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It can't possibly work reliably. It's going to be very challenging for honest kids because almost everyone is going to be cheating. The reality is that learnin

by ilaksh 4y ago

It can't possibly work reliably. It's going to be very challenging for honest kids because almost everyone is going to be cheating. The reality is that learning to think and write will be harder because of the ubiquity of text generation AI. This may be the last generation of kids where most are good at doing it on their own. On the other hand, at least a few will be able to use this as an instant feedback mechanism or personal tutor, so the potential for some carefully supervised students to learn faster is there. And it should increase the quality of writing overall if people start taking advantage of these tools. It's going to fairly quickly become somewhat like using a calculator. Actually it probably means that informal text will really stand out more. I am giving it the ability to do simple tasks given commands like !!create filename file content etc. It's actually now very important for kids to adapt quickly and learn how to take advantage of these tools if they are going to be able to find jobs or just adapt in general even if they don't have jobs. It actually is starting to look like everyone is either an entrepreneur or just unemployed. Learning about all the ways to use these tools and the ones coming up in the next few years could be quite critical for children's education. There are always going to be luddites of course. But it's looking like ChatGPT etc. are going to be the least of our problems. It is not hard to imagine that within twenty years or so, anyone without a high bandwidth connection to an advanced AI will be essentially irrelevant because their effective IQ will be less than half of those who are plugged in.

logifail 4y ago
> it should increase the quality of writing overall if people start taking advantage of these tools Perversely, it might also dramatically decrease reading, if there's no incentive for anyone to need to properly understand anything. A pretty dire scenario :(
- Gigachad 4y ago
  It's probably going to devalue memorizing facts and concepts in the same way the internet already has, although to a further extent. This could be really exciting as everyone now has a subject matter expert on hand to ask any question they could think of.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    Subject matter exports are quick to point out the limitations and flaws of chatGPT in their domain of expertise.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I expect in a few years we will have versions that are both more accurate, and can cite their answers / do real research.
      - simonh 4y ago
        I think that's unlikely. The architecture these things currently use doesn't allow for the possibility of that. We'd need to engineer systems with a very different architecture in order to do it. So yes maybe eventually, sure, but we're a long way from that.
      - ilaksh 4y ago
        You can search a knowledgebase using embeddings today and it works pretty well.
  - logifail 4y ago
    > It's probably going to devalue memorizing facts and concepts in the same way the internet already has [..] OK, thought experiment: try to think of the brightest people you know/ever knew. Not the most successful, but the ones where after every interaction you were left thinking "wow, person X is really, really smart". I can think of a handful of people from over the decades, who worked in wildly different fields. All of them were really good at recalling facts and at quickly grasping concepts. None of them ever needed anything explaining (or even saying!) twice. Note: this isn't about people who excel at rote learning (like you might do for a school test), just there are people out there who are simply great at absorbing information. ChatGPT isn't that, and my prediction is that it will never be that. People who are great at writing prompts for ChatGPT aren't going to be that, either.
    - 4y ago
- lmm 4y ago
  Maybe it'll force people to state their points clearly and avoid bullshitting, if no-one is willing to wade through unclear paragraphs. That might have a positive effect in the long run.
jb_s 4y ago
I've defeated it already using basic prompt engineering.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Is prompt engineering what kids are calling typical hacking behavior these days?
sdenton4 4y ago
/This may be the last generation of kids where most are good at doing it on their own./ Ironically, students almost all suck at writing...
o_____________o 4y ago
Schools are going to have to be reverse format: watch lectures at home, do homework in class.
- sodality2 4y ago
  Many of my college classes are (and even high school classes! though I was coming out of HS in the tail end of covid) like this. High school: Watch ~1hr lecture every night for next day's class, in which we did worksheets and the teacher would work through problems, but we were generally expected to have learned the material (teacher would not re-teach it). College: Last semester I had a Data Structures class with a similar structure, but with 2-3 lectures a week. Same idea, we worked on practice sheets in class and had far more time to ask questions instead of having the entire concept taught to us. I much preferred this because some concepts covered, I had a very solid understanding of, so not wasting time in class was great.
- kimburgess 4y ago
  That approach to education is quite common. There’s been more of a push over the past decade or so under the “flipped classroom” moniker, but it’s the same principle as reading at home, then working with that knowledge in a group where different ways of thinking may be discussed.
- chefandy 4y ago
  I currently have a class where the professor does a hybrid of that. Instead of a four-and-a-quarter hour class, he makes a one hour video the day before with the rote part of the lecture and tries to address anything that came up among students since the previous week's class. Then we have a three-and-a-quarter hour class which is mostly work and there's a minimal lecture to warm everybody up. While the medium is largely technical, it is a studio art class however so it was a bit different from most classes, anyway.
- p-e-w 4y ago
  No, schools (and employers, and scientists, and everyone else) are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they will rapidly become irrelevant, and cannot possibly hope to continue operating in anything resembling their traditional role.
idontpost 4y ago
[dead]
Gabriel_Martin 4y ago
Sorry, it is unclear if this comment is AI generated or not, I can't give you full credit for it. (No seriously. "The classifier considers the text to be unclear if it is AI-generated.")
- vorticalbox 4y ago
  I just tried the op comment and got > The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated.
anothernewdude 4y ago
It's going to falsely label any recent innovation in language as generated, because the training set will skew human-written as old and GPT generated as new language.
kobalsky 4y ago
> The reality is that learning to think and write will be harder because of the ubiquity of text generation AI is this just a baseless assertion or do you have something to back it up? what I'm seeing is that a lot of kids will have a 1:1 coach for a lot of topics. I know now it's not perfect, but this thing may be a few years away from having a likeable personality and fact checking what it says.
ElFitz 4y ago
> The reality is that learning to think and write will be harder because of the ubiquity of text generation AI. This may be the last generation of kids where most are good at doing it on their own. I think the form will change, but the substance is going to be like it always has. Those who give a damn, want to and are able to improve will be able to do it 100x by getting access to a new source of diversified ideas and view points, variations on their own, and information. And efficiently and more or less reliably delegating low-value stuff at a low marginal cost, freeing up bandwidth & increasing impact. And the grifters who’re always looking for shortcuts and constantly try to game whatever system they are in without any desire whatsoever to learn anything or grow in anyway… will keep doing just that. And the only value they’ll be able to bring will be… access to a tool anyone (but, yes, not everyone) can access. And that matters, because in the end many of the problems worth solving aren’t technical problems, but people problems. Writing this, I realise I may have completely missed your point and gone way off topic here.

