Futurology

I'm 37 and now back in college to finish up my degree. It's honestly depressing how badly AI usage has affected many of my classmates. I talk a lot with my professors as I'm close in age to many of them and from what I keep hearing over and over is that any online or homework assignments would have you believe that 95% of students have a perfect grasp of the materials. but as soon as they're in an environment without an internet connection everything falls apart.

I see it in person in my recitations, my physics class might be the worst. Kids get up to the board to to work a simple linear motion word problem and struggle to even make a list of all the variables. Yesterday I watched my professor try for 5+ min to get 2 different students to simply write the units next to the numbers they filed into an equation, they just could not understand what he was asking of them. Our first exam had over half of the class score below 40%.

I realize not all of this is attributable to AI use, but the amount of times I've heard students say "just ask chatgpt" is absurd. Several times I've overheard one of these exchanges and the replying students says something along the lines of they don't like to use AI or trust AI answers and then they get dogpiled by their peers in return. It's a serious problem, and one I don't have any easy answers to.