21 ms·

The availability of text generators will force positive changes to education

• croes 4y ago
  >Teachers adapted to the calculator. They can certainly adapt to language models. The burden is once again on those poorly paid with few resources. With this logic, one also believes that more crime leads to better police officers.
• ryndbfsrw 4y ago
  Thats really impressive students are doing this. These tools are non-trivial to use and it shows great initiative from them. I could see these tools being used proactively as part of a creative writing class or helping people improve their language skills. Top stuff!
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  The only real solution to this (assuming that grading systems are all that valuable in terms of optimal educational outcomes) is to base grades on in-class essay writing (and for CS, in-class coding) where students don't have access to any outside assistance, and have to think quickly. Using tools outside class to practice for the in-class work would make a lot of sense however, as students could then rapidly see what a decent essay or code body looks like.
  • rdtwo 4y ago
    I don’t Think ai essays are good but they might be less bad than some writers
  • Bakary 4y ago
    This is common in UK universities at least. You can have your entire grade for a year of dense reading at the MSc level be based on three hours of hand-numbing speedwriting. It makes sense while at the same time rewarding and punishing different personality types (and calligraphers).
    • nicoburns 4y ago
      The worst thing about this system is that there's not usually any chance to retake the exam. As far as I can see, there's no good reason for this, and all it does is heap pressure on students while providing a worse overall assessment of their ability.
      • Bakary 4y ago
        If you look at it another way, it's like a lifetime warranty. You can't trust an appliance vendor to provide quality, but you can trust that if they have a warranty they will meet the conditions where it will make financial sense to have one. Having such an exam adds enormous extraneous pressure that does not reflect the reality of conducting research, but it is this pressure that guarantees (with some exceptions) that the student has been coerced into learning the material to a sufficient standard. There will always be the cramming psychopath who grabs a first after just a week of study and who retains nothing of it, but most students just have to learn intensely over the course of a year to pass through the filter. In some ways, this is also why it's common in the UK for employers to not care so much about the specific degree, just that you have one with good grades from a reputable institution.
        • nicoburns 4y ago
          > There will always be the cramming psychopath who grabs a first after just a week of study and who retains nothing of it, but most students just have to learn intensely over the course of a year to pass through the filter. My concern is for the students who study intensely, learn as much as anyone else, but don't pass the filter. Universities in other European countries allow single units to be retaken without retaking an entire year, and it seems to me that this provides a fairer system without devaluing the qualification in any way.
          • Bakary 4y ago
            In a way it can root out psychological weakness. You rarely get contractually guaranteed resits in the real world when you mess up.
  • coreyp_1 4y ago
    I agree in principle, but there are so many special accommodations required (extra time for graded assignments, special assistance in the form of a reader, etc.) that would make this a nightmare. I lament, though, that students are often either (A) so overburdened with distractions that they don't have time to learn, (B) so pressured to get high grades that they cannot afford to get a bad grade, and thus must cheat, or (C) just don't care. There are a few gems that are willing to put in the work to learn and appreciate a subject, though. I just wish that more students put in the work required to learn.
    • Vrondi 4y ago
      I have legitimately met college students in the last few years who had no frame of reference for how much time they should be putting in. Freshmen who think that spending 15 minutes a week looking over their notes is "studying a lot" are pretty common right now (in the USA).
      • photochemsyn 4y ago
        Three hours of study for each hour spent in class is an average estimate of what it takes to absorb even moderately difficult material in courses in sci/tech. Relevant quote: "Every truth has four corners. As a teacher I give you one corner, and it is for you to find the other three." (Confucius)
        • themoonisachees 4y ago
          Which with napkin math can be shown to be bullshit. Students are spending approximately 1/3 of their time in classes, so how would they get time to sleep among the 4/3 required by studies and classes?
          • hombre_fatal 4y ago
            1:3 hours sounds super aspirational even for only the hardest of classes like organic chemistry and fluid dynamics. But your napkin calc isn't addressing the bit where you only take 1-2 classes like that per semester and pad the rest out with things like literature and electives so you could have a life.
  • dasil003 4y ago
    > students could then rapidly see what a decent essay or code body looks like. You mean like how today they study well-regarded human works? I’m not sure how the ML adds anything except which words tend to appear close to each other across a large corpus. The moment where young writers believe that ML is creating anything new and they try to learn from that is when modern civilization starts to eat its own tail.
  • pjmorris 4y ago
    > base grades on... and for CS, in-class coding Given that a typical programmer on a typical day has online access, and given the creative lengths students will go to to maintain access to said resources during exams, it seems worth considering allowing online access for programming exams. To address the obvious problems with that approach, could we use AI to generate unique variations on the problems we want the students to solve?
    • Vrondi 4y ago
      This is like any open-book exam. Make the time limit reasonable such that if they know the stuff, they can get it done while referring to a few things in a source, but if they don't know it, there's no way they can look it all up in the available time.
    • Test0129 4y ago
      Or we could stop asking students trivia and force them to think. Most of my graduate school exams were open book + notes but it hardly helped. You had to demonstrate knowledge by producing a novel solution to the problem most of the time. Not novel as in new research, but novel in the sense you weren't just regurgitating factoids from the books. I also had tons of open book and open note advanced math classes. The problems were made in such a way you had to make a connection with the material and link pieces together in non-obvious ways. In those classes I retained more information even to today. Teaching, even at the collegiate level, has become "how can I do the least so I can do what I want". Tenured research professors generally make terrible teachers...perhaps we need professional teachers.
      • mywittyname 4y ago
        For me, the most "open" a test was, the more I worried about it. Expecting students to remember everything on the test meant that it had to be easy. The hardest exam I ever took was my final exam for Linear Algebra. It was so "open" that people could use matlab on a shared computer that was also projected to the entire class. Turns out, the best students in the class didn't need help on a computer, so it turned into this kind of mind-fuck where you weren't sure if they got a different answer than you because they were wrong, or because you were. To add to the excitement, the questions all tied together and used the answer from the previous one, so if you missed one, you were guaranteed to miss every subsequent question.
  • bambax 4y ago
    > to base grades on in-class essay writing Of course. I don't understand how essays written at home are acceptable. It's a good exercise to do them (if done properly) but they shouldn't count for the final grade. Before AI there were professional essay-writers, or tutors, or parents. In a sense AI is progress because now everyone can cheat, instead of only the wealthy.
  • tjpnz 4y ago
    Might also be time that companies stopped taking grades into account when hiring and selecting for internships.
  • bergenty 4y ago
    At least for CS courses this means kids will never have the chance to work on something simplistic that can be coded up in 2 hours.
  • Auracle 4y ago
    You could have them write using a program that allows the teacher to play back their writing process in real time as well. Theoretically they could copy it from offscreen but unless they’re really good at faking going back and changing things and getting stuck at the right points it would probably be fairly easy to tell. On the flip side there’d be no definitive proof.
• bannedbybros 4y ago
  Clickbait. Nobody said students were acing their homework.
• Entinel 4y ago
  When I was a student I used to make good money writing essays for other people. I've finally had a job replaced by an AI.
• MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  It's just lowering the bar for cheating a little bit from buying essays / paying someone else to do it. Honestly I don't think writing essays for a course is a good measure of understanding the material. It's mostly an exercises in regurgitation.
