> Some thesises had hallucinated sources, some had AI slop blogs as sources, the texts are robotic and boring. But should I fail them, out of principle on what the ideal University should be?
No, you should fail them for turning in bad theses, just like you would before AI.
That's probably what should happen, but it's not what happens in reality. In grading I have to follow a very detailed grading matrix (made by some higher-ups) and the requirements for passing and getting the lowest grade are so incredibly low that it's almost impossible to fail, if the text even somewhat resembles a thesis. The only way I could fail a student, is if they cheated, plagiarised or fabricated stuff.
The person who used the AI slop blog for sources, we asked them to just remove them and resubmit. The person who hallucinated sources is however getting investigated for fabrication. But this is an incredibly long process to go through, which takes away time and energy from actual teaching / research / course prep. Most of the faculty is already overworked and on the verge of burnout (or are recovering post-burnout), so everybody tries to avoid it if they can. Besides, playing a cop is not what anybody wants to do, and its not what teaching should be about, as the original blog post mentioned. IF the University as an institution had some standards and actually valued education, it could be different. But it's not. The University only cares about some imaginary metrics, like international rankings and money. A few years ago they built a multi-million datacenter just for gathering data from everything that happens in the University, so they could make more convincing presentations for the ministry of education — to get more money and to "prove" that the money had a measurable impact. The University is a student-factory (this is a direct quote by a previous principal).
Yeah, our information and training systems are kinda failing at dealing with the reality of our actual information environment.
Take law for example and free speech - a central tenet to a functional democracy is effective ways to trade ideas.
A core response in our structure to falsehoods and rhetoric is counter speech.
But I can show you that counter speech fails. We have realms upon realms of data inside tech firms and online communities that shows us the mechanics of how our information economies actually work, and counter speech does diddly squat.
Education is also stuck in a bind. People need degrees to be employable today, but the idea of education is tied up with the idea of being a good educated thinking human being.
Meaning you are someone who is engaged with the ideas and concepts of your field, and have a mental model in your head, that takes calories, training and effort to use to do complex reasoning about the world.
This is often overkill for many jobs - the issue isn’t doing high level stats in a day science role, it’s doing boring data munging and actually getting the data in the first place. (Just an example).
High quality work is hard, and demanding, and in a market with unclear signals, people game the few systems that used to be signals.
Which eventually deteriorated signal till you get this mess.
We need jobs that give a living wage, or provide a pathway to achieving mastery while working, so that the pressure on the education lever can be reduced and spread elsewhere.
> A core response in our structure to falsehoods and rhetoric is counter speech.
> But I can show you that counter speech fails
Could you show me that? What's your definition of failure?
I get the feeling that you aren’t asking for the short version, because most people wouldn’t latch onto that point and create an account for it.
Hmmm.
An example - the inefficacy of Fact checking efforts. Fact checking is quintessentially counter speech, and we know that it has failed to stop the uptake and popularity of falsehoods. And I say this after speaking to people who work at fact checking orgs.
However, this is in itself too simple an example.
The mechanics of online forums are more interesting to illustrate the point - Truth is too expensive to compete with cheaper content.
Complex articles can be shared on a community, which debunk certain points, but the community doesn’t read it. They do engage heavily on emotional content, which ends up supporting their priors.
I struggle to make this point nicely, but The accuracy of your content is secondary to its value as an emotional and narrative utility for the audience.
People are not coming online to be scientists. They are coming online to be engaged. Counter speech solves the issue of inaccuracy, and is only valuable if inaccuracy is a negative force.
It is too expensive a good to produce, vs alternatives. People will coalesce around wounds and lacunae in their lives, and actively reject information that counters their beliefs. Cognitive dissonance results in mental strife and will result in people simply rejecting information rather than altering their priors.
Do note - this is a point about the efficacy of this intervention in upholding the effectiveness of the market where we exchange ideas. There will be many individual exchanges where counter speech does change minds.
But at a market level, it is ineffective as a guardian and tonic against the competitive advantage of falsehoods against facts.
——
Do forgive the disjointed quality in the response. It’s late here, and I wish I could have just linked you to a bunch of papers, but I dont think that would have been the response you are looking for.
I think this 3-part essay might be relevant to your argument: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/147/623330/society-of-the-psy...
I’ve been recommending network propaganda recently. The book has the data that makes the case better than I can about structural issues in the information ecosystem.
Also started going through this legal essay (paper?) recently, Lies, Counter-lies, and Disinformation in the Marketplace of Ideas
https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
The book "Nexus" by Yuval Noah Harari essentially makes this same point. The way he phrases it is that information's primary role throughout history hasn't necessarily been to convey objective truth but to connect people and enable large scale cooperation. So more information is not necessarily better.
Worth a read or you can check out one of his recent podcast appearances for a quicker download.
> The University is a student-factory
In The Netherlands, we have a three-tier tertiary system: MBO (practical job education / trades), HBO (college job education / applied college) and WO (scientific education / university).
A lot of the fancy jobs require WO. But in my opinion, WO is much too broad a program, because it tries to both create future high tier workers as well as researchers. The former would be served much better by a reduced, focused programme, which would leave more bandwidth for future researchers to get the 'true' university education they need.
> In grading I have to follow a very detailed grading matrix (made by some higher-ups) and the requirements for passing and getting the lowest grade are so incredibly low that it's almost impossible to fail, if the text even somewhat resembles a thesis. The only way I could fail a student, is if they cheated, plagiarised or fabricated stuff.
This is another example of "AI is exacerbating existing problems". :-) That kind of grading policy is absurd and should never have existed in the first place, but now AI is really making that obvious.
I've talked with professors at a major US research university. For Master's students, they are all paying a lot of money to get a credential. That's the transaction. They don't really care about cheating as long as they go through the motions of completing the assigned work. It's just a given, and like you say it takes more time than they have to go through the acacdemic dishonesty process for all the students who are getting outside help or (now) using AI.
> The person who used the AI slop blog for sources