AI is taking the jobs of Kenyans who write essays for U.S. college students
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Yes, obviously this industry shouldn’t exist. But it does. Lots of industries exist purely to fix inefficiencies in others.
If there was other global knowledge work available to Kenyans I’m sure they’d take it. These people are writing college level essays! They are probably better writers than most of us.
When futurists talk about industrial revolutions they all agree that in the long term it works out but in the short term it causes lots of pain and suffering for those whose work is displaced.
If you’re an AI futurist you should be intellectually honest and admit that chatGPT is probably not going to be good for Kenya. Trying to dress it up as if there’s absolutely no downside to this is just lying to yourself.
It is incumbent on us to figure out how to implement and regulate new tech so that it appeals to the better angels of our nature, rather than encouraging the atavistic Hobbes-ian instincts which successful societies must overcome.
What you do for a living isn't neutral, there's an opportunity cost. That person in Kenya writing an essay for someone else isn't doing journalism or writing a great novel, or starting a business or whatever. Now, for sure, Kenya isn't the best place for doing those things anyway, but it's never going to be if a whole pool of labor is doing bullshit work like grinding out college-level essays. There's no path from where Kenya is today (not great, not as bad as you might think though) to where the West is where work like that is a part of its economy, is there?
Can't you see how bad it for America - or anywhere - for people bright enough to understand stocks to be wasting their time selling stocks to rich people in Western countries
Economies are too complex to judge any one person’s choice of how they participate in them. If starting a business (or being a journalist or writing a novel) was a better idea, perhaps some of those Kenyans would have done that. But writing college essay brings (brought?) new money into Kenya that can be reinvested in new businesses, journalists, and novels. In the absence of non-corrupt foreign investment in Kenya I think this could be a big booster for their productive economy.
Or maybe not. But who are we to judge?
That's an issue for the American education system, not Kenya's population.
Having said all of that, let's not overstate the difficulty of writing college level essays, especially essays that are good enough for someone who isn't able to write such essays themselves.
But the opportunities in Kenya weren't taken from them? That's what the poster is trying to explain: A country should make sure their brightest are gainfully employed and compensated. That's how you build a better nation.
and the weather should make sure to rain often enough to not cause famine.
Equally, how many journalists does a country need? Not everybody can be a novelist. Not everybody can be a journalist.
At least you admit that essays are bullshit work; they don't actually assess an individual whatsoever if they can be outsourced, and are thus not fit for purpose of assessing someone.
OR is it because this phenomenon is proof that the ability to write winning college degree level essays and dissertations and the accumulation of a industrial scale workforce of talent able to create such works over multiple sophisticated subject areas and subjects, has no benefits for a actual economy and can only persist as a activity if supported by a highly distorted systematic foreign reward arbitrage?
Shouldn't they be employed at improving their own country, since they are this smart? Instead of gaining from corruption and fraud on another continent?
If the smartest young people in your country have to move abroad or work remotely for foreign companies in order to make the most of their skills, then your country and society is a total failure - ask me if you want, I'm from one of those places.
They can do what matters to them without cheating the system and getting rewarded a degree for it.
* (amongst other negative forms like rent seeking etc I'm talking about the positive case here)
Now these people will have to find other sources of income, and that will create economic and political pressures.
Different passports give different amount of travel freedom.
Some countries are stuck paying debts to other countries.
And so on...
This can be fixed by countries simply by making sure fraud and security risks can't end-up abroad.
But I don’t think the solution is for the west to ban people from bad countries making an income and bringing it home.
Of course, yeah, relying on corruption and fraud from another continent to try and make a living you can’t make in your own country is a problem. When the issue is that local corruption is not just having them work for more developed countries, but having them abandon their home countries entirely, yeah that’s a big problem. But I don’t think there’s a problem with having people work remotely for foreign companies while their own country isn’t yet able to properly utilize their own skills yet.
