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Comment by wduquette | Hacker News Reader

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions.

If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

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I’m surprised to hear that she’s only now learning the lesson of group presentations - if you’re even slightly more competent than your group, you’ll be doing all the work and the rest of the group will freeload off of you. It’s not like the freeloaders would have been able to answer follow-ups questions before AI.

Good for your daughter but doesn’t that example tell us the opposite of what this article is trying to argue? If the majority of a group of young people choose to use AI for their project, that doesn’t indicate that the majority hate it. That would indicate that they like and trust it.

Replace AI with Microsoft Word and it makes sense. Lots of people use it and lots of people hate it.

The article is saying what happens after people do use it, not that they can or do avoid altogether.

Or that they hate the project more than using AI

It might seem they are lazy and not willing to put in the hard work to learn for themselves. The follow up questions confirmed this.

Fair; I admit I climbed onto my hobbyhorse here.

You can use something and simultaneously hate it. For example, smoking.

That's not to say AI is addictive. It's probably not.

But, if all your classmates are using AI then maybe the workload increases to compensate. Then, you have no choice but to use AI. We see this pattern with companies all the time. They often don't want to advertise aggressively or employ dark patterns. But their competitors do, and then eventually the only way to stay competitive is to join them.

I mean…that’s essentially identical to group presentations in general. The other students didn’t do the work; what they don’t do the work with is irrelevant.

Except that in this case, the other students thought they had done the work. They put the time in, but in a different way than my daughter.

You don’t know that to be true. It doesn’t sound believable to me. It sounds like someone saying they thought they studied because they brought the book home and it was heavy in their backpack.

What I know is true is that neither of us has any insight into the interior life of those students. Even you have it secondhand from your daughter. You don’t know if they said that sheepishly, embarrassed at having been in exposed.

If we wanna argue that these tools made it a little bit easier to get away with not doing work then I’m in agreement. But so did PowerPoint. I had a lot of group presentations where it was somebody’s job to do the PowerPoint slides—often one of the easier jobs.

I guess I don’t know man. I’ve taught in college before the AI takeover and had lots of people that were bad at doing group projects. It’s pretty easy to get high and not do the work in college. With or without robots.

I know that to be true because the other group members talked about it with my daughter, and were honestly surprised at how much difference not using AI made. She has another group member who’s a slacker. But not all of them.

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