Hey I'm an educator and I found a way to trick the chatgpt so students can't use it.

I have two methods I employ to reduce they use of chatgpt

Method 1.

I use examples of people in my questions and the people are characters from popular TV shows. Like star trek. You could also use names of athletes or anyone that likely has a lot of content on them in media and internet.

For example : Spock and Uhura both were given an image of a dress to determine if it matched the dress of the missing scientist. Spock perceived the colors to match and Uhura did not. What would explain this difference in color perception?

The answer would be color constancy. It's also a reference to the blue/black gold/white dress. But chatgpt would not be able to understand that.
(I'm a perception researcher and educator).

Anywho if they copy paste , they are likely to get replies based on episodes of star trek tos.

The other thing I do in conjunction with the first is make it so that the resources I give them are easier and less work to use than dealing with the chatgpt answers that would require a lot of additional edits of the text to finally get the correct answer. And may not ever give the correct answer.

If they have a resource like a PDF of the PowerPoint lecture, they will use it instead if it's easier to use.

So make it the easier choice.

Yeah. It’s definitely a major contributor to the dumbing of humanity. We’re barreling towards Idocracy with open ~~arms~~. AI.

Because learning for kids/young adults isn't really the point anymore. The point of doing the learning is to "pass test" or, "get job" or, "move on to the next link in the education chain". So young people often feel faced with a choice, engage with the process to accomplish the tasks, or dissociate from the process entirely.

This systemic issue is likely why steiner schools and the like are seeing increased interest from parents.

It's because humans naturally want to avoid unpleasant work, and public schools teach us that learning is hard and work for some reason, rather than something fun. For instance, I used to read for fun an unbelievable amount, but then I was forced to do book reports with a required list of books to "prove" I was reading them, and it was just absolutely no fun at all. Why not have a discussion about it and the teacher can check the spark notes? This changes at community college back to learning is fun, but just years of being told to do busywork and be a drone kills learning for a lot of people I feel.

It's only going to get worse. We're going to encounter people who are basically being piloted by AI throughout their lives, with everything they do.

I hate that LLMs have fucked my ability to find decent documentation. The Internet is done for. I'm learning to garden and do basic electronics from text books now.

I feel like this is a progression of a trend I've been railing against for a while. My workplace has to contend with a massive amount of ever-changing regulatory and engineering information. There are thousands of pages of documents, with differing levels of authority and detail, governing all aspects of what we do.

I've been begging people to read the docs. Don't just ask your manager or predecessor, don't just skim through it, and for fuck's sake don't ctrl+f until you find something that looks good and run with it out of context. Treating this sort of research like a Google search is killing us during compliance inspections. Read the docs!

Shit changes, often. I have to constantly remind them, it's not what the docs said last year. It's what they say now. Know your responsibilities, know where to find the info that pertains to them, and review it often. Read it, know it, or at least know where to find it.

It's getting worse. I've seen experienced people submit supplemental documents with egregious errors after they "just used AI for grammar checking". I've seen proposed policy docs with references to regulations that are decades out of date. I've gotten questions about implementing things that were outlawed or obsolete before I was born, and I've been around a looooong while.

We can't meat puppet our way through this, blindly following AI, or people are going to die in horrible industrial accidents. I mean that literally. People will be killed. This is why we have the current mass quanties of regulatory documents, to prevent people from literally dying in awful ways.

I'm to old for this shit.

On one hand I don't blame people for wanting to make money.

On the other hand hand how come EVERYONE is in it for the money?

Integrity is all gone and I hate that I can be in classes with 40 CS majors and still can't share my hobby of programming with anyone.

It's not about AI; it's about how people are USING AI.

Take for example this recent video from Language Jones, showing how to use AI to leverage your native intelligence for language learning (Yes, it's from PhD in linguistics and yes, he cites research. "Always bring receipts" is logic 101). He shows how AI works best as a Socratic tutor, forcing you to generate answers rather than replacing thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQXiSGDXknA

When used properly, AI is a force magnifier par excellence. When used in the way you're likely encountering (young cohort? poor attention span? no training in formal reasoning, logic?) then yeah... "shit's fucked" (in the Australian vernacular).

I use to teach biomed, just before AI took over (so, circa 2013-2019). Attention spans were already alarmingly low and we'd have to instigate movement breaks, intermissions, break outs etc. I had to fucking tap dance out there - anything to keep "engagement" high and avoid the dreaded attrition KPIs.

