Comment by plagasul
2 days ago
Several. Yesterday a friend with no prior coding experience or knowledge showed me an app he initially built to help him study for public administration job positions. The exams for this positions are public (spain), but the tools are scarce, expensive or he did not like. So he used lovable, then switched to web gemini and claude, then paid claude. He now has +130 very active users on an initial free tier, while he figures out. The app is on github, runs on vercel with supabase, react, tailwind, bun... he has no idea what he is doing. I even installed claude code for him, got him an ssh key so he can do it locally, etc.
Another: claude code cracked for me some software that was calling a home that did not exist anymore via headless ghidra.
Another: I am a teacher, and qualifications and feedback is very very time consuming, specially in loose workflows with several sources and tools that are not connected. During class presentations I take loose notes. Now I have a local folder where I drop my 1 student list, with names and emails, 2 my loose notes, and 3 a qualification & feedback sheet model; then claude creates a sheet per student, formats and copies the feedback to the right sheet cell, waits for my corrections, then sends everything to their school emails. Much easier, much less time consuming.
That said, I am very critical of AI, I align with voices and reports calling for AI companies to give back, as they took much, and for AI as public infrastructure, to an extent. I see datacenters as probably inevitably future public infrastructure, with a public model that could resemble that of electricity etc (in spain) or more public (less private). I am wary of the actual and future ecological and social impact of datacenter building and other problems AI is or will create. It is difficult to negate its usefulness, though: it is like having several very fast assistants with expert knowledge on several fields, that just get better every month. We will see.
Do your students know their feedback is AI generated?
A pre-AI example from the military : course reviews and performance assessments were changes to be from a set of about 70 descriptors instead of written custom. Instructors could modify them, but many didn't or did so only trivially. The system was junked in within three years because of the obvious: those giving feedback didn't own it, and those receiving feedback didn't value it.
Feedback is not AI generated, just structured grammar corrected and pasted at the right spot. I then review the output to see if it remains within what I meant to convey with my feedback. This is relatively simple feedback, I have 'highlight' and 'to improve' fieldsm, with a few sentences in each, very focused. If the feedback felt depersonalized or its meaning or tone changed I would fix it or not use this method. For longer forms of feedback it may not work.
Reviewing if generated feedback is within scope of what you'd give is not the same as giving feedback yourself. It is wildly different in fact.
> Now I have a local folder where I drop my 1 student list, with names and emails, 2 my loose notes, and 3 a qualification & feedback sheet model; then claude creates a sheet per student, formats and copies the feedback to the right sheet cell, waits for my corrections, then sends everything to their school emails
Yikes! Is this legal in your country?
I've built a small system to do this anonymously. There is a students.csv with real data, a notes.txt that contains my unstructured comments and grades associated to ids (not names or student data), and a model.ods that contains the grading sheet model.
Claude takes the notes.txt and produces a json with corrected comments in the structure I asked for (highlights/needs work/grade), associated to student ids (not real data). This works both for single id or multiple id, for group assignments.
Then a script takes the json, creates a model sheet per student or group of students, fills the right cells, checks the ids against students.csv to fill the real names, and produces the pdf in a pdf/ folder.
Another script sends the pdfs.
I gitignore the sensible files, including an .env with SMTP pass, and denied permissions to Claude for those files using a rule at .claude/settings.json.
There is also a config file to change language, email text and other things.
I believe this is safe and compliant with GDPR, unless Claude ignores the deny rules! Any comments appreciated. Thanks.
possibly not or grey area under GDPR if I use identifiable information, as it is sent to Anthropic for processing, no matter if used for training or not, but I am unsure about this, I should probably anonymize and research it more, thanks for pointing it out
You could just send Anthropic scrambled names / emails and then unscramble locally?
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There is another institution I teach at that gives us Gemini, but not via API, which limits its use for this kind of work to an extent, I could do it via drive, I assume. There being a contract puts the institution and Google as responsible of the data. The first institution I was talking about has MS Teams, without AI afaik, but if they contract it I guess I can do the same with sharepoint, etc.
Sorry to tell you but it’s not grey area, it’s full on black. You do not have permission to share such data with a third party provider that doesn’t have strict privacy guarantees and that you have a data processing agreement with. TOS are not sufficient.
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So you're sending your students private data to Anthropic?
See answer above. Thanks.