  • TSiege 4y ago
    I'd really disagree with this. Essay writing forces a person to think critically. You have to construct an argument for or against something. Even if it's echoing source material or a teacher, you still have to think in a way that other testing formats do not. By offloading this to a machine the students are undercutting themselves more than anything else. They'll be less effective communicators and less capable of disagreeing with ideas and concepts the face in the real world
    • thrwy_918 4y ago
      I agree with you, but I also had instructors who demanded the same thing: essays as arguments, drawing on evidence and analysis to back up a thesis. An essay that is simply a description of the source material, or a listing of pros and cons with no actual thesis, is a totally different endeavor, and one that has much less value as method of instruction or assessment.
      • Vrondi 4y ago
        If there is no thesis statement, then it isn't really an essay; just a book report.
        • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
          Restating or paraphrasing a widely accepted thesis statement isn't very educational? When your freshman class of 200 students is writing essays on a handful of topics, the same ones every year, that every other school touches on, there's not going to much in the way of originality. Then again I guess the same argument can be made for maths but no one complains that we're teaching to memorize and repeat the same steps of various proofs one learns in 1st year.
• ponyous 4y ago
  The question is whether they want to adapt. I know of teachers who wouldn’t even look at the documents. A couple of classmates (10+ years ago) literally turned in empty docx. They all got the same grade as on previous exam.
• david927 4y ago
  In the Czech Republic, and I'm sure this is true in some other countries, many of the exams are oral. The student is given a prompt and they have to stand in front of the teacher(s) and talk about it, giving as much detail as possible. I think it's a great way to handle exams and I wonder if we'll need to shift towards that in the future.
  • brianbreslin 4y ago
    My father who is a college professor in his late 70s is starting to do this in the US as he found less correlation between a written assignment and students actually knowing what the material was. Forcing a presentation makes it harder for them to cheat.
    • n4r9 4y ago
      On the other hand, it risks privileging students that are extroverted and skilled at using rhetoric to disguise ignorance.
      • mannykannot 4y ago
        If students are successful at using rhetoric to disguise their ignorance from their teachers, we need to be looking into how teachers are selected, trained and compensated.
      • staticautomatic 4y ago
        Only so long as the teacher can’t tell the difference.
      • mountainb 4y ago
        Just like real life. When schools had more prestige, they also relied more heavily on intensive oral examinations. Some of the most prestigious schools in the world still rely heavily on intense oral examinations. Universities can also crib from how law school exams work if they want to still do written examinations.
• freeone3000 4y ago
  This is an ideal result -- after all, their working lives will be turning in machine-generated work to machine-evaluating bosses, so we should get them started early, lest they fall behind the prompt-engineering curve.
• randomwalker 4y ago
  OP here. The full title of this article is "Students are acing their homework by turning in machine-generated essays. Good." The last word was edited out by the mods, presumably under the belief that it's clickbait. Unfortunately, the headline now sounds like I'm complaining about this development, whereas my post is about how it will force much-needed improvements to education and free students from the drudgery of pointless essays that ask them to regurgitate content (as opposed to essays that teach writing skills or critical thinking, which remain valuable).
  • fenomas 4y ago
    I think that the site auto-edits titles on first submit, but if you afterwards edit and save, it will use what you put in verbatim.
    • OJFord 4y ago
      This is correct, OP, if you can still edit - just put it back in.
  • StevePerkins 4y ago
    Geeze. How is "... Good." considered unacceptable clickbait, while: - "Why I don't..." - "... considered harmful." - "... written in Rust!" are so ubiquitous?
    • dang 4y ago
      Those things are also clickbait and we also edit them out when we see them. Are you perhaps assuming that we see everything that gets posted here? That would be very mistaken.
  • zffr 4y ago
    IMO I didn't get the sense that the title is complaining. I took the title as neutral statement and assumed the article would provide evidence for the claim and possibly commentary on it.
  • DJBunnies 4y ago
• Vrondi 4y ago
  Time to go back to in-person handwritten essay exams.
  • sroussey 4y ago
    Not handwritten cursive, kids can’t read or write that today.
    • aerostable_slug 4y ago
      I took the LSAT some years ago (mostly just for curiosity's sake). When I turned my documents in to the lead proctor, she stopped me and said something like "you were to write your essay!" Confused, I told her I had, to which she loudly stated "you printed your essay, and that's not permissible!" Once I figured out she meant cursive writing, I told her I hadn't written anything in cursive since maybe 4th or 5th grade, and after that I typed most of my long-form homework on my trusty Apple ][e and "printed" handwritten notes, as I still do today. She turned a bit pale and then turned to the room, interrupted the test, and asked how many candidates were also "printing" their essays. Essentially everyone raised their hands. It turns out the poor older lady was a grade school teacher and had been instructing children how to write in cursive since the days of yore. When she faced the fact that those habits hadn't stuck with any of the once-4th-graders sitting in front of her, she turned even paler and went to get a drink of water. I felt a bit bad for her.
      • sroussey 4y ago
        I also typing reports on an Apple ][e. The e was better as it had lower case!
  • neverartful 4y ago
    Physical blue books and an ink pen in an auditorium within a time limit. This would work easy enough for in-person (on-campus) students. Not so good for online/remote.
    • hot_gril 4y ago
• A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
  I don't want to automatically defend pointless essays about 'How X influenced 19th century England' or whatever is the current go to topic for teachers, but, and it is not a small but, the whole point of writing pointless essays is to give students an idea on how to write for an audience ( their teacher ). At the end of the day, unused muscle will atrophy and students may have trouble even producing appropriate prompts for ML generator. I would weep for the future of humanity, but: 1. Coffee did not kick in yet 2. I have upped my nihilism lately
  • TrickardRixx 4y ago
    "For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them."
    • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
      I am familiar with this quote and I while I do not want to assume, I think it was intended as a rebuttal/counter to old codger how ancients also thought writing would kill memory. Spoiler alert. It did. Very few people attempt to commit things to memory outside some Guiness record competitions. And just in case I did not hit the point, introduction of Google with world encyclopedia at anyone's hand, further exacerbated that trend. To sum up, I appreciate the sentiment, but in HN I do hope for, nay, I expect pushback in the form that goes beyond weirdly smug quote. What I am saying is: argue with me. Don't quote me philosophical bumper stickers.
      • TrickardRixx 4y ago
        It seems to me that the average person around me remembers more than the ancients had the ability to even know. To your point of "pointless essays teach children how to write to an audience", there are entire populations of people who, as a matter of survival, learn how to modulate their communication based on the recipient. Those children learn this skill well before they write any essays about "How X influenced 19th century England".
• quacked 4y ago
  I love your attitude. I have the exact same one. I'm so excited that another form of busywork has been eliminated from school by robots. Eventually they're going to start having to structure classrooms around learning instead of worksheets.
  • somerandomqaguy 4y ago
    Maybe, but the flip side is that I'm wondering how many schools will look at the opposite and try to start using machine learning to grade essays as well.
    • soco 4y ago
      So we end up with machines grading machines, while pupils and teachers are left doing... something. Isn't it known fact that one cannot fix society with technology?
