>This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence.
I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?
The students were reading AI summaries rather than the original text.
Does this literally work? It adds slightly more friction, but you can still ask the robot to summarize pretty much anything that would appear on the syllabus. What it likely does it set expectations.
This doesn't strike me as being anti-AI or "resistance" at all. But if you don't train your own brain to read and make thoughts, you won't have one.
I was reading summaries online 25 years ago as well.
Hell, in Italy we used to have an editor called Bignami make summaries of every school topic.
https://www.bignami.com/
In any case, I don't know what to think about all of this.
School is for learning, if you skip the hard part you not gonna learn, your lost.
Instead of learning the things that can be done by ai, learn how to use the ai as that’s the only edge you got left.
I honestly think (you and) I'm missing something!
What you say is obvious to me and provably correct. I just can't argue with your statement no matter what and have been making comments in alignment with yours, just with way, way more text.
We are both being downvoted - I can't even see your post (it's so grayed out) and I've started to get those "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." myself, that is indicative of post throttling that kicks in on heavy downvotes. It took me 5 retries, waiting ~40 minutes each time and failing between tries to get this to finally post but I waited because this comment was important for me to put out there. I'm not going to stick around to keep waiting, retrying and posting again as I have other things to do in my life, so I will just abandon commenting altogether.
"AI" is changing society fundamentally forever and education needs to change fundamentally with it. I am personally betting that humans in the future, outside extreme niches, are generalists and are augmented by specialist agents.
I have a hypothesis that future software engineers will be a human generalist (the person) augmented by a large diverse group of specialist agents (the tools). The human generalist will keep their specialist agents fine-tuned, trained and upto date so that they generate implementations precisely as the human generalist specifies them.
This won't be limited to software engineering but looking at how well this thought process is polling here on HN, I'll pause :).
Are you and I missing something big or is the bigger crowd in denial?
I mean. By token cost, it costs less to scan a document and pass it to chatgpt as an image for a text summarization of the text than it does to ingest the text. I gave a talk on this at an AI meetup based off of my own experience.
When tokens were expensive I actually had a python script that stuck my text into an image for chatgpt to process lol.
>How can printing avoid AI?
Every online service in the university has an AI summarization tool in it. This includes library services.
>And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?
It can get in line. Engl academics have been talking about sustainability for decades. Nobody cared before, professors aren't going to care now.
This approach is just cheap theater. It doesn't actually stop AI, it just adds a step to the process. Any student can snap a photo, OCR the text and feed it into an LLM in seconds. All this policy accomplishes is wasting paper and forcing students to engage in digital hoop-jumping.
It’s not theater. It introduces friction into the process. And when there is friction in both choices (read the paper, or take a photo and upload the picture), you’ll get more people reading the physical paper copy. If students want to jump through hoops, they will, but it will require an active choice.
At this point auto AI summaries are so prevalent that it is the passive default. By shifting it to require an active choice, you’ve make it more likely for students to choose to do the work.
That friction is trivial. You are comparing the effort of snapping a photo against the effort of actually reading and analyzing a text. If anyone chooses to read the paper, it's because they actually want to read it, not because using AI was too much hassle.
You can certainly make it harder to cheat. AIs will inevitably generate summaries that are very similarly written and formatted -- content, context, and sequence -- making it easy for a prof (and their AI) to detect the presence of AI use, especially if students are also quizzed to validate that they have knowledge of their own summary.
Alternately, the prof can require that students write out notes, in longhand, as they read, and require that a photocopy of those notes be submitted, along with a handwritten outline / rough draft, to validate the essays that follow.
I think it's inevitable that "show your work" soon will become the mantra of not just the math, hard science, and engineering courses.
Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.
It’s not the time that’s the friction. It’s the choice. The student has to actively take the picture and upload it. It’s a choice. It takes more effort than reading the autogenerated summary that Google Drive or Copilot helpfully made for the digital PDF of the reading they replaced.
It’s not much more effort. The level of friction is minimal. But we’re talking about the activation energy of students (in an undergrad English class, likely teenagers). It doesn’t take much to swing the percentage of students who do the reading.
Are you really comparing the energy necessary to read something to taking a photo and having an ai read it for you. You are not comparing zero energy to some energy, you are comparing a whole lot of energy to some energy.
The quotas for summarising text and parsing images and then summarising text aren't the same. As you surely know.
Who’s paying for that? Certainly not the users (yet).
The taxpayers will, when those companies will need to be bailed out.
Students tend to be fairly lazy, so this may simply mean another x% of the class reads the material rather than scanning in the 60 pages of reading for the assignment.
You don't need to Ocr. Llms can respond directly to the scanned image. They are better than most Ocr programs.
Indeed the token cost of image inputs are lower because you have more fine grained control of the latent token space
You fundamentally misunderstand the value of friction. The digital hoop-jumping, as you call it, is a very very useful signal for motivation.
You can't easily copy and paste from a printout into AI. Sure, you can track down the reading yourself online, and then copy and paste in, but not during class, and not without some effort.
LLM services have pretty much flawless OCR for printed text.
It’s easy to take a picture of a printout and then ask AI about it. Not that hard even when it’s many pages.
It takes more initial effort than just starting reading, or even just skim-reading the material.