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Cumulative damage may be very small now, at the beginning of this age, but educators I talk to certainly are having a reckoning about it. Whether this will ulti

Cumulative damage may be very small now, at the beginning of this age, but educators I talk to certainly are having a reckoning about it. Whether this will ultimately be bad for education is an open question, but with the way many classes and homework are designed now, students using ChatGPT to answer questions certainly do learn less.

jerpint 4y ago
Education today seems broken, perhaps this will be a way to fix a broken system. They don’t teach abacus use in schools anymore as well as how to use log tables
- est31 4y ago
  Yeah, homework was designed as a way to make self study monitoring and verification scalable. It's not a bad solution but if the availability of AI makes it hard to control that someone has done their homework instead of giving it to an AI, then you have to look for alternatives. Thankfully, in such a world, AI is available to the "teacher" side as well and can serve as a way to both check that the student is doing their job and also to answer their questions, like a personalized teacher of sorts.
  - shagie 4y ago
    The "if I was a teacher" thoughts on how to handle a ChatGPT that can do short answer questions for English, History, and Social Studies classes... I'd have a set of N questions that shouldn't take long to answer but demonstrate that the material has been read. Yes, ChatGPT can answer them. The second part would be in class, after the homework had been handed in pull a name and number out of a hat and have that student answer that question again and answer a followup question on that material. The oral part of it makes it so that having another do the homework for the student and not do the reading means that the student would show a lack of understanding of the question or its followup. (note: my sophomore English teacher did this... and I messed up answering questions about the Miller's tale which I hadn't read)
    - cudgy 4y ago
      This is a brilliant tactic as avoiding being embarrassed in front of the class is a huge motivator. Plus, the value of teaching others is a huge benefit to the student for the subject matter and the practice of communication skills when explaining to the class.
- joelfried 4y ago
  Assuming we're limiting our scope to the modern American public school system this won't help, at least where I'm located. Teachers are required to have Masters degrees and are paid within the range for a part time cashier at Lowe's[1]. We aren't going to fix this system until that changes; when we're paying that badly we're going to get the worst of what's left. [1] Sourced the salary for teachers near me from Google's linked data. Sourced the Lowe's part time cashier range from an actual job listing in my area. Edit: fixed footnote, sentence fragment.
Filligree 4y ago
I 'borrowed' the (ten year old) daughter of a friend and sat her down in front of ChatGPT to see what would happen, proposing she ask for help with her homework. And yes, the first thing she did was see if it could literally answer it for her. It did. However, once that was done with she proceeded to massively expand the scope of the original homework... I've rarely seen anyone her age as enthused with learning, they're usually already tired of school. Yes, I was standing by to fact-check it, but it didn't actually make any mistakes. Which is a little unfortunate, I guess... I'd been planning to stress the importance of cross-checking. Oh well. It generally seems to get everything right at the level of questioning children are usually capable of. (Half an hour later she was asking it why water expands when it freezes. Fifteen minutes after that we were reading a wikipedia article on molecular physics... I dare say this was a productive evening.) --- I think ChatGPT is an incredible resource for learning, and trying to keep it out of schools is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It does better at teaching than the teachers often manage.
- cudgy 4y ago
  Productive sessions like this are great, but this is one session with one kid with a new, intriguing technology. It is hardly enough experience to roll it out to schools, and it is certainly a huge jump to suggest it is better at teaching than a human teacher would be.
lelandfe 4y ago
It is a five alarm fire at every university I have a line into. As in, “it’s time to radically rethink your entire course” kind of fire. I don’t think it’s bad, per se, but ChatGPT has effectively made it pointless to do certain kinds of assignments now. A lot of professors have been teaching the same way for many years. It’s a reckoning.
- babyshake 4y ago
  The ultimate reckoning may be that the model of teaching people how to think is now deprecated, as the ability to think and reason can now be outsourced in a way that is much more direct and powerful compared to search engines and the internet.
- ectopod 4y ago
  I attended a prestigious university. You could pretty much do what you liked (including nothing) for the three years and the degree was awarded for 30 hours of exams in a single week. In the exam room you couldn't copy work or pay someone else to do it or consult a chatbot. You knew the subject or you didn't. So you don't have to change the teaching. You could change the examining.
  - omnicognate 4y ago
    Yep, back to exams, which there was never anything wrong with in the first place, IMO.
    - nprateem 4y ago
      Except for the people who answer badly due to stress and discover they've wasted 3 years off the back of a few bad hours.
      - omnicognate 4y ago
        This is why we have retakes. If your coursework results in lower grades than fellow students who cheated (with or without AI) there's no such recourse. Even assuming all the students do it in good faith, there are factors other than knowing the material that can affect their performance on coursework. For example one person may have access to a well equipped, ergonomic, quiet space and plenty of undisturbed time in which to complete the assignment, while another may not. The major benefit of exams is that everybody is taking them in, as far as possible, consistent and controlled conditions. It's not ideal, but I think it's better than the alternatives.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I think ChatGPT could he harmful as-is but the tech can definitely be made vastly beneficial with some changes. Imagine using it interactively as a study partner or tutor rather than a homework cheat?
random_upvoter 4y ago
ChatGPT's knowledge doesn't run that deep. If ChatGPT can write a credible essay about a given subject it means your subject was rather generic to begin with. I was playing a bit with ChatGPT and I wondered how much actual knowledge could be stored in that model. So I asked ChatGPT whether it knew the song by Franz Schubert called "Am Feierabend" and if so, if it could tell me the subject/meaning of the song. "Certainly I know this song", responded ChatGPT and then gave me -- with total confidence -- a completely wrong answer about the meaning of the song. In fact I was a bit baffled by the authority with which is spouted this nonsense answer. A truly intelligent system would be aware about the limits its knowledge, right? So I think that with a minimum of creativity teachers can come up with questions that can easily stump ChatGPT.
- skinner_ 4y ago
  > If ChatGPT can write a credible essay about a given subject it means your subject was rather generic to begin with. ChatGPT created a pretty good essay for my daughter's home assignment. She had to write a fictive autobiography from the perspective of a 16th century noblewoman. Is that too generic? (Side note: ChatGPT did it in Hungarian.) > A truly intelligent system would be aware about the limits its knowledge, right? That's a question of definitions. If you ask me, ChatGPT is a truly intelligent system that is ridiculously unaware of its own limitations. It doesn't look like a contradiction per se, I've met very smart, highly functioning megalomaniacs.
  - lm28469 4y ago
    > Is that too generic? No but as you stated it's fictive... I can also tell you a lot of fictive science facts, or fictive president names, or anything fictive for that matter The goal is to use your _own_ imagination, of course chatgpt can align sentences in a semi cohesive manner, it's its whole purpose
- powersnail 4y ago
  ChatGPT has no concept of trying to be correct with regard to world knowledge. This doesn't just apply to obscure things. For instance, when I ask it about mainstream books and TV shows, it frequently misattributes words or actions to the wrong character. But not only that, it will then proceed to explain why the character said so, and how does it reflect on the character. It's not about awareness or limits of knowledge. From the point of view of a language model, it doesn't matter whether it was Todd or Walter White who killed Lydia, or whether it was Kinbote or Shade who invented a phrase. It only tries to generate a response to your input, such that it is a plausible continuation.

