I quit teaching because of ChatGPT

Consider that they've already ran out of training data. It's possible that we will go back into an AI winter for LLMs.

Could be, depends on where money gets dumped in that period. If it continues as it is now with a hyper focus on scaling LLMs and applying carelessly to every domain, I’m more convinced of a bubble pop. But then again LLMs have leaped things forward and the same can be said about deep learning and back propagation a decade or so ago. So maybe in a decade we’ll get another groundbreaking change in the field.

is gathering requirements and interrogating stakeholders the “fun and creatively rewarding” part of software development? Hell no.

I'm going to chime in and say that I actually do enjoy requirements gathering! I have basic programming skills, but it's not something I keep up on enough to succeed at leetcode tests or anything else employers use to measure programming skills. I've taken a long look at that/myself and determined the other supporting roles in the software development lifecycle are both more interesting to me and something I'm better at.

It's been a major struggle to search for this type of job, even though I have about 10 years of job history doing that as part of programming positions. I'm only less than two semesters away from attaining my Bachelor's degree, so hopefully that gets me somewhere. Though it's hard to be optimistic in this current landscape of tech layoffs.

I hear ya, I just think it’s gonna be a while before people actively prefer that. LLMs are quite impressive but as it stands now (which is not forever), they fall short on reasoning tasks. Yes, I’ve seen how they perform against ARC datasets, but I’m still not convinced by the landscape of architectures. Perhaps with some fundamental changes, or perhaps clever use of previous research like some of the blending of LLMs going on with RNNs or even RL.

I agree that’s not the fun or rewarding part but it’s an essential step that’s gonna be hard to surmount. And that’s even when hand waving away programming altogether which I’m still not convinced will be the case any time soon. I’ve certainly got a skeptical bias in this arena, but I’m just not impressed by what I’m seeing these days when it comes to programming or software engineering.

The cynic in me is telling me those companies will be more than happy to use my power supply, hardware and network resources to run their AI services, while keeping it online-only and locked down in such a way that they own all of my data and I own nothing. We'll see, though.

While I generally agree with you, I don’t think games like Chess and Go are good examples of the general trend. Games should always be safe from AI, since the whole point of games are to test human skills against or in collaboration with one another. It’s entertaining to watch others compete and to compete oneself.

Imagine someone trying to enter an RC car in an Olympic 100m dash? It’s completely irrelevant, since the whole point of the event is to watch people do it.

Drawn art and writing are not mainly thought of as games at this point. Maybe that will change? But if the point of art and writing is to induce a pattern of emotional response and thought, then the finished “product” is what matters more than the process of creation.

Today, things like ceramics is a mix of hobbyist, who do it purely for its own sake, and a small, small number of artisans who produce unique works for a small, niche market that appreciates that for high prices. It's not a real career path, but it is a thriving hobby. None of that is really different from where illustrations, or writing is headed, or is feared to head.

I think we're at least a decade off from that (the state where writing or illustrations are at), because the development of automated manufacturing devices like ceramics printers that are reliable and versatile to the point of replacing traditional forms of "artisanal" manufacture is at least an order of magnitude slower than the development of AI (I am a hobby ceramicist and I also started with plastic 3D printing relatively early on and watched its development over time - current ceramic printers are really not it), and one would argue that at least for a time physical artisanal products may grow in popularity instead, precisely because we're at a time where, contrary to digital art, it's trivial to make artisanal objects that are obviously made neither by AI assisted automated processes nor by large scale industry, and the demand for that seems to be increasing.

I think the real bottleneck here is that in order to make a (dignified) living selling artisanal objects the skills needed are 50% craftsmanship/artistry and 50% (or even more) sales and marketing, you usually don't make enough to hire someone for the latter in the long term, and at least where I live people who are able to learn both of those skills well enough are uncommon.

The few people I know who make a living doing ceramics are not doing terrible financially and are constantly sold out, however they all split their time between making products and teaching, because the latter is more profitable, and that market might be smaller, though similarly to the sales of their products, the courses are constantly sold out within a day or two.

