Confusement

A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.

That was on July 7th.

Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.

On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.

There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.

But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.

99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.

None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.

And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.

I've spotted a huge decline over the last two years. What's upsetting is how so many of our current third years have declined since their first year. I did a seminar with them the other day, on the topic of the environmental impacts of different diets. One guy told me confidently that there would be no additional agricultural lands if we all went vegetarian.

"Cool," I said. "What's your source for that?"

"I'm sure I read it," he said.

"Fair," said I, "go and look it up. Find an academic source, let's assess it to see if it's robust."

The first thing he did was go to Google, and then read the AI summary.

"That's not a source," I said. "Find me a source."

Five minutes later, he happily tells me that a Guardian article says so, and mentions the World Economic Forum.

"Okay," I said. "Neither of those are academic sources, and the WEF is secondary anyway. Go to Google Scholar, and find a journal article."

Ten minutes later, he tells me he can only find articles that say it's a very complex issue in spite of pop cultural received wisdom, and we don't actually know.

A THIRD YEAR. This man has a dissertation due in THREE MONTHS. This is a skill we taught him in first year, and it's all dribbled out of his ears in the quest for easy summaries from an autocomplete algorithm. And I dearly wish I could say he's an exception, but Jesus Christ, that would be a lie.

I'm currently writing a lecture for the second years for their research methods module, and I normally wouldn't need to do this. But I'm having to re-introduce them to the basic concepts of how to actually analyse findings rather than lazily take whatever they seem to say at face value. I'm trying to find a good paper that had Surprising findings, because I want to show them a research question and a set of results and then get them to speculate and research on why they found something so different, but that's a difficult thing to search for.

This, as I said in the post, is a noticeable and significant problem in the last two years. It is affecting students who were fine three years ago, and now aren't. It is a very specific issue that is affecting very specific skills, including previously very intelligent people

This is already attested in the literature. Meanwhile, the for-profit education system has not changed in the last two years

Additionally, prior to the last 2-3 years, I had failed one student ever, and flagged one student ever for plagiarism. This year we've had to deal with five separate plagiarism cases on the Masters course alone, all of whom admitted to LLM use. Not one of them can analyse information worth a damn; all of them had excellent prior undergrad scores.

What OP is observing is a real time deskilling process, where a student who WAS capable of completing the program no longer is, and the only possible causal mechanism other than undiagnosed brain damage is the student's reliance on chatbots in lieu of the prior generation of research tools.

I haven't been at my current institution long enough to judge, but this administration is super gung ho for AI and that makes me very nervous for exactly the reasons OP identifies.

They can’t fucking think for themselves (or rather, they’re losing the ability). This is not “ooooh technology scary” -- this is a fundamental, they can't fucking answer questions when I ask them to their faces. I fucking HATE when my colleagues roll their eyes and say, "Well, this is how we felt about phones! Just accept it!" First of all, it's different. And TWO! We're FUCKING FIGHTING PHONES every day! We've literally banned all cell phone use during class in my district because letting kids use their phones and not fighting their use in class FUCKED US OVER, and now we have to FIX IT.

I asked my students if it's nice/helpful/good/acceptable/normal to help someone else lift something really heavy they were struggling with. Of course they agree! Then I asked them if it would still be (or explain to them that it isn't) nice/helpful/good/acceptable/normal to help someone lift heavy weights if they are working out at the gym. The answer is no! Because the POINT is that it's hard to do alone! That's why it makes you stronger! (Plus it gives the kids a very funny and therefore memorable visual for the concept. You can play into it and have a laugh with the kids at how weird someone would be if they did that!)

I often used "Don't lift their weights!" as a shorthand when a student was trying to give another kid the right answer.

This. This is always in my mind when this conversation happens. I'm about to get unpopular.

I need all of you to Google "Laziness Does Not Exist Dr Devon Price" and read this piece. There are others but that is the best. Unfortunately, it's set so you have to sign in to see it, but it is essential reading. There is also a book. The author is here on Tumblr. This is good shit.

Mostly it's about disability, homelessness, etc. but I need you to understand that children are also a viciously oppressed class and school is a major part of that, and also a shitton of kids are also disabled, homeless, etc.

