In an online discussion post, Alcorn State University history professor Dr. Jason Gibson posed a question that represented part of his students’ midterm. It was about the…

  • Washedupcynic@lemmy.ca
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    6 hours ago

    This is hysterical. Like the cheaters couldn’t even be bothered to proof read what the AI wrote to make sure it was correct.

    • Redditisbollocks@feddit.uk
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      6 hours ago

      People are dumb. People will always be dumb, there’s no getting away from it.

      We are just apes after all.

      • madeinthebackseat@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        It’s not that we’re solely dumb and incapable of intelligence, it’s that many, if not most, will seek the solution with the lowest energy required. In turn, AI is creating a spiraling of learning and knowledge acquisition.

        Who knows where civilization lands in 20 years.

      • Trex202@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        Yes, but school is there to teach you to use brain. Why go school if no use brain?

          • tburkhol@slrpnk.net
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            49 minutes ago

            Goodhart’s law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

            Used to be that a college degree indicated people with time, money, and drive to put four years into study. It was a good measure of the “right” kind of person. Now it’s just another job requirement and doesn’t indicate anything.

        • Pxtl@lemmy.ca
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          3 hours ago

          Teenagers aren’t really known for making great decisions.

          Source: was once a teenager, made bad decisions.

        • Malyca@lemmy.zip
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          3 hours ago

          Why pay astronomical tuition, room and board, textbooks, all of it, just to learn nothing and use chat got. The bottom of the article said a professor at Brown thought all but 2 of his students cheated. At Brown. We’re so fucked.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      You haven’t ran into someone doing this on work emails?

      They don’t read the full email they get, just far enough to see if they got what they want. Then they plug it into an AI, and tell it to respond, then copy/paste it back to Outlook and hit reply.

      They’ll keep doing that, over and over. And it usually ends up with them insisting on a meeting to “discuss” where they essentially get in a loop of “it’ll work, just do it”

      And it’s like pulling fucking teeth to get them to admit the only thing they’re basing that on, is a chatbot told them it would work.

      People are worried about the kids, and we should be, but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they’ve got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent. Couple with Covid related IQ drops and the fact that time is linear and we’ll keep getting older…

      Society is fucked.

      We need to seriously treat AI like an addictive drug that people aren’t capable of limiting themselves with.

      • HWKII@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        People who use AI to do this at work, were doing it before AI too, just manually. Half-reading emails, restating the obvious, asking off topic questions and demanding meetings without purpose has been a norm in my career field for 20 years. Especially amongst middle managers.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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          54 minutes ago

          The difference is they’re lazy…

          With AI they can “produce” and everyone else that’s lazy doesn’t notice it’s gibberish.

          The only people who realize it, are the ones who were always doing the work.

          Those people were usually already struggling to pick up the slack. But now all the lazy idiots reply with multiple page emails and once you’re dealing with 5-6 of them at once, it’s impossible to keep up.

          It’s a literal gosh gallop attack, you can’t address all the ways everyone’s chatbot is wrong, and every email can I troduce multiple new issues while completely dropping the issue the chatbot insisted was most important.

          So yeah…

          The problem isn’t new, it always existed

          But now the issue is 10x the volume to get cleaned up

      • WesternInfidels@feddit.online
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        2 hours ago

        but it rotted adults brains even faster, and because of their age they’ve got a much shorter clock to stop using it before effects are permanent.

        Look here, I’m an adult who uses AI all the time and you need to understand that the people of Madagascar waft blissfully through the tropical waters en masse.

      • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
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        3 hours ago

        They’ll keep doing that, over and over. And it usually ends up with them insisting on a meeting to “discuss” where they essentially get in a loop of “it’ll work, just do it”

        And it’s like pulling fucking teeth to get them to admit the only thing they’re basing that on, is a chatbot told them it would work.

        Strange. I am experiencing the same. In one case, I had to make, after six months of discussing an interface, an end-to-end test to show it didn’t work and their, ahem, unit tests failed to show that. That was for a stepper motor interface and driver with three essential methods.