The resources are already in their home country from the beginning. Then the local elite sell those resources to foreigners and leave their countrymen being poor. Since poor isn't stupid, those countrymen learn to write essays since learning is free. Then they work for foreigners to get some money, so they can buy resources. It's a circle of stupidity.
Everything in life is step by step. I completely understand those who emigrate or work for foreign companies instead of working on improving their country - I had to do that myself after fighting for many years. Nobody can be so patriotic that they throw their life away in that manner. What I don't understand is how the rulers can decide to continue on this road to ruin.
it's not corrupt nor fraud from the point of view of the kenyans. They are merely doing a transaction with a foreigner. As far as the kenyans are concerned, it's the foreigner who is defrauding the university for plagerism and cheating.
Causing political change is hard, and a different skill. You might as well as Silicon Valley engineers why they're not improving American policy instead of making advertisers slightly better at getting clicks.
Say you’re the smart Kenyan who is willing to work. But there is no work in your country, or the only employment you can find is something that doesn’t use your intellect. You are that guy who can fix cars for a living, but there are no cars in the country. There are bicycles to be fixed, but they don’t pay enough to feed your family, or make progress.
You can choose to write essays, make money in dollars and afford a car. You can spend money in the local economy so that others can afford education, grow themselves and afford a car. Eventually you can create your own business locally to fix the cars. Or even better if you manage to make a lot of money, you can build a business that allows others to build their own business.
Or you could continue fixing bicycles, make no money and constantly worry about survival, and never do anything more than fixing bicycles.
And this is how capital and modern economics works. I’m also from one of those places. :)
Maybe instead of fixing bicycles or facilitating scams they could just do honest remote work for richer societies?
I don't see it that way. There's no moral hazard on the Kenyan side (they aren't the ones submitting work as their own). The same way a gun or car manufacturer isn't and shouldn't be liable for the criminal use of his product.
I could go on one of these market places and hire one of these Kenyan writer for completely legitimate reasons.
“ Politics is the mind-killer. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back. If you abide within that pattern, policy debates will also appear one-sided to you—the costs and drawbacks of your favored policy are enemy soldiers, to be attacked by any means necessary.”
I can imagine this entire sector being hollowed out completely within a few years, destroying the entire middle class.
I’ve also worked with enough extremely skilled people out of India who were involved in architecture and design work that I think all the skill needed is present in the country for their own tech sector to sustain itself eventually. Now if the government and societal norms will allow that to actually come to fruition…less sure on that.
India’s tech sector is almost entirely dominated by low paid, low skilled tech labor. TCS and Infosys combined employ over a million people.
To give you an indication of the skill gap, a fresh college graduate who joins TCS usually gets $4,500-5,000 per year. Meanwhile a VC funded startup product company will usually pay $30-40,000 per year.
I really don’t see how these $5k/year employees aren’t replaced by AI agents.
Newer versions with the ChatGPT-like AI is definitely closer than people think. and Customer Service jobs are a very large amount of employment here and overseas. Bad for lots of people.
Countries like Phillippines will suffer a lot. In India, the BPO industry alone employs over 4M people, and this is the first step towards middle-class for a lot of people. If this is taken away, I don't know what they will do.
Consider telephone and credit card networks. Some countries skipped straight to mobile/wireless telephony (with internet!) while the US had to make the "this region already is wired, why are we putting a cell tower there?" (this played out in the 90s). Similar has happened with creditcard terminals in USA, where other countries got better infrastructure faster because there wasnt a competing incumbent investment in place.
I'm not sure the logic stands. Following the same logic, I can also argue that of course looting should not exist, but it does. Looter could've taken a decent job if they could find one. Plagiarism shouldn't exist, but it does. The cheating students could've avoid cheating if they could get higher scores so they can find a decent job. And on and on.
What's wrong is wrong. Period.
Writing an essay isn’t. (Maybe it’s not allowed for the college student.)
People who cheated in school had a bit of an advantage, but with these advances, it forces teachers to find ways to test people in different ways.
