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My son and his friends are already doing their homework using ChatGPT. Teachers will have to get used to this and hopefully embrace it.

• TSiege 4y ago
  No judgement here, but I'm curious how they're using it and what your feelings are. It seems like you've embraced it
  • ttul 4y ago
    Literally everything. They’re using it to help with math homework. Putting together copy for a slide presentation about the history of Pepsico (why? I have no idea). Writing a silly story about an ape man who dominates the world through vicious conquests. “Now write a sequel” apparently works really well.
• jolmg 4y ago
  In the end, (ideally) it's the students that are losing out on education, though. That's unless there's a competition dynamic among students. Maybe embracing it is removing competition among students. EDIT: On second thought, one can just put more emphasis on exams taken in-premises with supervision.
  • Der_Einzige 4y ago
    School is not about getting an "education", this is pedegological propaganda. It's about maximizing your college admissions chances, which then leads to better jobs. Id rather be stupid and rich than "educated" and poor.
    • skor 4y ago
      would you rather be stupid? think of all the things you would have wished to know before you die. seems like a pipe dream to me.
      • drbeast 4y ago
        Look at Paris Hilton. Do you think she cares about subjects she doesn't know whilenshe gets chauffered around on her rolls Royce, eating meals made by a personal chef, in her Beverly hills home? The answer is no. A life of material richness vs being poor and highly educated. Ask a postdoc this question and I bet the majority would take lifetime wealth to having to slave away in a lab.
        • dvngnt_ 4y ago
          I dunno she's been in crypto since 2016. she's probably smarter than what you're giving her credit for
      • logicchains 4y ago
        > would you rather be stupid? think of all the things you would have wished to know before you die. If someone takes the approach that school is required for learning, then they'll stop learning after finishing university (as most people do) and within a decade they'll be stupid compared to someone who believed learning is a personal thing and kept learning after their formal schooling had ended.
    • jolmg 4y ago
      > (ideally)
      • Der_Einzige 4y ago
        No, even ideally it's still wrong. Educators are the arbiters of competence. It's their subjective opinions of you (marked with grades) that literally decide if you eat lobster thermidor or if you eat raman through your life. The greeks had an ideal. It's been so corrupted by the modern system that even the ideal is dead.
        • krisoft 4y ago
          > It's their subjective opinions of you (marked with grades) that literally decide if you eat lobster thermidor or if you eat raman through your life. I don’t think so? Maybe in some rare edge cases. If you were born to a rich family even with midling grades you will remain rich. If you were born to a poor family even with excelent grades you likely won’t raise above middle class, and that if you are lucky. If you were born into a middle class family and you are lucky enough to avoid catastrophies you will likely stay okay, but not lobster termidor every day rich. Honestly it is much more likely that if they give you great grades and put the idea into your head that you should be a poet or a philosopher or similar that they send you down the ramen path. I don’t know where you got this notion.
    • epolanski 4y ago
      You have few really distorted, cynical perceptions and biased ideas about school. First you're projecting your personal experience in your (I guess crap) school in a crap educational system to the norm. It's not. Second, jobs having higher educational standards is a reflection of the booming of educated youngs, not the other way around. Third, skilled uneducated professionals (e.g. plumbers, cooks, electricians, mechanics) make much more than graduates on average, it's a night and day difference, comes also debt free and you can start compounding much earlier. If money is your goal an education is actually not necessarily needed if not dangerous.
      • Der_Einzige 4y ago
        No, I am not projecting. I went to good schools and had positive experiences in school. It's still an arbiter of competence. Its still failed to hold up even a vestigial "ideal". And no, the stats say that tradespeople are massively underpaid on avg compared to BS holders. Ofc, no one believes this here since HNs demographics are highly clustered in the bay area where trades people basically just tell you how hard you're going to bend over for them...
        • epolanski 4y ago
          The US does not have a good education system and you're projecting US system to the norm. I'm European, know our school systems in various countries and it has no resemblance to the ideas you have about education and we don't really have such gatekeeping at college at all. Third, about trades, I've never lived in SF, but I lived in italy/poland/switzerland and even 6 months at OSU in columbus and I've seen that all the time: skilled tradesmen in all these places make MUCH more than average graduate. There's no comparison. I'm 100% sure the average decent carpenter or electrician makes more than a stem graduate in Italy or Switzerland.
    • pnf 4y ago
      This is just cynical and wrong. School is about ideological indoctrination and conditioning the political subject via propaganda during childhood development away from the prying eyes of disobedient parents. Read your Plato and Dewey.
• Pigalowda 4y ago
  Why should it be embraced? It can be avoided I suppose by using in class blue book written essays. I’m guessing universities are still doing that?
