the fuck is a chegg?
this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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The article explains it in the first few paragraphs. Here is paragraph 2 and most of paragraph 3:
Chegg should be familiar to most people who have been to college in recent years. It started out in the 2000s renting out textbooks and later expanded into online study guides, and eventually into a platform with pre-written answers to common homework questions.
Unfortunately, the launch of ChatGPT all but annihilated Chegg’s business model. The company for years paid thousands of contractors to write answers to questions across every major subject, which is quite a labor intensive process—and there’s no guarantee they will even have the answer to your question.
Wasn't it like Napster in that originally it was for pirating text books?
I don't think so, but I honestly hadn't heard of Chegg before today either.
Chegg fucken sucked anyway. Every time I wanted legimite help I'd get answers locked behind their paywall as the top hits.
The few times I paid for it, the solutions were often wrong as well. Very infuriating.
uh? that was the whole business model, you can see the questions for free but got to pay for the answers. initially you're reluctant to pay, but as hw due dates approach and you realize the cost of failing a class...
I believe there was a website that bypassed the paywall lol.
TIL I learned that Chegg was 1) still around 2) did more than sell college textbooks.
It must be sad to see your company value evaporate at the hands of the equivalent of liar-Russian-roulette, where the AI will return an answer to most anything. And it will return that answer with complete confidence, giving no indication if the result is real or completely fabricated.
AI is great a bullshitting.
Chegg wasn’t much better from what I remember. Right before my Discrete Structures II Final, my professor found most of our assignments posted and answered on Chegg. Instead of getting angry, he explained problem by problem everything the “Chegg experts” got wrong.
And that doesn’t even get into planted incorrect answers. I’m pretty sure our computer science department would deliberately answer relevant chegg questions incorrectly. If you use that specific incorrect answer and work they know you cheated.
ChatGPT solves all of this and I bet it does so with about the same quality as Chegg. I’m not saying I don’t think AI dumb. I’m saying Chegg was also kinda dumb.
Compare this to one of my college professors who would come in, Google the topic, find another universities notes to use, and then complain about them. Worst teacher ever. (He literally fell asleep during students' presentations and then berated them about weird minute details.)
I had a linear algebra professor that taught on PowerPoint, would go so fast you couldn’t keep up with notes, and if you used your phone to take a picture of the board, she would stop the class to explain to you how the slides are her intellectual property and you couldn’t take photos.
Some professors are just so wack... Like, if I copy your notes verbatim I'm also "stealing" your intellectual property just as much as taking a photo.
It really seems like they could quote sources.
But if they did that it’d be way easier to detect the plagiarism and they’d be liable for tons of copyright infringement.
I have no proof of this, just a hunch/consiracy.
Some supposedly do, and then have been found hallucinating non-existent ones.
Yep, AI has been shown to create sources (books/websites/etc.) names out of just pieces of the question asked and do it with the confidence that it's real.
TIL there exists a thingamajig called Chegg.
There's a stock ticker for this thing?
TIL as well. It went public back in 2021 just a year before the GenAI craze.
you could ask ~~chegg~~ chatgpt
Id rather kill myself (/s)
I guess I had a much different experience with Chegg than most.
For a handful of my classes, it was the only way to consistently get similar problems with worked out solutions. I'm not going to pretend I never was lazy and used it to cheat, but most of my usage was of problems I wasn't assigned so I could see how they were done.
That said, I can't speak as to how they pay the people that actually do the work, that may be a whole can of worms that I really probably should've looked into when I was using it.
As someone who checked it out for physics here's my experience:
Anything that could easily be found and be correct that would be found on chegg, would be easily repeated by chatgpt, and with usually clearer solutions that was easier for slightly different problem prompts.
Anything that could not be well answered by chatgpt likely would not have a good solution on chegg, being either outright wrong, or extremely confusing as an answer.
Yeah I'm sure I'd probably be using chatgpt these days if I were still in school instead of paying the frankly stupid amount Chegg cost.
I imagine it varies quite a bit depending on the subject and who's doing the answers. There were 3 or 4 answer authors that I learned to recognize as consistently quite good in the areas I needed it in.
AI taking the answer-questions-wrongly jobs
Too true. At the collegiate level chegg was often wrong.
I imagine the same is true for ChatGPT as well.
Just do your homework, you might actually learn something...
Fuck chegg. The only way to get through homework without spending 27 hours a day on it was to pay money for the wrong answer from chegg and then flunk out anyway. Now we have ai which can get you the answer FOR FREE, often even if it's a loaded trick question. I really wish I would have capitalized on that short window of time from after ai was invented and before schools got smarter about combating cheating.
Going to college was the biggest mistake of my life and I wish I would have instead spent all the money on hookers like boogie2988 did.
I think you are supposed to just do the homework
If you want a piece of paper that costs 20-40k, your approach is valid. If you want an education you need to invest a lot of time and effort.
Lmao boogie catching strays will never not be funny
Good. Fuck Chegg. Let cheating, plagiarizing dipshits have the dubious AI slop.
Once upon a time, straight outta school, I wrote up solutions to problems from the Serway physics book. For Chegg. $5 per problem.
Fuck Chegg.
i always went to scribd for books
Sad, one of my classes I really relied on Chegg to help me through the homework.