The best educators will adapt to AI. In some ways, the changes will be positive. Teachers must move away from mechanical activities or assigning simple summaries.<p>So much of education <i>always</i> comes down to efficiency, scale, and standardization. The best way to teach or test someone is by having a one-on-one conversation with them, coincidentally the least standardized. The most scalable and standardized way to do it is to publish some material and then asynchronously collect answers to a predefined set of multiple choice questions.<p>It seems like everything you can fake or cheat on is a byproduct of choosing to be further along the efficiency&#x2F;standardization&#x2F;mechanization scale. Which is a byproduct of many many systemic factors, not least of which is funding.<p>It&#x27;s frustrating as hell that so many of our teaching problems have obvious answers that are in many ways better for the students anyways, but those answers just aren&#x27;t systemically or economically feasible. Maybe they&#x27;ll have to become more viable as our current, ultra-mechanical system breaks.

This kind of thing is going to be the split between the technically inclined and the non-technically inclined. Those that believe thinking and understanding is too hard or that school is not cool or whatever will have technology to slide by on. They will be apart of the non-technical society and they will languish there. Comfortable in their lower pay and social media and grocery store tomatoes. Truly one of the herd of corporate loyalty.<p>Fine, I say, we can’t elevate everyone. It’s just a bit amusing though that for a long time the youth was smarter than the previous generation due to embrace of tech. Now the youth is going to be more and more clever and not necessarily more intelligent instead because that is what is valued, taking a shortcut that technology enables.<p>Oddly it might end up being a rift between the lower class and the middle class. Or perhaps more of a reshuffling as those who are willing to put in the efforts to understand will be apart of the techno-literate class and those who “dont care” will be apart of the “dont care” class.<p>Digital welfare for the non-nerdy.

The students use AI to complete assignments; the teachers use AI to create and grade them. It&#x27;s a giant self-licking ice cream cone.

I&#x27;m thinking of going back into teaching because of ChatGPT.<p>I created an entire scheme of work for my wife today, including all the lesson plans, and next I&#x27;ll work on some student resources and quizzes. It took about thirty minutes. She&#x27;ll need to check them over to make sure they&#x27;re okay, but still a massive time saver.<p>I&#x27;ve taken photos of my son&#x27;s revision activities and had ChatGPT mark them. It&#x27;s surprisingly accurate given his awful handwriting.<p>Report writing becomes a thing of the past, as I can upload a CSV of grades along with a sentence or two of description, and have it generate unique reports for each student.<p>This would all allow me to do what I used to love. I can just spend my time with students in the classroom, engaging them, teaching them, discussing with them. I won&#x27;t be bringing home mounds of paperwork, that eats into my evenings and weekends. I&#x27;ll go into work each day feeling fresh and ready to actually educate kids.<p>ChatGPT takes away the busy work from both teachers and students.

IMO most of the reason this teacher quit is students using ChatGPT to get around the puffery and wasteful production assigned.<p>It is important to have the skills to be able to do that kind of task, and transforming information rather than just transcribing it is a key way of training our biological supercomputers. However I can&#x27;t recall even one example of that being the case when I was in school at any level. I think if it ever did happen it was as an accidental side effect rather than an intended part of the process.<p>It would be much harder for such generative tools to regurgitate accurate content for novel things. As an example, a report about what the student was presently working on or had just completed in labs, or a design for something they&#x27;d like to do. Maybe a focus on the hypothesis or &#x27;request for funding&#x27; for a project would better model real world writing and have sufficient local focus to require human writing.

The real problem seems to be with the testing and grading system, and the fact that some people game them to receive some title or other credentials.<p>If one is really interested in learning to write well, or to understand what good writing is, then this particular teacher might still have liked their job.<p>That approach probably doesn&#x27;t make much money though.

&gt; However, these types of comparative analyses failed because most of my students were not developed enough as writers to analyze the subtleties of meaning or evaluate style. “It makes my writing look fancy,” one PhD student protested when I pointed to weaknesses in AI-revised text. IMO teachers, and academia specifically, are to blame for what AI is doing to students because they’re the ones that have defined good writing as “fancy writing”. The hardest part of learning to be a good writer has been undoing all the years of style over substance engrained in high school and college. If we’re taught to write like robots, is it any surprise we just have robots write for us given the opportunity? And is it any surprise we don’t see the point of learning to write if robots seemingly do it so much better?

