Junior’s school periodically invites eminent personalities to interview them and later publish those interviews in the school magazine. They select a bunch of students to conduct the interview of which this time around, junior was honoured to be a part of. And of course, he was asked to come up with a set of interview questions which would then be vetted by the teacher in charge, and the “best” from all the questions submitted would be selected for inclusion in the interview.
The personality in question is not very well known outside his circles, and hence very limited information about them was available online, which were a couple of Instagram pages and another obscure interview. So, I and junior used these limited sources to research the personality and come up with around 15 questions which we sent to the teacher. Their response, however, was that our questions were of low quality and that our questions needed to be more “specific”. We were then sent some samples of questions submitted by other students. And these were of course, very obviously, generated by AI.
I wasn’t sure how to feel like. Dumb to have spend an hour and some doing a task that could’ve been completed in two minutes? Or, troubled that the entire human innate ability to create content has now been rendered useless to a point where it now other humans (teachers, no less) consider human-generated content inferior to machine-generated, or, despondent that my so-called ability to write stuff has probably been rendered the most useless in the face of advancing technology?
And yeah, so I fired up DeepSeek and asked it this question: “Please generate a set of interview questions to ask <personality full name> the <what the personality does>.” I got a set of 20 questions neatly categorised under headings which I copy-pasted and sent over to the teacher, who seemed to be satisfied and selected a few from among them.
The time has come. I was under the impression until now that AI generated content was considered inferior compared to human-generated, but it looks like that is no longer the case. I could keep writing things like this, but I don’t see anyone attaching any value to human generated content anymore. Isn’t it ironical that arts, which was always considered the very essence of being human, is being taken over by the machines first? This is both fascinating and terrifying.
Disagree. I find most homework and schoolwork of this kind to be a bullshit job. they dont care if the actual educational objective is met. they care about the esthetics of it. by they i mean the system. and when you really are looking for high quality uniform boilerplate and dont want to deal with the fact that individual students will have high variance in percieved quality and thats not a bad thing, it becomes a bullshit task. the moment parents got involved in making projects, that was the moment it became a bullshit task. what was being compared earlier was the relative skills of the parent who did the project, now it is the LLM that did it. your writing as most writing that matters, is not about skill in some quantifiable way. its about your perspective. those who can differentiate between a perspective and boilerplate, and know when to use what, they care.
PS: this is not a criticism of you helping your kid. I dont care one way or the other. Rarely will the child learn what she really needs to learn from these kinds of assignments.