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What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education
- vorpalhex 4y agoThis could be great for university. Suddenly thousands of mediocre low effort papers are no longer sufficient to get a degree. Many students will have to put in real work. Others won't graduate and have to look at trade school or alternatives. College degrees will go back to meaning the holder has an advanced, specialized education and no longer be required for low end jobs as a bad filter.
- godzillabrennus 4y agoAs long as government money is doled out to barely adult humans in large quantities to obtain a degree there will be an industry to service providing these degrees.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kashkhan 4y agoin the academy today original thought that strays too far is actively discouraged. Undergrad is pretty much all analysis and derivation. But then college was never meant to create creative geniuses. Only efficient worker bees.
- TheRealPomax 4y agoI think you mean "This could be great for university. Suddenly thousands of mediocre low effort papers are now good enough to pass them and keep getting money from the government instead of having to fail them". Big universities are businesses first, research institutes second, and educations maybe fifth or even lower. Rare and blessed be the university that isn't a business in the modern age. But show me one, and I will show you a university that isn't on the international rankings.
- latency-guy2 4y agoAs if. I've seen a rather disturbing amount of malfeasance by educators, where they award the highest grade to anyone who even moderately puts in an effort. Many educators even waving away their responsibility to accurately determine aptitude and assign grades accurately. Grade grubbing alone has infiltrated even the most prestigious, and I find it hard to believe that the average student is that much better than their counterparts up to 70 years ago. Even the average student at these institutions. I just don't believe we can trust educators to do their job. I remember arguing back and forth with an educator who believed their only job is to 'educate', where if someone learned something, then they have done their job. I could not believe it. I'd understand if it was from a grade school perspective, but this person was teaching at a university. Another educator on HN no more than a few weeks ago in a related thread said their perspective is to not deal with the students, parents, and administration who will hound them about grades, they said something along the lines of "giving people an A will stop this, and who cares anyway? The best of the best will go on to do research, side projects, etc. anyway". Speaking towards the article, "Humanities" absolutely deserve their reputation, even among research where they have a perpetual replication crisis, hilarious events such as Sokal and Grievance Studies affairs. If you don't want this reputation, take a hit towards funding, call out poor research, in fact don't allow poor research to even get near publication. Reject more students. It is clear standards are low, raise them, significantly. You can make mistakes, but I hardly if ever see them corrected in a timely fashion. I should not see articles where a US state is considered to be higher in terms of voter suppression compared to North Korea.
- sampo 4y ago> when I asked it who was “President in 2022,” it responded (inter alia) with “My training data only goes up until 2021, so I am not able to provide information about events that have not yet occurred.” > Notice that it goes off the rails in its answer because it wrote me that in 2023! This is not a mistake. If the bot is trained with data only up to 2021, then for the bot 2022 is in the future, no matter when you ask, in 2022, 2023 or in 2030.
- cm2187 4y agoIn fact the probability that Biden was dead or incapacited by now wasn't nil. So wouldn't even be right to extrapolate based on mandate terms.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- layer8 4y agoThen a straightforward answer would be something along the lines of “Biden, assuming he didn’t die or was incapacitated since <date>, which is the last date I have data on.”
- judge2020 4y agoWe’ll probably see some real skill when Bing gets ChatGPT integration, but I fear even “ChatGPT Premium” won’t support browsing the web.
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- GenerocUsername 4y agoBooks allowed us to store data indefinitely. However, they required lots of effort to read, understand and synthesize knowledge. This new generation of AI is going to remove the slow to synthesize part
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoIt's a huge mistake. The point of life is the synthesis and growth through working through things. We are moving towards a completely meaningless but instant world.
- kristianc 4y agoIn fairness, they’ve been saying this exact same thing since about 1800.
- peteradio 4y agoPerhaps we should give credit to what they were seeing then rather than remove credit to what we see today.
- distortionfield 4y agoEven further back. Since at least the time of Greek philosophers.
- Turing_Machine 4y agoIndeed. Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters... This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit. Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. From Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’, 360 B.C.E.
- kurthr 4y agoWell it is a machine so of course it doesn't care: ChatGPT is a bullshitter in the (Frankfurt) sense of having no concern for the truth at all Detecting true plagiarism with it (or a derived entity as a service) would be as useful the currently proposed watermarking. Turn the technology to some advantage, because the profit seekers and free riders certainly won't be deterred.
- hodgesrm 4y agoIt looks as if there's a business opportunity to develop a modern Voight-Kampff test to detect AIs. [0] Anybody doing this now? https://nautil.us/the-science-behind-blade-runners-voight_kampff-test-236837/ https://nautil.us/the-science-behind-blade-runners-voight_ka...
- distortionfield 4y agoThere was a front page of HN post just a few days ago about a college student developing exactly that tool. As you can imagine it’s a hard problem but there is absolutely going to be value in it.
