AI, Admissions, and AO3

Are we on the last chopper out?

We live in a modern age that is defined by constantly shifting social and technological dynamics moving at speeds previously unheard of for any of our ancestors. Generations upon generations lived in the same villages as their parents, creating family roots that went back hundreds of years. The best you could hope for your in terms of future prospects for your community would be an absence of change. Across thousands of years, the overwhelming majority of changes your ancestors experienced left them worse off than they were before. But we live in an age of sustained progress unknown to our ancestors.

You might not realize that if you were one of the many people who have been sharing doomsday prophecies based on a recent article in New York Magazine about how students use ChatGPT in their coursework. Many seem to be of the opinion that those who are in school right now are irreparably damaged in terms of intellect because of LLMs. Looking at responses to the article, this attitude seems to be very popular among Millennials who see themselves as being in the last helicopter out before the fall of human intelligence.

The focus on undergrad Ivy League students is probably a mistake for discussing AI in schools. It carries the implication that the very heights of academic honesty have fallen to the AI hordes, and that no institution is safe. What goes unexamined is the possibility that being admitted to an Ivy League school is a process that these students are forced to game and plan around. Padding your application with stretched truths and even paying to become a “peer reviewed author” becomes necessary when competing with rich, connected parents who can all but guarantee a spot for their children. Why shouldn’t these kids try to take the easy route through the institution that asked them to sacrifice so much in high school just for the privilege of going into debt so they can attend?

A bachelor’s degree is also a necessity for pretty much any professional career with room for advancement at this point. Many will pursue their passion in undergrad, but many others pursue the subject that they’re the least apathetic about, or the subject they think will sound the best to prospective employers. If this is what you have to go through for a chance at a decent job after you graduate*, it’s hard to not adopt an attitude of ‘fuck you, got mine’.

*The author of this article recently graduated with a Bachelor’s in History, which is not a choice you make if you’re in college to get a job or meet people of the opposite sex.

Using AI to write your papers is obviously a problem, but the roots of that problem aren’t being interrogated and the blame is instead being fully directed at students. What I also find irritating about this attitude towards students using LLMs is that it isn’t original at all, and should be within living memory for anyone born before the new millennium. For whatever reason, coming up some time in the last 20 years of the internet is supposed to be a sign of intellectual merit, the Millennial version of walking 10 miles to school uphill both ways. The issue with this attitude is that I fail to see an aspect of the old internet enlightenment which is being permanently extinguished by LLMs.

Rose tinting is something that everyone will do to some degree, but it seems to be encroaching on our wider understanding of recent history as new generations aren’t experiencing the meteoric rises in living standards that older generations did. All of my grandparents were born before World War II (one was actually born during Pearl Harbor but thats technically pre war), reaching adulthood before the Baby Boom years. Meanwhile, my parents were both Gen Xers that never shared rave reviews of growing up in the 70s and early 80s. Maybe there was something poetic about my paternal grandfather dying right before the Dot Com Bubble after moving to Seattle in the 60s.

Source: Seattle Times

Were I roughly 10 years older, I might have had parents that grew up in a GI Bill subsidized home that allowed them a being the first in their family to get a college degree from UCLA back when the acceptance rate was 104% and tuition was $8.36. I would then have grown up in an era of steadily increasing levels of technological advancement, culminating in smartphones around the time I graduated high school. The recession would have hit pretty hard, but my digital skillset would evolve with the needs of the economy.