Comment by boothby
9 hours ago
> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else.
Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper.
> Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.
Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.
Are you suggesting we should do nothing if the solution has any flaws?
Some solutions have flaws but still improve things. Others are hopelessly ineffective and add nothing but overhead.
There's always going to be ways to cheat, the idea is to make it hard. I think secretly replacing a computer's internals such that no one else will notice is pretty hard.
Local inference? Why? Just install a SIM card and connect to your BigTech account.
While jamming cell signals is illegal, scanning for transmissions is quite easy.