I'm in software development and land on both sides of this argument.

Having to review or maintain AI slop is infuriating.

That said, it has replaced traditional web searching for me. A good assistant setup can run multiple web searches for me, distill the useful info cutting through the blog spam and ads, run follow up searches for additional info if needed, and summarize the results in seconds with references if I want to validate its output.

There was a post a couple days ago about it solving a hard math problem with guidance from a mathematician. Sparked a discussion about AI being a powerful tool in the right hands.

Yeah. It’s definitely a major contributor to the dumbing of humanity. We’re barreling towards Idocracy with open ~~arms~~. AI.

Academic writing is really hard. It requires intense concentration over a long period of time. I don't know that your kids would be doing more work if they didn't have AI- they'd probably just do what I did, phone in a shitty paper they churned out the night before/2 weeks late, because they could only start when they sufficiently felt like they were going to throw up from stress.

I'm glad I retired from the profession when I did. I was seeing that "no interest in learning anything" with the tools they had then. I can't imagine it now.

So brave. (Upvotes to the left)

We used to be graded on penmanship in our writing. Nobody was particularly upset when typing rendered a penmanship grade irrelevant. It became an unimportant metric to track; people with truly abysmal handwriting became perfectly capable authors. Penmanship was handed from author to artist.

LLMs are rapidly making structure and composition unimportant to the author. They are beginning to be able to convey ideas without being overly concerned with format. We need not be particularly concerned with the diminishing importance of this metric; people with little understanding of format can now become perfectly capable authors. Structure and composition is being handed over from author to poet.

AI provides a direct, immediate answer to every question you put before it. It provides that in a well-crafted, predictable, easy-to-read format. The student is not wrong for wanting this kind of response. It is what they, themselves, are asked to provide.

That the answer is rarely correct doesn't particularly phase them: They lack the experience to be able to identify the falsehoods. They haven't learned to question the lack of citation and attribution, or to cross check sources.

Where we now need to focus is on the roots of thought. The formation of ideas. The determination between fact and fiction.

Divide the class up into groups of three. The members of each group are to individually write a paper on the same, narrow topic. But, they are to deliberately include in their paper one to four significant falsehoods on their subject. Feel free to use AI.

Give the three papers to another group, and have them identify and prove the lies.

As the author, any intentional lie you manage to slip past the checkers earns big points. Any undeclared lie caught by the checkers costs you big points.

As the checker, every intentional lie you discover earns a few points. Every unintentional lie you catch earns big points. Every intentional lie you miss costs big points.

Your students were so focused on critical thinking tasks that they barely realize how much research they have put into the two topics they worked on.

Doesn't sound like an AI problem, sounds like a lazy student problem. These are students that would have done poorly before AI and tried to use other methods to slide by easier. You aren't seeing anything new, you are just using the reason du jour to blame it on.