  • jrodthree24 4y ago
    I really don't understand why essays are bad. Is there any kind of research that goes into this? I agree with you that learning should be the goal. And any busy work that doesn't help should be eliminated. But I just don't know if we know what the right structure should be and if we can say for sure that things like writing essays don't actually help students cultivate their writing and critical thinking skills.
    • randomwalker 4y ago
      I learned from one of the comments on my original post that many scholars have been saying this for a while, and that there's in fact a book that makes the same point! Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-Five-Paragraph/dp/1421427109 https://www.amazon.com/Why-They-Cant-Write-Five-Paragraph/dp...
    • lbotos 4y ago
      It's an interesting question. I'd personally love to see more effort being given to "defend your point as succinctly as possible." I wrote a lot of "minimum word count essays and in the "real world" clarity trumps length every day. Length is used as some proxy for rigor, but we know it's only a proxy.
• tomp 4y ago
  Good. Important rate-limiting things like exams or voting should be done in person.
• efsavage 4y ago
  They're probably being graded by machines, and the GPA is going onto a resume that's then screened by machine. Next Steps: Machine-generated assignments on the input end, machine generated interviews on the output end.
• Swizec 4y ago
  As an author, I’ve been thinking about the future and it sounds dreamy. AI is good at producing verbiage, which readers want for some reason. Humans are good at producing insight, which is the true product that readers are looking for, but don’t want to pay for (with clicks or money). So what if the author produced a 5 bullet insight and AI expanded it into the word salad that readers want to buy? We’re getting there, lots of startups in this space. Another aspect of why the word lettuce matters is SEO. So it feels like there may be a future where humans communicate in 5 bullet insights packaged as word salad by bots for bots.
  • sroussey 4y ago
    Why not have the AI produce the five points? Seems silly to have an AI write an essay and derive the main points itself, except perhaps to differentiate from another AI, but isn’t this what seeds are for?
    • Swizec 4y ago
      Because the AI can’t produce a novel insight (yet?). Those 5 bullets are the main points, AI can expand those into an essay. This idea comes from how you’d write any long essay, or a book. You start with an idea. Then you expand it into chapter/section titles. Then you expand into each of those into more sections. Then more. This gives you the full skeleton of what you’re trying to say and, really, already says the whole valuable part. Then you fill the rest with relatable anecdotes and other salad to make a meal and drive the point home. AI would be great at that part.
      • sroussey 4y ago
        I think this would be better, at least for now. But if the AI was trained on material that included the book and other writeups about the book, it might already have the answer.
        • Swizec 4y ago
          I mean the inverse of that. Writing a new book or essay that doesn’t exist yet :)
• poulpy123 4y ago
  > “For biology, we would learn about biotech and write five good and bad things about biotech. I would send a prompt to the AI like, ‘what are five good and bad things about biotech?’ and it would generate an answer that would get me an A.” I don't call that an essay, and it's something that can be done with a 10 seconds google search without AI.
• FredPret 4y ago
  In the 90’s there was a magazine article about Bill Gates. He interviewed some kids to hear what they want from computers. Doing their homework was the top answer. I remember thinking: yeah right, that will take many decades. I guess 2-3 decades was enough!
• whywhywhywhy 4y ago
  In high school the first few months of having a copy of Encarta to print out essays for homework was fun before the teachers caught on. If you don't want students to cheat like this maybe build systems that respect their time and engage their brains.
• jollyllama 4y ago
  Putting this out there: like most machine generated "art" these days, the relative increase of output quality is in part marked by a decline in both mean human output quality and the mean ability of humans to perceive quality.
• oldstrangers 4y ago
  These issues with AI are arising faster than ever, but no one seems to stop an extrapolate the inevitable end result. What do you do when an AI can realistically handle your average college student's entire course load? Existentially, does it even matter? Yes people will be dumber on average, but will they care if they have the answer to all of life's questions in their pockets? I'm old enough to remember people telling me I wouldn't always have a calculator handy, and obviously that didn't age very well. It sounds unnecessarily pessimistic in the face of all the things AI will help us with, but given what we know about human nature, I do expect AI to make us a lot lazier and ... dumber.
  • Buldak 4y ago
    Yeah, there seems to be a general sentiment that if a computer can do it, it wasn't worth a student doing it anyway. But presumably (?) there is a line to cross where that ceases to be the case. So where do you draw it?
  • SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    >I'm old enough to remember people telling me I wouldn't always have a calculator handy, and obviously that didn't age very well. Logical error though. The analogy to calculator is poor. With a calculator it doesn’t matter what your opinion of 17×93 is. There is a right answer and a way to get there. Our ability to get output from a calculator doesn’t change because more or less people use them. With AI prompted writing, there is no right answer, and what it spits out only exists because other people already wrote on the topic. The quality of the writing is entirely dependent on samples and usage.
    • oldstrangers 4y ago
      The analogy is fine, as it applies to my example of an AI handling the entire course load of your average college student. Math, science, creative writing, etc...
• oxff 4y ago
  This is good, because it shows what a cargo cult education and learning has been for the longest time. Critique in action.
• rongopo 4y ago
  Professor here --- I really need a tool to detect this. I have a student whose text always have the same faulty patterns: circular sentences, paragraph that do not sum up, etc. The problems are consistently the same, and even in purpose this cannot be imitated. I think there is a machine behind.
  • danielvf 4y ago
    One of our local writing teachers has addressed this by having the students do some surprise writing in class, no phones, and comparing it to home work.
    • MisterBastahrd 4y ago
      Persuasive writing section? "Write a persuasive essay regarding why the essay you're writing deserves the grade you choose based upon your knowledge of persuasive writing techniques and your classroom participation."
    • rongopo 4y ago
      This is IMHO the only way to go at the moment.
  • collegeburner 4y ago
    why do you need a tool? if its crap writing give it a crap grade and move on.
    • xena 4y ago
      A tool would be useful so that the teacher can avoid wasting their time reading an AI generated submission and continue on to the next essay.
      • kjkjadksj 4y ago
        Teachers have turnitin that kinda does this
• gautamdivgi 4y ago
  I had a chuckle at this. Good this is happening. Kids spend too much time on that anyway and most of it is bullshit. Sure if you had some great success we need a verifiable way to show it (maybe a resume). But this whole “oh look what great things I plan for the world” is nonsense. Hopefully it’s a thing of the past soon. Edit - talking about essays that folks write for college admissions, in case the context wasn’t clear.
• petercooper 4y ago
  When Babelfish came out in 1997, I used it to do my French homework, while attempting to fix up when it didn't quite get it right or used an idiom that didn't translate to French. My friend did the same and we were casually warned to stop "whatever it is" we were doing after a couple of weeks ;-) It turned out it was a lot safer to let Babelfish read French than to write it.. As a bit of fun, I recently scanned my daughter's homework and threw it into GPT-3 and while I didn't let her see or use the end results (if she had the idea to do it herself, that's her call, but I find the younger generations are not as computer savvy as the media would like you to think!) it pretty much nailed it without me having to do anything else. It's definitely going to cause changes in the educational system in a way that Babelfish certainly did not.
