4 ms·

Well, suppose there's two reasons his daughter has this assignment. 1. To learn the content of European history. For this, a chatbot is no different than Googl

Well, suppose there's two reasons his daughter has this assignment. 1. To learn the content of European history. For this, a chatbot is no different than Google, Wikipedia, or a dusty leather almanac. They do a job, they have known limitations, and you can use them deliberately. This doesn't concern me. 2. To learn how to write, capturing complex ideas and presenting them clearly. This is a skill that takes decades to master. It's easy to imagine an AI autocomplete system that handles sentence structure and grammar that becomes a crutch. This seems like a much more serious problem.

ghaff 4y ago
Yeah, even if the student took the trouble to look up a couple Wikipedia articles or whatever and got the model to make changes so that it was factually correct, they still mostly wouldn't have constructed and written the output which, at least at a high school level, is probably at least 50% of the point of the exercise.
dgudkov 4y ago
>For this, a chatbot is no different than Google... Exactly. AI chatbots look like something that can replace Google search and become the next big thing after search engines[+]. Like Google, AI chatbots will crawl and ingest the web. They won't be able to synthesize anything new, but it can be a convenient, very human-friendly way of querying the global knowledge base that the internet has become. [+] If AI chatbots become successful, they will definitely start injecting ads and spoil everything again.
jay_kyburz 4y ago
Yes, but now that we have a tool, it will never go away. Nobody knows how to grow food, or build their houses, or do 100 little things that we rely on for our modern life. Do we really need to be able to "write" a sentence. My kids (and my own) handwriting is almost unreadable, but by age 10 all of their work is done on a laptop. Do they even need to be able to write by hand any more? update: I'm more concerned that we cannot yet run these tools locally on computers we control, and with information we feed into them. I'm more concerned about the dystopian nightmare of having the advertising industry in charge of our sentence writing tools.
- willhslade 4y ago
  The Antikythera mechanism says hello.
  - jay_kyburz 4y ago
    People didn't forget how read the stars because they were using their Antikytheras too much.
    - willhslade 4y ago
      > Yes, but now that we have a tool, it will never go away. Tools can go away. They can come back, too. But they can go away. I would also point to the Japanese experience with firearms. But I'm guessing you already know about that too.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> They do a job, they have known limitations, and you can use them deliberately. I think you're severely underplaying this (as many other commenters are). Google, Wikipedia and a dusty leather almanac are, for typical use cases, mostly right - and when they are wrong, they're wrong in specific ways you can quickly learn to spot and correct for. The output of GPTChat, or Copilot, is mostly wrong. Sometimes overtly, usually subtly, almost always randomly wrong. And since the problem domain is open-ended, you can't just make the GPT-3 output right by logically inverting it - there are many more possible wrong answers the model could give you than there are right answers.

ghaff 4y ago

Yeah, even if the student took the trouble to look up a couple Wikipedia articles or whatever and got the model to make changes so that it was factually correct, they still mostly wouldn't have constructed and written the output which, at least at a high school level, is probably at least 50% of the point of the exercise.

dgudkov 4y ago

>For this, a chatbot is no different than Google... Exactly. AI chatbots look like something that can replace Google search and become the next big thing after search engines[+]. Like Google, AI chatbots will crawl and ingest the web. They won't be able to synthesize anything new, but it can be a convenient, very human-friendly way of querying the global knowledge base that the internet has become. [+] If AI chatbots become successful, they will definitely start injecting ads and spoil everything again.

jay_kyburz 4y ago

Yes, but now that we have a tool, it will never go away. Nobody knows how to grow food, or build their houses, or do 100 little things that we rely on for our modern life. Do we really need to be able to "write" a sentence. My kids (and my own) handwriting is almost unreadable, but by age 10 all of their work is done on a laptop. Do they even need to be able to write by hand any more? update: I'm more concerned that we cannot yet run these tools locally on computers we control, and with information we feed into them. I'm more concerned about the dystopian nightmare of having the advertising industry in charge of our sentence writing tools.

willhslade 4y ago
The Antikythera mechanism says hello.
- jay_kyburz 4y ago
  People didn't forget how read the stars because they were using their Antikytheras too much.
  - willhslade 4y ago
    > Yes, but now that we have a tool, it will never go away. Tools can go away. They can come back, too. But they can go away. I would also point to the Japanese experience with firearms. But I'm guessing you already know about that too.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> They do a job, they have known limitations, and you can use them deliberately. I think you're severely underplaying this (as many other commenters are). Google, Wikipedia and a dusty leather almanac are, for typical use cases, mostly right - and when they are wrong, they're wrong in specific ways you can quickly learn to spot and correct for. The output of GPTChat, or Copilot, is mostly wrong. Sometimes overtly, usually subtly, almost always randomly wrong. And since the problem domain is open-ended, you can't just make the GPT-3 output right by logically inverting it - there are many more possible wrong answers the model could give you than there are right answers.