Are the students so overburdened with work from their classes they are exhausted? Life sucks for teens now. Can't go anywhere and hang out, can't do shit outside the house without adults and cops breathing down their necks. Parents are convinced that stranger danger is an imminent risk and their kids are going to be murdered or assaulted, and so are the kids, because they're raised with septic paranoia. Their actions are monitored 24/7 everywhere. Parents track them. Stores photograph them. Their personal information is sold on the Internet. They can be bullied relentlessly outside of school in new and horrible ways. They don't get to set boundaries. Horrible messages about body image are funneled at them everywhere they go to have fun -- game apps and social media sites and even fucking Netflix, which used to be DVDs and is now an advertising platform. Sites that should not be under an age lock still lock them out. Accurate information about a lot of things is getting gatekept from them. Their attention is curated by faceless corporations who reward it by building algorithms that target their weaknesses and are now collaborating with cops. Their lives have been so micromanaged for fake safety and for college preparedness and for passive consumption they don't know how to chill the fuck out and entertain themselves, they often don't know what to DO when they aren't being shoved around.

That may not seem relevant, but ADULTS have allowed this environment to happen. Of course these kids want AI friends. Having real ones is very very difficult and it's a relief to have a very affirming friend that asks nothing of you and never will. We don't give kids time or space to have friends besides over text or messaging apps. Of course they want to use the shortcut of ChatGPT if it saves them time. Even with a degree their future is debt and a pointless soul sucking job and they know it, so why should they give a shit about school? Why shouldn't they make it easier for themselves? Of course they are on social media constantly. They can't go places like my generation could. Adults made a world that is awful, adults hold them to these go-nowhere standards that give them very little in return. Why do anything the hard way? They don't care about lifting weights because their strength means fucking nothing, and never will until they can see a future where they matter.

I am 100% certain this is not always the case and many are just doing it the easy way because teenager. But those kids are not an excuse to not fix things for the rest. That's the same logic as withholding food benefits because some people cheat the system. Which, uhh. We also do to poor children or neglected children who can't pay for school lunches. So they grow up knowing they are not valued at school and I wouldn't feel particularly inclined to do what school asked of me either. Pretty sure I would fuck off as much as I possibly could because it deserves as much from me as it givess. Why in the name of god should they care about school assignments? The fact that any of them do care at all is miraculous to me.

You sure as shit wouldn't catch ME doing anything the hard way if I were that devalued and constrained.

"If this is the future we're fucked."

Same thing as participation trophies. It isn't the kids that made that happen. Not their fault.

Maybe I'm wrong because I don't teach and don't have to see this all the time. But as a formerly over-pressured child who got virtually NOTHING out of school, the environment kids are in today is fucking awful in ways I thank god I never knew. I could get away from the bullying by going home, and I got to go to the mall.

It isn't the kids' fault. They need to fix their shit, using generative AI for assignments isn't okay. They need those skills.

Are adults making sure those kids have a future that rewards them for not cheating?

No.

Because almost nothing is under our control either. Most of us are getting fucked over, too, by powers greater than us bent on subjugating us. Most of us are powerless. It will take immense effort to fix that. And we have to do it.

It sucks to be in the middle like this. But we have to remember that true laziness by and large is a myth.

I am sad about kids not doing the work, too. Scared. But I don't blame them one bit.

The first five years of that were flailing at a community college and dropping classes after the withdrawal period and not knowing what to do with myself, the last two years were after transfer to a state school and taking a 125% class schedule every quarter because I'd figured out what I wanted to study and was really good at it after giving myself five years to figure out how to manage my time and get good at recognizing things that were causing problems.

If you're in the US and you've got ADHD and you're worried that you're not going to do well in college or if you're in college and struggling, I strongly recommend trying a community college as a less expensive, more flexible option for lower division classes that will also almost certainly guarantee that you've got more access to professors and resources on campus.

Not getting a college degree is not the end of the world. The timing of getting a college degree is likely more flexible than you've been told. There are multiple paths toward getting a degree. It's always acceptable to go back to school if you don't succeed the first time. TALK TO YOUR SCHOOL'S DISABILITY RESOURCE OFFICE if you're struggling.