• thwayunion 4y ago
  No evidence is provided. I'm curious whether the author actually has evidence or is just asserting that this is possible and likely happening. IME, and I have lots of "E" (including training and finetuning my own models), this probably isn't entirely true in most writing-heavy courses. You can use the largest language models, in an interactive fashion, to generate portions of half-decent papers. Maybe even "ace" papers on certain subjects with certain grading criteria (namely, "looks reasonable", not "fine-toothed comb"). But in many courses the essays will be extremely low-quality, and even in the happy cases saying that the essay is "machine-generated" is eliding a lot of manual effort. I agree that students are probably using LLMs for their homework, but I'm skeptical that they are all getting As on assignments that are designed as big assessments, or that the essays are actually fully machine-generated. I bet a lot of students -- the laziest ones -- are getting "WTF is this essay even about... did you have a stroke while writing this?!" feedback if they are using LLMs to generate essays whole-cloth. Pedagogically, this matters. Think about calculator usage. There's a huge difference between allowing use of TI-83 on Calculus assignment with lots of word-heavy application problems and allowing use of Wolfram Alpha on a Calculus assignment that's "integration recipe practice".
  • _delirium 4y ago
    Yeah, I could believe it "aces" homework in a really open-ended writing assignment. An assignment like: write an essay explaining a personal experience and what it meant to you. The people that's the biggest issue for at the moment are probably writing instructors, since the goal of those classes is to just practice writing something/anything. In computer science though, the writing I've had turned in in my classes that I suspect is LLM-generated usually gets an F. It tends to just ramble about the subject in general and not hit any of the specific points that I'm asking for. Last year I had a take-home exam in an operating systems class that I suspect one student fed entirely as prompts to an LLM, and it was... odd. The answer to every question was a paragraph or two of text, even in cases where the expected answer was true/false, or a number. And even when I did want text as the answer, it was way off, e.g. in one I asked them to explain one strength and one weakness of a specific scheduling algorithm on a given scenario. The submitted answer was just general rambling about scheduling algorithms. Some of this is probably within the reach of an expert using clever prompting strategies, but students who can do that could probably also answer the original question. :-) To be fair, I have seen the "ramble generically on the subject of the question" strategy manually implemented by humans too, in the hopes that if you throw enough BS at the question you might get partial credit by luck. Maybe designing assessments to be LLM-resistant will have the nice side benefit of reducing the viability of BSing as a strategy.
• greenhearth 4y ago
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  There's a neat trick I've seen teachers do to address the concern that regurgitation isn't learning (and it sort of mirrors the technique we use in machine learning): ask a follow-up question based on the essay. A student that has done the underpinning research to generate the essay should be able to field a closely-related question, offered in realtime. If they can't, that's concerning. (To be sure, some students will address this approach by having the machine auto-generate the essay than going off and reading around the answers the essay gives to understand the adjacent space to field the upcoming question. Good; that means they just used the machine as a "cliff's notes on the topic" generator, they still did some research).
  • riskable 4y ago
    That's also just testing memory. I had a teacher do that to me in high school where they graded papers during winter break and when they asked me about it in January I could barely remember that I wrote the document let alone the specifics of the topic. Of course, I have a exceptionally bad (37th percentile) long-term memory so maybe that's just me. Schooling in general seems to be geared towards tests of memory at the expense of understanding. High school me: "Well I understood it at the time" hehe
    • shadowgovt 4y ago
      > just testing memory IIUC, testing memory is half of pedagogy. Memory (or the student growing the necessary techniques and discipline to supplement an internal lack of it) is pretty key to (at least US) pedagogy in the primary / intermediate levels.
• cainxinth 4y ago
  I'm a copywriter. I've tested out several GPT-3-based services to see if they could speed up my workflow. None were up to my standards. I spent more time editing their semi-coherent output than it would have taken to just write the thing from scratch. I have no doubt, though, that the day is quickly approaching when they will be of greater use and even threaten the livelihoods of people like me.
  • nicbou 4y ago
    I needed a copywriter, and my experience with copywriters was similar to yours with GPT-3.
    • cainxinth 4y ago
      Yeah, I know. The abundance of mediocre copywriters helps me maintain my client portfolio. I’ve had clients drop me for someone cheaper many times before, but they often come back after having a bad experience.
  • notRobot 4y ago
    As a broke student who recently got started with copywriting to make ends meet, is there any way to email/message you with a question or two if you don't mind?
    • cainxinth 4y ago
      HN doesn't allow for DMs and I'd rather not give out my email. But you can ask me right here if you like.
      • notRobot 4y ago
        Thank you. How do you stand out from the competition and find well paying and stable work? I'm having a hard time finding places that value high-quality copy and are willing to pay for it.
        • 4y ago
• dawnerd 4y ago
  Solution? End homework assignments and make students write in person.
• Goronmon 4y ago
  People seems to be focusing on college level work. Isn't this going to also cause huge problems at the high school level? When teachers are dealing with large classrooms and a very limited amount of time spent in class, sentiments like "just learn to teach better" aren't going to be very helpful.
• greenhearth 4y ago
  How is it good? Writing essays teaches writing and also reading. It also teaches thinking critically about your writing and your reading. They are not pointless at all. It's exactly the same as taking code off the internet instead of trying to solve an algorithmic riddle. You may learn something new, but the problem solving process itself is lost and not developed.
  • mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Well you have a whole article, as well as lots of great debate in these comments telling you why it is (or isn’t) good. That’s the beauty of using those reading skills you mentioned.
    • greenhearth 4y ago
      What, "the education system, etc...?" Give me a break.
      • mynameisvlad 4y ago
        That's hardly an argument against it.
• WaitWaitWha 4y ago
  I disagree. Time to time I hire entry level people. Their writing in general, the primary method of communication is atrocious. I am not complaining about fundamental grammar or punctuation. I make those mistakes more frequently then most myself. There is no cohesive flow of thought; there is a lack of logical structure. They are unable to unpack their justification for recommendations. This costs us because we have to have multiple "draft reviews" until the document is succinct, or cost us when the recommendations are misunderstood. Over the last three decades I have seen the decline in the skill of writing.
  • marcus_holmes 4y ago
    So automate. If computers are better than students at writing essays, they're probably better than entry-level hires at writing whatever documents you need.
    • thwayunion 4y ago
      The purpose of writing in professional settings, especially internal documents for a engineering team, is to convey information. Even if models are better at writing essays, it's highly unlikely that the generated essays will convey useful and accurate information. Ie, the writing may be better as a context-free composition of words and symbols, but the semantic content of the writing within the context of the business will be at best nonsense and possibly even misleading. In GP's context, excellent writing that's pure bullshit is even worse than bad writing. Generating design documents that discuss real tradeoffs from a combination of email threads, slack messages, meetings, and code is quite a bit different from generating the billionth essay on Napoleon. We use the latter, in part, to practice the basic skills required for the former. But just because a model can do a half-decent job at the latter doesn't mean that it is anywhere near being able to do the former.
      • marcus_holmes 4y ago
        I haven't seen a proper document (as in "documentation") for years. The API code I have to link to is auto-documented by compiling together comments in the code base. The language documents are written by humans, probably, but in a style that a computer could easily replicate (if they can do better than a high-schooler essay, definitely). 90% of the writing tasks I've encountered in the last 10 years is content generation for content marketing. And failing that entire industry dying in a fire (which would be a good thing), having that auto-generated by AI would be simple and no loss to humanity. > it's highly unlikely that the generated essays will convey useful and accurate information My MBA essays didn't do this either, so I'm not sure what the problem is
• imwillofficial 4y ago
  This is awesome, I swear kids in school are the most creative problem solvers on earth. Just maybe not the problems you intended.