        This guy is senior software architect at my workplace.

        Boss insisting that I get to an agreement with him on ai usage.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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          3 hours ago

          Boss insisting that I get to an agreement with him on ai usage.

          Because most bosses don’t understand if one person is using a bunch of AI, that almost always means everyone else is spending a lot of time behind the scenes making it workable.

          They want AI to cut workers, so one worker using AI and touching a lot of things looks great…

          As long as the other humans are there to clean up the mess, the AI users appears super productive.

          But then when managers layoff everyone that doesn’t use AI because they’re not as productive, chickens roost and you realize no one still in the building actually knows their own work let alone the wider product

          Even if caught before layoffs, by the time a worker’s over reliance on AI is noticed, that employee can often no longer function without it.

          But besides all that:

          Anyone that expects employers to still pay for tokens a decade from now is insane. We’re gonna see people taking 100k salary, and spend >50% of that on AI tokens themselves.

          There’s no way American corporations will keep shouldering the cost, they’ll push that off onto the employees the second they can.

        • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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          2 hours ago

          No one here is using AI.

          I’m sure you know what you mean with “here”, but no one else does…

          They’d just have to randomly make assumptions

    • stealth_cookies@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      Most people who use AI to write something can’t be bothered to make sure it is correct. It pisses me off at work so bad when someone “writes” a document or does “research” with AI and just copy pastes it into an email without actually reading to see if it makes sense.

      I got so pissed of a couple months ago when people were telling me about a “great research document” that someone put together for something we had coming up that we desperately needed information about. As soon as they shared the document to me I realized it was completely AI generated and 1/3 of it didn’t make a lick of sense. I wanted to yell at the person who created it to at least take 10 minutes to delete all of the obviously incorrect crap.

      • urushitan 漆たん@kakera.kintsugi.moe
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        4 hours ago

        You’ve hit the nail on the head. What you’re describing isn’t just laziness — it’s a fundamental breakdown of trust in the modern workplace. Let’s delve into this.

        Here’s the thing: when someone copy-pastes AI output without reading it, the document was never the deliverable — the verification was the deliverable. The prose isn’t load-bearing; the checking is. A document nobody read isn’t a document — it’s a liability with formatting.

        And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Is the AI actually the problem here? No — the workflow is. This genuinely comes down to ownership:

        • Trust erodes silently. Every unchecked paragraph is a small withdrawal from a shared account nobody audits — until the balance is zero.
        • Verification is idempotent. Ten minutes of reading costs the same whether you do it once or a hundred times — but skipping it compounds.
        • The failure isn’t technical — it’s cultural. No review, no judgment, no accountability.

        This is exactly the kind of thing that starts as one bad research doc and scales — from a single email, to a team norm, to an entire organization quietly outsourcing its thinking. In today’s fast-paced world, the ability to say “I read this and I stand behind it” isn’t just a soft skill — it’s a superpower, and honestly? A testament to the rich tapestry of what human-AI collaboration could be.

        Ultimately, your colleague didn’t fail to use AI correctly — they failed to be the human in the loop. The tool didn’t remove their judgment. They left it at the door.

        I hope this helps! Would you like me to draft a one-page best-practices memo your team can circulate? 🚀

        /s in case this isn’t blatantly obvious

    • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 hours ago

      That happens with classes like history or philosophy, the ones that are considered to be mostly useless blablabla.

      • Throbbing_banjo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        6 hours ago

        You… Think the entire subjects of history and philosophy are “useless blablabla?” That is certainly an opinion to have.

      • x00z@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Regardless of what history is being taught, people like you often forget that the goal is to also help you develop your brain.

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        6 hours ago

        Those being treated as useless (goes back to No Child) is the fucking problems

        Humans are not innately moral, someone needs to teach them that shit, that’s what history and philosophy is for

        • wjrii@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          (goes back to No Child)

          In the US, that shit goes back at least to the GI Bill post-WW2 and the Cold War STEM obsession that took root after the Soviets launched Sputnick. For better or worse, and to be clear a very real portion of it was for worse, before that time College or University was a finishing school, hopefully to include intellectual development, for future elites. Well-read, well-rounded and well-spoken were the expectation, and it was a ticket to opportunities.

