[marginalium]
I'd Rather Read The Prompt
16 May 2025
I’d Rather Read The Prompt. Another perspective on AI in assignments:
You only have to read one or two of these answers to know exactly what’s up: the students just copy-pasted the output from a large language model, most likely ChatGPT. They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style. The prose rarely surpasses the sixth-grade book report, constantly repeating the prompt, presumably to prove that they’re staying on topic.
Now, empirically we can’t tell when people are cheating with AI. Or maybe we can’t tell when they try to hide it better. Because it’s certainly true that I spot obvious AI stuff very regularly in both written and increasingly in verbal assignments.
I like this perspective on it though. In particular the two paragraphs:
- If it’s not worth doing, it’s not worth doing well
- If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly
It’s also true that probably the main tell is something about how boring the output tends to be. See also I’d rather see the prompts.
Anthologies: Betterment, Gratification, Wealth Architecture, Digital Architecture, On Aesthetics, On Being Fruitful, Noetik