[Flavius]

This approach is just cheap theater. It doesn't actually stop AI, it just adds a step to the process. Any student can snap a photo, OCR the text and feed it into an LLM in seconds. All this policy accomplishes is wasting paper and forcing students to engage in digital hoop-jumping.

[mbreese]

It’s not theater. It introduces friction into the process. And when there is friction in both choices (read the paper, or take a photo and upload the picture), you’ll get more people reading the physical paper copy. If students want to jump through hoops, they will, but it will require an active choice.

At this point auto AI summaries are so prevalent that it is the passive default. By shifting it to require an active choice, you’ve make it more likely for students to choose to do the work.

[Flavius]

That friction is trivial. You are comparing the effort of snapping a photo against the effort of actually reading and analyzing a text. If anyone chooses to read the paper, it's because they actually want to read it, not because using AI was too much hassle.

[blell]

Any AI app worth its salt allows you to upload a photo of something and it processes it flawlessly in the same amount of time. This is absolutely worthless teather.

[ulrashida]

Students tend to be fairly lazy, so this may simply mean another x% of the class reads the material rather than scanning in the 60 pages of reading for the assignment.

[anon291]

You don't need to Ocr. Llms can respond directly to the scanned image. They are better than most Ocr programs.

Indeed the token cost of image inputs are lower because you have more fine grained control of the latent token space

[jrm4]

You fundamentally misunderstand the value of friction. The digital hoop-jumping, as you call it, is a very very useful signal for motivation.