by ilaksh 4y ago

logifail 4y ago

> it should increase the quality of writing overall if people start taking advantage of these tools Perversely, it might also dramatically decrease reading, if there's no incentive for anyone to need to properly understand anything. A pretty dire scenario :(

Gigachad 4y ago
It's probably going to devalue memorizing facts and concepts in the same way the internet already has, although to a further extent. This could be really exciting as everyone now has a subject matter expert on hand to ask any question they could think of.
- goatlover 4y ago
  Subject matter exports are quick to point out the limitations and flaws of chatGPT in their domain of expertise.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I expect in a few years we will have versions that are both more accurate, and can cite their answers / do real research.
    - simonh 4y ago
      I think that's unlikely. The architecture these things currently use doesn't allow for the possibility of that. We'd need to engineer systems with a very different architecture in order to do it. So yes maybe eventually, sure, but we're a long way from that.
    - ilaksh 4y ago
      You can search a knowledgebase using embeddings today and it works pretty well.
- logifail 4y ago
  > It's probably going to devalue memorizing facts and concepts in the same way the internet already has [..] OK, thought experiment: try to think of the brightest people you know/ever knew. Not the most successful, but the ones where after every interaction you were left thinking "wow, person X is really, really smart". I can think of a handful of people from over the decades, who worked in wildly different fields. All of them were really good at recalling facts and at quickly grasping concepts. None of them ever needed anything explaining (or even saying!) twice. Note: this isn't about people who excel at rote learning (like you might do for a school test), just there are people out there who are simply great at absorbing information. ChatGPT isn't that, and my prediction is that it will never be that. People who are great at writing prompts for ChatGPT aren't going to be that, either.
  - 4y ago
lmm 4y ago
Maybe it'll force people to state their points clearly and avoid bullshitting, if no-one is willing to wade through unclear paragraphs. That might have a positive effect in the long run.

