Read Eats, Shoots and Leaves. One of the funniest grammar books ever.
6 Likes
Just for fun, I thought I’d ask Chat GPT to help design a writing course that discourages students from using AI to write their assignments (though this is not the approach I would pursue). Here’s what I got on first pass:
—————————————
To design a writing course that discourages or prevents students from using AI to write their assignments, focus on creating a structure that prioritises process, originality, and in-class participation. Here are key steps:
-
Emphasise Process Over Product
• Drafts and Revisions: Require multiple drafts for each assignment, with evidence of iterative improvement. Assess drafts alongside the final version.
• Annotations: Ask students to annotate their work, explaining their thought processes, sources, and writing decisions. -
In-Class Writing
• Include timed, handwritten writing exercises during class. Use these as benchmarks to understand students’ natural writing styles.
• Require that a portion of the graded writing is completed in a monitored environment. -
Personalised Assignments
• Design prompts tied to personal experiences, specific class discussions, or unique, localised events. This makes it harder for AI to generate plausible responses.
• Incorporate open-ended, creative, or reflective tasks that cannot be easily replicated by AI. -
Use of Anti-AI Detection Tools
• Employ AI detection software cautiously and transparently. Inform students about its use to deter reliance on AI tools. -
Oral Presentations and Defences
• Require students to orally present or defend their written work. Use this to confirm understanding of the content they submitted. -
Foster Ethical Awareness
• Discuss academic integrity and the limitations of AI in developing critical thinking and personal expression.
• Include reflective assignments about the ethics of AI use in education and writing. -
Monitor Consistency
• Track individual writing styles throughout the course. Sudden shifts in tone, vocabulary, or structure may indicate external assistance.
• Compare in-class writing samples with take-home assignments for alignment. -
Collaborative and Public Work
• Use peer reviews or group projects where students must share and critique each other’s work. Public sharing adds a layer of accountability. -
Innovative Assessment Formats
• Incorporate non-traditional writing assignments, such as multimedia projects, handwritten journals, or portfolios that include reflections and process notes.
By embedding these strategies into the course design, you can reduce the temptation or feasibility of relying on AI while promoting authentic engagement and skill development.
———————————
At this stage, you could refine the question iteratively to generate even better ideas and approaches until you have an outline you find satisfactory. For example, you could ask Chat to give you alternatives to AI detection tools or ask it how to use AI to help students improve their writing, etc. IOW, use AI to help you deal with AI…
ETA: This is an example of how quickly AI could replace a brainstorming session that might have taken hours and needed someone to produce a summary of the ideas presented by the group. I simply typed in a question and got a decent, formatted response in a matter of seconds. Instead of using group time to get to this stage, this output could be the starting point for a brainstorming session that could further refine the list — with AI assistance, of course. 
ETAA: I hope no one takes offense. I don’t post this simple example as a solution to designing a writing course. I’m just offering it as an example of how to start a conversation with an AI tool (and Chat is certainly not the most sophisticated of them) and what a starting point could look like. Of course, the more expertise you bring to the conversation, the better and more effective the output.
4 Likes
Interesting article “offers early evidence of artificial intelligence shaking up the workforce:”
“Everybody should be thinking about AI, no matter what they do for a living,” Summers added. “Because AI can be highly empowering. But it also means certain types of activities won’t be done by people anymore.”
…Automation has indeed claimed American jobs over the last century. In a Substack post, Deming cited the early 20th-century example of telephone operators. But AI’s impact is more likely to enable short-term boosts to productivity with longer-term threats of displacement by workers more adept with the technology.
“When companies start to get squeezed — when we hit the next recession or something — they’re going to start expecting more out of knowledge workers,” Deming said. “They won’t want that memo in two days, because they know this technology is available. They’ll want it in two hours.”