I once had a teacher who gave us open book, open note, etc... for chemistry. The trick was, you had ~60 minutes to do it. If you didn't practice, you'd never finish the test in time.
I also had a different teacher in thermo 2 give us two different insane problems, and we had to solve them. GPT would easily fail at this. It involved drawing a few diagrams of layers and calculations. (although, I wonder if you could train LLMs on this problem) Still, you had to do this in class, no calculator, just set up the equations.
If you remember one of the questions it would be interesting to know what the current crop of LLM chat bots return in answer. If you know the correct answer to the question it would be especially interesting to know whether the prose the things return has any semblance of truth to it.
My preference for university exams was a simple, single page cheatsheet that you had to make yourself. You could write the finicky stuff that is hard to remember on it, but you couldn't fast-learn the material like you could from a book. Though I do remember writing out little programs for the weirder stuff like required coverage over concrete reinforcement bars. Which felt a bit like cheating at the time.
If AI can "level the playing field" then we need to change the game?
In my domain (computer programming) I know enough and have enough experience that I can gauge the skill and knowledge of my peers (and they mine.) That is how I get jobs. I go in and talk to the other programmers, and I can demonstrate that I'm "the real deal".
In re: "just [letting] doctors go yolo on their patients" I don't want to get into a long thing here, but I will mention that a strong argument could be made that the current system is not very good at getting positive outcomes. What I mean is, doctors and hospitals kill a lot of people. In other words, the existing systems to train and employ doctors are far from perfect.
(Not to put too fine a point on it, the way to find good doctors is to ask other doctors whom they would let doctor them, ya feel me?)
- - - -
edit: I realized I didn't answer your question.
What I propose is that we throw out the whole obviously-broken academic system.
I propose that people go to colleges and schools to learn, at any age, at any time, and they don't get grades or degrees or anything.
You get to be a doctor or architect or whatever by demonstrating to other people who know that you too know, rather than "earning" a proxy (degree or whatever) that can be faked.
If human life were simple enough that it could be covered by a system of tests and grades we wouldn't have these huge brains on the ends of our spines, eh?
That's just describing a test? A (verbal, written, practical) test is just a demonstration that you know X.
I mean a scenario where the candidate for doctor (or whatever) talks to half a dozen or a dozen doctors who then say "yay" or "nay" and if all of them say "yay" they are a doctor but if any of them say "nay" then they are not (although this doesn't mean that they can never become doctors later, they just have to address the failings first that led to the reviewing doctors to decline to admit them to their ranks.)
It's about humans communicating with other humans in a way that is extremely difficult to fake, as opposed to whatever testing system we're using now (that people cheat at) that produces (unreliable) proxies for actual domain knowledge.
If you just want to learn tests are unnecessary.
If you want to become a doctor the only distinction should be that other doctors must be willing to submit themselves to your care.
(This might sound crazy, but the person who is the greatest healer I've ever met IRL is not a doctor and would be laughed at by most of them, yet he can effect miraculous cures of major diseases, among other things. His art is completely off the radar of modern medicine.)
But most of what you need to prove is not something you actually use in your job. A A in compilers will help you get a job as it makes you seem smart, but very few developers will ever write one. So in that case, the A in itself is the goal.
I hated tests like this... because I was a lazy kid who coasted through school and didn't understand why "simply understanding the material" was insufficient. In college (Cornell) the chaos continued, I got poor grades in calc because despite getting all the bonus questions right (which tested your understanding of the material), I couldn't finish the actual test in time because I hadn't done the problem-set homework (these problem sets took 6 hours to do btw... coming from a high school that only started challenging me towards the end, I was completely ill-equipped to handle that level of self-discipline).
Of course, in the working world, it turns out that persistence/commitment/self-discipline is the real payoff. I had to learn that the hard way later on.
On the third attempt I had a different lecturer - an old guy who favoured attendance over anything else and gave the same problems each year. I knew most of the material already, so I got 80% out of that.
I learned nothing from that experience though and went on to fail 22 courses over the seven years I spent in college.