A friend of mine teaches an intro to web development course - its a 2 day thing, usually over the weekend at a co-working place that does events, and the stories he tells me are insane. These are mostly college graduates and white collar professionals who want to learn some code. They are often perplexed by the idea of a file and folders. Right clicking something is novel for some. He gives all the instructions ahead of time so they can get started right away. That first day is almost exclusively helping people get the &quot;dev environment&quot; setup. Its just a folder on their desktop with some html, css, and js files.

I imagine it&#x27;s difficult to be a good teacher and find effective ways to encourage students to rigorously think about things they care about in spite of the discomfort it might cause.<p>I also believe increasingly capable and sophisticated AI systems will play a formative role in transforming education, not as the current chatbots that are disrupting education as mentioned in the article, but as active participants in the reimagined classrooms of the future. The transition will probably be rough, but it has the potential to bring about a better future and more fruitful learning and writing.

I want to point out here: These are PhD students that the author is talking about. Granted, it seems like the class is a bit of a &#x27;BS&#x27; requirement from the department. Like Ethics classes and HR trainings, i.e. a class that isn&#x27;t on your quals and has no affect on graduation.<p>Still, these aren&#x27;t middle schoolers. They are all &#x27;big kids&#x27; when it comes to intellectual attainment. They&#x27;re past the pre-med and pre-law maddness, they are in academia by choice over money (the author mentions comp-sci students), and they are even bothering to attend this class at all and not just go with a &#x27;Gentleman&#x27;s A&#x27;.<p>And even these folks, even when confronted, Just. Do. Not. Care.<p>I get the author&#x27;s point of view, and agree with their decision to quit.<p>But, as LLMs get better here in the next 5 years ... yeah, the class is pointless.<p>Hell, the research is probably pointless too, and the students know it. The truth of the pointlessness is very debatable, once the students get out and past the grad school blues.<p>I&#x27;d love to know what the students are thinking about the class and about it all too. They&#x27;re the ones being trained on this, afterall, and they clearly do not see any point to it.<p>I mean, it just feels like the students are some of those Imperial Chinese bureaucracy applicants, sitting alone in those open air cubicles, all next to thousands of others, and trying to make the absolute perfect calligraphic strokes, one chance only, or their entire village&#x27;s hopes and dreams fall to dust. And no one gives a rat&#x27;s ass that the words they are writing are saying &#x27;Time is short, dance in the flowers, laugh, run, play, the universe has spared us a precious few&#x27;.

Is this all bad?<p>The conversational model of learning, the dialectic, can be better for learning than just reading walls of text.<p>Instant access to a lot of information, in a more conversational model. I&#x27;ve found it to be more natural.<p>Are we reaching the stage where every kid has a &quot;Young Lady&#x27;s Illustrated Primer&quot; from the Diamond Age? That would be a good thing.

Would he have this problem with smaller classrooms of kids that elect to be in the class rather than having an academic obligation to. There will be always kids who skate by, it just seems like a is exposing that there is a limitation of choices for students in higher education.

Corporate writing (web-sites, marketing, internal hr emails) before LLM&#x27;s might as well have been written by an LLM for its predictable platitudes, word usage and patterns.

Related:<p><i>The Elite College Students Who Can&#x27;t Read Books</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41707605">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41707605</a>

&gt; I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as “delves into”). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students.<p>&gt; So I quit.<p>This strikes me as a non-sequitur. Her students were making a certain class of mistakes, so... she quit? Don&#x27;t students always make mistakes of one kind or another? Teach them to do better, in this case by not using AI, or revising manually the AI output, or some other way. Isn&#x27;t that the job?

Solution: Go back to in-person pen&#x2F;paper tests while having those bags you put your phones into that you get back at the end of the test.

It bodes ill.<p>The hand of fate doth steer our course,<p>As wisdom wanes to machines&#x27; force.<p>A hollow voice, devoid of soul,<p>Whispers false, yet takes its toll.<p>Oracles warned of knowledge lost—<p>Now we reap the bitter cost.

I feel for the author, being a part-time teacher myself and seeing the impact of ChatGPT first-hand.<p>However, I think there is a viable alternative:<p>1. Spend the beginning of the year&#x2F;semester showing the potentially disastrous effects of GenAI (e.g. through various exercises involving GenAI)<p>2. Once students have been &quot;vaccined&quot; against ChatGPT, assume they will still cheat and switch to a type of teaching that leaves little room for cheating with ChatGPT, e.g. long in-person sessions where students write in classroom. Then grade their production (i.e. don&#x27;t leave room for them to update after class).<p>The world is changing fast and brutally, but teachers are the head of the spear against mass enshitification.

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