Both of those are very "top down" options, which work best when they have full control over the material. Probably glass and metal crafting will be the first to go, as the materials are more stable and predictable, with ceramics after that, but I imagine that woodworking will be the last to fall, as working with variable grain and density would ask for more improvisation than is currently doable.

I've had classes that had a lecture hour twice a week and a lab hour once a week. Something like that could work.

And to fix the handwriting problem... maybe electric typewriters will come back in style!

Those are good points. I'm imagining more of a mid-term/final type deal where you would only need to take the test 2-3 times a semester. That way it has little impact on actual teaching days.

Ditto. I have ADHD and I always did much better of the blue book tests than the regular extended period home written essays.

To be fair to the teacher, when I get report cards for my kids in New Jersey, they refer to skills as Underdeveloped, Developing, and Proficient.

Underdeveloped means that they might qualify for remediation programs.

So when that teacher is saying they weren't developed enough, that's essentially just saying 'they haven't learned enough about that yet to be considered Proficient,' not 'they are incapable of learning that.'

The author is teaching doctoral students, not undergrads. A technical PhD student is working 60+ hour weeks on research, classes, and TA responsibilities combined. I can easily see how they just do not give a shit about the writing class they're being forced to take.

The example is even less typical than that. The author appears to have been specifically teaching English courses for (presumably incoming) international students (at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, also oddly not mentioned). So these were likely writing classes that students were being required to take while others in their cohort were not, and were likely entirely outside of their department's program and normal requirements.

There could be significant motivation to cheat or cut corners in that context, and the students' departments might not care, or might even unofficially encourage it. The author could well have been caught more in inter-departmental drama than a breakdown of student behavior.

Maybe times have changed, but when I was a grad student, even a whiff of cheating would have been a death sentence. The academic community is simply too small and has too long a memory.

This would be a fair assessment if the students knew how to write, but from OPs comments these people cant write well enough to see why its a problem that their chatgpt answers change styles halfway through.

I guess the good news is you’ll have a leg up if you’re a good writer, going forward.

Bad news is we’re all going to be forced to read badly written generated articles. I know some of us are already, but chatgpt hasn’t creeped into science publications yet, and I guess it will soon.

That's a fair point. I've read similar complaints about undergrads too, which is why it's been on my mind. But I totally understand if you're working towards a dissertation that you don't care about some other class you're forced to take

Right its just lowering the bar.

This professor would have to learn how to grade AI generated papers. They’d have to familiarize themselves with the current limitations and grade it based on how well the student prompted the AI rather than how well the student wrote something.

They just don’t want to do that, because in a class meant to teach people how to write, its a waste of everyones time.

I imagine at some point in the future the curriculum might change to “AI prompting” instead of “writing” and the only people who actually know how to write will be the English/etc majors, just like the only people who can do basic algebra are the ones who had to use it in college.

That seems odd as most markets don't compare to the US markets. The EU doesn't even allow the purchase of US ETFs (they have their own, that US citizens aren't allowed to purchase...).

Because spending thousands on an "education" you're not learning/using just because employers want a stamp is a waste of money? Why not just charge a fee and save students 3 years of their life?

I see the same way I see inflation: as the amount of things a dollar can buy goes down, the need to have a dollar (ideally, many dollars) goes up. The degree (or dollar) is losing intrinsic value, but that’s making it more of a necessity for more people, not less.

Its losing value because people who don’t really want to learn are being forced to go through the program in order to find a job.

These people do the bare minimum, and graduate without having learned a whole lot, and so they don’t produce as good of work as you’d expect from a college graduate.

This is because college is an educational playground, theres semi loose requirements to get through it and the expectation is you get what you want out of it. If you want to waste your time and get the rubber stamp, they let you.

So the rest of us have to go through insane interviews because the employers cant trust that we didn’t waste our time in college. Our salary expectations are lowered because more people have a degree. Its more difficult to find a job because more people graduated with the same degree at the same time.