Yet another Hacker News

Kenyans Did College Students' Homework for Years. Then A.I. Arrived

40 points pseudolus 3 days ago 28 comments

pseudolus 3 days ago | parent

mc32 58 minutes ago | parent

So the unethical helping of unethical students is being subverted by unethical language models… What a world!

I guess I should not be surprised by people being sympathetic to this “business model.”

SoftTalker 40 minutes ago | parent

There will always be unethical students who cheat. At least the Kenyans were making a living from it. Now that's gone, and the money goes into the pockets of some of the wealthiest people on the planet.

atleastoptimal 36 minutes ago | parent

Would it be more ethical to donate GPUs to Kenyans who can then host their own Kimi instances and then resell the tokens at a higher price?

mc32 32 minutes ago | parent

So if I were an unethical hacker who hires Ukrainians to develop an APT for me and they know what I’m using it for, they are in the clear ethically because they’re using it to feed their children and arm themselves against russkies?

SoftTalker 27 minutes ago | parent

Maybe not "in the clear" but somewhat more forgivable than Anthropic doing it.

It's the old parable of whether it's unethical to steal a loaf of bread to feed your children.

rwmj 17 minutes ago | parent

Next up: Hard working romance scammers out of work after police shut down operations.

Animats 25 minutes ago | parent

Amazon gave up on Mechanical Turk recently, too.[1]

If everything you do for money goes in and out over a wire, you're fucked.

[1] https://www.mturk.com/help

pixl97 18 minutes ago | parent

Chuckles, I'm in danger.

monster_truck 25 minutes ago | parent

Never went to college, but I made pretty good coin writing papers for friends who did.

It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats (doctors/non-computer engineers aside)

VladVladikoff 21 minutes ago | parent

Don’t really understand how people even could cheat. In most of my classes the majority of the mark was in class paper midterm and paper final. Cheating on the take home assignments would only make you fail the midterm and final even harder.

bananaflag 18 minutes ago | parent

Have you heard of cheat sheets? Or looking at your neighbor during exam? Passing pieces of paper?

sampullman 11 minutes ago | parent

Many of my tests after a certain point were open book, or at least explicitly allowed a cheat sheet.

It wasn't going to help you if you didn't know the material, though writing the cheat sheet in the first place is a pretty good form of studying.

econ 9 minutes ago | parent

We made grids of tiny dots on an eraser, so tiny a grownup couldn't really see it.

End of the year a teacher asked how we did it. He knew our answers were the same, he put us far apart, he watched us the whole time every test, the whole year.

We asked for an eraser then someone "random" would throw it then asked for it te be returned when they needed it again.

I pointed at a tiny dot on the eraser. Roughly 3x2 mm. There, that was the last test. He couldn't see it.

jjice 17 minutes ago | parent

Definitely the case in classes like that. Also a really obvious sign if you ace homeworks and get a 40% on an exam.

In my CS program, I ended up having at least half the grade be from projects and labs that I watched so many people cheat on. I'll even consider being the dead-weight in a group a form a cheating, but maybe that's too far.

Those same folks really struggled during interviews in their last semester (this was during a very friendly job market). I imagine that the majority of them are also dead weight on their teams these days.

It's a shame. You're cheating yourself of your own education, which can be quite expensive here in the US.

pvab3 5 minutes ago | parent

that's what I did. I could usually pull out a C on the final exam. That is certainly something I would do differently now, as a non-teenager.

I never cheated on exams or papers or projects but I would use solution sets for homework, which was always a small completion grade

mc32 19 minutes ago | parent

In my experience the biggest cheaters were foreign exchange students who saw the six month to year stateside studies as a mere opportunity to have fun and pretend to study.

watwut 18 minutes ago | parent

> 's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats

Not true. The "have someone else writing my work" is rather massive level of cheating and not at all a routine thing everyone does.

jimbo808 17 minutes ago | parent

Graduated with highest honors from a top engineering school and never once considered cheating

dmazzoni 16 minutes ago | parent

No, most people don't cheat. The world would fall apart if they did.

In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful. If you don't have the skills, you can't do the job. You can't fake it 'till you make it if it's painfully obvious to your coworkers that you don't understand basic concepts.

OroPla 14 minutes ago | parent

> In a lot of occupations the skills you learn in college are real and meaningful

Such as? Medicine and STEM aren't one of them as far as I know.

glenstein 11 minutes ago | parent

>It's always been my understanding that virtually everyone cheats

I'm sure it's prevalent in absolute numbers but I didn't and the vast majority of people I know in college didn't. I think it exists in pockets and specific environments but, it's like watching too many mafia movies and thinking every laundromat is a front.

slackfan 9 minutes ago | parent

Guess I was a sucker because I didn't cheat.

Much was learned today.

jandrese 18 minutes ago | parent

How come I didn't know that everyone else was cheating in college? Here I was learning the content like a sucker and then being useful in my job after graduation.

vasco 12 minutes ago | parent

"Man drums publicity up for his fake essay business for people that are too lazy to even use AI"

robotnikman 4 minutes ago | parent

Tbh I kinda enjoyed writing essays in college if the topic was interesting.

QuadmasterXLII 3 minutes ago | parent

Scandal as fraternity discovers 2/3rds of pledges were cheating by paying TaskRabbit temp workers to drink and dance in their stead, while the pledges stayed home and doomscrolled.