Bot-Passivity

So I've just officially gotten a Big Giant Piece of Paper that qualifies me as a Master of something or other (in my case, arts management) and sat through an overwhelming stadium-arena of a graduation ceremony, jam-packed with thousands of attendees and over 10 pop-up stages each shuffling a school's worth of graduates for a hat tip, a photo op and a tube - all over in two hours. Two years of sidelining my publishing/art career is worth it for all of this, I guess...? (I am saying this as a neutral joke - I do have a professional reason for working to earn this degree)

Anyway all of this set-up is because I want to talk about something casually.

Sometimes on Twitter I come across funny-haha tweets from academics warning against the perils of undertaking a PhD (which I am at no risk of pursuing) and getting churned by the publish-or-perish grind. I find this all validating since this is going to be the last time I ever set foot in the ivory tower as a requirement to get Big Giant Pieces of Paper, and doing my Masters again kind of reaffirmed to me that academia still isn't the life I want to keep maintaining. I love studying, I love the aura of university and my mind is engineered for it, but I certainly don't find the system as is inspiring or motivating or effective for the advocacy/educational work I want to do.

I am also realising that I entered and am exiting the academic grind at the right time. Amongst the funny-haha tweets I see a few from teachers across high schools and universities discussing and lamenting the increasing usage of AI by students and the fatalistic acceptance of AI by admin. So now you have students paying big money for AI to generate assignment responses and essays for their Big Giant Papers, and teachers trying to come up with ways to circumvent such behaviour. I am so glad to never have to be around these people as my classmates and that my work won't be caught up in the blast radius.

It's not necessarily the use of AI for schoolwork I have a problem with (you can read my thoughts about AI as a whole here), even though I have a strict principle against using AI for work that requires expression of your own opinions, skills and passions. What I have a problem with is that the student is very likely not using it critically and intelligently. People just trust generic-use chatbots with the undifferentiated, unverified, unaudited dataset to algorithimically predict the most common responses for their coursework and think that's enough to skate by?

The problem with using generative bots to produce papers or diagrams or anything that communicates something, is that you as the user have to audit and edit the output - because the bot sure isn't going to do that. The bot can't see or perceive content, let alone nuance, and it's been known to hallucinate or get confused by information since it can't tell if the Reddit user is more correct than a scan of an expert's monograph from Google Books than a website from an organisation made in the 00s. So if you are going to be the bot's editor, you yourself need to know the topic you're asking the bot to dabble in. At this point, may as well do actual research and read a book and make your own notes and generate the information from your brain. At least any mistakes you make you can claim as yours, and if you get interrogated by a teacher you don't have to scramble and hoist blame onto a billionaire's parrot. Doing the latter only makes you look stupid. (Cheating used to have style back then)

But people don't even think through all of that. They just happily use the bot and don't perceive the consequence; not even the consequence of paying Big Giant Money to go to university so they can not pay attention to class, not read the syllabus, not talk to the teacher, not interact with their peers, not build up the skills they purportedly want to study, and then outsource intellectual labour of assignments to an app and further degenerate their thinking/writing/speaking/learning abilities.

I will be the first to admit I am a Snob so I am pretty confident saying that I would absolutely hate participating in the same intellectual space with classmates like this. The reason why I love academic practice (even though I don't like being in it) and I do the creative work I do is because I love being around people who Think and consider their actions, ethics, tastes as part of their oeuvre of embodied intellectual living. I really like listening to other people's perspectives and experiences and how they express those in themselves and what they do. No matter how poorly they write, or how much they struggle to speak because of a second (or third or fourth) language, I like being with someone whose eyes light up when I ask them about their pet advocacy - why they are studying, and what they will do to make where they come from better.

It sucks that academia is structured in such a way that it's become more and more numbers/clout-poisoned. Publish more, more GPA, more students, more churn, more degrees that are not "useless" in a capitalist society, more $$$ - at the expense of actual learning and working. All of this clout-poisoning just makes it more appealing for students to overcome pressure to achieve a Number, and for admins to sit back and not have any principle beyond 'lol let's follow what the latest oligarchs of the capitalist system, who are often part of our board, are obsessed with in this trend cycle'. Unfortunately in their quest for churn they are going to be producing more and more graduates who didn't get the skill they paid for to obtain. Or maybe that's the obligarch's goal after all? Easier to dispose of an employee when they are only averagely capable of doing average things, or lesser.

IMO, students who use AI tend to do so because they are struggling massively with the material and are not being assisted. Teaching a struggling student requires teachers who are compassionate and attentive, and perhaps fluent in the student's native language - but those qualities are in short supply as teachers are being churn-crunched. So, lost and without other options, the student uses AI and hopes it speaking in a faux-intelligentsia using the student's name and card number will skate by an inattentive teacher's glance. Unfortunately, the paper the AI produces is not of standard either (see above, about needing to critically edit the ouput). In the end nobody learns anything and it all becomes pointless. Which probably is the point.

The worse thing is that in the next few years I will be in the same working environment with more and more of these bot-passive students-turned-colleagues, and I don't know if my patience can stand being around that kind of condition. Yeah yeah, maybe I am learning towards being more in the mean-area of Snob, but I honestly think having standards should be a minimum requirement. While we are here, let's add 'consideration for the work that I do and its effects on stakeholders' and 'honour for one's labour' to the pile of expectations.

It's such a sad state of affairs, and I hate to see the sadness infect more and more of the world I live in. At least during the NFT and crypto era, that nonsense was confined to the computer. But nowadays I don't even have the same privilege of turning the computer off to avoid the latest mind-ruining scheme.