The real impact of AI at university level that I've watched in real time is how so many students come onto courses now - including Masters level - who straight up don't know how to analyse/evaluate things anymore. They just accept whatever they first read/hear completely uncritically. Every time you point it out you have to coax them into Actually Thinking.
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.
Ngh. Yelling at the choir here, I know, but NNNNGH
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