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Comment by wodenokoto | Hacker News Reader

A lot of snark in the comments, but I think author is absolutely right: this should har come with a big warning and that warning should have had 3 options:

1) go ahead and delete everything 2) back up and then go ahead 3) abort and keep things as they are

ChatGPT definitely wants to be the copilot of all your work. Guy didn’t just have chats, he had drafts that his virtual assistant helped formulate and proof read. Give how big and used ChatGPT has become, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone tech savvy that this is being used for serious work outside of vibecoders.

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I still don't understand what could've have happened here. I'm not a chatgpt user so I'm not familiar with the UI.

He starts out saying he "disabled data consent". That wording by itself doesn't mean delete the content at all. The content could theoretically live in local storage etc. He says the data was immediately deleted with no warning.

Then OpenAI replies that there is a confirmation prompt, but doesn't say what the prompt says. It could still be an opaque message.

Finally, he admits he "asked them to delete" the data.

It's always interesting to see how hostile and disparaging people can start to act when given the license. Hate AI yourself, or internalize its social stading as hated even just a little, and this article becomes a grand autoexposé, a source for immense shame and schadenfreude.

The shame is not that he was so imbecile to not have appropriate backups, it is that he is basically defrauding his students, his colleagues, and the academic community by nonchalantly admitting that a big portion of his work was ai-based. Did his students consent to have their homework and exams fed to ai? Are his colleagues happy to know that probably most of the data in their co-authored studies where probably spat out by ai? Do you people understand the situation?

> The shame is not that much that he was so imbecile to not have appropriate backups

These comments vehemently disagree:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46726570

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777039

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46777123

> ... (the rest) ...

It's not that I don't see or even agree with concerns around the misuse and defrauding angle to this, it's that it's blatantly clear to me that's not why the many snarky comments are so snarky. It's also not as if I was magically immune to such behavioral reflexes either, it's really just regrettable.

Though I will say, it's also pretty clear to me that many taking issue with the misuse angle do not seem to think that any amount or manner of AI use can be responsible or acceptable, rendering all use of it misuse - that is not something agree with.

It seems you are desperately trying to make a strawman without any sensible argument, i don't personally think it is "snarky" to call things as they are, plain and simple, you, as supposed expert and professional academic, post a blog on Nature crying that "ai stole my homework", it's only natural you get the ridicule you deserve, it's the bare minimum, he should be investigated by the institution he works for.

A reasonable amount of AI use is certainly acceptable, where "reasonable" depends on the situation, for any academic related job this amount should be close to zero, and no material produced by any student/grad/researcher/professor should be fed to third party LLM models without explicit consent, otherwise what even is the point? Regurgitating slop is not academic work.

Sorry to hear that's how my comments seem to you; I can assure I put plenty of sense into them, although I cannot find that sense on your behalf.

If you think considering others to be desperate, senseless, and erroneously reasoning without any good reason improves your understanding of them, and that snarky commentary magically ceases to be or is all-okay because it describes something you find a big truth, that's on you. Gonna have to agree to disagree on that one.

The author is an absolute and utter embarrassment for all the good academic professionals out there, and he is also literally admitting to defrauding his students of their precious money, which they thought was going to human-led instruction, he's also put all of his colleagues in an very dodgy position right now. It is preposterous that we are even arguing about it, it is the sign of how much AI-sloppiness is permeating our lives, it is crazy to think that you can be entitled to give years of work to a chatbot without even caring and then write an article like this "uh oh, ai eat my homework".

It is not the student‘s money - academic education is basically free in Germany. But they are still defrauded of their valuable time and effort to follow classes they thought were worth it.

Rent, university taxes and all the other taxes are still due, i'm from the EU too and education is definitely not "free", freer than somewhere else for sure.

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