>This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence.

I didn't get it. How can printing avoid AI? And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?

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coffeefirst 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The students were reading AI summaries rather than the original text.

Does this literally work? It adds slightly more friction, but you can still ask the robot to summarize pretty much anything that would appear on the syllabus. What it likely does it set expectations.

This doesn't strike me as being anti-AI or "resistance" at all. But if you don't train your own brain to read and make thoughts, you won't have one.

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epolanski 12 hours ago | parent [-]

I was reading summaries online 25 years ago as well.

Hell, in Italy we used to have an editor called Bignami make summaries of every school topic.

https://www.bignami.com/

In any case, I don't know what to think about all of this.

School is for learning, if you skip the hard part you not gonna learn, your lost.

	▲	skeptic_ai 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Instead of learning the things that can be done by ai, learn how to use the ai as that’s the only edge you got left.

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mold_aid 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>How can printing avoid AI?

Every online service in the university has an AI summarization tool in it. This includes library services.

>And more importantly is this AI-resistance sustainable?

It can get in line. Engl academics have been talking about sustainability for decades. Nobody cared before, professors aren't going to care now.

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Flavius 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This approach is just cheap theater. It doesn't actually stop AI, it just adds a step to the process. Any student can snap a photo, OCR the text and feed it into an LLM in seconds. All this policy accomplishes is wasting paper and forcing students to engage in digital hoop-jumping.

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mbreese 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s not theater. It introduces friction into the process. And when there is friction in both choices (read the paper, or take a photo and upload the picture), you’ll get more people reading the physical paper copy. If students want to jump through hoops, they will, but it will require an active choice.

At this point auto AI summaries are so prevalent that it is the passive default. By shifting it to require an active choice, you’ve make it more likely for students to choose to do the work.

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Flavius 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That friction is trivial. You are comparing the effort of snapping a photo against the effort of actually reading and analyzing a text. If anyone chooses to read the paper, it's because they actually want to read it, not because using AI was too much hassle.

	▲	randcraw 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You can certainly make it harder to cheat. AIs will inevitably generate summaries that are very similarly written and formatted -- content, context, and sequence -- making it easy for a prof (and their AI) to detect the presence of AI use, especially if students are also quizzed to validate that they have knowledge of their own summary. Alternately, the prof can require that students write out notes, in longhand, as they read, and require that a photocopy of those notes be submitted, along with a handwritten outline / rough draft, to validate the essays that follow. I think it's inevitable that "show your work" soon will become the mantra of not just the math, hard science, and engineering courses.

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blell 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.

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mbreese 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s not the time that’s the friction. It’s the choice. The student has to actively take the picture and upload it. It’s a choice. It takes more effort than reading the autogenerated summary that Google Drive or Copilot helpfully made for the digital PDF of the reading they replaced.

It’s not much more effort. The level of friction is minimal. But we’re talking about the activation energy of students (in an undergrad English class, likely teenagers). It doesn’t take much to swing the percentage of students who do the reading.

	▲	blell 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Are you really comparing the energy necessary to read something to taking a photo and having an ai read it for you. You are not comparing zero energy to some energy, you are comparing a whole lot of energy to some energy.

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LtWorf 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The quotas for summarising text and parsing images and then summarising text aren't the same. As you surely know.

	▲	blell 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Who’s paying for that? Certainly not the users (yet).

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ulrashida 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Students tend to be fairly lazy, so this may simply mean another x% of the class reads the material rather than scanning in the 60 pages of reading for the assignment.

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jrm4 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You fundamentally misunderstand the value of friction. The digital hoop-jumping, as you call it, is a very very useful signal for motivation.

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secabeen 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can't easily copy and paste from a printout into AI. Sure, you can track down the reading yourself online, and then copy and paste in, but not during class, and not without some effort.

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xigoi 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

LLM services have pretty much flawless OCR for printed text.

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stephenbez 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s easy to take a picture of a printout and then ask AI about it. Not that hard even when it’s many pages.

	▲	layer8 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It takes more initial effort than just starting reading, or even just skim-reading the material.