Is it a problem if students cheat using AI?

A really bad take I'm hearing: "It's fine if students use AI to cheat at writing, they'll have AI in real life." It's bad because: 1) Learning to WRITE well is a primary way people learn to THINK well. There are other ways to learn to think well (e.g., a strong culture of oral debate and rigorous discussion), but that’s largely not how things are set up, so without writing, there’s a vacuum. Until schools change, students are sacrificing learning to think. 2) Normalizing cheating in one d...
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Companies shirking their responsibility to make AI text detectable

Image by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash
It's really a shame that OpenAI hasn't deployed its technology for detecting whether text was generated using ChatGPT, despite it being developed 2 years ago. They know students are currently using their technology to cheat at a truly massive scale. And teachers struggle to know what to do about it. OpenAI's inaction damages the academic environment - especially for the non-cheating students, but even for the cheaters, too. You've got to prove you can be trusted to do the right thing in s...
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Nine ways that text-generating AIs will probably change the world in the next ten years

Image generated by the A.I. DALL·E 2 using the prompt "A robot hand drawing itself by MC Escher"
Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4). Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years: #1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and...
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