• guns 4y ago
  Essay writing unconsciously reinforces one’s opinion on a topic. This is an excellent tool for intellectual development when the student is free to argue any sensible position. Unfortunately, teachers often require students to choose orthodox positions, and thus essays become a primary tool for indoctrination. Cheating has no place in an academic institution, but machine generated essays are an interesting way for students to avoid enforced compliance.
• crazygringo 4y ago
  > free students from the drudgery of pointless essays that ask them to regurgitate content What "pointless" essays are these, may I ask? The classic 5-paragraph essay (intro, point #1, point #2, point #3, conclusion) is the foundation of the vast majority of non-fiction writing. It's teaching the most foundational writing skills. When students are asked to "regurgitate content" and they can't, it means they don't understand the content or they don't know how to write. They need to be able to master that before they can move onto more advanced writing (or more advanced content). I hated writing essays in high school, because I didn't understand the why or how, because I had mostly bad teachers. When I finally learned how to write papers in college, everything clicked and I went from getting C- grades to A grades in subjects that involved essays -- and the writing and explaining skills that I learned, I later wound up using daily in my professional life. But the problem was never with "pointless essays" -- it was that nobody ever taught me how and why to do them properly.
  • ethbr0 4y ago
    Well said and written! Your bad teachers would be proud. The theme in the comments seems to be "X is simple, therefore rote practice isn't valuable." But that glosses over the fact that fully understanding and being proficient at X is often a prerequisite for learning X'. Or in other words, calculators can do arithmetic. If we skip mastery of that, how do we propose to teach children differential equations? What is probably more important is the grading-side of ML: by leveraging more ML to auto-note and -score the mechanics of assignments, we free up teacher time to focus on interpreting and suggesting improvements for students, which many teachers are currently too overwhelmed to do.
  • chrisseaton 4y ago
    > The classic 5-paragraph essay (intro, point #1, point #2, point #3, conclusion) is the foundation of the vast majority of non-fiction writing. Never heard of this format or it being some kind of standard. Is five paragraphs really an ‘essay’?
    • tcmart14 4y ago
      It was pretty common when I started writing papers in school up till maybe 10th grade? I've never heard it as "classic 5-paragraph" but as "1-3-1 format." After 10th grade we introduced bringing in counter arguments.
• thwayunion 4y ago
  Have you given A grades to papers that you are certain were generated by LLMs? Or have you spoken with educators who have? IME, LLM-generated papers are more likely to generate concern about mental health than As. Seriously. I've had faculty comment that they are concerned that a third of their students are suffering from some sort of actual mental illness, and when I explain LLMs they are incredibly relieved that there is a possible alternative explanation.
• Aunche 4y ago
  > free students from the drudgery of pointless essays that ask them to regurgitate content (as opposed to essays that teach writing skills or critical thinking, which remain valuable) That's something that sounds good on paper, but it's incredibly difficult in practice. For one, students are all over the place in ability, so what's critical thinking for one student may be the most boring of intuition for another. Evaluating students based on their critical thinking is ripe for subjectivity. I've had multiple teachers who were great at teaching, but clearly had favorites and that was very discouraging for students that were on their bad side and received arbitrarily bad grades. The English teachers I most appreciated followed a boring rubric that incentivizes more formulaic writing. Also, regurgitating content is an important skill as well. Half the formal writing I do at work is documentation, which strictly falls into this category. The other half is design docs, which arguably is a form of regurgitation as well. I'd come up with the design anyways, and the doc is just to share it to others.
• la64710 4y ago
  Great now students can use this free up time to do more productive things. /s
• marcus_holmes 4y ago
  "when I were a lad"... we used to have lines given to us as a punishment. Cue Bart Simpson writing on a blackboard, but for us it was "200 lines saying I am not allowed to shitpost on HN" or whatever. If you could program a computer to print the lines for you, then 2 pages of dot-matrix printer output was accepted. I even had a teacher give me 2000 lines - a monstrous punishment by hand - because they knew I could code. They just didn't realise it would cost me an extra 5p in paper and nothing else. Teaching has moved on, and lines are no longer a thing. I hope teaching moves on from essays, because they're about the same level of educational achievement. Essay-writing is no longer a skill that anyone values outside academia, because we moved on. Academia should move on.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    Real work values the ability to write clear proposals and designs, which isn't far from an essay. Even in tech jobs. Sometimes I'm given a doc that takes so long to understand that it'd be better to just ask the author. There needs to be some way to teach writing skills, whether it's essays or something else. My real gripe with English class is that probably 95% of my assignments have been about fictional work where I'm supposed to describe a character's emotions or explain what the author meant by something. And seemingly the most boring books possible. It was useless and repetitive.
  • dehrmann 4y ago
    > Essay-writing is no longer a skill that anyone values outside academia, because we moved on. Downvote because essay writing is essentially researching a topic, forming an opinion, and communicating that opinion. This is applicable in almost every knowledge job.
    • marcus_holmes 4y ago
      Disagree. When I was writing essays for my MBA, I formed the opinion, searched for journal articles whose extracts agreed with my opinion, and cited them. I don't think I read a single article or researched a single topic. Essay-writing is about jumping through hoops; working out what the lecturer expects to see and then giving it to them. Admittedly that is also a skill required in every knowledge job (replace "lecturer" with "boss"), but I think there are better ways to teach this.
• endisneigh 4y ago
  A calculator and a language model aren’t really the same at all. That being said I’m generally of the opinion that homework should be optional anyway, so if this accelerates the demise of homework, fine. Evaluations should happen strictly in person under supervision. Cheating is just too easy these days.
• Viliam1234 4y ago
  > pointless essays that ask them to regurgitate content (as opposed to essays that teach writing skills or critical thinking, which remain valuable). It's all just a question of time. GPT-3 can regurgitate content, GPT-4 will exhibit writing skills, and GPT-5 will write with critical thinking... at least on the level that an average student does today.
• jvvw 4y ago
  What's more likely is that coursework will be abandoned and all assessment will be done via invigilated exams :-) (As it was in my degree in fact). I've marked 'essays' in computer science (billed as reports but equivalent enough for these purposes) and I think they are mainly set because the university wants the students to be able to write clearly which is a reasonable ambition. It's often really hard to assess 'understanding'. It's possible to detect non-understanding more easily - you ask enough questions and hope that the non-understanding slips. I guess you try to give students enough rope to hang themselves. Or of course sometimes it is obvious that they don't understand things from the get-go. But it's very hard to create questions novel enough that they can't basically be gamed with regurgitation. Universities do try but still difficult.
