Farewell Maya mailbag

AI and antisemitism on campus

Today is Maya’s farewell mailbag, so I don’t have any lengthy recommended reading, but I did enjoy this piece from Jonathan Caulkins and Keith Humphreys, which contains a striking graph:

Now I’m turning the virtual mic over to Maya, who will of course be missed, but will always be a valued member of the Slow Boring family! You’ll find links to some of her work below, but here’s her very first Slow Boring post, which was about fixing the NBA’s bad officiating, as well as a popular piece she wrote on high school debate.

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Milan Singh: What are you up to next?

For the first part of the summer, I will be interning for Invention Studios, an entertainment production company run by Nicky Weinstock. He’s best known for producing the Apple+ TV show Severance — a sci-fi psychological thriller that I would strongly recommend. I’ll be reading scripts and writing coverages for Invention.

During the second half of the summer, I will be interning for the consumer products team at Lightspeed Venture Partners. In this role, I’m particularly excited to meet founders working on artificial intelligence startups.

Eric Wilhelm: Maya, how are professors dealing with AI in the classroom?

With its current capabilities, LLMs are posing a clear threat to academic writing and programming assignments. 

I mostly take classes that assess students with take-home essays, which are clearly at risk for AI-enabled plagiarism. As I wrote about last summer, ChatGPT-4 can already get a mix of As and Bs in Harvard classes. This year, I’ve been struck by how most of my professors have completely ignored artificial intelligence in their pedagogy and syllabi. The few professors that did mention AI tended to simply warn students not to plagiarize using the technology.