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ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks
- 1970-01-01 4y agoYesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268913 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34268913
- beezlewax 4y agoThey know students have phones right?
- toinewx 4y agoI learnt a ton from asking random questions to ChatGPT. This move is clearly temporary and will be reversed
- danieka 4y agoMy question is, did you learn the truth from ChatGPT? It seems like it will always give plausible sounding answer, that may or may not be correct. For example I asked it today to enumerate the rights given to all christians as part of the priesthood of believers according to Luther. It enumerate a couple of plausible sounding rights. Unfortunately none of them were correct.
- tester457 4y agoI don't like asking it for real life facts. It's better at writing emails, simple code, bash scripts, grunt work, etc.
- musingsole 4y agoIt's less like finding a Wikipedia article and more like asking a gossipy cousin about a topic. It tends to land in the right ballpark and capture the tone of a thing.
- visarga 4y ago> It tends to land in the right ballpark and capture the tone of a thing. One weird trick is to use this text to search the web. Because it is already in the ballpark it will be a very good query. The model would bullshit "The height of Everest is 8,230 m", you take this string and search it, find "height of Everest is 8,849 m" -> correct the original response. Now the problem is, how do you decide what information to trust in search? AI needs a big push to index and do consistency checks for all facts. Let's have the model write a billion wiki entries and knowledge base concepts. Check for support, consistency, competing explanations - everything should be in there, we don't decide what is true. Then a language model can say when a topic is controversial, or when it doesn't know something. Of course the goal is to find the truth, but we know it is going to be tricky. In the meantime we can have models that know when they don't know, or when the information is not certain.
- rib3ye 4y agoI am learning a JS game dev platform and ChatGPT has been a GREAT help, even though it’s only right 90% of the time. It cooler if it were an “auto-answer” tool for Stack Overflow. That way I could still get instant answers, and the community could asynchronously validate the answers.
- Jcowell 4y agoIf you’re learning something, glow do you know if it’s correct or wrong. I can see it as a tool to remind you (like damn I forgot how to reverse a linked list) but not on a topic that you wouldn’t be able to remember or not since you didn’t know it in the first place.
- MAGZine 4y agoI definitely agree with this, but what I have found it useful for is for discovering 'unknown unknowns' that I can then research in more depth. It's too bad that it produces such plausible-sounding answers while being subtly wrong. But it can certain help people to expand their knowledge. I don't think it's a replacement for a comprehensive education on a topic, but can help people get closer.
- phailhaus 4y agoChatGPT is a chatbot, not Google. It just produces answers that are plausible-sounding. ChatGPT is not doing any searches or data lookups for you in the background. Unfortunately, you may have learned total garbage.
- dumbfounder 4y agoChatGPT is just a tool, like a calculator. Calculators are banned in certain circumstances and required in others. At first they were probably seen as cheating, but then the system realized they could be used to enhance what kids learn. Why take away a tool that could be used everywhere in life? That's not how progress should work. The system should evolve to embrace such tools, but the obvious problem is that it just won't happen quickly enough, and in the short term they will be used for illegitimate purposes, and so we just ban.
- defnotahuman 4y agoThe problem is that calculators are correct 100% of the time, ChatGPT is not. What makes it more difficult is that it's often really hard to tell when ChatGPT is correct or not.
- thatjoeoverthr 4y agoFor whom is that a problem, in this case? If you have a hallucinating computer do your test and it doesn’t work out for you, that’s on you.
- eyko 4y agoI think it boils down to the (intellectual) effort needed to synthesise your thoughts, which is a skill that leads to deeper understanding. I'd say ChatGPT is a bit better as a tool than copying from a colleague, just because you still have to double check for correctness. However, does it rob students of that opportunity to think deeply and therefore learn? I'm not sure to what extent, but I'd imagine that there's an impact to _some_ extent. ChatGPT is also going to get better, and will eventually be pretty accurate (or, at least as accurate as a student of a subject may be). My stance is that in school, you should be learning to think instead of memorising. If the goal is to memorise, however, then use ChatGPT isn't that harmful (you'll still fail for memorising the wrong information). Overall I'd treat ChatGPT as a tool, and give students the facts: first gain a deep understanding of a subject so you can learn to verify, then use the tool later in life. I'm also mindful of the fact that if an AI is not guaranteed to be correct, which is the case right now, then students now have an incentive to _understand_ the subject so they can verify, which might actually be a net good?
- kypro 4y agoI've said it in another thread, but if you have to ban a tool to preserve the value of some course or examination then it's likely they have little to no value in the real world. In most cases the courses are fine, but the examination probably isn't testing anything useful if it can be cheated with tools like ChatGPT. For example any maths test which only tests students on problems which are easily solvable by a calculator isn't testing any skill of real world use. But this doesn't mean maths itself isn't valuable, just that the test isn't. In some cases like programmers and writers, ChatGPT might actually be eroding the value the current curriculum. For example, I'm not sure if there's much value in learning things like basic SQL queries anymore which was something I had to learn when studying computer science. ChatGPT is great at writing SQL queries if you're able to tell it exactly what you need.
