Gongol.com Archives: May 2025
May 7, 2025
With final exam season imminent, a fair number of professors and other college-level instructors have begun to lament that tools like ChatGPT are in such widespread use that term papers and many written exams seem doomed for extinction. This comes as a rude awakening for those who passed through college without generative artificial intelligence tools -- and in some cases, without even a computer of their own. It naturally raises important issues about the very purpose of education: One lecturer compares using these large language models to "using a forklift for weightlifting at the gym". ■ Our culture is really in a difficult spot right now. As a rule of thumb, expert-level information is transmitted in writing, while general knowledge is transmitted orally (or in formats that approximate it, whether they are summaries, infographics, or videos). People instinctively like oral transmission because it's easy to consume in a passive fashion (e.g., watching a YouTube video explainer). In many cases, oral transmission can be a helpful level-setting tool, allowing the student to orient themselves to where new knowledge fits within a context of what they already know. ■ But oral transmission hits hard limits. Some subjects must be struggled with. Some topics must take time to fully conceptualize. Yes, you can pick up on what you need to know about changing a tire by being "talked through" the task. No, you cannot do the same to understand electron shells within an atom. ■ Large language models cannot turn expert-level topics into orally-transmissible ones without throwing more and more words at the problem, which is what people who turn to LLMs are often trying to avoid (if they wanted to do the reading, they wouldn't have asked for a summary). More reading at lower information density isn't really better than less reading at high information density, assuming that the author wrote clearly in the first place. ■ A well-written piece on a sophisticated topic calls for concentrated reading, but it's a thousand times more effective than a superficial approach that demands less of the reader's effort. And now, with students (and no small number of graduates) trying to substitute their own writing with LLM-generated junk, we really get the rude awakening that some people are, at least implicitly, rejecting the very idea of education altogether. This is bound to have distressing consequences.
