I have a friend that teaches uni labs… God, EVERYBODY uses AI to code the most basic, most boring, most intuitive and easy hello worlds, if / else chains, basic arithmetic, basic UI templates, the list goes on.
If uni students are like this I can’t imagine what is lower. It must be abysmal.
I understand using AI, I really do, but come on, if you can ask it to write an assignment, you can fucking ask it to explain it to you as well… Even AI can grasp and explain such basic starter uni bullshit… BUT THEY JUST DON’T BOTHER. They LITERALLY JUST DON’T CARE. IN UNI.
It’s mind boggling to think that a fucking 18 year old that made it to uni is so fucking incredibly idiotic.
As someone who went through university before AI, this is nothing new.
Software engineering is a 4 year title. In 3rd year, there were still people that couldn’t pass basic programming, which as you may guess is a 1st year subject.
People that have been studying software engineering for 3 years could not pass a subject where the most complicated assignment was filtering over an iterator. And I don’t mean implementing it, I mean literally doing
my_list.get_iterator().filter(is_odd);. Whereget_iteratorandfilteris already implemented.The difference is, previously lazy students had to be either forced to engage and learn against their will, or come to terms with the fact that they don’t want to, and change a career to something they don’t hate doing. Now they have an option of faking an education without wrinkling their brain even once, and I can’t classify this phenomenon as anything but civilisation ending event. Not to be overly dramatic, but dark ages are comming
Glad our uni was programming-heavy and required us to implement our own stdlib in C and C++ and then tested it on speed, accuracy, memory constraints and extreme scenarios.
We then used our own true-and-tested implementations in the upcoming assignments - like DFS, BFS, A*, graph search, simulated annealing / tabu search / genetic algorithms, and many more.
While it was kind of a pain submitting my code and automatic testing software told me it didn’t pass some random valued and finding the bugs, it was very educational and I taught me a lot.
I’ve had 4 years of programming before uni, tho.
As a 10+ year dev I’d admittedly likely need to look it up unless we are talking about lambda expressions, but if it was coursework I’d assume it would be in review.
But yeah, we had our fair share of dropouts in the comp courses as well, which was always nuts to me.
honestly, i think it’s an overarching issue with the education system. ai is not the cause, it’s the symptom, people had a million ways of dodging tasks before it too. it’s just easier now than it’s ever been.
if you know anything about indie game design, you know that learning is fun. as in, not that learning is a fun activity, but that learning is literally what fun is. you just need an environment that’s actually conducive to that, and it will be extremely gripping, because you will have created a flow state generator.
but it turns out that doing that, while also ensuring what you’re learning is at all useful (as opposed to, y’know, how to pop heads in counter-strike or something) is difficult enough that most teachers just gave up and decided that learning must suck. which is a problem for many reasons, but i think the biggest one is that if it’s not fun, you’re not actually learning: if it’s boring, it’s because you already know how to do it, and doing it more doesn’t make you do it better, and if it’s frustrating, it’s because you keep failing and all that failing doesn’t teach any skills. practice is important, sure, but good practice lies halfway between these ends, and it’s fun. but a lot of people don’t get there, and they’re told it doesn’t matter if you get there, what matters is if you get through.
i think that’s why all these courses are getting skipped by ai. because a staggering amount of people in education programs, in any kind pretty much, aren’t there to really learn, they are there to get through, by any means. because the whole social contract is that this is a thing that sucks, but if you get through it, you get a piece of paper and that paper will give you a nice life. it’s a nice thought, it’s understandable, human brains are wired to understand tradeoffs intuitively. but it skips the bloody point of why we do all this in the first place.
and yeah, i get why you’re frustrated that uni students don’t know this. but honestly, how would they? no one told them the world they were raised in since the age of 6 is a lie.
People who were dodging tasks before knew that they were doing it, and in the end they either had to adapt and learn, or fake it till they learned something against their will, or dropout.
Now they get through the education without once having to think. Which means the whole generation is basically uneducated, and relies on like two companies for all of their thinking.
Crazy that as soon as a passable human analog came about, we instantly offloaded creativity, communication, and thinking.
I mean, a computer gaming course isn’t any of that in the beginning. It’s basics, and basics is what LLMs excel at. Need 800 lines that are a monotonus number of checks boiled down to some sort of mapped system to clean up the code? It can do that in a fraction of a second.
The problem is that when you skip those basics you never learn the more advanced stuff either, because you don’t have the basics to build upon.
I think it’s difficult to learn the advanced stuff if you skip out on the basics. Experienced programmers can use AI for basic stuff, why not?
Disclaimer: I’m not a programmer so I might be talking shit.
How do you mark that? You can’t just give them a zero
Yes you can; it’s easy. Make the policy clear that any generative AI use will result in disqualification of the whole team. Then enforce it.
disqualification of the whole team.
Oh fuck no. I’ve been stuck on teams with deadweights before. Teachers refused to do anything about them contributing nothing at all. Still pissed that asshole graduated.
I swear group assignments are probably the best exposure to real-life work that the school can offer. You will run into people just as lazy throughout your life. Better to recognize them early on and come up with a plan for dealing with them.