- lostmsu 4y agoNot sure I entirely agree. Imagine there's a trainable skill like writing, and GPT can write at low-intermediate level, but can't at high level. How do you test students before they completed intermediate level?
- lfodofod 4y agoMake students write in the classroom using a pen and paper? Isn’t that more or less the standard at low-intermediate level?
- lostmsu 4y agoHandwriting is at least just as pointless exercise.
- lfodofod 4y agoI agree about handwriting being pointless, but simply doing writing exercises in the classroom should be sufficient to get students past the ChatGPT level. Right? Assuming the teacher is doing their job, it should be really easy to make sure nobody is cheating using machine learning.
- WUMBOWUMBO 4y agoIf I recall anything about my days in the DOE, a motivated student won’t have any problems getting their hands on a banned ChatGPT on a school network.
- seydor 4y agoI mean, something like chatGPT (that will refuse to invent things) is perfect for student companion. It's endlessly patient and willing to explain every word you don't understand. No teacher can do that to this degree. If i were a teacher i d want to offload work to it.
- xfz 4y agoIt was endlessly patient until they introduced rate limiting. :)
- tootie 4y agoWhen I was playing with extracting stories from ChatGPT my feeling was always that it writes like an 8th grade honors student.
- seydor 4y agoso, it can also be their (annoying) imaginary friend
- lolinder 4y agoIt will also make stuff up if it doesn't know the answer. A tutor who did that would get fired.
- xfz 4y agoAre mathematics students allowed to use calculators, or did they ban those too?
- lolinder 4y agoTypically, yes, a student in fourth grade learning multiplication isn't allowed to use a calculator. We tend to assume that you need to be able to do something by hand first so you have an intuition for what a right answer looks like. Only then can you use the machine to speed up the process.
- abossy 4y agoI wonder if the script can be flipped to both encourage the use of ChatGPT and scrutinize its output among students. I imagine that analyzing the results of ChatGPT output for something like a routine essay prompt requires a higher degree of precision and subject-matter expertise than writing the essay itself.
- heliophobicdude 4y agoThis is excellent! It also helps people to learn the tools that we would inevitably need to learn how to use. Prompt engineering is a skill I'm seeing a need for
- tootie 4y agoI'm sure they're concerned about essay writing, but my kid has been using to help with physics and math homework. Not for basic calculator functions, but it's surprisingly good at giving formulas for complex problems. You can ask things like how to calculate the angle in degrees of fired projectile given initial velocity and range and it will give a formula. Then you can rephrase for how to solve for velocity given range and angle.
- iLoveOncall 4y agoAre you praising ChatGPT by explaining how it allows your kid to avoid having to think and learn their lesson?
- dxbydt 4y agoSome of the Calculator analogy comments downstream are inaccurate. 300,000 students in the United States compete in the AMC 8/10/12 exams every year. Calculators have always been banned. The official policy[1] states sternly in uppercase - --- AMC 8 The only materials that students are allowed to have on themselves during the competition are writing utensils, blank scratch paper, rulers, and erasers. NO CALCULATORS OR PHONES AND SIMILAR ELECTRONIC DEVICES OF ANY KIND ARE ALLOWED. No questions require the use of a calculator. AMC 10/12 - AIME The only materials that students are allowed to have on themselves during the competition are writing utensils, blank scratch paper, rulers, compasses, and erasers. NO CALCULATORS OR PHONES AND SIMILAR ELECTRONIC DEVICES OF ANY KIND ARE ALLOWED. No questions require the use of a calculator. -- Mathcounts[2] is kinder, but only a little bit - "Calculators are not permitted in the Sprint and Countdown Rounds, but they are permitted in the Target, Team and Tiebreaker Rounds". There are 500+ chapter rounds every year, plus 56 state rounds, & each school sends upto 12 contestants, so again a very large number of students compete in these exams with no calculator. Note when they say "No questions require the use of a calculator" - that's quite a dubious claim. For eg. the question which is bigger 9^10 or 10^9 ? With a calculator it becomes trivial. Without, you take logs to base 10 and do some simple arithmetic by hand. For most trig problem sets, you'd have to know the standard sines & cosines. With a calculator that becomes moot. [1] https://www.maa.org/math-competitions/amc-policies https://www.maa.org/math-competitions/amc-policies [2] https://www.mathcounts.org/programs/official-rules-procedures https://www.mathcounts.org/programs/official-rules-procedure...
- tomjen3 4y agoThis is just going to mean students use it from home or from their phones. And the issue is that you can't prove ChatGPT has been used, so cheating is that simple.
- bsaul 4y agothis story made me realize we’re amazed by chatgpt’s ability to answer our questions. But how about chatgpt’s ability to evaluate our answer to its questions ? Never seen prompts of chatgpt acting like a teacher. Wonder how that would look.
- chrisMyzel 4y agoI've read this nice quote which I can't correctly replicate without butchering: "Schools are banning chatGPT but children won't let schools tamper with their education"