The news about academic cheating has gone from worrying to post mortem. Colleges apparently can’t manage cheating on any level. As usual, a lot of handwringing and total lack of answers produce a sort of techno-manga doomscape.
Those headlines create a bizarre set of situations from “AI is an existential threat to colleges” from the Washington Post (paywall) to the truly alarming penalizing of a student for proofreading using Grammarly.
The AI outscores the humans relentlessly at about 83%, according to Forbes. As usual, honesty gets you nowhere. See that quaint little rustic waste of time called the USA for details.
Strangely, people aren’t happy with this 100% true-to-Western-cultural breakthrough into institutional incompetence and corruption.
Despite the decades of noble roles of mainstream media and so many utterly futile public figures, people who can’t do their jobs aren’t much in demand.
“Why not?” you enquire, grimly bolting yourself to the ridiculous shriveled lettuce of a society.
Well, ‘cause:
Education has become a stagnant backwater of regressive politics. They’re either scared of it or actively trying to prevent it. See Oklahoma for details. Defunding public education is actually a stated policy in the USA. If they seriously think everyone can afford private education, you can see the level of intellect in the mix.
Past idiocies sabotaged education decades ago. The blame isn’t all one-way. Imbecile ideas like not teaching phonics (structuring basic words and concepts) did a lot of damage. Many people in multiple generations are functionally illiterate.
The illiteracy of the system itself doesn’t exactly help in managing AI issues. Literacy isn’t just being able to read. It’s being able to understand what you read. It’s essential to critical thinking, of which we have so little lately.
The future isn’t looking at all good for the skills bases required to manage new tech and things like human reality.
Let’s get down to basics:
1, AI cannot replace humans. If you replace people with AI, you have to check absolutely everything. It’s actually more work.
2, AI doesn’t give you actual skills. You still need to learn and understand to know your stuff. Your overpriced education is utterly meaningless and useless if you can’t do the jobs.
3. It’s pretty easy to prove who can really do a job and who can’t. All you need is a simple competence test. See if the useless smug little brats can function.
4, Force AI providers to include AI detection capacity in their products by law. This “free lunch for fakes” stuff has to stop somewhere. Bear in mind that the present capacity is nothing like up to this task. According to the Forbes article above, the current 6% detection rate of AI is an overestimate. (Might help with scientific fraud and deranged social media bots, too.)
This isn’t “artificial intelligence” yet. It’s “artificial idiocy”. It’s fixable.
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Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
