How ChatGPT spoiled my semester

Every semester, I see a bit more ChatGPT being used in classes. This semester, the most obvious occurrences are in my Engineering Psychology classes.

Engineering Psychology is a second major that I’m doing — it’s the study of how humans interact with technology; a bit like UX design.

In one of those classes, we’re doing a group project for a real industry client. In writing the initial proposal for that project, it was clear that a majority of my groupmates were filling in their portions with writing straight from ChatGPT — still in the tell-tale bullet point form:

I told a groupmate that I would take over this section, and deleted the work. Just to come back a few hours later and find a newly ChatGPT’d body of work:

1. Our project has absolutely nothing to do with blockchain or any of the other word-vomit in here.
2. Some of the sections were written to answer a subtly different question than the one we were supposed to answer. The writing wasn’t even answering the correct question.

I don’t have a problem with taking inspiration from ChatGPT for assignments, I just think that you should at least evaluate and understand what it’s saying before dumping its output onto your collaborators.

Repeatedly in these Engineering Psychology classes — which seem uniquely bullshitable with LLMs — I find myself buried in clearly ChatGPT’d slop produced by my groupmates.

The projects in these classes are often actually quite interesting! But I have no motivation to wade through the river of cheap verbiage and rewrite parts of the project while my groupmates stand on the banks and watch. Why should I be the one person trying to pull yeoman’s work for all of us?

I think I would love these projects if I were doing them alone. But when my groupmates are proxies for $20/month subscriptions, without even particularly imaginative prompts, I lose all motivation.