          After the war, we simply adapted the existing educational infrastructure to a vastly expanded audience who were now told that some degree was the ticket to any promising white-collar career; teachers colleges, technical colleges, and completely new institutions all moved to a model based on the prominent pre-war universities, but with very different “customers”. The students were there to get a professional credential, not to secure social cachet. The democratization of higher education was very real, but the number of people who needed to be college graduates far outstripped the number who wanted to think deeply about literature, history, and philosophy (or at least the number of people who understood that pretending to do so was part of the social contract).

          Then, to make sure we didn’t fall behind the Commies, as many resources, financial and social, as possible were poured into STEM programs. This was again within this same “University” paradigm, so students who had no particular desire to study history or philosophy were being required to do so, but 95%+ of the institutional and cultural signals they got told them this was busy work required by ivory towered non-entities who didn’t do anything “real.”

          The humanities professors and department chairs see all this too, so they take steps to avoid making waves and keep their jobs, and keep their departments as healthy as possible. Undergraduate coursework, both the assignments and the expectations, gets watered down, especially for GenEd required courses. There’s genuine stuff to unpack as to why, how, and how much STEM kids and jobseeking kids should be required to study the humanities after high school (Peter Thiel comes to mind as someone who maaaaybe should have avoided college level philosophy courses), but the particular way it went down in the US was not very healthy. Ironically, in fighting to preserve the vestiges of a liberal-arts education, its defenders may have undercut its perception.

        • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
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          6 hours ago

          They are useless. History is useless by definition; and philosophy has reached the peak of its usefulness somewhere in the middle of the XIX century and can’t do better anymore. Like alchemy, which was useful at some point.

          • palordrolap@fedia.io
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            4 hours ago

            Often, people who say that philosophy and the study of history are useless endeavours are hoping for the resurrection of some historical philosophy or another and they don’t want people to find out how and why it failed.

            Are you one of those people?

            • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
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              4 hours ago

              That’s strange logic. I just want people to analyze the current situation with modern tools, not referring to some ancient legends.

          • frostedtrailblazer@lemmy.zip
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            4 hours ago

            What makes something useful to you? Does it need to be something done or learned purely for the sake of profits? Does it need to be cold and unfeeling data for it to matter?

            • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
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              4 hours ago

              That’s the question I can’t answer. Really, I can’t formulate a really nice definition of usefulness. But still I can’t think of any use for history. Except maybe fun as in “literature”. But being fun doesn’t justify its teaching at school. Drinking alcohol is fun too, but…

              • frostedtrailblazer@lemmy.zip
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                3 hours ago

                History serves as a record for the decisions of those who came before us. I believe it matters so that we can learn something from both the mistakes and the pivotal moments of the past.

                Personally, I was convinced about just how much history mattered when I took a class on it taught by a veteran. The way we avoid making poor decisions -decisions which bring about the premature deaths of countless young men and the innocent, through acts of war - is by learning from our past and looking for a better path.

                Philosophy matters for the same reasons, imo. If we are not taught how to reason, how can we expect to live a life that has any meaning or purpose? Both for ourselves and for others. If we’re not taught how to see through the dangers and misdirection of logical fallacies, for instance, we can more easily be bought into a lie or blame a scapegoat for all of our problems.

              • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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                4 hours ago

                This is absurd. You don’t think there’s anything important that we can learn from our past and apply toward our future?

                • username_1@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  3 hours ago

                  Time changes. Cultures, laws… Absolutely all that changes. Data, that history gathers, can’t be used for prediction. At least the precision won’t be better than if you will just analyze your current situation. Absurd is trying to predict the future from fairy tails about kings and dragons.

                  • CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works
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                    3 hours ago

                    Time changes but people don’t. Weird that you bring up fairytales about kings and dragons despite that having absolutely nothing to do with history.