I'd rather read the prompt

Summary

When I grade students’ assignments, I sometimes see answers like this: Utilizing Euler angles for rotation representation could have the following possible downsides: Gimbal lock: In certain positions, orientations can reach a singularity, which prevents them from continuously rotating without a sudden change in the coordinate values. Numeric instability: Using Euler angles could cause numeric computations to be less precise, which can add up and produce inaccuracies if used often. Non-unique coordinates: Another downside of Euler angles is that some rotations do not have a unique representation in Euler angles, particularly at singularities. The downsides of Euler angles make them difficult to utilize in robotics. It’s important to note that very few implementations employ Euler angles for robotics. Instead, one could use rotation matrices or quaternions to facilitate more efficient rotation representation. [Not a student’s real answer, but my handmade synthesis of the style and content of many answers] You only have to read one or two of these answers to know exactly what’s up: the students just copy-pasted the output from a large language model, most likely ChatGPT. They are invariably verbose, interminably waffly, and insipidly fixated on the bullet-points-with-bold style. The prose rarely surpasses the sixth-grade book report, constantly repeating the prompt, presumably to prove that they’re staying on topic. As an instructor, I am always saddened to read this. The ChatGPT rhetorical style is distinctive enough that I can catch it, but not so distinctive to be worth passing along to an honor council. Even if I did, I’m not sure the marginal gains in the integrity of the class would be worth the hours spent litigating the issue. I write this article as a plea to everyone: not just my students, but the blog posters and Reddit commenters and weak-accept paper authors and Reviewer 2. Don’t let a computer write for you! I say this not for reasons of intellectual hon...