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How University Students Use Claude

(www.anthropic.com)
395 points pseudolus | 5 comments | 09 Apr 25 15:41 UTC | HN request time: 0.262s | source
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zebomon ◴[09 Apr 25 17:00 UTC] No.43634458[source]▶
The writing is irrelevant. Who cares if students don't learn how to do it? Or if the magazines are all mostly generated a decade from now? All of that labor spent on writing wasn't really making economic sense.

The problem with that take is this: it was never about the act of writing. What we lose, if we cut humans out of the equation, is writing as a proxy for what actually matters, which is thinking.

You'll soon notice the downsides of not-thinking (at scale!) if you have a generation of students who weren't taught to exercise their thinking by writing.

I hope that more people come around to this way of seeing things. It seems like a problem that will be much easier to mitigate than to fix after the fact.

A little self-promo: I'm building a tool to help students and writers create proof that they have written something the good ol fashioned way. Check it out at https://itypedmypaper.com and let me know what you think!

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1. janalsncm ◴[09 Apr 25 17:21 UTC] No.43634723[source]▶
How does your product prevent a person from simply retyping something that ChatGPT wrote?

I think the prevalence of these AI writing bots means schools will have to start doing things that aren’t scalable: in-class discussions, in-person writing (with pen and paper or locked down computers), way less weight given to remote assignments on Canvas or other software. Attributing authorship from text alone (or keystroke patterns) is not possible.

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2. zebomon ◴[09 Apr 25 17:37 UTC] No.43634905[source]▶
It may be possible that with enough data from the two categories (copied from ChatGPT and not), your keystroke dynamics will differ. This is an open question that my co-founder and I are running experiments on currently.

So, I would say that while I wouldn't fully dispute your claim that attributing authorship from text alone is impossible, it isn't yet totally clear one way or the other (to us, at least -- would welcome any outside research).

Long-term -- and that's long-term in AI years ;) -- gaze tracking and other biometric tracking will undoubtedly be necessary. At some point in the near future, many people will be wearing agents inside earbuds that are not obvious to the people around them. That will add another layer of complexity that we're aware of. Fundamentally, it's more about creating evidence than creating proof.

We want to give writers and students the means to create something more detailed than they would get from a chatbot out-of-the-box, so that mimicking the whole act of writing becomes more complicated.

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3. pr337h4m ◴[09 Apr 25 17:44 UTC] No.43634985[source]▶
At this point, it would be easier to stick to in-person assignments.
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4. zebomon ◴[09 Apr 25 17:54 UTC] No.43635124{3}[source]▶
It certainly would be! I think for many students though, there's something lost there. I was a student who got a lot more value out of my take-home work than I did out of my in-class work. I don't think that I ever would have taken the interest in writing that I did if it wasn't such a solitary, meditative thing for me.
5. logicchains ◴[09 Apr 25 19:03 UTC] No.43636208[source]▶
>I think the prevalence of these AI writing bots means schools will have to start doing things that aren’t scalable

It won't be long 'til we're at the point that embodied AI can be used for scalable face-to-face assessment that can't be cheated any easier than a human assessor.