it’s so fucking frustrating to be in college and know everyone uses chatgpt and to be tempted by it constantly while also knowing intellectually that it doesn’t work and it’s a bad idea. like, i hang out in the library a lot, and i see people using chatgpt on assignments almost every day. and i know it isn’t a good way to learn, because it’s not really “artificial intelligence” so much as it is an auto text generator. and it gives you wrong information or badly worded sentences all the time. but every week i stare down assignments i don’t want to do and i think man. if only i could type this prompt into a text generator and have it done in 10 minutes flat. and i know it wouldn’t work. it wouldn’t synthesize information from the text the way professors want, it wouldn’t know how to answer questions, it just spits out vaguely related words for a couple paragraphs. but knowing my classmates get their work done in 10 minutes flat with it while i fight every ounce of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in my body is infuriating.
i think one thing that’s been really helpful in keeping myself from using it is thinking about Why i have to do the specific assignments i have. like what is the actual goal. like some assignments the goal isn’t “share a story about parenting styles in ur personal life” so much as it is “show you understand the concept of parenting styles thru a story”. or it’s not “how do hormones impact teenagers’ decision making abilities” it’s “can you understand, reword, synthesize, and explain the information in the text and videos to explain how hormones impact teenagers’ decision making abilities”. and looking at it as “this assignment is asking me to read some words and then understand and explain them, which is a skill i want to have” rather than “i have to answer these stupid questions that seem really obvious because all my professors want me to die forever” has helped. especially in a world where everyone uses chatgpt i want to know how to read with my own brain
I think of Bloom’s Taxonomy with this kind of thing :3c It helps me get past the stage of “ugh you KNOW i know this though, why do i have to do this?” Because, remembering is the lowest form on the triangle, and by that, it’s like the simplest. Everything higher needs the previous skills. Kind of a cool chart for what OP described above, the understanding, the rewording, synthesizing, all these other skills that are being checked besides knowing/remembering.
(I personally can’t fathom why someone would go to college to outsource even the most basic steps of learning to a predictive slop machine, even as someone who skipped more assignments than I should have in my first years of uni. To me, it seems like they’re wasting their 10 minutes and at the end the true work of the assignment isn’t even done bc the prof wouldn’t like. know if they’re meeting the content or taxonomy level goals???? but what do i know)
Reblogging this. Remind me in five years when I’m a teacher that I need to be mindful of what and how I teach.
I’m doing group work in many of my courses and recently my group partner came up to me and said “you’ve inspired me to stop using chatgpt, I want to understand how it works” and I’ve never felt more proud of being mediocre at assignments
Capitalism. Specifically, companies can’t market to children, and it’s easier to resell a metal shoebox than a building with any level of identity.
