The email is ominously titled “Final Reminder : The Importance of AI” and flagged “High Importance” when it’s just an ad.

Rest of it goes on about how they got a wallstreet bro to come give a speech about “AI replacing 40% of the jobs.”

Idk why a university likes AI this much either. They even overlook cheating as long as it involves AI.
Both students and graders tell each other they use it openly.

At first it felt weird I am complaining about free accounts and free speeches from investors but then it kinda clicked these are NOT free either. My tuition is paying for all of this.

Even the bus pass has a 5-day sign up process to “save money from students not using that service.”

But somehow they just arbitrarily gave everyone multiple premium chatbot accounts anyways.

Am I just paying a 50% ransom to microsoft for my degree at this point?

Also the email is AI generated too. ITS FROM THE FUCKING DEAN.

    • CannonFodder@lemmy.world
      117·
      5 hours ago

      This probably is written by someone who thinks using ai at all is cheating. Rather, it’s a practical tool and if you know how to use it, it makes the job faster and allows one to do more. They should be teaching students to use AI - if something can be done better with AI, businesses will want people to use it. Yes, doing some work without is good - just like we teach kids to do some math without calculators, but at some point we don’t care because the goal is being able to get shit done efficiently with whatever tools you have.

      • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        11·
        3 hours ago

        The point of University is to teach people how to reason. Teaching people how to use AI literally does the exact opposite.

      • jj4211@lemmy.world
        7·
        4 hours ago

        It’s not like using AI is some elusive skill that needs a while lot of training, the whole point is that it in and of itself responds to natural language and responds in kind.

        Now building AI systems, training, prompt stuffing, etc, those do warrant some education, but using them… The biggest thing to teach is that their apparent confidence is untethered from their accuracy, but that hardly calls for a significant role in education.

        With progressing to calculators, you are offloading basic fundamental tedium to chase larger complexities. Biggest issue there is what complexities are you chasing using the LLM that the LLM can’t do in an education context? Keep in mind that for evaluation in education, we frankly don’t push things into the unknown, because the evaluator has to know that it is solvable, how it is solvable, and the solutions should be viable as a basis of comparison between students. Pretty much the moment it becomes fodder for education or job interviews, LLMs are going to be pretty good at just doing the whole thing. It’s still moderately useless for my professional area, but it can largely whip up a slack knockoff with no problem. A colleague told to evaluate LLM “right now” resorted to “interview ware” for lack of better ideas and it knocked it out of the park and got him excited, then when he tried to put it to work on less well trodden work and was shocked that it had deteriorated to totally useless when he actually needed it.

        In short, acknowledge the models and platforms and their usages, but I dont think they should factor significantly for students or job interviews.

    • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      13·
      5 hours ago

      This was inevitable when all academic institutions were taken over by MBA sociopaths who have no concept of how anything works beyond “line goes up”.

      • chunkystyles@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        1·
        2 hours ago

        Endowments drive me insane. They don’t get used to do anything. Just giant dragon hoards.

        My alma mater could probably give half a million people free tuition by using its endowment, and they have the gall to beg me for donations and I’m still paying off my loans.

  • atrielienz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    20·
    5 hours ago

    My sister just went back to school to get her engineering degree and they make them all sign up for a program called handshake? It tries pretty desperately to schill work from home jobs training AI. And they literally all read like scams.

    • Finalsolo963@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      21 minutes ago

      Every US college/community college shills handshake. Mine forced me to burn a vacation day to sit in their orientation and they tried to sell handshake as some unique perk as if I hadn’t seen it at every other school I’d attended. I was furious.

    • BreakerSwitch@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      16 minutes ago

      Can’t wait to get paid for several months deliberately sabotaging AI until someone realizes what I’m up to

  • FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world
    251·
    4 hours ago

    If LLM’s could do everything that the CEO’s have promised, they wouldn’t be rolling out porn generators to gin up usage.

    This is Theranos 2.0, and while LLM’s can be a useful tool in some ways, it’s clear to anyone who uses it regularly that the promises don’t jive with the functionality, and I don’t see how we get it there when they’ve already trained on the whole of human knowledge and they still can’t figure out basic queries.