After my junior year I found a job through a school friend whom I helped preparing for his exams and from that point on I started weighing whether on a given day I should go to lectures or make money. My family was in a precarious situation financially and I only needed two full days to finance repeating a course, so the choice was obvious at the time.
I almost dropped out after two semesters because I failed too many courses (four - two was the limit after the first year), but I talked the dean out of deciding to kick me out - we had that option back in the day.
I spent the remainder of my time on what you could consider a Performance Improvement Plan - took 14 courses for the third semester, failed three, but thanks to that I was just three short starting the fourth, which was acceptable.
Four years of winging it like that and after a total of five years(instead of the planned four) I had my Bachelor of Engineering degree.
In hindsight I should have not went to do a Master's Degree because I never finished my thesis due to not being satisfied with the scope(or the lack of it).
I unfortunately have both (although both are now being managed and my stability has hugely improved). There was a lot of drama before the diagnoses, and I'm still working through having taken it personally...
Our chemistry professor had the opposite approach – memorize all the things and test that. I still don’t understand chemistry.
In college every professor encouraged bringing notes, textbooks, anything you need. The exam is there to test your understanding, not whether you can memorize a bunch of trivia.
The toughest exam I ever had was for the compilers class – 4 hours open internet do whatever you want as long as your compiler passes my unit tests. 2 questions: Add feature A and feature B to the compiler you built at tutorials this semester.
Absolutely no way you could cheat on that.
Yes, we can find creative in-class test methods immune to cheaters and GPTs. But if the skill you are testing has been commodified, the deeper problem is to justify learning it at all. Once you have the calculator, learning long division hardly matters. Most adults have forgotten the algorithm.
We're making the skill of writing, and much else, into a calculator.
But we don't know yet what the implications will be... the skill is writing is bound up with thinking and culture in ways long division is not.
Long division does have applications in some areas of maths, like polynomial division and factoring.
If you didnt know long division, you would surely not be able to learn about polynomial factoring. Knowledge is knowledge, and it does not expire.
This is more important than ever in the world of chat GPT. When you’re dealing with something that can quickly generate something that sounds convincing regardless of truth value, you need that quick intuition to keep up. So the question is, if you’re a chemistry major, how do you gain that intuition? It’s possible that generating lots of data from GPT and just checking it for truth value more painstakingly before handing it in is sufficient to eventually learn. But it’s also possible that you do need to personally learn the fundamentals by working through problems if you want to eventually gain the intuitions a chemistry major needs to have. While a deeper problem exists in the commodification…it’s hard to say how much that deeper problem affects the ideal way to teach people to be skilled in a subject.
One Intro to Physics (for majors and engineering) professor was the toughest and reveled in it. The class, in general, was a weeder class, so we all knew going in that it was meant to be overly hard.
The final though. My lord. It was hard, yes, but he put a little extra bit of psychological torture into it: It was a 'choose your grade' final.
In that, he had written four separate final exams. One was a D, one was a C, one was a B, and one was an A. You had to choose which final to take, and that would be the grade you got for the exam, providing that you passed that test. If you didn't pass you got an F. You could only choose one exam to take, no trying to finish the D quickly and then move up to a B.
I think only one person had the chutzpah to take the A level test. Everyone else struggled along with the Bs and Cs. Which, I unfortunately have to remember, were very difficult themselves.
I don't consider that work to be illegitimate; he gave me fully-written essays that I did not change the content of, only the grammar, so that his actual thought could reach his prof in a clear way. A discussion of privilege would mention that he was a rich kid whose father was, by his telling, a fairly important man in Sri Lanka.
As such, I think anyone being salty towards this industry of people with essay skills writing essays for money is... wrongheaded, at best. Yes, the clickbaity title of the article emphasizes the way it is being abused by privileged people in the US, but as far as I'm concerned, it is just as possible that they are rewriting essays for people who are doing the work but struggle to compose the words.
