#how dare she be using his precious chatGPT for that when HE needed it for generating code!

[aristoteliancomplacency]

You’re absolutely right that there’s clear hyperbole going on in that tweet thread, but you have to be feeling very uncharitable indeed to claim that the worry of ‘reverting to where AI is’ is an indulgent statement that ‘doesn’t mean anything.’ It’s really very easy to understand what the student meant - the exact meaning is explained within that same tweet (along with how they’re defining ‘dumber’). She is referring to loss of ability / practice in thinking critically.

Given that they’re doing this for an assignment I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re drawing that claim from an article like this. Which certainly makes it sound far less knee-jerk and more like a response which has some logical and calm thought behind it. Concerns about impact on critical thinking skills, it turns out, are indeed a totally legitimate concern to have. (Brain atrophy is another thing, of course, which sounds more like a term first year students might bandy around without fully understanding it).

Of course, you’re fully entitled to your interpretation but on that particular point I’d suggest you’re being as reactionary as you’re an accusing them of being and engaging in a very bad faith interpretation. They’re very, very clearly not talking about AI as a field of study. C’mon.

‘But everyone in my peer group that I know knows way more about this’ is a sentiment that will often be true (or its opposite will be). I am constantly surprised at what, in turns out, most people my age don’t know - or what I don’t know that supposedly most people my age do know. Anecdotal evidence is still just anecdotal evidence, after all. And it’s certainly not enough to extrapolate across an entire country, let alone the globe. And if you’re on tumblr you’re more likely to be Online, and far more likely to be aware of all tech issues. You specified you did an intro to computer science and learnt Java and wrote code for a basic AI: of course your experience is atypical for your generation. Most students don’t do that.

And on the other side of that - this tweet thread is also just one group of students! It’s not evidence that all students - or even the majority - were so unaware of the pitfalls of relying on chatGPT to generate accurate info. But from hearing academics talk about their encounters with students and chatGPT in other places, it’s also not a unique experience.

There’s a lot of discussion about chat GPT among academics. Some have students who understand the issues, are skeptical of it, etc. others have massive issues with plagiarism, with students not understanding how it works, etc. the situation can be so drastically different between different unis (or even departments, or even individual classes tbh). This is absolutely not a unique situation in terms of people reporting how little some of their students understand about chatGPT (and that’s not even getting into the issue of how little many academics themselves understand about it - recall that recent incident what a prof tried to fail a whole class bc he asked chatGPT if it could have generated their essays and somehow took its reply to mean that it had generated them?)

Tl;dr: I agree the language here is very dramatic. I agree privacy should be a big concern (though in this context I can also see why it didn’t come up - it’s not relevant to how accurately chatGPT wrote an essay). I think it’s also very dramatic to suggest that what the students understand now is worse than their previous total ignorance.