The email is ominously titled “Final Reminder : The Importance of AI” and flagged “High Importance” when it’s just an ad.
Rest of it goes on about how they got a wallstreet bro to come give a speech about “AI replacing 40% of the jobs.”
Idk why a university likes AI this much either. They even overlook cheating as long as it involves AI.
Both students and graders tell each other they use it openly.
At first it felt weird I am complaining about free accounts and free speeches from investors but then it kinda clicked these are NOT free either. My tuition is paying for all of this.
Even the bus pass has a 5-day sign up process to “save money from students not using that service.”
But somehow they just arbitrarily gave everyone multiple premium chatbot accounts anyways.
Am I just paying a 50% ransom to microsoft for my degree at this point?
Also the email is AI generated too. ITS FROM THE FUCKING DEAN.
There’s even an em dash out of place, a telltale sign of AI models.
To be honest, I’m using them too. I don’t know where I picked it up – books, probably – or whether I’m using them right. I don’t think I ever formally learned them, and if I did, it’ll have been in German and I have no idea how that transfers to Englush. I also produce slop, but that’s on me being an inept writer.
That’s why I find such “that’s gotta be AI” judgements a bit awkward: it might genuinely be a person poorly trying to ape some writing style they saw but never understood. Just because I’m trying to sound “proper” doesn’t mean I’m an AI. My intelligence (or ignorance?) is entirely natural.
Edit: Come to think, I might have picked them up from a certain colleague. MBA, (ab-?)uses them all the time, sometimes in places that seem weird to me, and has done so before LLMs became such a hype. Maybe there’s some school of management writing that LLMs are trying to imitate, but without any actual semantic sense for the context, neither they nor I use them in actually valid constructions?
We hardly even ever em dashes in normal writing, so who knows where LLMs picked up the tendency. Hyphen’s sure, but em dashes?
I have a 1940s cookbook that has a lot of them in but they haven’t really been used in modern type settings since then.
The hole “topic is just not doing x - it’s doing y” is a dead giveaway of using an LLM.