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I found this a very depressing read. Worse than the one about how kids at even elite universities can't really read or engage with a book anymore.

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I teach at a college in The Netherlands, and this is not my experience at all. We give the students assignments, and when they hand them in, there's usually an individual assessment. Then we walk through the code, and ask them a bunch of questions. If you can't answer these questions, we ask them where they got their code from. And I caught many students.

However not all code matters. If the subject is "design patterns", then we're not going to ask them questions about run-of-the-mill Spring Boot code.

Kids these days, am I right?

no, if a 33 or 40 or 99 year old student were doing this I'd find it just as bleak.

They tend to write fewer of those type of articles because people aren't so credulous about how dumb the olds are these days.

My partner's an academic and this tracks with what I've heard from her and her colleagues. It's possible they're all in on a conspiracy to lie to me for shits and giggles, but I doubt it.

I also remember what it was like to be in University and I know several of my classmates would have done this if it had been available. Human nature has not fundamentally changed in the 13 years since I finished school.

Here is a similar article primarily about middle-aged adults: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi...

Why is it a moral outrage when students do it, but universities cheat students in many ways and we just grumble and accept it as a necessary evil. Just accept cheating as the same, maybe attack financial aid itself instead of the students. Say "this money is disproportionately being siphoned directly into the organizations coffers and very little of it is being used to teach anyone anything whatsoever. Therefore we are restricting access to financial aid, capping it to $X million total" etc. What's the point of a scholarship if there's no "school" being taught?

The person you responded did not frame this in moral terms, but emotional terms. I'm not here to grandstand about the morality of anyone's behavior, but knowing students can't engage with long-form written content is depressing to me. Knowing that many (most?) will not teach themselves how to engage in critical thinking and work through frustration is also depressing.

Part of this is empathy, just knowing they are depriving themselves of skills they don't even realize the importance of. Part of is selfishness, feeling like our next generation of thinkers and creators are potentially self-sabotaging.

I don't know, I'm out of the prediction game, I don't really want to get drug into utilitarian arguments about the place of AI, or debates on what was wrong with education, etc. Frankly, I'm out of my league there. I'm just sad to see people lose the ability to think for themselves and struggle through hard problems.

Yes, I use generative AI myself, I'm not a luddite or anything.

There's a huge leap (a chasm, really) between depressing and moral outrage, and I am not attacking anyone. This comment is a complete non-sequitur from mine.

So there's something depressing about cheating but not from a moral basis? What's depressing about people who want to minimize work and maximize profits?

even the way you're framing the question is depressing to me, not everything is about profit.

Where's the profit in answering your question? Where's the profit in writing it even?

Karma points! Duh

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