I used private and public LLMs to answer an undergraduate essay question I spent a week working on nearly 30 years ago, in an effort to see how the experience would have changed in that time. There were two rules:
- No peeking at the original essay, and
- No reading any of the suggested material, except to find references.
The experience turned out to be radically different with AI assistance in some ways, and similar in others.
If you’re not interested in my life story and the gory detail, skip to the end for what I learned.