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."

This reply brings to mind the well-known Heinlein quote:

    A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

What an awful quote. Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization.

That is literally not true.

I'd be interested in counter-examples?

Given the original, ludicrous, claim was:

> Literally all progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization.

Then we don't really need plural examples, right?

Anyway - language, wheel, fire, tool-making, social constructs like reciprocity principle - I think gave us some progress as a species and a society.

All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists.

Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.

The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.

Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.

> All of these examples are done by specialist because I don't see many cars being build by dentists.

I'm not sure how you get from pre-agricultural humans developing fire, to dentists building cars.

I don't doubt that after fire was 'understood', there was specialisation to some degree, probably, around management of fire, what burns well, how best to cook, etc.

But any claim that fire was the result of specialisation seems a bit hard to substantiate. A committee was established to direct Thag Simmons to develop a way to .. something involving wood?

Wheel, the setting of broken bones, language etc - specialisation happened subsequently, but not as a prerequisite for those advances.

> Even in mankind's beginning specialization existed in the form of hunter and gatherer. This specialization in combination with team work brought us to the top of the food chain to a point where we can strive beyond basic survival.

Totally agree that we advanced because of two key capabilities - a) persistence hunting, b) team / communication.

You seem to be conflating the result of those advancements with "all progress", as was GP.

> The people making space crafts (designing and building, another example of specialization) don't need to know how to repair or build a microwave to heat there for food.

I am not, was not, arguing that highly specialised skills in modern society are not ... highly specialised.

I was arguing against the lofty claim that:

"All progress we've made is due to ever increasing specialization."

Noting the poster of that was responding to a quote from a work of fiction - claiming it was awful - that the author had suggested everyone should be familiar with (among other things) 'changing a diaper, comfort the dying, cooperate, cook a tasty meal, analyse a problem, solve equations' etc.

If you're suggesting that you think some people in society should be exempt from some basic skills like those - that's an interesting position I'd like to see you defend.

> Of course everybody still needs to know basic knowledge (how to turn on microwave) to get by.

FWIW I don't have a microwave oven.

The discovery of fire itself was not progress, but how to use it very much is. They most likely didn't have a "discover fire" specialization in the modern sense but I doubt the one first to create a fire starter was afterwards deligated to only collect berries. The discovery and creation of something obviously often comes before the specialization or it would otherwise be impossible to discover and create anything.

>FWIW I don't have a microwave oven.

That was just an example. You still know how to use them hence basic knowledge. Seem like this discussion boils down to semantics