jerpint 4y ago

Education today seems broken, perhaps this will be a way to fix a broken system. They don’t teach abacus use in schools anymore as well as how to use log tables

est31 4y ago
Yeah, homework was designed as a way to make self study monitoring and verification scalable. It's not a bad solution but if the availability of AI makes it hard to control that someone has done their homework instead of giving it to an AI, then you have to look for alternatives. Thankfully, in such a world, AI is available to the "teacher" side as well and can serve as a way to both check that the student is doing their job and also to answer their questions, like a personalized teacher of sorts.
- shagie 4y ago
  The "if I was a teacher" thoughts on how to handle a ChatGPT that can do short answer questions for English, History, and Social Studies classes... I'd have a set of N questions that shouldn't take long to answer but demonstrate that the material has been read. Yes, ChatGPT can answer them. The second part would be in class, after the homework had been handed in pull a name and number out of a hat and have that student answer that question again and answer a followup question on that material. The oral part of it makes it so that having another do the homework for the student and not do the reading means that the student would show a lack of understanding of the question or its followup. (note: my sophomore English teacher did this... and I messed up answering questions about the Miller's tale which I hadn't read)
  - cudgy 4y ago
    This is a brilliant tactic as avoiding being embarrassed in front of the class is a huge motivator. Plus, the value of teaching others is a huge benefit to the student for the subject matter and the practice of communication skills when explaining to the class.
joelfried 4y ago
Assuming we're limiting our scope to the modern American public school system this won't help, at least where I'm located. Teachers are required to have Masters degrees and are paid within the range for a part time cashier at Lowe's[1]. We aren't going to fix this system until that changes; when we're paying that badly we're going to get the worst of what's left. [1] Sourced the salary for teachers near me from Google's linked data. Sourced the Lowe's part time cashier range from an actual job listing in my area. Edit: fixed footnote, sentence fragment.

