I did not get the feeling that the author was against AI, but rather was bemoaning that students were using it to avoid learning. Philosophy is a good example of a subject where the knowledge is a means to developing your own cohesive principles. You don’t have to ever evolve your principles beyond their organic development, but why even bother taking a philosophy class at that point.

The ideal philosophy class is probably Aristotelian, with direct conversation between teacher and student. But this is inefficient, so college settled on using essays instead, where some of that conversation happened with the student themself as they worked through a comprehensive argument and then the teacher got to “efficiently” interject through either feedback or grading. This also resulted in asymmetric effort though, and AI is good at narrowing effort dynamics like that.

The author’s point was that the student’s effort isn’t a competition against the teacher to minmax a final grade but rather part of developing their thinking, so your “day of reckoning” seems to be cheering for students (and maybe people) to progressively offload more of their _thinking_ (not just their tasks) to AI? I’d argue that’s a bleak future indeed.

Where I disagree with the author is in worrying about devaluing a college degree. It shouldn’t be necessary for many career paths, and AI will make it increasingly equivalent to having existed in some town for 4 years (in its current incarnation). I’m all for that day of reckoning, where the students going to university want to be there for the sake of learning and not for credentialing. Most everyone else will get to fast-forward their professional lives.

ChatGPT isn't doing original research. It relies heavily on the compiled output of the folks "perched in their ivory towers". Kill off those ivory towers and it'll look as dated as IE6 in a few decades.

Given you decided to outsource your response to this article to AI, you may have missed that this is a HEALTH ETHICS professor who's seeing medical students decide to have AI write all their papers so they don't have to engage with the class. Maybe you'd be fine with your doctor having spent his whole time in college training himself that the answer to "should I bend the rules to let this patient into a drug trial that could help them out?" can be found in whatever AI service his practice subscribes to, but I would prefer someone who paid attention in class.

Why the attitude? The prideful educators in their ivory towers, unlike Sam Altman or the folks at google and microsoft, humble downtrodden men of the earth making billions off the AI.

Because he's envious and feels inferior, and thinks he's sticking it to those meanies who made him feel that way.

Replace AI with plagiarism in your statement. Now what do you think?

Ah yes the industrial revolution, which had no far reaching negative consequences at all. What a great metaphor to go along with your LLM promotion.

I mean, one can always point to negative consequences of change, but if you look at the overall results of industrial advance it's pretty hard to see the net negative for most people. Social advance on a lot of different axes had pretty impressive growth because of the industrial revolution.

That's great. I'll keep that in mind from my front row seat to the climate catastrophe, and as every day, ~19k people die from man-made air pollution. [1]

It is all a net positive somehow... Sure.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/data-review-air-pollution-deaths

Because coal-fired air quality in places like London was so great before the industrial revolution really got rolling. Or even wood fires in homes without chimneys in many places around the world.

> It is all a net positive somehow... Sure.

So yeah.