Hacker News Reader

Comment by ls612 | Hacker News Reader

This whole piece is AI generated.

The prose is a bit too purple and tortured for that, IMO. Stock Opus 4.7 or 5.5 Pro is a more disciplined writer.

And, anyway, the point the article is trying to make is obvious. What's absolutely not obvious, and what it sheds very little light on, is what the University is going to look like in 10 years. Not what it should look like, but what it is most likely to look like.

> what the University is going to look like in 10 years

Mostly like they look like now, probably. With slightly more strictly enforced rules around exam.

I fail to see why it won't be like that.

You may be right. But that will mean the university becomes increasingly irrelevant and disconnected from the reality that students experience after they graduate.

I read a lot of AI prose three days and this bears none of the hallmarks. If this is AI, if really live to see the prompt.

I'm confident this is human.

It is easy to change the system prompt to make the AI talk with a different voice. It is remarkably hard (at least for Claude, I haven't experimented as much with GPT) to get it to not use so many em-dashes like this essay does.

Style is the wrong diagnostic. Purple prose and em-dashes can be prompted in or out. The harder question is whether the reasoning was committed or generated. A distinctive voice tells you nothing about whether the person actually worked through the argument or had it produced for them. Which is sort of the point the essay is making about students.

There's no way. Just the first paragraph alone is enough to convince me; it's too well-written and melodious to be AI, with too much original thought:

Today, the demonic vice of the old is not that they are hard and demanding on the youth — instead they do not demand enough from us, and they cannot quite believe that we have not lived up to the little they have demanded. They think too well of our generation.

Without defending the quality of the rest of the essay, it's a great start. LLMs today could never match it.

This is such an ignorant trope. The last few places I worked ALL used em-dashes as part of house style and I will continue to use them. It's extremely common (and arguably the LLMs do it because it is extremely common).

I can tell you with 100% certainty this is just how UChicago students write

It sounds to me like how I'd imagine a Philosophy student at the University of Chicago would write.

As noted in my own parent comment: I loved reading this (it's too well written it could not be AI despite the emdashes), and especially appreciate any mention of "The Whispering Earring", which is one of my spinning tops to remind me to remain vigilant of my cognitive health despite my almost complete embrace of AI.

this comment is ai generated

AI generated or not, I concur. I rally want to know what Universities will look like in 10 years time. What will be taught there that cannot be taught by an AI (whatever form or interface it has).

Will Universities still be centers of knowledge and exploration? or will that be more disseminated through society, and so Universities not so important?

What courses will exist? Are those vastly different from today's courses?

> AI generated or not, I concur. I rally want to know what Universities will look like in 10 years time. What will be taught there that cannot be taught by an AI (whatever form or interface it has).

Computer-assisted instruction been amazing unsuccessful. Why is that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com