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Comment by Frieren | Hacker News Reader

> ChatGPT didn't ruin anything. Lazy students did.

That's a very unuseful way of looking at it. It solves nothing.

ChatGPT has created a problem, we need to look ways of solving it. Unregulated technology is harmful, we need regulations that limit the bad use cases.

To just blame people so, lets be real, your shares on bit tech corporations go up is destructive for society. This tools, like social media, are harming people and should be regulated to work for us. If they cannot then shut them off.

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The solution is obvious:

Go back to pen-and-paper examinations at a location where students are watched. Do the same for assignments and projects.

Something like this does seem like the only viable option. I wonder how much it will actually happen.

Better: 15-30min interrogation. I loved those, I can reason through the problem without worrying about writing correct sentence and hoping the other person I understood what I wrote and I understood the question.

As a person who used to teach at uni a bit, they sound great, but I dread the amount of work to actually spend 20 meaningful minutes with every student in a row to test their knowledge. Grading the assignments was already the most exhausting thing in the whole year.

I'm not saying I disagree, but that won't work too well for coding assignments, for example

> That's a very unuseful way of looking at it. It solves nothing.

They're not trying to give you facts that solve things, they're just giving you facts, as they see it. You can do with that info what you will.

This article is about adults who are paying considerable amounts of money to be educated, significantly undermining the education they're paying for by offloading the exercises onto chatbots.

And your response is that we need regulations??

Institutional policy, changes to lesson practices, cover the risk of wasting your education in intro materials... sure!

But state is not your parents, it's certainly not mine. Geesh.

And who gets to decide that?

Democracy

Ahah good one...

Where does democracy start and personal choice end?

"Unregulated technology is harmful, we need regulations that limit the bad use cases"

Unfortunatly most often the cure is worse than the poison.

Seriously? Regulate use cases? That's sort of like the very short-lived attempt to regulate automobiles, by requiring someone to walk in front of every vehicle, ringing a bell.

Actual, useful AI is a disruptive technology, just as the automobile was. Trying to regulate use cases is the wrong solution. We need to find out how this technology is going to be integrated into our lives.

This is why we should allow kids to drive cars in gym class.

Actually gym classes are a dumb leftover from the turn of the century (no not that turn, the 1900 turn). It serves no purpose anymore. Modern students get no meaningful skills, no lasting health benefits. It's mandatory exertion for a grade.

Learning to drive a car at school would do a whole lot more good!

What's wrong with making sure every kid gets to move a bit (exert, as you put it)? It doesn't matter for kids that are already fit, but I think that it's great for health of the bottom 30% who doesn't exercise and doesn't have a proper diet (both are their parents fault, to be clear).

That was actually pretty useful regulation when the streets were full of people, horses, commerce, kids, etc.

It would be pretty useful regulation to bring back, then maybe the streets would be full of people, horses, commerce, and kids again.

You seem to think that before ChatGPT there were no students cheating?

There will always be people that try to outsmart everyone else and not do the work. The problem here is those people, nothing else.

Is it possible that the methods of cheating in the past were a lot more ineffective, risky, or expensive? If a tool like ChatGPT makes cheating a lot easier and less risky, of course more students will use it.

Any sufficiently sharp quantitative change is also a qualitative change.

That applies here, with these academic-cheating scenarios: It's not just some incrementally cheaper and more-convenient way to hire somebody to write your paper like you could for decades.

I never understood this argument... "something was somewhat possible before, hence anything enabling more of it is not a problem and we shouldn't even mention the possibility of it being harmful"

Totally agree, especially in cases where new technology lowers the bar to entry considerably, resulting in potentially many more people using it.

"It was always possible to buy meth if you knew where to look, so it's not a problem that meth is now sold in grocery stores. The people abusing it are at fault here" yeah, ok.

My point was that there's always been cheating, the tools just change. I'm sure cellphones have been a tool of choice like 10 or 15 years ago.

Literally everything on this planet is a slight iteration of something preexisting, that's hardly an argument. Internet is just a better mail system. A container ship is just a fast mail man. A nuke is just a very big grenade. Yet all of these things revolutionised the world.

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