The days of students being able to concentrate for 60+ mins in a row are likely gone. Hell, there's an oft repeated meme stat that average attention span on digital devices has dropped from two and a half minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds today. Whether you consider the provenance of that dubious, it does point to "people have trouble paying attention".

But...that's not AI's fault. The "shit was already fucked".

I think there's something (still) to be said about Classical Education Method. We need things like that. We need to teach our young ones about things like "intuition pumps" and "street epistemology", reasoning etc. And we can use ShitGPT to do it.

Take a simple example: a student uses ChatGPT to write an essay on climate policy. The AI generates a claim. Now ask: "What would prove this wrong?" If they can't answer - if they can't articulate what evidence or logic would falsify it - they don't understand it.

They've outsourced the reasoning. That's the difference.

It's not easy out there; it never was. But there's a confluence of factors (popular culture, digital devices, changing demographics, family dynamics, "education" being streamlined as vocational pre-training etc etc ad infinitum) that certainly seem to be actively hostile towards developing thinkers.

Here endth the pro clanker sermon.

Ramen; may we be blessed by his noodly appendage.

PS: I’m actually pretty hostile to AI myself and have been working on an open source engineering approach to mitigate some of these issues. Happy to share it if curious (not selling anything, Open source: just something I'm trying to use to solve this sort of issue for myself)

yep. watching kids squander their one chance at university education over their reliance on this shit is depressing as fuck.

I'm in software development and land on both sides of this argument.

Having to review or maintain AI slop is infuriating.

That said, it has replaced traditional web searching for me. A good assistant setup can run multiple web searches for me, distill the useful info cutting through the blog spam and ads, run follow up searches for additional info if needed, and summarize the results in seconds with references if I want to validate its output.

There was a post a couple days ago about it solving a hard math problem with guidance from a mathematician. Sparked a discussion about AI being a powerful tool in the right hands.

Not a teacher but rather was a student in language school and will be a student again hopefully soon. But last time we were in language school everyone was using Chat GOT to get answers in work sheets and translations and stuff just to get a passing grade when in reality the class didn’t actually have a grade. They were cheating for nothing, paying for a class to learn, and swapping out the critical language learning for slop???? Granted we were allowed translators for words we don’t know yet/had trouble with grammar (us especially since autism moment) but we only used Google Translate and normally only single words, which were then put into our need to learn vocab list. At first we felt stupid because everyone seemed to be finished way before us and at lightning speed understanding what’s going on?? But we started to notice they’re ask on their phones and not in the active workbook and after a while found out it was chat gpt. They even said we should get it to not fall behind and yet we were trying to actually learn. Anywho on any spoken portion and exams we and 2 other people who didn’t use gpt passed without issue. :P

we all do, m8

When I try to do a general search for help on how to solve a problem the top results in most search engines aren’t the old Academy style videos of guides anymore. They are sponsored links, paid tutoring websites, and YouTube videos of people playing at influencer instead of teaching.

Just wait until the AI companies move on from the onboarding phase and into the enshittification one.

It's called ChatGPT. Not ExpertGPT, ScientistGPT, EngineerGPT, DoctorGPT, or fucking TeacherGPT.

I have no idea how a novelty Eliza 2.0 impresses so many microcephalics to the point it's destroying our society.

Perhaps handwritten in-class research papers need to make a comeback

You can use AI to learn everything OR to learn nothing. They've made the second choice.

I explain to the students, that the essays/tests, are to find out what YOU know. Not the computer. Not your friend for help. YOU.

You are getting your year 12 certificate some day. Not your friend.

If this annoys you, watch the cartoon WALL-E. Sooner or later, humanity will come to something like this, and then they will self-destruct.

It’s not even about the tech, there’s just something about not wanting to learn that deeply upsets me.

and this is exactly why I hate the "new age" society.

I'm a returning student, and I'm really upset at the level that my cohort turns to AI for everything. There's no effort to think about a problem when most school work is already in the system and can be retrieved easily.

It's also upsetting to me how attractive an option it can be. I can spend all this time working on something, or i drop a simple prompt and just rewrite the answer in my own words. When you have something that you forgot about or procrastinated on, it's really attractive to say "What are some themes in Moby Dick?" and basically rewrite the response. What's even more upsetting than that, is the amount of people who wont even retype a thing to pass it as their own, but just copy/paste.

An increasing number of my profs are adding AI into their courses, with the feeling that it's inevitable. It's distressing to see an assignment that calls for us to ask a chat or about the problem then fact check it. I feel like that's teaching the exact opposite of what these kids need.

🤝 In slop hate we concur.