  • origin_path 4y ago
    Are you sure the essays are set for that reason? I had to write essays and reports a lot in my CS course but the reason was pretty clearly because the professors didn't want to do code reviews. They certainly didn't care about clarity of writing given the absolutely minimal feedback provided on those reports, the general uselessness of what little was provided and the fact that by the time you reach a university you've already sat through many years of educators teaching you how to write (or trying), so CS profs have no edge there. What taught me to write wasn't school or essay writing homework, not even at university level. The crucible that forged my own ability to spell and argue was the internet. Slashdot, blogging, later HN. If I was a teacher trying to teach people to write, I'd be tempted to pick some reddit forums, and ask students to find a comment they thought they could add to, then submit (to me) a set of replies to them. Online forums give you real time feedback in whether your argument landed or not, whether people understood what you meant and so on. Literally every mini-essay is graded by other readers, in real time, on demand (maybe not on writing quality but it never is, not even in school).
• __MatrixMan__ 4y ago
  There's a limit to how well you can know your students' writing styles if your classes are large. If this is something we want to change, the obvious path is to stop expecting a single teacher to grade 150 essays in a weekend. Fire 20 admin, hire 40 teachers (more or less, depending on the size of you district), then see how many AI's slip through.
• RocketOne 4y ago
  I don't believe, as an ex-English teacher, that any teacher thinks a student is 'acing' their essay if that's not shown in their other writing. Little Johnny, with his poor spelling and grammar, does not suddenly turn in an excellent paper with exemplary grammar, spelling and punctuation. So unless they teach computers how to screw up in the exactly the same way that Johnny does every time he writes a sentence, any teacher worth his salt is going to know it's not his work. As for those with excellent writing skills, well, they have less need to cheat but even they would be sussed out with in class essays and assignments.
  • hot_gril 4y ago
    > unless they teach computers how to screw up in the exactly the same way that Johnny does every time he writes a sentence You can ask an image generator for something like "Barack Obama painted by Picasso" and get a passable result, so it's probably possible to augment a writing model to mimic the style of Johnny's past essays.
• sebringj 4y ago
  I've tried doing this myself for company related compliance testing which mostly is bullshit anyway and doesn't apply to me. GPT3 is better used as a tentative backup tbh because it sometimes gives wrong answers or strange answers similar to how the images and video produced from Stable Diffusion and the like are strange and dreamlike or just impossibly wrong.
• ecshafer 4y ago
  Since this is hackernews: During my undergrad I had a professor that would give us our homeworks as normal. But to hand it in, we had to demo the project. He would tell us what to put into the program, check the outputs to make sure it works. Then ask us to show the code for specific parts to spot check it and ask us how it worked. Its essentially an oral exam, and would be hard to cheat it. It is hard to fight against technology but in person has a way of maintaining a good standard.
• trwayAcademic3 4y ago
  There's several purposes for these highly structured writing assignments. 1. What is the student's reading comprehension. Did they understand the reading assignments and lectures. 2. What is the student's writing skill. Is it free of grammar, spelling mistakes, and is it clear and comprehensible. 3. Can the student follow instructions. Did they carefully read the prompt and directly address all points of the prompt. Reading comprehension can be largely offloaded or doublechecked with cliff notes, youtube videos, or just bugging your classmates for their notes. Writing skill can be largely tool driven with spell check, grammar check, and the new NLP tools like grammarly or hemingway. This largely leaves modern college essays to testing bullet point 3, did the student fully address the prompt in the manner the teacher specified. In my undisclosed observations this is the primary point reduction in college writing that causes a student to not have an A. This is also the exact type of thing the substack suggests can be offhanded to GPT-3, what makes college writing awful for the college students. If this is the case, are we going to build anti-GPT3 techniques such as have students write in a controller lab setting? Are we going to accept that a certain number of submissions will be machine-enhanced and let grade inflation continue? Are we going to accept that modern college essays might be more an exercise in editing machine output than generating new text? The best math classes accepted the invention of the calculator, the computer, and use them as tools to teach even more math.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  18-20 years ago I would just put randomly generated gibberish in my papers after making my point and showing competence in the topic but not having met the minimum word requirements. The educational attainment from my peers was so low that teachers were pretty understanding and gave high marks because I did the point of the assignment. Reminds me of that, but GPT-3 is pretty impressive.
• abeppu 4y ago
  In multiple subthreads here, people are embracing the idea that if machines can just write all the prose -- great, why should humans bother? As with image generation, one thing I think we haven't adequately considered is once a sizable fraction of the available online data is machine generated, but isn't marked as such, and we begin training models on the outputs of the last generation of models, structurally we can enter a different regime. A sequence of models each trained on the prior model's output can converge to meaningfully different behavior, because we're repeatedly, incrementally changing the task by changing the training data distribution. If _all_ the data is generated by the prior model, this process seeks a fixed point which is reflective of the model architecture and not the original training data. There's a very real possibility that using generative models more (and publishing their outputs) can make these models worse in the future. Weirder, however, is no one has really had the opportunity to look at what happens to human language when a sizable fraction of what we read is produced by these models. Will we normalize any quirks of their output? Will we reproduce or incorporate any idiosyncratic features into our own writing? How will we adapt in a changing linguistic environment?
  • jedberg 4y ago
    I'm not to worried about convergence of the models that use prior training data. Eventually the models won't work and people will notice, and either create new training data or go back to only using older data to train. Also there will always be people who "want to do it the old way" and will still create new art and new writing, which will seed the training data. As for normalizing the quirks of the output -- maybe? But would that be so bad? Language changes all the time, it's constantly mutated by influencers (not the Instagram kind, but the ones that have existed for centuries). Look at how British English is literally called "The Queen's English" because it actually shifted to how the Queen spoke, since she ruled for so long and was very influential to that society. Also it should be noted that some news articles, especially in finance, have been written by computers for over a decade now, and not a lot of people seem to have noticed.
    • js8 4y ago
      > Eventually the models won't work and people will notice, and either create new training data or go back to only using older data to train That has already happened in "free market capitalism". Prices are supposed to be the representative models of the product quality, but became decoupled from it because companies set the prices based on competitors and not based on quality of what they sell.
• jimbokun 4y ago
  Are we sure the language models won't do just as well writing essays requiring writing skills or critical thinking? What about a couple years from now? Getting a good grade on a class assignment is getting pretty darn close to passing the Turing test.
• FigurativeVoid 4y ago
  My degree is in English. Specifically I focused a lot on composition theory. Or writing about people writing. I have a few thoughts about this. 1. If it isn't rampant now, it will be in a few years time. Cheating is highly incentivized in college, and this makes it very hard to catch. I doubt you could generate a thesis this way, but you could certainly pass your electives. 2. Writing is highly conventionalized. Half of getting a good grade is following conventions. AI will get really good at this. 3. I suspect ESL students will use this first. When tutoring writing, extremely smart ESL students were getting poor grades in writing courses for having bad grammar, vocabulary, whatever. This will help them get good grades until the AI surpasses native speakers, who will then use it. 4. This is really tragic for students. Writing is really great for solidifying thoughts and learning. I still journal to this day just because of this. This will deeply affect how people learn. But the outcome remains to be seen. Edit: Better words
• chiefalchemist 4y ago
  > regurgitate content (as opposed to essays that teach writing skills or critical thinking, which remain valuable). Thanks for the clarification. That said, Devil's Advocate here... But isn't "regurgitate content" a writing skill? That be all still quite a bit? Don't they have to walk before they can run (i.e., fine-tuning communication skills)? Regurgitation essays are graded, and that produces a bell curve of quality, doesn't that indicate the skill is a skill worth recognizing? Isn't the lack of such a simple skill indicative of something in a student? I agree that critical thinking is essential. It's something too few of us seem to have. But aren't these essays the gateway to that next step? That is, if you can't be critical of your own ideas, and their organization and presentation, are you truly ready to move on to next level lessons in critical thinking? Put another way, if it were math, why teach addition and subtraction? Why not just move on to calculus? Or higher?
