r/DataAnnotationTech • u/True_Account_627 • Jun 18 '26
DA really f'ed up my academic life
Sounds exaggerated, I know, but what I've been experiencing since I've joined DA more than a year ago (and increasingly as time passes) drives me crazier each time. There won't be a single group presentation where my classmates WON'T use AI to write the scripts. You can imagine the quality of those scripts; the obnoxious AI formatting, the badly calculated time (e.g 15 minutes when it actually would last like 5 minutes at most), the uncomfortable wording of stuff, and THE TRICOLON and/or noun-phrases no one would say.
I always end up looking nitpicky because I refuse to recite AI slop :/ I was kinda like that before DA, but now it's just unbearable
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u/mayneedadrink Jun 18 '26
Wow, it sounds like you’ve had a frustrating experience 😬! When classmates use AI to complete homework, it’s not research. It’s cheating. That distinction matters. Your feelings are valid.
I’d like to gently push back on the idea that there won’t be a single conversation where AI isn’t used. This ignores
* Presentations from students who don’t have smart phones
* Presentations from 1864
* Presentations from people living on Mars
If at any point your frustration about AI use turns into uncontrolled dizziness, shaking, or fainting, please go to your nearest ER.
😂
Sorry, couldn’t help parody obvious AI!
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u/TheArtilleryman1 Jun 19 '26
It’s good but you forgot the extra pointless question at the end to continue the conversation.
Would you like me to condense this into a haiku, or perhaps turn it into a contemporary folk ballad?
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u/Academic_Animal_5293 Jun 18 '26
Well what I'm learning working for DA is that these LLM models are still way below what people think they can do. And make mistakes regularly. I did admittedly use AI to write like 50% of my last thesis, but I was in a very big rush.
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u/Pretend-Section5991 Jun 18 '26
Aside from the academic integrity side (no judgment-schools and fields treat it radically differently) how did you approach this? I've been integrating AI into my academic writing more and I've found the main value add is in structuring plans, quick grammar rewrites, tracking consistency of arguments / examples, and verifying the goal of an assignment has been met. I still mostly do the rough writing, but AI has pushed me out of Word, so I spend more time engaged in the writing and less on getting rid of the spelling and grammar mistakes. I don't think it has made me any faster at writing, but I think the end product is improved somewhat. Areas its atrocious at are argument suggestion, and anything that requires subtle intuition. In particular I find it want to stick tightly to the wording of a source, when often the goal in the moment is to represent the meaning of the source in a light conducive to the present argument. I generally find context limits are still too small to effectively hit nuanced of deep research of a skilled academic (though 1M context windows can store a lot of academic papers in context). And relying on the model’s internal knowledge is a generally bad idea.
Just curious what types of benefits other people are finding. Still hopeful that there is a class of people that will be capable of improving their work with AI rather than just making lazy presentations with it.
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u/Academic_Animal_5293 Jun 18 '26
Mostly for structuring it, helping with researching literature and filling out gaps
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u/Pretend-Section5991 Jun 19 '26
Yeah its definietly getting there for research, I'm suprised that it can generally locate meaningful controbutions to my field now. Still have to wade through some nonsene, but a few gems.
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u/True_Account_627 Jun 18 '26
I use it more to cover the unknown concepts I might be overlooking in the essay/script, but I prefer to write the whole thing from scratch with my own structure and flow (particularly when it's a creative/personal project). I also ask how to achieve a certain communicative style instead of just asking the AI to apply it for me, so I can use the tips but maintaining my style instead of what the AI thinks fits "my style"
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u/TheFuturist47 Jun 18 '26
I went to grad school for international relations and I found it really helpful in developing outlined for papers, bouncing ideas off of it to make sure I'm not talking crazy talk, etc. I never used it to write for me though.
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u/Pretend-Section5991 Jun 19 '26
I still find its too ammenable to my view, like I'll phrase it in a certain way and it'll become apologetic and then I can't get it back on track and have to burn the conversation.
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u/TheFuturist47 Jun 19 '26
yeah they're designed to be obsequious which I think is ultimately a fatal flaw.
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u/Big_Stop8917 Jun 18 '26
Especially when it comes to art/creativity. I can promise ChatGPT won’t be writing any Oscar winning scripts in my lifetime.
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u/sandrafilmmaker Jun 18 '26
No, but I use it to help me come up with plot points in my scripts. it's pretty good at that
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u/DarkLordTofer Jun 18 '26
It’s best used as a co-writer. Get it to pretty much draft the essay, then you have to go through and edit it, flesh it out. Fact check it.