• skor 4y ago
  my partner (a professor in a European university) and I had a chat with gpt3 for 5 minutes tops, even though we were having some beers while we were doing that, we noticed instantly the “rhythm” of the output. Don’t pretend, we will see you ;) exams will show what you’re really capable of. lol
  • krisoft 4y ago
    Oh that is just great. We will have all kind of teachers and professors running around with half baked ideas of what ChatGPT does or does not sound like, deducting points and being hardass based on a hunch. What do you think your false positive rate is? How did you quantified that based on a five minute interaction (which only contained true positive samples, and only in response to your prompting)
    • asdff 4y ago
      I wonder if you can just ask chatgpt if it wrote the essay?
  • drbeast 4y ago
    Ok, so I'll have chatgpt write my 15 page research paper with citations. I'll then spend 1.5 hours rewriting and proofing it as opposed to the multiday researching, outlining, and writing I used to have to do. And with all of that extra time, I'll study for your "exams". Just replace chatgpt with Wikipedia, did this for 4 years of uni and another 2 at an ivy n school. No one was the wiser and now I have a cushy MBB job to show for it.
• sunflowerfly 4y ago
  Teachers will adapt. Some are already giving students a question, allowing the students ample time to research, then writing papers with a pencil in class.
  • krisoft 4y ago
    ChatGPT is still supremely usefull there. I can borrow whole phrases and structure from it if I want to. I get my question, research it, provide chatgpt with an outline and ask it to fluf it out in a nice style and maybe copy it down once. Even if I only remember 80% of what I wrote then that is still a win.
• teeray 4y ago
  Good. Homework robs children of their childhood. If ChatGPT forces more school to happen in school, that may be its greatest contribution.
  • optymizer 4y ago
    "Homework robs children of their childhood". Hell yeah! I too think that's exactly what's wrong with the education system nowadays - too much homework and not enough time for drugs, Call of Duty, $120 apparel from LuluLemon, browsing TikTok all day in bed, and sending nudes over SnapChat. Childhood. Solved.
    • logicchains 4y ago
      If "wasting kids' time so they can't do worse things" is meant to be the point of the education system, it's a stupid idea, as it just means when they're adults with more free time they'll catch up on what they missed, and as a bonus they'll carry a lifelong hatred of learning from being trained to associate it with mind-numbing, pointless busywork at school.
      • optymizer 4y ago
        If homework is "wasting kids time" and "busywork", you and I have very different definitions of homework.
        • teeray 4y ago
          I took Spanish for 7 years and passed all the classes. Countless hours of homework involved every week. As of my 30s, I can now mostly read warning labels and some of the Spanish manual if I happen to grab the wrong one out of the box. Conversations with a native speaker? No way. If that wasn’t a complete waste of my time, I don’t know what is.
          • optymizer 4y ago
            It seems like you wrote this in support of the argument that homework is a waste of time, but it doesn't seem like you're describing a problem with the concept of homework or how it applies to learning a subject. You're describing a situation when the subject itself was not useful to you in retrospect. Presumably, from your point of view, all of the time invested into it was a waste of time, not just the homework part. That said, it doesn't follow from this that any homework is a waste of time. It doesn't even follow that Spanish homework is generally a waste of time. One cannot generalize from your example at all because you might be an outlier. You'd have to show that learning Spanish provided no value to the majority of kids who studied it, or that class time is sufficient to learn Spanish so homework isn't really needed, which would be a very hard thing to argue for a human language. For what it's worth, I took Bulgarian folk music - I'm not Bulgarian, nor do I live in Bulgaria, nor can I play any musical instruments. Was it a waste of time? Acquiring knowledge is never a waste of time for me. Typing comments on HN might be though.
• greenie_beans 4y ago
  i would've been that student, and now i teach creative writing to kids in my free time. we use pen and paper to write poems. but if i were an english teacher assigning research-like papers, i'd definitely incorporate chatgpt responses into my assignments. make them write a draft with chatgpt3 then revise it themselves in class with pen and paper. then write a version in their own words without plagiarizing the chatgpt version, but they can only use google docs or some format that can track changes, so the teacher can see the process. or something like that — it would need some iterating and real-world feedback.
  • aliqot 4y ago
    >but if i were an english teacher assigning research-like papers, i'd definitely incorporate chatgpt responses into my assignments. now THAT is a creative thing to do. I like that. I suppose the calculator version would be to do something like: "here is a simple graph plot, create an equation that produces a similar plot" Wish there were more teachers like you embracing this stuff as a tool rather than doing your best to design a curriculum to 'defeat' it.