We all know that's not true in every case, and probably not true in most cases, but bottom line, This Is A Legitimate Industry, and writing off the bad effects of AI on said industry by assassinating the character of those who participate in it for survival is reprehensible.
From the pragmatic philosophical distinction, I've acquired an appreciation for distinctness that's as great as mine for clarity[1]. Incidentally, I always find it surprising how readable Peirce's popular works are.
[1] https://courses.media.mit.edu/2004spring/mas966/Peirce%20187...
I'm pretty sure there's a critical mass of famous science dudes who relied on someone else to turn their scribble into coherent writing. No difference.
That's called tutoring.
Not only is it legal, but a lot of institutions encourage it and even run official services to offer it. Language proficiency for foreign students is often a pretty big barrier to their success. Your student learned from you, and I'm sure he wasn't ashamed back home to tell his parents that he hired a tutor to sharpen his skills.
What these people are doing is different, they are sending in the assignment and expecting a completed paper at the end. They may or may not use it to further their understanding or skills, but they will definitely submit it as their own.
> white-presenting Canadian
What does that even mean?
edit: I describe myself as straight-presenting for the same reasons.
Side question: Is race as present over there in politics as it is here in the US? I remember reading about the country now having racial quotas for TV guests appearances and university research grants.
I don't see the point of this article.
Maybe the smart Kenyans are themselves using ChatGPT to 5x their throughput and essay-writing business in the meantime.
Does anyone know what fraction of Kenyans have incomes of at least 1000 USD/month?
Competing with GPT4 on price for boilerplate essay is just pointless.
The competition would be between a $20 per month OpenAI membership and paying a Kenyan by the essay.
The Kenyan could use OpenAI for drafts and charge $5 per essay. (S)he would earn more than $20 per month.
As I've gotten older I've noticed how my day job depends more on communicating effectively than solving hard technical problems.
The best technical idea doesn't serve you if you can't communicate it to others.
One of my friends once submitted an essay where the introduction and the conclusions were coherent, but all the text in the middle was just unrelated garbage. It's an extreme case, but in many cases if the extremes and the subtitles are fine, the quality of the middle is not so important.
(BTW, it's "poring" not "pouring".)
I wonder how easy it is now for Western high school teachers to outsource things like lesson planning or grading tests to lower-cost countries? Startup idea: build a marketplace like that. There has to be a market for it.
You can draw whatever conclusions you want, the "point" is mostly to make you aware of new facts, though perspectives are also quoted in the piece -- including yours! Specifically, one quoted person talks about both pros and cons and says: "This means they can now spend more time being creative, and have better articles because of the time ChatGPT saves them."
Which some significant part of the college student body is not willing to. Having the option to do something without the will to do so is practically equivalent to not being able to.
The kind of people who would look for someone to write their essays is also very likely to opt for the lowest friction method, and chatGPT is obviously that. The article mentions that low word count easier answers are where he primarily felt a hit, and chatGPT would be good at those.
This is and isn't true. I made a living doing high-skill essay writing for a while - I specialized in upper-level undergraduate or graduate level papers with a 24-48 hour turn around time. I charged out the nose.
For the American students, you're right. For the foreign students at US universities (the majority of my clients), they had a ton of money to throw around, a lack of understanding of how the systems worked, and strong status incentives to get a degree by any means necessary. Most of them were also privileged enough to never have to learn planning and therefore left things to the last moment, which is where I came in. I'd expect LLMs to contribute to the bifurcation of the cheating market with domestic students making use of them but rich foreign students not so much.
(I did this because if I made too much I'd lose my healthcare and since I have a condition where my meds cost 300k+/yr + makes 40+ hour weeks difficult, the 'logical' thing to do was work the grey market since I could have healthcare and work the 20-30 hours/week that was comfortable for me. Now that I have healthcare that isn't in danger of being taken away if I'm too successful, I no longer engage in this.)
This is far from a US-only thing though; degrees serve as gatekeepers to status and positions worldwide, so there is a market that will be filled.
