Fuck AI

Most people are incredibly lazy when it comes to writing.

Over on Reddit, there’s a subreddit where you needed to write a 500 character text post to accompany your picture. That’s to prevent it from becoming just another photo dumping ground. After all, it is a DISCUSSION forum. DISCUSSION, for emphasis.

Well, that rule - which had existed since the sub was formed - got more and more criticism the past few years. It was deemed ‘too difficult’, ‘elitist’ and other such nonsense. And of course, with people’s terrible reading comprehension, that’s a barrier as well.

For reference, 500 characters is less than two tweets. So most people should be able to write that.

God, I miss the early internet when people put actual effort into writing posts.

The story is an eyeball grabber precisely because it is being pitched as "stupid entitled parents".

Dale and Jennifer Harris allege that the Hingham High School student handbook did not explicitly prohibit the use of AI to complete assignments and that the punishment visited upon their son for using an AI tool—he received Saturday detention and a grade of 65 out of 100 on the assignment—has harmed his chances of getting into Stanford University and other elite schools.

Hingham High is regularly ranked as one of the best schools in the country, and has a reputation operating as a feeder into the Ivy League and similar tier universities. In these kinds of high-stakes environments, GPA and Class Rank are a form of commodity that parents (not unjustifiably) go to the mat to wrangle. The difference between admittance and denial to a school like Stanford can be hundreds of thousands a year in future professional income for the kid.

But that's the real root of the problem here. A single grade on a single test in a single class determining a student's entire socio-economic trajectory creates all sorts of moral hazards. One of which is parents willing to litigate over a grade.

Perhaps the problem isn't with this particular pair of parents realizing the stakes, but with an increasingly steep pyramid of incomes based on where you enter the workforce.

This is also why zero tolerance doesn't work with bullies. Because the moment the bully gets in trouble, his bully parent will waddle into the office and bully the faculty and staff because their little shit stain got in trouble. Faculty doesn't wanna deal with these bully parents, so the bully kids get away with everything as a result

Perhaps it is also that LLMs are horrible at making any kind of argument and probably wrote a shit paper

They tend to be excellent at churning out pages of high school tier writing prompt slop. The precise grammar, the easy-to-read formatting, and the automatic citations make them the ideal tool for generating this kind of beginners writing.

The problem with LLMs in a writing class is the same as calculators in a math class. Its trivial to learn how to use, but doesn't instill the background into how and why it produces these outputs. It's a literal black box.

The purpose of churning out term papers isn't to provide useful information to your grade-school teacher. It is to practice the art of research, analysis, condensation, and presentation. You're supposed to create shit writing at the early stage of your development. That's part of the learning process. Write bad. Get instruction on how to improve. Write better. Get more instruction. Write good.

Bringing an LLM to a writing class is like bringing a hydraulic press to the gym.

Someone else in the comments said that it's possible (may vary by state / locale) that 65 may be the lowest grade they're allowed to give now. So if that's the case, I suspect the teacher would have given them a 0 if they could.

My university would give you an automatic F for plagiarism/cheating that would effectively set you back 2 years.

It is good this kid got caught when he did, because all he gets out of it now is one bad grade and a lesson to not use LLMs in the future (hopefully, the parents don't seem to be the best in this regard)

The student handbook also doesn't have any warnings against inserting it into your rectum, because we expect common sense to tell you that's a terrible idea.

I'm pretty sure there will be a passage about plagiarism in the handbook too.

These kids need to learn what "fuck around and find out" means by themselves. Sheltering them from consequences does a lot of damage later on.