2 Likes
I don’t think/hope teachers are replaced by AI but I do think AI might reduce the numbers of teachers. DS loved math/CS so we supplemented his learning via AOPS, etc. There are many kids that are just being held back by the school systems and hopefully AI can help keep these kids interested and learning. Hopefully, schools will realize learning is not really tied to one’s age and AI can assist in developing programs for kids as opposed to having the accelerated kids to help teach the others…
3 Likes
Your son did this online I assume?
1 Like
I am ready for AI to do my doctor job!
It can start with the charting and paperwork, thank you very much! When it’s ready to do so safely, it can even take over the analyzing, diagnosing and prescribing parts. AI can leave me to drain and pack any abscesses and freeze off ditzles (once the AI has analyzed the lesion image and determined it to be benign.) In my free time I will surf CC.
4 Likes
Some courses he did online, some he just did via the book and homework. Later he was a tutor as well for AoPS. Great resource!
2 Likes
One of my s’s was in AI healthcare. This is not far from reality, sadly. I told him if AI was there to help providers with diagnostic considerations that was fine, but if it was a way for insurers to deny care or avoid a doctor to doctor review he had gone to the dark side.
2 Likes
I am sure it is a great resource!!
Our school actually does a good job - hands on projects, etc.
Here’s an interesting first-person article about why AI is not (yet) eliminating Data Science jobs. AI Is Coming for Data Science Jobs… But Not the Way You Think | by James Gearheart | Data Science Collective | Feb, 2025 | Medium
I think the reality is more complex. AI is eliminating the more mundane and rote work that data scientists do. So, it can reduce employment for data scientists. But it is also opening up new work possibilities. If those can be done by the same data scientists, jobs may decline less or increase. Alternatively, the jobs created may be done by other folks and some of these data scientists would be laid off. My guess is that many companies have yet to do either the data science or AI that they could, so jobs in this sector will rise, but the jobs that exist will be different.
3 Likes
Google introducing a Data Science AI Agent
2 Likes
The NYT had an article/interview about AI today. It’s pretty wide-ranging and only a part of it discusses AI automating jobs but it’s the sub-text for much of the discussion.
Here is a gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-ben-buchanan.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1U4.9Uri.Wxz2dpRvKrdE&smid=url-share
sample quotes:
Unless you are engaging with this technology, you probably don’t appreciate how good it is today. And it’s important to recognize that today is the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s only going to get better.
I’ve talked to a number of people at firms that do high amounts of coding, and they tell me that by the end of this year or next year they expect most code will not be written by human beings.
2 Likes
Don’t we have all that now? Everything done/found with software on a computer is not AI. Everytime there is a photoshop or CGI video, someone says it’s AI, it’s not.
1 Like
What I mean is…AI can be used to do things like generate letters, reports, etc. Info is typed in by the user so that specific info is used in the AI generated documents.
Of course, it is important that the user check the AI generated document for accuracy.
But this means many folks don’t have to create and save documents on their PCs using computer software. I have a lot of templates, but this AI feature really is good…in my opinion. It’s a huge time saver.
I didn’t realize Jeff Selingo has a podcast. He spoke with Google and university faculty in NYC last week.
“Higher ed has long been a pathway into the workforce and social mobility. As jobs disappear because of AI—particularly entry-level jobs requiring a BA, how should colleges and universities shift their approach inside and outside the classroom?
That was THE question on my mind when we recorded the Future U Podcast at Google’s Gen AI & Labs Live convening in New York City last week with government and higher ed leaders.
What a thoughtful panel with Google’s Christopher Hein, The City University of New York’s Ann Kirschner and Pace University’s Marvin Krislov.
Every organization, including colleges, needs an AI plan.
“It’s particularly true of higher education because…we create new knowledge," Kirschner said.
At Pace, “every student in their required computer science class takes a six week module on artificial intelligence,” said Krislov. “We are trying to level set so that when someone graduates with a degree, as well as having liberal arts curriculum, they will have some experience in artificial intelligence.”
Lots of doubling down on how colleges and universities are uniquely qualified to both put the gas on AI, but also the brake.