As an example, my grandfather did similar work as a side job — in the USSR. The real qualification for many director level posts was “on good terms with the right people in the party”… but the formal qualifications required some related degree to the (factory, institute, etc.) function. If you could not get the degree yourself, you found someone to help.
I would not at all be surprised if the situation is identical in modern China.
Why in the world do you think a lazy US college student would go to the effort to arrange an international money transfer to get an essay written by ChatGPT and edited by someone, when they can just get it from ChatGPT directly and cut out the middle man? It's not like ChatGPT is obscure or unknown at this point.
This is just a Steven Pinker-esque attempt to sound clever while handwaving away hardship and not realizing what you are saying is utter nonsense.
IMO, it doesn’t make sense to purchase expensive licensing to use GPT, when you could easily hire a living, breathing Kenyan to actually write stuff for you.
With a bit of training, Kenyans can become well suited for general purpose organic workloads and open ended tasks requiring high degree of intelligence and subjective analytical skills. Horizontal scaling is relatively straightforward and Kenyans will cooperate with each other with very little configuration required. Kenyans also do not require nearly as much prompting as GPT due to their innate intuitive abilities and superior comprehension skills. They possess great capacity for novel creative thought without extra input stimulus.
The typical downsides of organic computation pipelines still exist: Unlike an AI, Kenyans can suffer from burnout or have inconsistent performance metrics, they are also much slower to produce outputs. There is a high degree of variability between Kenyans due to poor quality control, nonetheless it is easy to replace a Kenyan with a new one.
Consider Kenyans.
Honestly I'm wasting too much time here. I wish I could feed the bot with my beliefs (Electron bad, nuclear good, Windows 11 a train-wreck, AI a bubble, ...) and it would post for me as appropriate.
Don't worry, with those believes you don't have to post at all! There are hundreds of us that already write the same comments!
1) undesirable_outcome will not happen, and here's a rational argument why.
2) ok, undesirable_outcome did happen but it wasn't undesirable in the first place and here's a rational argument why
dismiss the concerns, then invalidate the concerns, it's how you keep progress moving
a) trust - many don't outsource because the are not willing to reveal company code, are worried the outsourcer will sell their logins, etc.
b) availability - AI will drive your kid to school, do his schoolwork, choose him content to watch on his phone, and find you recipes. At some point it will likely also prepare the dish.
c) cost (as you pointed out) - Even if you could send your kid to school by taxi, etc it would be prohibitively expensive.
d) reliability - the level of AI is pretty low now, but as that improves you will get a less mixed bag than outsourcing.
Couldn't the AI store/do those things now? Why is an AI program controlled by an external company trusted to parse company code and logins?
"Menial standard tasks dealing with messy data our humans outsourcing" jobs are going to be hit pretty hard.
Plagiarism is already rampant. These tools make existing plagiarists worse. I doubt they will create new plagiarists.
(P.S. I say it's low risk because plagiarism can be difficult to prove. It's very easy to catch a plagiarist. A poor student who never shows up to class all of a sudden handing in lengthy papers using terms never covered in class rings alarm bells for any teacher.)
Soon all that content will be replaced by GPT output, not my doing, but it's happening.
I don't know the consequences of language models recycling their own content, etc. but it's already here. Probably input will be limited to some authenticated trusted sources if possible.
Literally sawing the very own branch they are sitting on.
Hopefully AI can improve ranking systems.
Just guessing.
For example, despite unsubscribing from emails daily and constantly junking, I still get a ton of spam. I assume simply telling a model "never show me a marketing e-mail again" probably works pretty well.
Well, GPT has to learn on something. Right now it's just a language model. It won't get better unless people keep writing these "non-native-english-speaker content".
And maybe we read different things, but I disagree - a lot of my problems were solved by niche non-native-english-speaker bloggers posting about their problems and original research that went into solving them.
Sarcasmsnake eats its tail, to big to fail..
It's a skills amplifier.
So your thesis that this is good for the Kenyans is easily disproven.
