alt Hacker News>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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secabeen • today at 4:23 PM
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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Flavius • today at 4:26 PM
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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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.