jb_s 4y ago

I've defeated it already using basic prompt engineering.

mensetmanusman 4y ago
Is prompt engineering what kids are calling typical hacking behavior these days?

sdenton4 4y ago

/This may be the last generation of kids where most are good at doing it on their own./ Ironically, students almost all suck at writing...

o_____________o 4y ago

Schools are going to have to be reverse format: watch lectures at home, do homework in class.

sodality2 4y ago
Many of my college classes are (and even high school classes! though I was coming out of HS in the tail end of covid) like this. High school: Watch ~1hr lecture every night for next day's class, in which we did worksheets and the teacher would work through problems, but we were generally expected to have learned the material (teacher would not re-teach it). College: Last semester I had a Data Structures class with a similar structure, but with 2-3 lectures a week. Same idea, we worked on practice sheets in class and had far more time to ask questions instead of having the entire concept taught to us. I much preferred this because some concepts covered, I had a very solid understanding of, so not wasting time in class was great.
kimburgess 4y ago
That approach to education is quite common. There’s been more of a push over the past decade or so under the “flipped classroom” moniker, but it’s the same principle as reading at home, then working with that knowledge in a group where different ways of thinking may be discussed.
chefandy 4y ago
I currently have a class where the professor does a hybrid of that. Instead of a four-and-a-quarter hour class, he makes a one hour video the day before with the rote part of the lecture and tries to address anything that came up among students since the previous week's class. Then we have a three-and-a-quarter hour class which is mostly work and there's a minimal lecture to warm everybody up. While the medium is largely technical, it is a studio art class however so it was a bit different from most classes, anyway.
p-e-w 4y ago
No, schools (and employers, and scientists, and everyone else) are going to have to come to terms with the fact that they will rapidly become irrelevant, and cannot possibly hope to continue operating in anything resembling their traditional role.

idontpost 4y ago

[dead]

Gabriel_Martin 4y ago

Sorry, it is unclear if this comment is AI generated or not, I can't give you full credit for it. (No seriously. "The classifier considers the text to be unclear if it is AI-generated.")

vorticalbox 4y ago
I just tried the op comment and got > The classifier considers the text to be very unlikely AI-generated.

anothernewdude 4y ago

It's going to falsely label any recent innovation in language as generated, because the training set will skew human-written as old and GPT generated as new language.

kobalsky 4y ago

> The reality is that learning to think and write will be harder because of the ubiquity of text generation AI is this just a baseless assertion or do you have something to back it up? what I'm seeing is that a lot of kids will have a 1:1 coach for a lot of topics. I know now it's not perfect, but this thing may be a few years away from having a likeable personality and fact checking what it says.

ElFitz 4y ago

> The reality is that learning to think and write will be harder because of the ubiquity of text generation AI. This may be the last generation of kids where most are good at doing it on their own. I think the form will change, but the substance is going to be like it always has. Those who give a damn, want to and are able to improve will be able to do it 100x by getting access to a new source of diversified ideas and view points, variations on their own, and information. And efficiently and more or less reliably delegating low-value stuff at a low marginal cost, freeing up bandwidth & increasing impact. And the grifters who’re always looking for shortcuts and constantly try to game whatever system they are in without any desire whatsoever to learn anything or grow in anyway… will keep doing just that. And the only value they’ll be able to bring will be… access to a tool anyone (but, yes, not everyone) can access. And that matters, because in the end many of the problems worth solving aren’t technical problems, but people problems. Writing this, I realise I may have completely missed your point and gone way off topic here.