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I guess I have a fairly cynical take on this. I think this just exposes that AI is fundamentally going to undermine the value of education in certain fields. Th

• visarga 4y ago
  I give you another anti-cheating solution: test all exams on chatGPT, by giving it first the tasks, then the answers for self grading. If the model fails, use the problem, if not, change it until chatGPT fails. The task should always require human intervention to pass.
  • oceanplexian 4y ago
    I think the purpose of exams is deeply misunderstood. They are supposed to be a feedback system for the teacher and the student so the student can improve. They’re not a competition or an intelligence measuring stick. ChatGPT is kind of the perfect tool for that; if a student doesn’t understand maybe AI can help then get to the right answer and give them personalized attention. Something that IMO teachers fail at due to the nature of large class sizes where teachers can’t help tutor each student.
    • hgsgm 4y ago
      How does GPT help that at all? It can't diagnose and correct misconceptions, only proffer its own. And sadly, colleges and employers deeply misunderstand the purpose of exams, which forces students to misuse them.
  • 8note 4y ago
    I think this will optimize for unclear questions and tasks. The ai will fail because it can't figure out what it is you were looking for, and the student will too
• pupppet 4y ago
  But isn't there value in a student researching and putting their thoughts to (virtual) paper? A lot of this testing is more about the journey than destination, and students are losing these valuable skills by cheating.
• mustacheemperor 4y ago
  >any tests that test someone's ability to multiply and divide large numbers is basically a worthless test Right now, teaching elementary school aged children to solve complex multiplication and division is considered an effective way to teach people critical thinking, persistence, and basic logical reasoning structure. Structured education typically relies on an ability to assess student improvement, so 3rd graders don't get a calculator when they take a multiplications table test, even though we'd all use one at our desk at work. I would surmise that likewise there is value to students learning to read, analyze, and report insight about a text, to attempt to identify symbolism and patterns, to communicate their ideas effectively, and to be assessed about that - even if by the time they're in the workforce they'll usually just ask an AI to do it.
  • musicale 4y ago
    Learning how to multiply and divide large numbers was one of my earliest exposures to numerical algorithms. I usually use a calculator or Python for large numerical computations, but the algorithmic understanding is something I use every day.
• SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
  The problem is with areas like reading comprehension. The underlying skill is still human-value-added today - asking ChatGPT to produce a summary of your comment isn't anything like a replacement for reading it and understanding it myself. But educators can't read minds to determine if real comprehension is taking place, and the only way they currently know how to measure it is through tests which ChatGPT can cheat.
• comfypotato 4y ago
  I think you meant “stopping people cheating isn’t going to change that”. In my friendly/complementary rebuttal, the catch lies somewhere in the phase of learning foundational material. In the same way that traditional mathematics education emphasizes doing problems by hand that could be solved computer, there’s something to be said for learning to parse the research material that ChatGPT has indexed when you’re writing a term paper. It’s worth noting here that math education may be moving away from the rote memorization and routine problem solving that today’s math researchers state are essential. ChatGPT has made it much harder to detect cheating on untimed power tests. The biggest downside I see to this is that it makes an old problem worse. If a prof has no choice but to administer a non-computer (proctored) timed exam, students who take tests slowly or have anxiety disorders are going to suffer.
  • oceanplexian 4y ago
    At the end of the day though, it doesn’t really matter. The person cheating is failing themselves if the foundational material you’re talking about is so important. If they can somehow manage to pass enough courses while using an AI, and then get a degree out of it, or a 4.0 GPA, or whatever then the degree wasn’t that valuable to begin with. This already mirrors the real world pretty well. Outside of your first job or two, nobody really cares what your GPA is or what college you graduated from. In the real world if you managed to cheat with an AI you’d probably get a nice promotion. I don’t personally see a downside, other than the demise of certain flawed notions of academic success that deserve to die out anyway.
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • Jensson 4y ago
      Lets say we are training ChatGPT2, would you let it use ChatGPT for solving things? Do you think it would learn better if it had to learn itself without relying on ChatGPT? We learn by doing. Relying on smart tools puts you in a local optima, it is hard for you to improve over those tools, but people who don't rely on tools continue improving and then start using the tools later.