• origin_path 4y ago
  There is a need for solutions on several levels here: 1. Quick, tactical. The most obvious fix would be for AI companies offering web access to LLMs to simply make searchable all the text they generated, ideally via an API so aggregator services can index and locate text given samples of it. If you pay enough (corporate/enterprise subscriptions etc), your output doesn't get indexed. Students would be forced to find LLM services that don't do this but there likely won't be that many, as offering such services for free is expensive. 2. Classroom changes. Force students to record their screen as they work on the essay, so teachers can see as it gets typed out. Of course again, some students can overcome this barrier, but it's about raising the bar. 3. Changes of approach. The hardest fix but ultimately the only solution. Students are forced to write arbitrary essays ultimately due to a belief that this teaches people "how to think". Ask what the justification for a humanities degree is, for example, and you'll probably get this answer. If teachers are awarding good grades to AI generated text either their exercises aren't testing this ability, or AI can actually think and should be protected as a sentient life form. I think it's more likely that these essays aren't a good way to test thinking skills. What could work better? Something more direct, maybe? Testing people on logic puzzles, rationality tests, bias check tasks and so on. I definitely feel our society has major difficulties with rationality at scale, and we saw this during COVID in which people routinely conflated rationality/wisdom with blindly outsourcing their thinking to academics and civil servants, regardless of the underlying merits of the arguments those professors were actually making. There's also the other goal of teaching people how to write, but being able to write well is largely about being able to think well, once you mastered the basics of spelling and grammar anyway. With modern AI driven spelling/grammar checkers it's also less important to deeply master the rules, and time can be better spent on the learning how to think and structure an argument aspect.
• atlgator 4y ago
  Better alternative to Adderall.
• noasaservice 4y ago
  I'm glad I had a specific teacher in HS for English. He had us do a positional paper over a topic we were passionate about. Topics were first come first serve. We got them approved. And when everyone was done getting topics, he then said "You are now arguing for the OPPOSITE of what you asked for." He later explained why he did so. Obviously, the dept had paper requirements... But he also wanted us to learn a topic and viewpoints from all the angles, including ones you would normally dismiss. It was also a learning moment of "understand the issue before making opinions, and then form a well thought out decision". I've never seen his style before or since.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• gnicholas 4y ago
  I wonder if this will affect the split between term papers and in-class essay exams. My wife is a professor and has historically assigned the former, on the theory that it's more flexible for students and there's no downside if the final is open-book. But it seems that in-class essay exams may gain popularity if professors believe that students will use AI tools on term papers. Students who don't use tools like this might also advocate for (or simply select into classes that use) in-class exams.
• js8 4y ago
  Students are not the only ones who needs to learn critical thinking, the AI needs to learn it too.
• whiplash451 4y ago
  I don’t share your enthusiasm. Essays are a great way to learn structured writing for kids.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  Required intro Writing courses in college aren't so bad these days, at least in many places, shifting more to a critical thinking model of writing construction. That said, other college courses are often required to have a writing component where it simply doesn't make sense and you get nonsense assignments. I like the ability of AI to respond to nonsense with well-constructed nonsense. Here's a nice essay I generated that demonstrates the ability for GPT-3 to respond to even ridiculous prompts, so it should have no problem plowing through the average topics encountered in school. Prompt: Write an essay about the horror of ice cream (start text: Murder) I can't think of anything worse than ice cream. I mean, maybe it's not as bad as, say, murder, but it's up there. I shudder to think about the horror of ice cream. It conjures images of congealed dairy product, cloyingly sweet and sickeningly creamy. To add insult to injury, it’s often served at incredibly cold temperatures, making it a perfect vehicle for achey tummies and jittery limbs. Then you have to deal with the guilt. After all, you're eating something that was created from someone else's death. It's a horror that doesn't need any extra fuel. Ice cream is already one of the most gruesome things imaginable. Imagine adding in the thought of someone else's death? It would be like watching a horror movie and having the killer pop up out of nowhere, ready to devour your flesh. And that's exactly what happens when you eat ice cream--you become a victim in your own life-sized horror movie. To put it bluntly, ice cream is dreadful – and there’s no getting around it. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it’s one of the most reviled foods on the planet. After all, why would anyone want to consume something that tastes terrible, feels terrible on the stomach and makes you feel like you’ve been beaten with an ice cream scoop? Ice cream has also been linked to violence. In 2005, there was a murder spree in Maryland in which four people were killed by an ice cream enthusiast named Jeffrey Dahmer. Dahmer was known for killing and cannibalizing some of his victims. He would lure young men into his home with the promise of free ice cream and then murder them.
• jrm4 4y ago
  As a non-tenure track college instructor, I'm pretty much "good" on this as well. I think perhaps obviously the bigger underlying difficulty is that very often "teachers" aren't seriously empowered to, nor really judged on their ability to, teach. In higher-ed of course, it's because publishing is king. I have sympathy for the great number of people who teach in higher ed for whom this will make things harder -- but also it's gotta change. (For what it's worth, I've seen that "writing" from college students has improved drastically over the last decade or so and I'm pretty sure the vast majority of them are not doing this. I just think they are more involved with the "written word," even if those "words" include emoji, etc. But grammar and even logic have improved tremendously; the only downside is that it all sounds like branding/advertising copy. But that's better than what we had before)
• kazinator 4y ago
  The value of an assignment like "write three good things and bad things about biotech" is simply that you have to write something that is halfway coherent, using complete sentences, with good punctuation and grammar. It doesn't matter that you don't learn much about biotech, if anything at all. The idea that because a machine can learn to do that, children don't have to, isn't very sound. Calculators are not comparable because they aren't AI; calculators require a detailed specification of the calculations to be performed. They don't just write your math homework. Just wait, AI will do that too. Word problems like "If John has three times as many apples as Bob, who has four fewer than Mary, ..." will be solvable by AI, and so then calculators will go away, being replaced by zero effort.
• dudeinhawaii 4y ago
  When I was in school, I had the mindset that I wasn't going to discover new insights about very common historical events or writings. I was given a topic like "write a 50 page paper describing the impact of Teutoburg Forest on Roman politics" and rather than try for new insight, I searched the web and found a couple dozen sources. I copy pasted those sources and fragments into a giant word document. I then organized them into what would roughly make sense in terms of timeline and insights. Lastly, I went through and paraphrased every single sentence from start to finish and added in an introductory and conclusion/summary paragraph. The end result was 100% unique (as measured by computer plagiarism software) and netted me an A+. The professor was dumfounded as to how I came up with a 100% original 50 page paper on such a common topic. Having ML write your paper is obviously cheating but isn't too far from what I did mentally. I think the valuable thing being lost is the ability to research a topic, quickly understand what's relevant, and structure the results.