Filligree 4y ago

I 'borrowed' the (ten year old) daughter of a friend and sat her down in front of ChatGPT to see what would happen, proposing she ask for help with her homework. And yes, the first thing she did was see if it could literally answer it for her. It did. However, once that was done with she proceeded to massively expand the scope of the original homework... I've rarely seen anyone her age as enthused with learning, they're usually already tired of school. Yes, I was standing by to fact-check it, but it didn't actually make any mistakes. Which is a little unfortunate, I guess... I'd been planning to stress the importance of cross-checking. Oh well. It generally seems to get everything right at the level of questioning children are usually capable of. (Half an hour later she was asking it why water expands when it freezes. Fifteen minutes after that we were reading a wikipedia article on molecular physics... I dare say this was a productive evening.) --- I think ChatGPT is an incredible resource for learning, and trying to keep it out of schools is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It does better at teaching than the teachers often manage.

cudgy 4y ago
Productive sessions like this are great, but this is one session with one kid with a new, intriguing technology. It is hardly enough experience to roll it out to schools, and it is certainly a huge jump to suggest it is better at teaching than a human teacher would be.

lelandfe 4y ago

It is a five alarm fire at every university I have a line into. As in, “it’s time to radically rethink your entire course” kind of fire. I don’t think it’s bad, per se, but ChatGPT has effectively made it pointless to do certain kinds of assignments now. A lot of professors have been teaching the same way for many years. It’s a reckoning.

babyshake 4y ago
The ultimate reckoning may be that the model of teaching people how to think is now deprecated, as the ability to think and reason can now be outsourced in a way that is much more direct and powerful compared to search engines and the internet.
ectopod 4y ago
I attended a prestigious university. You could pretty much do what you liked (including nothing) for the three years and the degree was awarded for 30 hours of exams in a single week. In the exam room you couldn't copy work or pay someone else to do it or consult a chatbot. You knew the subject or you didn't. So you don't have to change the teaching. You could change the examining.
- omnicognate 4y ago
  Yep, back to exams, which there was never anything wrong with in the first place, IMO.
  - nprateem 4y ago
    Except for the people who answer badly due to stress and discover they've wasted 3 years off the back of a few bad hours.
    - omnicognate 4y ago
      This is why we have retakes. If your coursework results in lower grades than fellow students who cheated (with or without AI) there's no such recourse. Even assuming all the students do it in good faith, there are factors other than knowing the material that can affect their performance on coursework. For example one person may have access to a well equipped, ergonomic, quiet space and plenty of undisturbed time in which to complete the assignment, while another may not. The major benefit of exams is that everybody is taking them in, as far as possible, consistent and controlled conditions. It's not ideal, but I think it's better than the alternatives.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

I think ChatGPT could he harmful as-is but the tech can definitely be made vastly beneficial with some changes. Imagine using it interactively as a study partner or tutor rather than a homework cheat?

random_upvoter 4y ago

ChatGPT's knowledge doesn't run that deep. If ChatGPT can write a credible essay about a given subject it means your subject was rather generic to begin with. I was playing a bit with ChatGPT and I wondered how much actual knowledge could be stored in that model. So I asked ChatGPT whether it knew the song by Franz Schubert called "Am Feierabend" and if so, if it could tell me the subject/meaning of the song. "Certainly I know this song", responded ChatGPT and then gave me -- with total confidence -- a completely wrong answer about the meaning of the song. In fact I was a bit baffled by the authority with which is spouted this nonsense answer. A truly intelligent system would be aware about the limits its knowledge, right? So I think that with a minimum of creativity teachers can come up with questions that can easily stump ChatGPT.

skinner_ 4y ago
> If ChatGPT can write a credible essay about a given subject it means your subject was rather generic to begin with. ChatGPT created a pretty good essay for my daughter's home assignment. She had to write a fictive autobiography from the perspective of a 16th century noblewoman. Is that too generic? (Side note: ChatGPT did it in Hungarian.) > A truly intelligent system would be aware about the limits its knowledge, right? That's a question of definitions. If you ask me, ChatGPT is a truly intelligent system that is ridiculously unaware of its own limitations. It doesn't look like a contradiction per se, I've met very smart, highly functioning megalomaniacs.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > Is that too generic? No but as you stated it's fictive... I can also tell you a lot of fictive science facts, or fictive president names, or anything fictive for that matter The goal is to use your _own_ imagination, of course chatgpt can align sentences in a semi cohesive manner, it's its whole purpose
powersnail 4y ago
ChatGPT has no concept of trying to be correct with regard to world knowledge. This doesn't just apply to obscure things. For instance, when I ask it about mainstream books and TV shows, it frequently misattributes words or actions to the wrong character. But not only that, it will then proceed to explain why the character said so, and how does it reflect on the character. It's not about awareness or limits of knowledge. From the point of view of a language model, it doesn't matter whether it was Todd or Walter White who killed Lydia, or whether it was Kinbote or Shade who invented a phrase. It only tries to generate a response to your input, such that it is a plausible continuation.