- rd 4y agohttps://gptzero.me/ https://gptzero.me/
- bioemerl 4y agoChat GPT reveals that academia has fallen short of the trend as follows. " When you are growing and everyone trusts you, you can do no wrong, and your mistakes shrink into nothing on their own." " When you begin to shrink and your reputation sours, you can do no right, your wrongs balloon catastrophically and your rights slowly shrink into nothing like your wrongs used to" Academia I'm sure provides tons of stuff, but once you sour your reputation and you pop your balloon, it's very very hard to recover from it. We've gone from a world where the average person trusts institutions to a world where the average person doesn't. Even I don't trust anything coming out of any large institution anymore. If I look up news, and I see CNN and MSNBC and any of those big networks, I keep scrolling until I find someone showing me the raw event with no commentary. If I search some review I scroll past all of the official review sites and find some random nobody who appears to be expressing their own experiences. Why? Because I don't trust anything bigger than an individual. Doctors hide themselves behind hospitals with a million accountant sent number punchers who are incentivized to screw you over. Companies pull the journalists into their wings so that the journalists are beholden random advertisers, and can write whatever they want without much risk to their own credibility. I'm confident academia is falling to very similar issues. These institutions take responsibility and spread it thin like butter over toast, and when you do that everything and that institution needs to be considered not credible. All of these opinions of academia probably come from the behavior of a small fraction of bad actors who get popularized in the news, but because those bad actors aren't named and shamed as individuals, the institution takes the blame and all of the good things that come out of it are no longer worthy of trust.
- bulgur 4y ago[dead]
- bioemerl 4y agoI think everyone and everything will be targeted by spammers, not because they are hated, but because such spammers are universal and will always target any open gap that exists. There might be targeted attacks, but I believe that if there was drive for such attacks, they'd already be in play without Chat GPT.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- aogaili 4y agoMost people can't think, but they can parrot and bullshit so ChatGPT is getting very close to the average human level intelligence...
- sebzim4500 4y agoIn fact, when you view ChatGPT purely as a machine to parrot and bullshit then it is already superhuman. (Moreso with the parroting than the bullshitting)
- aogaili 4y agoYeah agreed.
- dpedu 4y ago> The corporate and political climbers are on to the fact that producing grammatically correct bullshit is apparently often sufficient to pass too many of our introductory courses. Hmm. This feels true outside of universities as well.
- x0x0 4y agoI wish. We interviewed students at a very expensive local university to do some writing for my startup. We were stunned at the number of them who couldn't string together a 5 paragraph essay that was (1) spelled correctly (!!!!), (2) grammatically correct; and (3) contained coherent, logical thoughts. iirc we interviewed 5, and 3 failed on 2 or more of the previous points. It appears to be possible to be an undergrad at Santa Clara, presumably with passing grades, while being... not exactly illiterate, but essentially so. I know this sounds like a grandpa yelling get off my lawn, but our standards were not super high. Correct spelling, correct grammar, and a simple 5 paragraph essay with a clear thesis and supporting arguments.
- Der_Einzige 4y agoMen are mass opting out of universities. Universities are seeing record low enrollment and it's only going to get worse. https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233 https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-... I predict the death of the university in our life times.
- raincom 4y agoIn many third world countries, teachers/professors are abysmal and incompetent. So, if the US can grant student visas to people who can afford the US tuition fees, these colleges can be filled up with foreigners.
- jltsiren 4y agoThe university is very resilient and capable of reinventing itself and its mission. I predict that every major contemporary state will fail before the university.
- Shorel 4y agoThat's only in that particular country. In the rest of the world, it just keeps going on.
- pawbablynull 4y agoProducing bullshit that’s decent enough to get through uni has always been a thing. Some people are panicking now because it’s gotten very easy to figure out that they are the actual bullshitter and they finally need to actually do their jobs properly for the first time in their lives but don’t know how to.
- raincom 4y agoChatGPT bullshits, because almost all humanities are occupied by bullshitters. Best example from this blog post itself: “It is difficult to say whether these events show that the humanities have been “infiltrated by bullshitters,” as this would depend on one’s definition of “bullshitters” and one’s perspective on the events in question. However, it is clear that these events sparked significant debate and discussion about the nature of knowledge, truth, and intellectual standards within the academic community.” Ask any student/professor in Humanities on, say X. The obvious response is: it depends on how you define X. Darwin doesn't define what species is in his "On the origin of species". Even today, we don't have a definition of species--of course, there are many definitions, but not all agree to one definition. One doesn't need a definition to start doing research. However, in humanities, definitions have become fetishes. That's what ChatGPT demonstrates in her examples.
- skybrian 4y agoWhat do you mean by "definitions have become fetishes?" What are some examples? Noticing that most words are ambiguous isn't a bug. It's a commonplace observation that you can repair and move on from. There are a zillion online debates that get started because people interpret words differently (or even adversarially) and don't clarify. It's good to be able to avoid falling into that trap. In in interactive context, you might ask your conversation partner what they mean by X (if you can't infer it from context). Otherwise, you might pick a definition that seems useful and go with it.
