How University Students Use Claude

> A common question is: “how much are students using AI to cheat?” That’s hard to answer, especially as we don’t know the specific educational context where each of Claude’s responses is being used.

I built a popular product that helps teachers with this problem.

Yes, it's "hard to answer", but let's be honest... it's a very very widespread problem. I've talked to hundreds of teachers about this and it's a ubiquitous issue. For many students, it's literally "let me paste the assignment into ChatGPT and see what it spits out, change a few words and submit that".

I think the issue is that it's so tempting to lean on AI. I remember long nights struggling to implement complex data structures in CS classes. I'd work on something for an hour before I'd have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts. With AI, I can simply copy/paste my code and say "hey, what's wrong with this code?" and it'll often spot it (nevermind the fact that I can just ask ChatGPT "create a b-tree in C" and it'll do it). That's amazing in a sense, but also hurts the learning process.

When modern search became more available, a lot of people said there's no point of rote memorization as you can just do a Google search. That's more or less accepted today.

Whenever we have a new technology there's a response "why do I need to learn X if I can always do Y", and more or less, it has proven true, although not immediately.

For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc

Not that these aren't noble things or worth doing, but they won't impact your life too much if you're not interest in penmanship, spelling, or cartography.

I believe LLMs are different (I am still stuck in the moral panic phase), but I think my children will have a different perspective (similar to how I feel about memorizing poetry and languages without garbage collection). So how do I answer my child when he asks "Why should I learn to do X if I can just ask an LLM and it will do it better than me"

The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions.

Like, Socrates may have been against writing because he thought it made your memory weak, but at least I, an individual, am perfectly capable of manufacturing my own writing implements with a modest amount of manual labor and abundantly-available resources (carving into wood, burning wood into charcoal to write on stone, etc.). But I ain't perfectly capable of doing the same to manufacture an integrated circuit, let alone a digital calculator, let alone a GPU, let alone an LLM. Anyone who delegates their thought to a corporation is permanently hitching their fundamental ability to think to this wagon.

> The irreducible answer to "why should I" is that it makes you ever-more-increasingly reliant on a teetering tower of fragile and interdependent supply chains furnished by for-profit companies who are all too eager to rake you over the coals to fulfill basic cognitive functions.

Yes, but that horse has long ago left the barn.

I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS. I do know how to write a web site. But if I cede that skill to an automated process, then that is the feather that will break the camel's back?

The history of civilization is the history of specialization. No one can re-build all the tools they rely on from scratch. We either let other people specialize, or we let machines specialize. LLMs are one more step in the latter.

The Luddites were right: the machinery in cotton mills was a direct threat to their livelihood, just as LLMs are now to us. But society marches on, textile work has been largely outsourced to machines, and the descendants of the Luddites are doctors and lawyers (and coders). 50 years from new the career of a "coder" will evoke the same historical quaintness as does "switchboard operator" or "wainwright."

I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs.

IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process.

> IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process.

The (as yet unproven) argument for the use of AIs is that using AI to solve simpler problems allows us humans to focus on the big picture, in the same way that letting a calculator solve arithmetic gives us flexibility to understand the math behind the arithmetic.

No one knows if that's true. We're running a grand experiment: the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E.

>the next generation will either surpass us in grand fashion using tools that we couldn't imagine, or will collapse into a puddle of ignorant consumerism, a la Wall-E

Seeing how the world is based around consumerism, this future seems more likely.

HOWEVER, we can still course correct. We need to organize, and get the hell off social media and the internet.

> HOWEVER, we can still course correct. We need to organize, and get the hell off social media and the internet.

Given what I know of human nature, this seems improbable.

I think it's possible. I think the greatest trick our current societal structure ever managed to pull, is the proliferation of the belief that any alternatives are impossible. "Capitalist realism"

People who organize tend to be the people who are most optimistic about change. This is for a reason.

It may be possible for you (I am assuming you are > 20, mature adult). But the context is around teens in the prime of their learning. It is too hard to keep ChatGPT/Claude away from them. Social media is too addictive. Those TikTok/Reels/Shorts are addictive and never ending. We are doomed imho.

If education (schools) were to adopt a teaching-AI (one that will given them the solution, but at least ask a bunch of questions ), may be there is some hope.

>We are doomed imho.

I encourage you to take action to prove to yourself that real change is possible.

What you can do in your own life to enact change is hard to say, given I know nothing about your situation. But say you are a parent, you have control over how often your children use their phones, whether they are on social media, whether they are using ChatGPT to get around doing their homework. How we raise the next generation of children will play an important role in how prepared they are to deal with the consequences of the actions we're currently making.

As a worker you can try to organize to form a union. At the very least you can join an organization like the Democratic Socialists of America. Your ability to organize is your greatest strength.

So your plan is to encourage people to "get off the Internet" by posting on the Internet, and to stave off automation by encouraging workers to gang up on their employers and make themselves a collective critical point of failure.

Well, you know, we'd all love to change the world...