<
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/openai-chatgpt-ai-cheating-education-college-students-school.html>
"Chungin “Roy” Lee stepped onto Columbia University’s campus this past fall
and, by his own admission, proceeded to use generative artificial intelligence
to cheat on nearly every assignment. As a computer-science major, he depended
on AI for his introductory programming classes: “I’d just dump the prompt into
ChatGPT and hand in whatever it spat out.” By his rough math, AI wrote 80
percent of every essay he turned in. “At the end, I’d put on the finishing
touches. I’d just insert 20 percent of my humanity, my voice, into it,” Lee
told me recently.
Lee was born in South Korea and grew up outside Atlanta, where his parents run
a college-prep consulting business. He said he was admitted to Harvard early in
his senior year of high school, but the university rescinded its offer after he
was suspended for sneaking out during an overnight field trip before
graduation. A year later, he applied to 26 schools; he didn’t get into any of
them. So he spent the next year at a community college, before transferring to
Columbia. (His personal essay, which turned his winding road to higher
education into a parable for his ambition to build companies, was written with
help from ChatGPT.) When he started at Columbia as a sophomore this past
September, he didn’t worry much about academics or his GPA. “Most assignments
in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just
had no interest in doing them.” While other new students fretted over the
university’s rigorous core curriculum, described by the school as
“intellectually expansive” and “personally transformative,” Lee used AI to
breeze through with minimal effort. When I asked him why he had gone through so
much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the
learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and
your wife.”
By the end of his first semester, Lee checked off one of those boxes. He met a
co-founder, Neel Shanmugam, a junior in the school of engineering, and together
they developed a series of potential start-ups: a dating app just for Columbia
students, a sales tool for liquor distributors, and a note-taking app. None of
them took off. Then Lee had an idea. As a coder, he had spent some 600
miserable hours on LeetCode, a training platform that prepares coders to answer
the algorithmic riddles tech companies ask job and internship candidates during
interviews. Lee, like many young developers, found the riddles tedious and
mostly irrelevant to the work coders might actually do on the job. What was the
point? What if they built a program that hid AI from browsers during remote job
interviews so that interviewees could cheat their way through instead?"
Via
Garbage Day: Meta has a cool new slop feed
https://www.garbageday.email/p/meta-has-a-cool-new-slop-feed
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
