4 ms·

Training people (or anything) using a flawed objective function is not useful. Writing essays, specifically expanding a list of well-reasoned bullet points int

Training people (or anything) using a flawed objective function is not useful. Writing essays, specifically expanding a list of well-reasoned bullet points into communicative written prose will be a worthless operation in the future, and likely already is.

mrtksn 4y ago
Have you not noticed that when you write something down with the purpose of summarising it in a structured way you tend to understand it better? There's no market for kids essays, we never made them write these things with the purpose of being useful output. The market for essays for grown ups is also very small, making kids write things down was not with the purpose of covering the case of them becoming journalists or something. It's just that makes them learn to think and structure their thought process. That's why people take notes and write down things even if its not going to be graded or read by anyone else.
- hosh 4y ago
  Agreed. Yet many students, parents, and even teachers lost sight of this purpose.
- cthor 4y ago
  School essays and actual essays aren't even the same thing.[0] It sounds like a more didactic use of these kids time would be arguing on forums about their favorite anime. [0]: http://paulgraham.com/essay.html http://paulgraham.com/essay.html
  - tkgally 4y ago
    > School essays and actual essays aren't even the same thing. Yes. And one interesting thing about ChatGPT is that, when asked to write an essay about a topic, it defaults to the standard introduction-body-conclusion organization of a school essay assignment [1]. Since its training data must have included texts organized in many other ways, I wonder if it was tweaked to default to the school-essay format. [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html
- aeternum 4y ago
  Long form essay isn't great for that, especially as taught in school. Writing an idea down as concisely as possible is important, the rest is just embellishment and is easily handled by AI.
lemmsjid 4y ago
There is a progression though. For students, the objective is to write what to an adult would be mediocre essays, because they are on a path to writing adult level essays. The AI can write mediocre essays, but not adult level essays. Assuming that a student must write a bunch of mediocre essays in order to progress past the AI to write adult level essays, then they need to be evaluated on writing a bunch of mediocre essays. If the teacher cannot distinguish between AI output and the student's output, and the result is that we give up on evaluating mediocre student essays, then the students are ultimately inhibited from progression to adult level essays, which, currently, are superior to the AI's output.
wwweston 4y ago
Automatability may make an output ubiquitous to the point where marginal value for any given output is small, but if it was really "worthless" no one would bother automating it in the first place. We automated a lot of arithmetic and then some higher math decades ago, but that hasn't meant that knowing how to do it is worthless. Effective communicative prose is an inherently high-value part of coordinating human activity. The number of roles exclusively dedicated to it might shrink but it's part of nearly every activity in a specialized society. What's most likely is that people will use it as a time-saving tool but everyone will be evaluating how good the output is and tweaking it. And that means until we're at a point where people trust AI to actually evaluate the value of AI output, many of these roles (and certainly anyone building AIs that do this) will need to know how to recognize good output -- and the training involved in that probably involves practice in personally doing it.
Jensson 4y ago
We train AI's by giving them flawed objective functions as well. Nobody is impressed if you are able to copy an image, just use ctrl c and ctr v! All imagines the AI is trained on are worthless, we already have them, why train the AI to generate images we already have? Or, maybe practicing things we know how to do is a good way to practice?
layer8 4y ago
Why should I take your deliberations seriously? You’re saying that your writing is a worthless operation already.

mrtksn 4y ago

Have you not noticed that when you write something down with the purpose of summarising it in a structured way you tend to understand it better? There's no market for kids essays, we never made them write these things with the purpose of being useful output. The market for essays for grown ups is also very small, making kids write things down was not with the purpose of covering the case of them becoming journalists or something. It's just that makes them learn to think and structure their thought process. That's why people take notes and write down things even if its not going to be graded or read by anyone else.

hosh 4y ago
Agreed. Yet many students, parents, and even teachers lost sight of this purpose.
cthor 4y ago
School essays and actual essays aren't even the same thing.[0] It sounds like a more didactic use of these kids time would be arguing on forums about their favorite anime. [0]: http://paulgraham.com/essay.html http://paulgraham.com/essay.html
- tkgally 4y ago
  > School essays and actual essays aren't even the same thing. Yes. And one interesting thing about ChatGPT is that, when asked to write an essay about a topic, it defaults to the standard introduction-body-conclusion organization of a school essay assignment [1]. Since its training data must have included texts organized in many other ways, I wonder if it was tweaked to default to the school-essay format. [1] https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html https://www.gally.net/temp/202212chatgpt/defaultessay.html
aeternum 4y ago
Long form essay isn't great for that, especially as taught in school. Writing an idea down as concisely as possible is important, the rest is just embellishment and is easily handled by AI.

lemmsjid 4y ago

There is a progression though. For students, the objective is to write what to an adult would be mediocre essays, because they are on a path to writing adult level essays. The AI can write mediocre essays, but not adult level essays. Assuming that a student must write a bunch of mediocre essays in order to progress past the AI to write adult level essays, then they need to be evaluated on writing a bunch of mediocre essays. If the teacher cannot distinguish between AI output and the student's output, and the result is that we give up on evaluating mediocre student essays, then the students are ultimately inhibited from progression to adult level essays, which, currently, are superior to the AI's output.

wwweston 4y ago

Automatability may make an output ubiquitous to the point where marginal value for any given output is small, but if it was really "worthless" no one would bother automating it in the first place. We automated a lot of arithmetic and then some higher math decades ago, but that hasn't meant that knowing how to do it is worthless. Effective communicative prose is an inherently high-value part of coordinating human activity. The number of roles exclusively dedicated to it might shrink but it's part of nearly every activity in a specialized society. What's most likely is that people will use it as a time-saving tool but everyone will be evaluating how good the output is and tweaking it. And that means until we're at a point where people trust AI to actually evaluate the value of AI output, many of these roles (and certainly anyone building AIs that do this) will need to know how to recognize good output -- and the training involved in that probably involves practice in personally doing it.

Jensson 4y ago

We train AI's by giving them flawed objective functions as well. Nobody is impressed if you are able to copy an image, just use ctrl c and ctr v! All imagines the AI is trained on are worthless, we already have them, why train the AI to generate images we already have? Or, maybe practicing things we know how to do is a good way to practice?

layer8 4y ago

Why should I take your deliberations seriously? You’re saying that your writing is a worthless operation already.