• seppel 4y ago
  > I guess I have a fairly cynical take on this. I think this just exposes that AI is fundamentally going to undermine the value of education in certain fields. The fact some tests can be "cheated" by AI really just suggests that some skills have little to no value in our future AI-prevalent world. If you think about it, most of the stuff you learn at school (beyond reading and writing) has not much value apart from certifying that you are not stupid and compliant to do stupid tasks.
  • gonzo41 4y ago
    I had to rearrange and equation at work yesterday. I let everyone know that 9th grade was not a waste.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
    Really what we need to do is take a good hard look at how education system works and whether or not it is aligned with our goals. Sadly, that's a pretty massive undertaking and no one can be arsed to support doing difficult things on a societal level any more.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    The value of knowledge in school is to have a "liberal arts" baseline, for future selection and pursuit of an area of interest, and a basis for comparison for the river of bullshit you spend the rest of your life wading upstream through, so you don't get fooled by age old scams and lies about how this time is different.
• teeray 4y ago
  I think that the only solution may be for the essays to be written in controlled environments (school). If AI forces schools to do more school in school and less homework, I count that as a massive win. What I would give for the countless hours of my childhood and teenage years wasted on useless homework…
• jelled 4y ago
  You'll still be able to test writing, but going forward it will need to be done in a proctored setting. Similar how you would test grade school math given the existence of calculators.
  • ceres 4y ago
    Honest question: how valuable is the current mode of testing (based rote memorization) if much of that can be done by AI anyway? Maybe it’s time for new testing methodologies?
    • HEmanZ 4y ago
      Where are people testing just rote memorization? At least 20 years ago when I was in lower school, most of what we did had only a very small memorization component. The SAT, ACT, SAT subject exams, etc only barely rely on memorization, and many questions have no memorization component at all. It’s why 4th graders can get top-percentile scores on some of these. You need both memorization and applied reasoning to be taught in school. Without something to apply reasoning to you can’t really reason about anything. And without applied reasoning, memorization is pretty useless.
    • 8note 4y ago
      I think it's fine for ai to be able to answer test questions? If the ai can get a good answer, the questions must be fairly well constructed, and it's reasonable to expect a student exposed to the same info could also come up with a good answer.
• kenjackson 4y ago
  With schools though you often need to learn things along the way that can easily be cheated with an AI, but the end goal not so much. For example, writing a basic screenplay can be done with ChatGPT, but it can’t write one that will likely be turned into a movie/show. And automation will continue to make some jobs obsolete and create new ones. For example in youth sports we don’t get great coverage of youth/school events. I’m hopeful in the not too distant future we can get game summaries and stats for all games — and editors will probably be needed to add commentary. That’s something I’d love to see.
• mrtksn 4y ago
  Yeah, no. Training people doesn't work like that. Education is about training people, we don't utilize the output of the kids and reward them with grades that they can exchange for food and toys. The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware of their development so we can improve it. Another thing we do is selecting the particularly good ones for further advanced training. The problem with cheating is that it provides wrong data about their progress, you don't want to end up with a generation that cheated their way up without learning anything. The selection for further training is probably not that big of a problem, its mostly about supply and demand and ChatGPT won't change that.
  • yanderekko 4y ago
    >The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware of their development so we can improve it. Another thing we do is selecting the particularly good ones for further advanced training. You're missing the point. Why are we making them achieve progress on something that is being trivialized by AI? Let them use AI as a complementary tool and test them on something that requires measurable human skill. If this is difficult it's a sign that perhaps you're not teaching anything valuable.
    • rocketbop 4y ago
      Respectfully, I think it's you who are missing the point. There is value in teaching humans to communicate and synthesize information. It's possible that in the future the best thinkers and philosophers and historians and political analysts will be AI, but 1/ we are very very far from that, and 2/ it's important for civilisation that we don't leave thinking to the machines.
      • mrtksn 4y ago
        Exactly, educations is not a vocational school where we teach people useful skills so they start doing whatever they learned. Machines have long been able to do things that we teach in the schools, the purpose of teaching is developing people. Once they are developed(that means they built understanding of how nature and society works and how to interact with) and its time to expect an output, only then we can talk about teaching useful skills. Vocational schools do exist and they are useful but that's not what we are concerned about. People who cheat not to learn useful skills simply spend their time and money.