- raincom 4y agoIn legal contracts, definitions are not only necessary, but also protect both parties. That's why definitions are added in contracts. There are definiendum (a term that needs to be defined) and definiens (that does the defining). Definiendum =df definiens What do these definitions do? Replace a symbol (or a string) with a sentence or set of sentences. How do these help settle disputes? Let us imagine a scenario: Some Y says that there are no native religions in Africa, except Christianity, Islam and Judaism, because Y defends this based on his theory of religion. Another guy say: Ah, whether native religions exist in Africa depends on your definition of 'religion'. In that case, Y will say: 'religion' =df what does not exist in Africa. Now one can see all absurdities about definitions. One needs a theory about what religion is (in the world) to settle whether native religions exist in Africa/India. Instead of coming up with theories with testable consequences, one engages in definitional quibbles and plausibility arguments. Now look at plausibility arguments. If someone can argue for P, others can equally argue for ~P (not P). How to pick between P and ~P? Based on people's voting? This is another reason to have theories (as we see in Natural sciences). Now you can see journalists, professors who assign students to write arguments, and students trained by such professors.
- vajrabum 4y agoI think its interesting in the discussion of bullshit in the humanities article there is no knowledge or acknowledgement of published bullshit in STEM. And yet pretty much every competent STEM academic is going to have seen a lot of it, perhaps more than in the humanities. There's a reason for citation counts and impact numbers being rewarded more than the raw number of publications when it's time for making tenure decisions.
- onos 4y agoThe argument here is that society holds the humanities in contempt because their students aren't held to any meaningful standards --> aren't taught to do anything useful. I think that is dated, but was the sense ~10 years ago. Today, they are seen as an active threat to society by many, with their one main contribution being promotion of intersectionality / DEI / attack on freedom of speech & meritocracy.
- dgb23 4y agoWhat is meritocracy?
- limitedsupply 4y agoOK, I’ll bite. A very reductionist definition is “bigger contribution = bigger reward”.
- dgb23 4y agoIn my experience it is very subjective and generally contextual what either side of that equation means. The term meritocracy has often been by people who have a very clear view on what contribution and reward mean and they typically assume a closed and fair system where everyone already agreed on the meaning of those terms and on the rules on how to evaluate those things on a case by case basis. To be honest I'm just not sure whether it is a useful term at all outside of games, sports and other controlled systems with predefined and agreed upon rules.
- Jensson 4y agoUnder capitalism everyone decides what to reward, even the poorest people in first world countries make tons of decisions what to spend their money on, that is how we decide merit, if people decide to give you their money you have merit. We try to regulate so it doesn't get abusive but there will always be some holes, but that system is as close to an unbiased merit function we have gotten. The other good merit function we have is one vote per person, that is how we elect national leaders, this doesn't have some of the abusive loopholes as the capitalist merit function, but instead it has other abusive properties which is why every modern country choose to do a mix of both.
- thot_experiment 4y agoplease tell me this was at least partly written by ChatGPT as a joke illustrating the very kind of meaningless academic drivel that it's attempting to rail against? Not speaking to it's truth content, but it reads like self important bullshit.
- Animats 4y ago"But it is to be hoped that if ChatGPT triggers us into tackling how we can remove our willingness to give bullshit a pass — even for the wrong reason (combating the the threat of massive plagiarism) — then it may help us improve higher education." That's a useful problem to tackle. ChatGPT is good at well-written blithering. This shines a spotlight on the fact that society, and academia, tolerates well-written blithering. A sizable percentage of what appears on op-ed pages and in "thinky" magazines of all political persuasions looks like ChatGPT output. The humanities, as a field, now have to address that. Text on factual subjects which is not grounded to facts or a valid model is junk. That's recognized for technical writing. A "how to" article or a repair manual that tells you to do things that won't work is junk. That's not a criterion that's historically been applied in the humanities. Now it has to be. This isn't the end of the world. There was a time when good penmanship was a indicator of content quality. (Look up "Chancellery cursive") Then came typewriters. After that, spelling was considered a useful indicator. Then came spell check, followed by grammar checkers. Those traditional indicators are now dead. Lack of such errors merely indicates that someone has the right tools. Good automated blithering generators may force a style of writing more like classical newspaper reporting. Who, What, When, Where, Why, under the byline of the reporter who was there. Or like Wikipedia, with "cite needed" all over. That's not a bad thing. Now we need automated tools to criticize blithering. Ones that check sources and verify that the sources say what was quoted. Automated provenance verification. Checking for false confirmation via multiple routes from the same source. Opinion presented as fact. This could be healthy for political discourse. I look forward to seeing speeches marked up by automated checking systems. Perhaps in real time.
- layer8 4y agoIt would be interesting if AI would end up raising the expectations placed on humans for academic (and other) publications, and maybe even for general discourse, because “obviously” if your output can be replaced by an automaton, you’re not up to snuff and can’t be taken seriously. I’m not holding my breath though, the opposite trend of putting AI up on a pedestal is quite strong.