At the risk of perhaps stating the obvious, there appears to be a whiff of aggression from this article. The "fighting fire with fire" language, the "haha, we love old FakeFoster, going to have to see if we change that" response to complaints that the voice was intimidating ... if there wasn't a specific desire to punish the class for LLM use by subjecting them to a robotic NKVD interrogation then the authors should have been more careful to avoid leaving that impression.
Tried it in earnest. Definitely detect some aggression, and would feel stressed if this were an exam setting. I think it was pg who said that any stress you add in an interview situation is just noise, and dilutes the signal.
Also, given that there's so many ways for LLMs to go off the rails (it just gave me the student id I was supposed to say, for example), it feels a bit unprofessional to be using this to administer real exams.
Not that bad? I gave it a random name and random net ID and it basically screamed at me to HANG UP RIGHT NOW AND FIGURE OUT THE CORRECT NET ID. Hahaha
That does not resemble any good professor I've ever heard. It's very aggressive and stern, which is not generally how oral exams are conducted. Feels much more like I'm being cross examined in court.
Also tried it and it could have been a lot better. If I had any type of interview with that voice (press interview, mentor interview, job interview) I would think I was being scammed, sold something, or had entered the wrong room.
The belligerence about changing the voice is so weird. And it does sort of set a tone straight off. "We got feedback that the voice was frightening and intimidating. We're keeping it tho."
