Redditor u/Gifthunter3 posted on the r/NoStupidQuestions subreddit asking, "To people who regularly use ChatGPT for school: Do you think you’re still learning?"
They went on to explain the reasoning behind their question. They wrote, "I don’t mean this to be rude, I genuinely want to know. I don’t use it, but most of my classmates do. For assignments, open-book tests, whatever they can use it for. If you do use it, do you believe you’re still retaining information? Do you feel well-informed for your eventual profession? Do you feel bad about using it or is it more of a flippant decision?"
"I understand the why, I just don’t know if I’d feel comfortable going into a job without having done the work myself, struggled myself," they wrote. "But I also know that struggling isn’t always the most reasonable option."
People are slowly losing their vocabulary and knowledge retention
People in the comments had a lot to say to u/Gifthunter3. The top commenter on the post, u/maddyp1112, explained that they had purposely been avoiding using ChatGPT because "I’m honestly scared of losing my ability to think of words to type myself."
"I got an email from my teacher telling me to be careful because some words I use 'make it seem like I’m using AI' and I was really thrown off by that. They weren’t even that crazy, just normal words that were slightly more formal for research purposes," they added. "Now you can’t even know bigger words anymore I guess without being accused, I’d be afraid to pick up a thesaurus at this point, it’s dumbing us down even if we don’t use it because there are repercussions for coming across as 'too smart'. I don’t like the trajectory we seem to be heading in."
Check out 18 Redditors' responses about LLM use in the classroom below.
1. Banging heads against the wall
"I used it far too much in first year and now I’ve completely sworn off of it, my understanding of physics has increased massively now that I actually let myself bang my head against the wall over things I don’t understand rather than feed it into the misinformation machine." —u/uglyUfologist
2. Hell to pay
"I’m a graduate student and it’s legitimately difficult to discuss class content with my LLM-using peers at times since their understanding tends to be significantly more superficial and/or inflexible. There will be hell to pay in professional fields that require real knowledge, eventually."—u/JackalThePowerful
3. Zipping through
"I feel sure kids who cheat with AI aren't thinking about what [they're] learning. They're trying to zip through what they see as unimportant so they can watch cat videos." —u/IslandGyrl2
4. ChatGPT apologies
"I have uploaded reference materials to ChatGPT for various projects in pdf format. I've asked it to refer to those documents to give me an answer on a specific topic. It often gives me something I know is false. I then scan through the documents myself and find the answer, when I bring this up to ChatGPT it will initially tell me I'm wrong. When I mention specific page number it reverts 'oh yeah, you're right. Sorry about that.'
"I just thought it would be a handy way to find what I need without having to scroll through multiple documents. It doesn't do it very well.
"How people are using this to write essays and things which it scans the internet for is beyond me. If it can't accurately look through a few documents without making errors what chance do people think it has of scanning the entire internet." —u/DEAD-VHS
5. Filters are important
"I don’t use ChatGPT but every time I search something up on Google (and forget to put the -ai filter) it’s such a struggle to scroll past the AI summary at the top." —u/qingskies
6. Searching is rough now
"I think people need to get even if the students do want to research on their own.... now searching sucks with so much LLM written stuff. No wonder many of them go to use LLM themselves to feel tailored to them when most of what you find elsewhere are gonna be someone else's LLM post." —u/alt_for_ranting
7. "Ruining the kids"
"Nobody is learning.Functionally illiterate and innumerate is back in style because of the ridiculous way schools handle a student failing to grasp the subject matter. My nephew was sick of his school holding him back and he wanted to get his GED and start taking community college courses. He was above average in grades, and he failed the GED test completely, every section. It was easier to just keep showing up at his HS and get assigned a diploma. Public schools are mostly a disaster. There are some that work, in wealthy neighborhoods, by and large, but most are actively ruining the kids." —u/GSilky
8. Exam prep
"I am using it to create mock exams for myself to prepare for the real thing in a class that doesn't do open-book tests. It's been extremely helpful and I've used that tactic in study groups to help two of my classmates turn their failing grades around.
You can use it as an actual learning tool or you can use it to slack off." —u/GotchurNose
9. Another cheating tool
"I'm a computer science professor. Students do know about the issues, but only the top ~20% actually understand it, simple as it is, and most of those are not using AI for there coursework. The rest of them are just happy to have yet another way to cheat." —u/ComparisonOk8602
10. Silver linings
"I'm returning to school now in my 30s and the one engineering professor will ask ChatGPT how to do things properly and will screencap the response as a lecture slide. I could fucking do that. I'm in school because I am trying to learn how to do things by the book, not some [expletive] LLM telling me something plausible but not knowing if that's actually real or made up. The one silver lining is that I don't trust the professor so I look it up myself so I'm at least learning that skill, but I shouldn't have to second guess." —u/TheophilusOmega
11. Nobody cares
"Nobody cares about learning. You can audit Harvard classes for free, online, who does that? People just want the certificate." —u/xmodemlol
12. Fantastic for math
"I use ai and it’s been fantastic honestly. I’ve been using it for my math classes, it shows me every single step in solving any given problem. I can harass it over any step of the process as much as I want without any guilt. It isn’t perfect. I think that because I can spot when something isn’t correct…and that I’m actually doing really well on tests where I don’t have chatgpt indicates to me that I’m learning the material just fine.
I know a teacher would love to answer my questions, but I don’t think I could subject my teachers to the kinda nonsense I have going on up there. I have a mountain of questions, I could stall an entire class for hours and go in circles until I understood something. As a matter of courtesy…I will keep my thoughts to myself." —u/DefinitelyNotKuro
13. Math, again
"I genuinely don't understand either, AI helps me understand maths and stuff and walks me through explanations, prepares questions based on the sources i provided etc. People talk like it is some magical tool that engraves knowledge directly into your brain. Maybe just me idk" —u/QUDUMU
14. Critical thinking is lacking
"As someone employing recent grads, I can tell you that unequivocally no. They are significantly behind compared to recent grads from 5 years ago. It’s bad. No critical thinking skills." —u/Stellar_Jay8
15. Socratic method
"I'm doing my masters for fun. ChatGPT has a study mode that does a Socratic method thing and doesn't give you the answers. I find it pretty good. Using it to learn rather than cheat is just a choice." —u/Expensive_Goat2201
16. Discovery tools
"May not be an academic student anymore but I definitely do find it useful for learning, but only in specific scenarios. Id only use it if it's an incredibly well documented subject that is well known too. But even then I'm using it primarily as a discovery tool to help with pointing me in the right direction, not as a primary source.
I find it's great when I'm learning something new as a way to help guide me to which sub topic I should start with and to help confirm my understanding when I'm looking at real documents." —u/drakken_dude
17. English class assistance
"I don't use ChatGPT but I will say that a lot of my classmates are apparently having a lot of trouble in an English 300 class, which is surprising because you have to take prerequisite English courses to even be able to take a 300 course. But they're all having trouble even following rules the professor sets out.
It's kinda wild. I feel like it's an English 100 course sometimes. The prof is way too nice, instead of deducting them for lack of critical thinking skills, the prof often gives tips and basic intro to essay crafting tips in class that they should already know anyway. It kinda feels unfair sometimes." —u/ikigami_
18. "We can't stop"
"This question isn't directed at me as I'm not in school but I use it a lot for work (software engineer). And both me and my friend have expressed worries that it's making us dumber. Issue is we can't stop using it. If we stop using it we become less productive and performance suffers. The situation we're in fucking sucks. If we don't use it, the competition will and will beat us. Just race to the fucking bottom" —u/Junior-Childhood-404
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