  • lijogdfljk 4y ago
    To be fair though, that sounds... mostly legit, what you did that is. Ie in many cases in school i don't think they actually care to teach you the subject. What good is that subject really going to have on your life going forward? Even if the sense of ethics or history-repeating i suspect it's quite low. What those meaningless tasks can do (though highly dependent on the person, i assume) is teach you how to research, how to communicate, and how to cite. At least that was always my takeaway from many subjects in school that were subjective (ie not math, science, etc). The content is often the least important aspect of many early learnings. .. but then again i loathed school growing up, so who am i to speak on the subject lol.
  • yoyohello13 4y ago
    In my mind, what you did was actually the goal of the paper. You researched the prevailing theories of the "impact of Teutoburg Forest on Roman politics" and summarized them in your own words. You probably have a much better understanding of the subject than if an AI did it for you though.
  • insane_dreamer 4y ago
    > I think the valuable thing being lost is the ability to research a topic, quickly understand what's relevant, and structure the results. And that's arguably a more valuable skill than the writing itself.
• ksaj 4y ago
  How's this for an educational product idea: Use AI to read a student's essay, then produce exam questions based on the content. This test would be delivered orally (with accommodation for disabilities that might impact their ability to complete the task, of course). The student should ace the test if they understood the subject well enough to ace an essay on it. They should know the answers very well, since the questions are specific to what they've apparently written. The mark they get on this test would be the research part of the mark they receive for the essay. Then it is just grammar, organization, etc. thereafter.
• ineedasername 4y ago
  Something I haven't seen mentioned much is the potential for this to actually be a powerful research tool. As a trivial example, here's a prompt using the highest quality Da Vinci model: Write an analysis of the 2020 MLB baseball season The 2020 MLB baseball season was one of the most unique seasons in recent memory. The season started later than usual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it was shortened to 60 games. This meant that every game was even more important, as there were fewer opportunities for teams to make up ground in the standings. The Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series, defeating the Tampa Bay Rays in six games. It was a dominant performance by the Dodgers, who won all three of their postseason series. They became the first team since the 2009 New York Yankees to win a World Series after losing the previous year's Fall Classic. In 2007 The Rays made an incredible run to the World Series, becoming just the second team in MLB history to reach the Fall Classic after winning fewer than 40% of their regular season games. For the 2020 season they were led by their pitching staff, which posted a historic ERA of 3.56 during the regular season. Though this is at least a little potential than actual capabilities, since fact checking other responses to questions has shown problems-- correct facts in the wrong context, e.g. similar questions gave stats for a team that were correct, but for a season other than the 2020 one asked for in the prompt.
• kotlin2 4y ago
  This article contains a logical error that I see quite frequently, which is the belief that something being anti-X is somehow pro better alternative Y. In this article, the author believes that writing that stimulates critical thinking and analysis would do a better job at preparing students than the current five paragraph essays that students typically write. They argue that the prevalence of text generators will force change in education from the current system to something better. The argument makes no sense when considered analytically. There is nothing special about the factual five paragraph essay that lends itself well to text generators. Rather, the fundamental issue is that humans have discovered ways of training ML algorithms that can perform almost any task that a human can do. There's nothing stopping the creation of text generators trained to write any conceivable school assignment. Cheating is only going to get easier and more sophisticated over time. This presents a serious issue that may require rethinking how students are evaluated in general.
• gojomo 4y ago
  Narayanan (~randomwalker) is writing a book about, & with likely title, "AI Snake Oil". Of course there's plenty of BS around the domain – every epochal advance arrives inside a phalanx of pretenders & hypesters & scammers. But the rapid progress in the field risks nearly any tangible statements about "AI that does not and cannot work" – the book's stated theme – becoming invalidated by on-the-ground events between composition & dead-tree printing. Thus this viewpoint will more and more be driven towards a sort of timeless mood of generic skepticism & even denialism. There'll be a big audience for that. It's comforting. It meets people at the limits of their understanding. It assuages their fears. But like a head-of-lettuce, it won't age well, except in comparison to even shorter tenures. I think this 9-para, ~500 word… 'essay' – dare I call it that? – is an example of the trap Narayanan finds himself in. Sure, essay assignments have all sorts of long-recognized limitations, dutifully recited here, as could have also been said in the 1990s, or 1960s, or 1930s. But their longevity in education – their 'lindyness' – suggests they had some value, as both exercise & evaluation. No easy replacement was found in the leisurely decades (centuries?) they were relied-upon. Now, through K-12, they're done-for, in just about any case where a student remains unobserved, with access to LLM writing-assistance. In another 2-5 years, LLMs will not just be writing A+ Senior-in-High-School-level essays, but postgraduate star-student level papers. Against that, Narayanan offers hand-wavy bluster: that somehow, in unstated ways, the "teachers and adjunct professors [who] are underpaid and overworked", who already in the ancestral environment had to depend on the "easier" but "mind-numbing" and "easier to grade" essay-assignments, will somehow now figure out a better approach, in a more-difficult environment, where their go-to solution for generations has been yanked away. Sure, little Timmy has never swam before, but throw him into the deep end. His problem isn't "callousness or incompetence", so he'll figure it out! Narayanan's understatement: "The adjustment will be painful, for sure." To the extent there will be adaptations, they are unlikely to come from the AI-denialists, who underplay access to these tools as no-big-deal. Adaptations could include uncomfortable steps already on the rise, like closely surveilling students in tech-excluded environments, to be sure they practice, & can perform, those thinking-steps that we'd rather they not fully outsource to cheap thinking-substitutes. Or sessions with AI tutors, who can drill students in more-intensive ways than those "underpaid and overworked" teachers in large institutions have historically managed. Workable solutions will more likely be inspired by Stephenson's (1995) 'The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" than Narayanan's (2023?) 'AI Snake Oil'.
• karaterobot 4y ago
  I'm getting a little tired of the fallacious argument which compares some new technology to an old technology from the past, and says "see how people were afraid of that technology from the past, yet their fears proved unfounded? In the same way, fears about this new technology are unwarranted." The reasons I grumble whenever I see this argument made are: 1. The things being analogized are usually not related in such a way that one prediction not coming true suggests that the other prediction won't come true. You have to examine the likelihoods in isolation, you cannot reason from analogy about everything. 2. Often, predictions about the negative consequences do come true, it's just that we adjust our response to them and fit them into our new view of the world. For example, the prediction that allowing calculators in the classroom would make students worse at arithmetic wasn't wrong, we just decided that we didn't care if students are good at arithmetic anymore. That's fine if it's how we decide the world should be, but it is not the same thing as the prediction being wrong. 3. More generally, the way I view disruptive technologies is that they are not "just like" some previous technology, and therefore analogous to it. What I mean is, when someone says "people staring at their phones is just like people staring at newspapers in the past", they ignore the fact that phones replaced newspapers. There was a competition, and newspapers lost, so we have to acknowledge there is some meaningful difference between the two that explains why.
• beloch 4y ago
  I think we're going to see the return of the oral exam (i.e. You show up to the prof's office and they ask you questions on the spot.). Perhaps not for massive low level courses, but likely for advanced courses. They're going to be the bane of the timid, but they do provide ample motivation to study and require elaborate measures to cheat on.