Raw LLM Responses

i don't agree that working hard on generating your own ideas and then plugging that into an llm helps, and i think this kind of thinking promotes giving up on that mental labour. for one, llms are programmed to reflect back to you what it seems like you want to hear, so you aren't going to get any good critical advice. but more importantly, if you actually don't ask for help from an llm for this kind of stuff, your cognition develops further to the point where you can think through the entire problem yourself and don't need to ask for help in the first place. i've had people who relied on "sensible and responsible use of llms" or something of the sort for their college assignments in my classes and there was nothing happening in their brains. the more they used llms, the more they were relying on those llms to do all their mental labour. and the key here is - it does NOT feel like that when you're used to it. they THOUGHT they were really working hard to craft those prompts. they thought they were working hard before and after getting the output from the llm of choice. because they were. their brains were working overtime to keep up with the demands of asking chat gpt to summarize things and doing a quarter of their assignments before handing it off to an algorithm. but they were working hard in the same way a toddler struggles to open a bottle of water before handing it off to their parent. if they had instead dedicated that effort to developing their own skills, in class discussions would be second nature for them. but they didn't. they handed off their thinking to chatgpt instead. you discarded the robot lifting weights analogy, but it's pretty accurate. maybe you were only focusing on what kinds of grades these people can get, in which case you're right that you can get an a whether you do the work yourself or make a robot do it. but the actual objective of college and school and all these stupid assignments that everyone hates is to learn things and develop your brain. you don't study shakespeare in school because you need to know shakespeare in your life. you study shakespeare in school because studying literature develops your reading comprehension. when you don't do the work yourself you don't develop these skills. edit: also handwriting essays in class sucks ass and i say this as a literature major who loves writing essays. essays do not need to be written under time pressure and in fact you are going to produce an exponentially better essay if you don't have to do it under time pressure. not everyone can write fast and this goes doubly for the people who have disabilities. most importantly, essay writing is not actually linear. any remotely good paper is going to be written somewhat out of order and then edited. sometimes you start on the 4th paragraph before starting the 2nd one. sometimes you don't write the intro till you're done with everything else. another extremely important part of learning to write well is editing. these kinds of things cannot be done when you have to handwrite an essay in a time controlled setting. the ONLY reason to do time controlled essays is to eliminate ai use and that's really sad because being able to write longer projects over longer amounts of time is kind of what a lot of classes are trying to teach you. you can't learn accurate in-text citations and bibliography in these kinds of assignments. you can't do a research paper. you can't reasonably be expected to write longer than a 1k essay in about 90 minutes, but college is full of assignments that are thousands of words long. one of the most involved papers i had to write as an undergrad was a 4k word paper on a specific time in history. i had 6 different sources, 4 of which were not from class so i had gone out and found and read those papers on my own on jstor. it took me about 3 full days of non stop work to complete (i stayed overnight at the library and literally only stopped for naps, and ate while reading and writing and editing, and only went home to shower and brush my teeth). these are the kinds of projects you have to do as a college student and using ai assists for any of it would have been a detriment to my own skill development. but you cannot reasonably ask students to do this like an exam. you NEED to assign these kinds of projects because this is literally what students are going to university to learn. it's all well and good for you as a youtuber who doesn't know shit about pedagogy or cognition to sit there and talk shit about people who feel just making assignments be handwritten and timed and in class, but there are plenty of reasons handwritten timed essays are a worse choice than normal assignments. students will be losing a lot if all their classes have to transition to this ridiculous elementary school shit just to prevent cheating.