Sure, but when you’re working and happen to have lazy people on your team it’s generally not gonna get you fired and take away significant career opportunities. When you’re in uni, however, you could fail your course and consequently fail to get a degree. The consequences are not comparable.
Sure, great, it’s one thing if it’s costing the employer money. It’s quite another if I’m paying for an education and the school is fucking me over
Even better, use of Gen AI is a violation of the Academic Honesty code and will result in punitive actions. Either learn to cheat well or don’t cheat at all.
administration won’t let you do that. you will lose your job if you try to fail students.
they will force you to pass students.
also a lot of parents straight up bribe teachers now for grades.
This has been an issue with schools since forever. Focusing on grades instead of learning means many kids will do what is needed to get a good grade, pass the class and get the degree.
When we stop valuing grades and start valuing knowledge directly, learning improves. Knowledge should be the reward and what we laud. The grade is just a mechanic for evaluation, but should be considered no value in itself. That’s what kids need to be taught and shown from day one.
When your kid comes home from school, ask them what they learned. Ask them to teach you as if you don’t know, or maybe you really don’t. Don’t correct them, instead ask questions that might lead them to the correct answer, if you know it. People learn best by teaching others. When you give your kid the expectation that they will be teaching you what they learned, even casually, they pay attention in class and do much better.
It’s much better than doomscrolling tiktok for both of you, trust me.
“What did you learn at school today?”
“Nothing.”
you can’t measure knowledge though.
schools teachers and students are measured, they are judged by numerical performance metrics.
also, after grammar school parents have no clue what their kids are doing or learning. most adults can’t do algebra or read beyond a 7th grade level.
plus what you are implying would require massively more teachers and time in education, something nobody wants.
Grades are the measure of kids are progress in what learning and what knowledge they actual have, you can call it something else like in Montessori where they change the system of grading where they use terms like mastery but they still have a system in place to track progress.
I think you’re confusing grades with teaching to the test, thanks No Child Left Behind btw, here which okay is a very valid point but end of they day standardized tests are a way to measure your actual grasp of the material being taught. Sure, how you get there needs adjustment at least in America where our math scores and reading comprehension scores are abysmal but to say it’s grades is the issues is kind of reductive when it’s such a more complex issue that involves how we teach, how we deal with disparate incomes, new thing is low enrollment, and why the hell aren’t we teaching phonics when whole-language and three-cueing methods are proven to be ineffective for literally decades now.
There’s a reason why colleges are moving back to requiring ACT/SAT scores in their applications again because in particular with items like math, kids were graduating and then finding out that they didn’t understand basic concepts like Algebra.
Also, this conversation has nothing to do with the article and AI.
Nah, the person you are replying to had a way better take on this than you.
It’s the difference between a distinguished educator and a proficient educator.
Who the fuck enrolls in an educational course, if they wish to skip learning?
Oh, you’d be surprised.
I used to teach english for non native speakers, and after chatgpt’s debut in 2023, almost every single essay, homework, and presentation was entirely done with LLMs. We had to demand handwritten essays, and presentations had to be done in the classroom (we gave the theme, they worked out a presentation, and then presented it the same day without leaving the class).
And even then, some students would ask to go to the bathroom, use their phones, memorize a whole ass paragraph from chatgpt and then come inside class to write it down.
As all the others say, they want the cert and the status that comes with the cert.
It’s part of the reason everyone needs three years experience for an entry level job, a good student fresh out of education is worth little but then worth a lot if they learn fast. A bad student fresh out of education won’t learn at all and will be an active detriment, if only because they’re taking a seat someone better could take.
People who use AI for everything aren’t guaranteed to be bad students, but bad students probably will use AI for everything. The trick will be figuring out the difference.
Yeah, ultimately I think the root of the problem is how much HR is part of hiring and selection processes despite not really knowing how to evaluate the specific skills required to do the job. If skills were being evaluated rather than resumes and interview skills, then cheating your way to a degree would be pointless.
I know you want the business owners to work harder but I have a question for you:
How much do you wanna work for an interview? I applied to 50 places, I would quit society and become a hermit if I had to take an exam (evaluation whatever you wanna call it) for each one.
What if we had a place we can attend where we prove skills and they give us a paper which makes us skip this “skill evaluation” you are talking about?
Maybe some sort of paid interview where actual work is done. Like give them a real task to complete to demonstrate their ability to do that task (and then go over it with them to see if they know what is going on with it to rule out using an AI to do something they don’t understand).
Or have technical people handle the technical parts of the interview, people that will recognize when someone gives an answer to a problem that isn’t on the answer key but is actually the best answer they’ve seen for that question. I bet there’s tons of stories where some clueless HR person rejected someone because they were smarter than the answer key but the HR person had no idea and just marked them wrong. Except the stories don’t get told because neither party has enough information to realize just how idiotic the scenario was.
Increasingly higher ed in america is being treated as a degree mill, where students are “customers” and the degree is a “product.”
It’s disgusting, but it’s a natural consequence of a commodified education system in which colleges and universities are treated as businesses.
