Atoning to my LLM sins 🧎🏾
Isn't that the point? When assigned a dreaded "To-do" on Canvas, the goal isn't to finish it, it's to wrestling with a problem. Having a TA skim through it, compare it to a ruberic, give you a passing grade and then move along isn't the point. It's the temporal exposure to discomfort and what comes of it that matters. Assignments, ideally, are meant to be contained exercises that bring students a certain amount of frustration to endure- to tank. A permission to think of only a certain topic for a while. And through this temporary endurance, an imprint is left on the assignment doer, the grooves of their brain a little bit different, the texture forever changed after doing so.

But we all know this is far from the truth.

Allow me to repent for my ChatGPT sins this- nay all quartiles. My quartiles end with a sense of grief. Naively, I start with a sense of hope - akin to the the earlier paragraph. But, to pass my classes in an "ideal" manner, I find myself taking shortcuts. Skimming slides, submitting assignments without doing all the reading, cramming for exams. All this before chatGPT. LLM's have not alleviated this grief, but only made them heavier. I have been asking chatGPT for summaries, code, outlines, to give me ideas, to precheck my assignments, to do much of my thinking for me. I mourn the person I could have changed into if I did things "the right way". I mourn the energy, water and resources to pass a class that in the end, did not change me to the fullest.

As I write this, I admittedly, am fighting the urge to copy the text, submit it into a chatbot, ask it "what do u think". The validation of having an assistant assure me every step of the way that what I have to say matters is addictive.

Anyway, here's what Claude had to say:

Karan Paranganat
** No LLM's were used to alter this text
June 2025