“Resistance Is Futile” — Philosophy Professor Lets Students Choose AI

Educators have found themselves at war with artificial intelligence software ever since it became popularized. As it grew in popularity, methods to try to curb students from handing in AI-generated slop formulated from a few ChatGPT prompts began pouring in. Some teachers even required their students go back to turning in handwritten assignments.

But that didn't stop folks from finding workarounds to this new stipulation, as in this Hackster article that shows a program someone developed where a machine hand writes out AI-generated content onto a sheet of paper.

The war against folks who are dead set against learning or doing anything creative on their own is one that many feel humanity will ultimately lose.

Just talk to anyone about Dead Internet Theory and consider how many bots are constantly flooding social media to churn out propaganda. It's not difficult to imagine a future where a significant number of social media interactions are just going to be bot accounts complimenting and/or criticizing other bot accounts on posts uploaded by AI-generated avatars.

One Philosophy professor has decided to embrace the use of artificial intelligence in their class as part of a large-scale experiment.

Reddit user @adinteresting7332 posted an image from their college course's "AI Use Policy" section that stipulates students are not allowed to use artificial intelligence for their first take-home exam. For the second take-home examination for the course, the professor says that students are allowed to use artificial intelligence software.

And for the third take-home exam, their professor said that students can choose whether or not they'd like to use AI. Several of the Redditors who replied to the post, like a top comment that raked in 21,000+ upvotes, said that the "philosophy teacher is running an experiment," and that the students in the course were "the test subjects."

OP replied to the aforementioned user corroborating this fact, stating, "As a matter of fact, that's exactly what he said to us."

Another person who commented on the post referenced an MIT study that analyzed the brains of three separate groups of essay writers.

They went on to speculate that the philosophy professor was attempting to perform a survey similar to the one produced by MIT. According to the university, students who utilized AI-generated prompts (LLM) in their essays showed "the weakest connectivity" in neural brain connections.

Folks who relied on search engines only displayed moderate brain activity connections, and those who relied on just their brains when writing essays displayed the strongest neural connectivity. In short: Relying on AI-assisted tools creates a surplus of what MIT calls "cognitive debt."

As Decoder puts it: "ChaptGPT might be draining your brain," and ultimately decreasing your cognitive functions over time. So students who become too reliant on ChatGPT are weakening their brains and making themselves dumber in the process.

Academia isn't the only place that has expressed worry on a fear of people becoming overly reliant on AI. Recently, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck expressed how these tools are ultimately harming the industry. Not because they're necessarily putting people out of jobs, but because of AI's inability to effectively capture humanity, which is the basis of artistic endeavors.

While promoting their new Netflix film The Rip on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Affleck didn't mince words when it came to AI's acumen in creative pursuits. "If you try to get ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to write you something, it's really s---ty. Because by its nature it goes to the mean, to the average. I just can't stand to see what it even writes," the Oscar winner stated.

The duo did concede that artificial intelligence will have a place in making moves, just as visual effects are utilized as an ancillary instrument meant to amplify creative processes. Affleck went on to state that unions and guilds will ultimately decide "if this is a tool that can actually help us."

No Film School penned an article highlighting how Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gillian is staunchly opposed to artificial intelligence. In fact, his new Apple TV Plus series, Pluribus, states in its credits: "This show was made by humans."

Gillian had acerbic words for AI tools. "AI is the world's most expensive and energy-intensive plagiarism machine," he penned.

The screenwriter and filmmaker stated: "I think there's a very high possibility that this is all a bunch of horses--t. It's basically a bunch of centibillionaires whose greatest life goal is to become the world's first trillionaires. I think they're selling a bag of vapor."

Gillian went on to compare AI to "a cow chewing its cud-an endlessly regurgitated loop of nonsense," he said.