I personally think we need to cut out the parasitic administrators and let the department faculty run the schools like co-ops, and possibly hire out the few administrative tasks that are actually necessary.
That would be far cheaper than paying these enormous administrative salaries, so it could lower tuition while increasing faculty pay.
But has anyone considered those poor shareholders?
We also need to address companies gutting any internal training programs and then gate keeping jobs that really have no need for a college degree behind a requirement for any bachelor’s degree at all to be eligible for consideration. There’s way too many jobs that that in my father’s time had a 6 month probation period where they taught you the basics of a trade, where now they just contract college grads and hope a BA means they can figure it out on their own, in lieu of having proper in house training programs.
There are a lot of people who don’t really have any need for, or even interest in, a higher education who are going just because it’s become the bare minimum to get an okay job through this inflation of requirements for entry level positions. They get saddled with debt they don’t need (and can likely I’ll afford), while the curriculum gets dumbed down for everyone, in order to keep the schools’ numbers looking good.
To be clear, this isn’t a knock on any of these folks. I just think there need to be more viable routes to a career with a living wage for people who don’t want to go to university. Maybe they come back later in life, maybe they don’t, but they should still be able to find a job that affords them a dignified life.
Wools that just want the cert
The mentally bankrupt
Just for the cert or whatever at the end.
most people hate learning. because it’s difficult and requires effort and time.
cheating is easy. you get results with less time or effort.
Add a new part that needs to be done in class with no AI on the existing project.
Add this new feature
Fix these bugs.
Explain how you addressed these problems and what kind of complications you ran into and how it could have been easier to manage.
The PR is part of what you get graded on.
So i imagine if a student doing a video game course is doing it because they are passionate about gaming, and these students are willing to use AI to shortcut something they actively want to do, then its not a big leap to assume they are using it to deal with all the other subjects they find tedious.
I feel like we are heading for a future of flesh robots interfacing with the internet to steer their lives, and the second the internet goes down people will be wandering around aimlessly, looking dazed in an internal conflict between wondering where to start and being confused that the black glass in their hand cant give them answers.
You’re right, I should read Accelerando again.
Stupid in, stupid out applies to teaching as well. 🥲
ugh,we’re so fucked
Make them write out the pseudo code by hand for thier projects? from what I can gather, the issue is that they don’t understand the underlying code that the Ai created? Thus bug testing or altering values manually is not in thier wheel house?
I’m not an expert on this matter but I don’t hear anything about pseudo code, which allows you to write code for anything… Just got to translate it into code/a language that the computer can use?
I would’ve wanted to see exactly what kind of games these students were putting out.
QWOP
GIRP?
That’s unfair towards QWOP.
honestly, if you live in a western nation, this is probably your only way to aactually succeed in the game industry. I don’t blame them. Its disgusting, but it is what it is.
I can forgive the modern reliance on LLMs, but anyone creating software still needs to understand how it actually works, or else it will come out as garbage. Games are no exception.
My two cents on this is that the education system is lagging.
Implied, thing’s are changing quickly too soon for any education to happen. A lot of education platforms are training companies llm modules. Students are adapting by using llms but it doesn’t produce more data. All big tech that’s invested in llms are pushing it harder down your throat to the point of canceling contracts as threats.
And then there’s always the “which studio will be shut down today?”
On one hand employers are telling their employees to use more AI, like their jobs depend on it and in the other hand an educational game dev program is punishing people for using it. I’m not pro-AI, but you’ve got to admit there are some mixed messages going on.
It’s a program for learning how to develop games. There’s no point in trying to teach someone who isn’t willing to learn. Businesses don’t give a shit about the wellbeing and continued professional development of their employees, they just want to see Line Go Up™. Therefore, they want employees to use the slop machine.
Those employers are just trying to get employees to code themselves out of a job. If AI is doing the work for you then there’s no sense in keeping you around, and no sense in teaching you anything.
If you’re going to be a developer you will have to learn how to use AI. It’s as simple as that. Obviously there’s a big difference in AI assisted coding and asking Claude to make you a Mario clone.
You’re under the impression that these kinds of courses are only teaching you how to tell an ai to come up with something for you. Making games isn’t one single field and I’ve yet to see a compelling argument that ai can do all of these. You have design, engine/programming work, 2d art, 3d art, animation, sound design and probably more I’ve missed. Ai can do parts of these things maybe even passably in some cases but it still needs direction.
You’re saying that as if the learning how to use AI with coding is the hard part and needs to be done from the start, rather than people learning the foundation that means you will understand not just what to tell the AI but what it is doing so you can think of the pitfalls it might not consider as well as have an idea of when something is taking longer than it should (or going much quicker than it should, which could mean it’s not really doing what you expected).
Stupid in, stupid out applies to teaching as well. 🥲
edit: meaning that we, as a civilization, are allowing Artificial Ignorance to “teach” our students. I never disparage teachers, FTR. Sorry for the hazy sentence. Stoned in, stoned out. 😅
In computing, it’s GIGO: Garbage In Garbage Out.
True enough. Like PEBCAC.