The ones who were doing the essay-writing meanwhile can now take on more complex tasks with the aid of ChatGPT.
It's those more complex projects - that many workers in Kenya previously did not have the skills to complete - and that individuals cannot trivially get ChatGPT to do for them, that many workers in Kenya can now do by utilizing ChatGPT.
clearly essay writing is a bit pointless if it can be farmed off to someone else and the students are still able to graduate and function in careers
A really bad problem in these countries is their best in brightest are too busy doing service jobs for Westerners than doing the work in manufacturing and infrastructure that builds their capital base.
So this is going to make them poorer and cut an income source for the country as well.
Poor countries are not poor by choice. And removing avenues of financial support (and an import at that) is not a net positive.
"Income source for the country"? Having your brightest employed in foreign ventures is a great loss for the country.
I would just sit idle if I were not solving assignments.
Can you elaborate?
I'm very pro-education, and anti-college admissions essay.
Public education for all is not much different than the American idea of “temporarily embarrassed millionaires”.
Leave education for those that either want or can benefit from it. Come up with more efficient systems for the rest of the masses.
We both agree that a literate and highly knowledgeable citizenry is paramount to the success of society, but the current western education model is failing to produce that citizenry. This failure is in part because professional educators remain unaware that universal education did not create developed societies, rather developed societies created universal education.
Information alone is insufficient to instill individuals with the character necessary to create great societies. The citizenry must already be strong-willed and self-determined for education to successfully add serious value to their lives. Those are the people who fight for their education. Many students today instead fight to avoid learning anything, because the system they're trapped inside has become so odious and hampered by redundancy, inefficiency, and a total lack of humanity.
Everybody has their reasons about whats wrong about formal education - some are better and some are way too individual, yet lets do not act as if formal edu was something flawless
I used to find such arguments patently ridiculous myself, until a very recent HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35488772.
The political slant in those EXAM QUESTIONS appears completely absurd to me-- its basically on a "full points only if you call the californians hypocrites"-level (and thats not even hyperbole), and if that is what an exam is allowed to look like I don't even want to know how much overt preaching happens in the lectures.
An opinionated professor is fine, possibly entertaining even, and being exposed to conflicting viewpoints is valuable in itself, but THAT went WAY beyound any reasonable bounds.
It's fine if he explains his viewpoints in lecture occasionally, but not if passing a class is dependent on agreeing with the professor on everything. If that were the case, most economists would fail his midterm.
But the fact that the professor himself has no problem sharing this online is concerning itself.
This should, in my opinion, appear immediately and obviously unethical to everyone involved, even if you share the professors political outlook completely...
I can offer a solution though. Don’t create that many for-profit institutions that teach useless degrees. Don’t put students in debt for getting useless degrees that they cheat their way though. Done.
Just because LLM can generate text doesn't mean generating text is useless. Namely, it helps thinking.
Do you also believe humans have to understand fractions because computers can do them? Genuine question; a lot of people think like that.
EDIT: Also, no one is putting anyone in debt. People are free to choose what they want to do. Don't wanna study, just don't. Easy. No, what's actually happening is that individually are making dumb decisions out of their own free will.
This doesn’t disprove that many degrees are profit-driven. Those are bound to have dumb assignments that even an LLM can complete.
> People are free to choose what they want to do.
I wonder if you ever heard of incentives in society. Incentives can be misaligned.
Right, lets stop teaching children how to sum.
I wonder if you've ever learned anything complex in your entire life. Probably not. But the rest of us now that training of any kind starts simple and builds from there.
Also - weird thing to say about kenyans. The people under discussion specifically make their living by researching and writing academic essays, I think the natural assumption is that they'd be pretty sharp. No one wants to pay for Cs and Ds.
My experience in college was that plenty of students have priorities of just passing without having to do the work, and would pay for C’s in required courses they don’t think are important while partying or working a part time job.
You aren't immediately at a major league level of play when you start playing baseball.
Why would you immediately be a good writer, critical thinker, poet, or whatever else?