• kube-system 4y ago
  Someone who can use a calculator to solve a problem, still has to understand the concepts being used in order to know what buttons to press on the calculator. They will have learned what those calculations mean, and how they work. Using an AI to crap out an essay with no understanding of the topic is not the same thing. While an essay is the way we test students, it is a stand in for measuring understanding, which is the ultimate goal.
• jimbokun 4y ago
  This is understating the problem. In months or years, it's not clear if any human will be able to provide economic value, relative to state of the art AI. I don't see where any fundamental barriers lie between current AI and surpassing humans across the board. What can humans do that is unachievable by AI in the foreseeable future, given the current rate of advancement?
  • yunwal 4y ago
    We are still leaps and bounds away from robotics that can match the precision and versatility of human hands. I also think in terms of knowledge work, we’ll have to work through at least a few more plateaus before we automate away most humans. Transformer models were a huge leap, but you can see us pushing against their limits already.
• sega_sai 4y ago
  I'm not sure I buy this argument. People still need to learn that 2+2=4, derivative of sine is cosine and similarly simple things in non-STEM fields. Sure these questions can be answered by ChatGPT trivially, but it doesn't mean they don't need to be taught.
  • eagleinparadise 4y ago
    That's not the way the system works. You spend a semester or a year going deep about Calculus, Geometry, AP Euro, or whatever. These are all things most people don't need to know unless they specialize.. Perhaps instead, we should have a semester or year classes through 8-12 + college discuss the nature of manias, like analyzing the tulip bubble, crypto bubble, 2008 mortgage bubble, etc. These are all common things that happen over and over again. Lessons which can permanently (and frequently) be called upon. You can measure and grade people with these topics that aren't officially taught. We just decide to teach less important things
    • lofatdairy 4y ago
      I'm not convinced calculus, geometry and European are "less important". I don't even think you can understand truly understand the tulip bubble without understanding early modern European history (or 08 and the crypto bubble and US history for that matter -- e.g. the birth of the Fed and all that). It's not enough to simply say "don't get caught in a speculative bubble" because 1. it's hard to know when you're in a bubble (housing has utility after all, part of the reason this was so disastrous was because hardly anyone defaulted on a mortgage before) 2. people will get hurt regardless (it's not like only the speculators got hurt in 08) 3. this is sorta just "no shit" advice in general, and yet people still get caught up in speculation. So if you want to convince anyone, you need to be able to formulate arguments on broad history rather than relying on pedagogy to simply convince people not to take some unclear action. There's probably a lot more to be said about math education in general, but I'll just note that this seems to be a recurring debate in general. Personally, I wished my math education was more rigorous and more abstract. Obviously not everyone uses calculus, but also not everyone takes calculus. I'd also rather a society where a significant portion of students are trained to think of things in terms of rates of change and accumulation of change and apply that to solve physical problems, rather than the society in which even talented students are just trained to add up spare change.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  > The fact some tests can be "cheated" by AI really just suggests that some skills have little to no value in our future AI-prevalent world. That's like saying 'speech has no value'. It doesn't have value on its own, but if you can't speak then suddenly there is a whole pile of stuff you can no longer do. The ability to put your thoughts down in writing and to organize them into a hopefully coherent form is an act that has implications far beyond the writing itself. Besides the fact that it can help you to organize your thoughts in the process. Plenty of times when I write a longer piece I find out halfway that one or more of my assumptions were wrong and then I get to fix that and re-evaluate my position. It isn't rare at all to go through several such iterations for a single text and at the end of it I have a much better insight into the material that I thought I already knew well enough to write about. Don't underestimate the value of these foundational skills.
• gsatic 4y ago
  Right. Why run and build muscle, if your avatar in the shitverse can run the whole day? Take it easy. Lie down. Put the googles on. Dont worry about the muscles.
• deleted 4y ago
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• michaelbrave 4y ago
  Some years back I heard several mathemeticians advocating that the kind of math we teach should be more proof and theory based and less computation and memorization based because computers can do the computation bits better, and so knowing more than the basics of it was like putting our effort into the wrong part of the subject, and our current education system emphasises that portion of the subject the most. I imagine many avenues of education and careers will have to start shifting like that, leave the parts the computer is good at for the comupter, specialize in the parts the computer is less good at then work together with the machine.
• afpx 4y ago
  AI is just an enhancer to those who already have creativity and ideas. Expect a Golden Age.