“We owe it to our students and our faculty to help them navigate this," Krislov said. “There are a lot of free thinkers in universities, and if you allow them to be involved and critical, they will help you distinguish between when it is good and when maybe it should not be relied on, as well as all the ethical implications as well.”
AI requires us to rethink the relationship between education, teaching in the classroom, and experiential learning.
These are no longer siloed activities. “We have to start to recognize what makes someone unique and special and better when they’ve got AI as a tool set,” Hein said.
“Our job," Kirschner added, "is to prepare students for a lifetime of learning and earning. That’s our job. The earning part we’re a little queasy about. We don’t want to be ‘vocational. One of my least favorite words, as if there’s something anti-intellectual about students needing a job.”
There’s a future for academic researchers, with AI as a co-scientists.
AI won’t likely eliminate an entire layer of academic research jobs, Hein maintained. “The amount of deep specialization that’s required for so much research that’s happening today is to a point where you’ve got to be to 20 years of learning before you can understand so many of the complex different things that interact with each other,” he said. "So I don’t think that this should be a closing of the aperture where we’re seeing less research being done by fewer people.”
1 Like
I attended a conference at a well-known university this weekend on AI and my field this weekend. I learned a lot and met some AI folks who might become collaborators, although they figured out that the kind of problem I work on is a lot harder than the problems that traditional academics study. The impact is probably going to be greater within academia for a while and this work will create jobs. Some of the work – an AI that will advise folks who otherwise won’t have access to professional help – will not take jobs. Others will create jobs in the short run and eliminate many in the longer run. There will of course be new jobs created to do new things that we could not do before.
It will take more time before the work I saw can translate from the academic arena to practice, but it will likely happen.
Incidentally, I went a conference with the same subject five years ago and the progress has been remarkable – we’ve moved from concepts to projects that could not even have been imagined five years ago. There is an interesting interplay – large language models apparently are not very good at math so you need to need other AI for that – sounds like the Data Science Agent mentioned above might be tuned for math.
One very nice thing as an aside. I have not been a full-time academic for quite a while but did a fair bit of writing as an academic in the formative stages of my field and so a couple of things that I wrote are widely cited. Since leaving academia, I have continued to write (a book and a number of articles). But, because my primary activity is not academic, I don’t attend academic conferences very often. So lots of people know me from my work but have never met me. It was really gratifying to have people come up to me and say that they had read/cited my work and felt like they were meeting a rock star (remarkably more than one person said that). It is nice to know that my writing has an impact.
4 Likes
When humans and AI work together as a team, they can identify innovative ideas for addressing social problems more efficiently than either humans or AI could on their own… However, people sometimes surrender their good judgment and defer to AI’s decisions—even when AI produces incorrect information.
You really need to have humans synthesizing and validating the data.
This is why it’s even more important that we focus our education energies on teaching critical thinking. Otherwise, we will be easily pursuaded by convincing AI narratives that propose false solutions.
7 Likes
I wonder about ethics of this,
“ Meet the 21-year-old helping coders use AI to cheat in Google and other tech job interviews
PUBLISHED SUN, MAR 9 2025 8:00 AM EDTUPDATED MON, MAR 10 2025 2:21 PM EDT
KEY POINTS
- As artificial intelligence becomes more advanced, employers are trying to build workarounds to prevent candidates from cheating in virtual job interviews but are struggling to keep up.
- Columbia University student Chungin “Roy” Lee said he used AI to game a popular virtual interview platform used by tech companies and later received several internship offers.
- Google is among companies considering moving away from virtual interviews as AI becomes more popular among candidates as a way to cheat the process…”
“….Everyone programs nowadays with the help of AI,” said Lee, a 21-year-old student at Columbia University, which has opened disciplinary proceedings against him, according to documents viewed by CNBC. A Columbia spokesperson said the university doesn’t comment on individual students.
“It doesn’t make sense to have an interview format that assumes you don’t have the use of AI,” Lee said.
1 Like
Spoken like someone who doesn’t understand ethics. And that’s a real issue.
1 Like