I started my Masters of IT at the University of Melbourne in July 2023. Every semester I see more of it being used to rush through assignments. While I also use its services when I desperately need to, it comes at a cost.
I made it a point only to use it to understand concepts in a simplified manner and use it as a tool to improve my academic writing, I see more and more students around me sprint through their semester assignments without knowing anything about their lecture content.
To draw an example through comparison, I took a subject called AI Planning for Autonomy last semester, whose entire content was based on Classical Planning and Reinforcement Learning. Now, for the kind of assignments that were given to us (to be done in Python and PDDL), there was only little that GenAI could help us with. For this subject, in my personal experience, even ChatGPT did not know much about these topics even if I used to try to understand a specific concept. Even if it did, the assignments were complex enough for it to fail to think. Result? People took the time to sit through the lecture content and try and apply it to the assignments to solve them. A win for knowledge development :)
I believe it's still a few years before GenAI can think, imagine, or create in a manner the human brain does.
I took Computer Vision this semester, all of whose assignments I saw my peers do completely through ChatGPT. Generally, on a good day, anyone could just upload the assignment specification to the chat, and get a detailed solution. You could do all the assignments, and even the final project completely through Claude and ChatGPT, and score decent enough to get through. Yeah, that's concerning. You could skip all lectures, use ChatGPT to get your stuff done, and make it through the subject. In my opinion, it's just widening the knowledge gap for people, enabling them to think less :(
I'd rather use LLMs to tutor myself, debug code, and automate trivial tasks than skip on the knowledge I'm striving for. In the end, I believe it should be me feeding it through my thinking than the opposite.