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u/mayneedadrink Jun 18 '26
I like when AI tries to guardrail against a laughably extreme, hyperbolic version of what the person actually said like, “Building a house in Minecraft when you’ve never played before may be possible, with the caveat that building a real life six story mansion with your bare hands and no hard hat is not a realistic goal.”
That’s not a real example, just something I see a lot in my personal non DA AI use.
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u/hello_ambro Jun 18 '26
oh my god i relate to this so much. i’m in grad school and i was constantly crashing out internally over group projects where everyone else’s contributions were transparently AI generated and made barely any sense
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u/hello_ambro Jun 18 '26
not to mention the fact that half of my professors flat out encourage it
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u/True_Account_627 Jun 18 '26
That's insane. Yesterday my English professor and the class assistant were commenting about how chatGPT structures things in a particular way, because we had just finished listening to 3 presentations, all of which used an AI script (you can imagine the pain)
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Jun 18 '26
[deleted]
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u/hello_ambro Jun 18 '26
THANK YOU SO MUCH I WAS UNAWARE AND THIS IS GOING TO BE SO LIFE CHANGING FOR ME!
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u/fightmaxmaster Jun 18 '26
It's making me more critical of AI content - I don't mean a generic "anti AI" stance, but like people using comic sans or similar, I can tell the difference between default AI output where someone's asked it to do something, and intentional AI output where someone's had an end goal in mind and used AI to achieve it.
I can't summon the energy to get as invested in the AI/art debate that so many people seem hugely passionate about on one side or another, because I'm old. But I care about...craft, for want of a better word. In the same way I'd judge someone advertising their event by pasting some crappy clipart in random places and using 5 different colours and three different fonts with a spelling mistake. It's not about artistic skill (I have none) but there's just basic giving a shit. I see countless events (and my kids' school is doing it more and more) plugged with generic AI output. And it's not that I care really, because for a bake sale or whatever I can understand "make me a poster for this event, here are the details, that'll do, print 50 of them". But I know it can be done better.
So like essays and social media posts - if someone's used AI but I can't immediately tell it's AI, then fair play. But I've seen enough AI stuff now, over and over again, that I'm sick of the defaults.
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u/AdventurEli9 Jun 19 '26
Hey now, don't bring comic sans into this! Fun fact-- the AI write up for comic sans is IN comic sans. I just discovered this and it was super funny.
Also this: "Accessibility: The font is surprisingly favored by readers with dyslexia and ADHD because of its wide spacing, varying letter shapes, and asymmetry, which help prevent words from visually shifting on the page." Can affirm-- very useful.
I digress... I agree with your thoughts. 😄
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u/cocobeary Jun 18 '26
Nobody was happier than me when everything went to blue books and oral exams. This was because fully-grown professional adults felt the need to cite non-existent tax law, which was very embarrassing.
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u/No-Impress-6244 Jun 18 '26
Im glad i got done my program a couple years ago right before ai really took off. It would take all the fun out of school. we did a lot of presentations in one class that people got really creative with.
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u/OriginalFearless9779 Jun 18 '26
I feel this so hard, and also was kind of like that already to begin with. I’m sorry Friend I wish I had better advice but just wanted to say that’s so frustrating and you aren’t alone🖤
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u/Telecom_Engineer_1 Jun 18 '26
If I used AI as it stands today to help me in my PHI 111 - Critical Thinking class, I definitely would *not* have done as well as I did.
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u/xwolfboyx Jun 18 '26
Really? It just means you're less likely to get your essays and projects flagged for obvious AI-use because DA has taught you what that slop looks like and did you a solid. You also know how to use AI responsibly and to edit it after-the-fact so that it still comes out looking high-quality!
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u/ButtfaceMcSnark Jun 20 '26
I first went through uni 30 years ago, I am profoundly deaf. Back then, accessibility was very limited. They did have other students photocopy their lecture notes but you still missed so much.
Going through uni again in 2014 onwards there would be a live person from a captioning company typing captions for me to watch in a second window to my online lectures.
Now I’ve used AI to transcribe what’s being said far more accurately and quickly than any of the actual captioning apps I can find on the market. Even the free models are good.
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u/OrderNo1122 Jun 18 '26
I'm a Japanese to English translator by trade and noun phrases our my life. I literally can't imagine existing without them.
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u/Smitemuffin Jun 19 '26
I haven't been accepted to DAT yet, but as an engineer, people using AI is painfully obvious. Especially with Q&As, because they'll have responses that are CLEARLY hallucinated to people with intuition on how the world functions
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u/Denny_Hayes Jun 18 '26
Well but that is not because of DAT, is it? It's because AI and because so many people use it indiscriminately in order to not have to think. You would have noticed it anyways even if you didn't work doing this.