> it's about how students learn. This obviously requires someone that wants to learn.

FINALLY ! Someone who gets the point I was trying to make. I wish I could upvote you a million times.

This is precisely the point. Professors are happy to help people who want to learn.

Students who prefer to copy/paste into LLMs do not want to learn. University is there to foster learning and reasoning using your own brain. An LLM helps with neither.

Sweep aside the misunderstanding about students trying to "cheat" with LLM output instead of engagement in the topic at hand. I think there is a secondary debate here, even when you understand the original intent of the post above. It still boils down to the same concerns about "slop". Not the student presenting slop to the existing teaching system, but the student being led stray by the slop they are consuming on their own.

Being an auto-didact has always been a double-edged sword. You can potentially accelerate your learning and find your own specialization, but it is an extremely easy failure mode to turn yourself into some semi-educated crank. Once in a while, this leads to some renegade genius who opens new branches of knowledge. But in more cases, it aborts useful learning. The crank gets lost in their half-baked ontology and unable to really fix the flaws nor progress to more advanced topics.

The whole long history of learning institutions is, in part, trying to manage this very human risk. One of a teacher's main roles is to recognize a student who is spiraling out in this manner and steer them back. Nearly everyone has this potential to incrementally develop a sort of self-delusion, if not getting reality-checked on a regular basis. It takes incredible diligence to self-govern and never lose yourself in the chase.

This is where "sycophancy" in LLMs is a bigger problem than mere diction. If the AI continues to function as a sort of keyhole predictor, it does not have the context to model a big-picture purpose like education and keep all the incremental wanderings on course and bound to reality. Instead, it can amplify this worst-case scenario where you plunge down some rabbit-hole.