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> Fortunately for him, ChatGPT knew the story and was happy to write an essay with arguments. [Btw, according to him pretty much everyone in class routinely has

> Fortunately for him, ChatGPT knew the story and was happy to write an essay with arguments. [Btw, according to him pretty much everyone in class routinely has the AI do their essays] >He was about to send this essay in. Why would you encourage your child to use ChatGPT like this? "Everyone else is doing it" seems like a great argument for NOT doing it yourself as those kids are going to seriously lack critical thinking skills in a few years as they offload that work to AIs.

b112 4y ago
No defending, merely pondering. It may be, and this part horrifies me, like using a calculator. I remember when they first became affordable, and at that time, the same horror. And from what I've seen, that horror came to fruition, as I see younger(20s to 40s) adults sometimes struggling with simple math. EG, if the power is out, and manually handling change at a cash register. Yes, there is intelligence, but also the honing and application of the same. And calculators reduced some of that. Now enter chatgpt. Here goes the ability to hone arguments, forge essays, etc, etc. Gone! Imagine when everyone gets a brain link, I bet all long term menory will fall into ruin, too.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  I'm not sure the analogy is the same. To me it seems more like plagiarizing an essay or copying homework answers from Chegg or something like that. You haven't gained a new skill, you've just mindlessly pasted an answer from somewhere else. You CAN certainly use tools like ChatGPT in a powerful and useful way that amplifies your own abilities instead of atrophying them. >Now enter chatgpt. Here goes the ability to hone arguments, forge essays, etc, etc. Gone! It's just not the same. If you take an essay prompt and just paste it into ChatGPT and then paste the output into your homework submission what skill exactly are you exercising or learning? There IS value in having to think about a problem and make a coherent argument in text form and you certainly lose that if you never practice it because you just let ChatGPT do it. At least with some of the current models, e.g. ChatGPT, we can't even be sure of the veracity of it's outputs so not only are you not learning any skills you can potentially output blatantly false information as well.
HDThoreaun 4y ago
First, I'd say that using chatGPT actually lead to more critical thinking here since the essay had to be proofread for mistakes. More importantly though using ai to assist in writing is the future, there's no point in ignoring that. And as the OP points out, getting good output isn't that simple, it is a skill that needs to be trained.
- 12345hn6789 4y ago
  Did it though? All I see here is having someone else do the work, and you making sure it looks about right. They found it some of it doesn't work properly so they had to actually do the work themselves. Seems all they learned was to improve the questions to feed the bot, not ant critical thinking skills.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    IMO making sure it looks right is just as much critical thinking as writing. The errors are quite insidious and hard to catch without paying close attention.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  But OP didn't even intend to do that originally, he said they were about to submit a 100% fake essay before starting that proofread process.
xeyownt 4y ago
For me this is the wrong attitude. AI is there, and more of it will come. The best you can do as a parent is to help your children to use it correctly. I'm pretty sure that using it correctly will help to improve the critical thinking, and will help children to express themselves in a better way (by virtue of example, or correction, etc -- possibilities are countless). New technology doesn't mean people will regress.
- smolder 4y ago
  > New technology doesn't mean people will regress. It doesn't always, and the value of different skills change over time... But where horse riding is pretty well obsoleted by the alternatives, unassisted writing and the associated cognitive skills are unlikely to be. It's a good idea to be concerned with potential regression there.
welshwelsh 4y ago
Being able to effectively offload work to AI is an extremely valuable skill. The Washington Post and Associated Press use AI to generate articles. In the real world, only results matter. Using technology isn't cheating. The solution is not to make students manually do what AI can do perfectly well. Instead, give them assignments that are too complex for AI to solve unassisted. Raise the bar so high that a ChatGPT generated essay will earn them a C and they need to do substantially better than that to get an A.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  But in this case the essay isn't the required result. Someone in Washington Post needed an article and got one from AI, but in the students' case absolutely no-one needed that essay, it wasn't assigned because the teacher wanted to receive x essays on that topic, it wasn't even necessarily assigned with the intent to learn how to write good essays (sometimes they are, but usually not). That assignment was made with a goal of getting students practice doing careful reading, thinking and analysis, getting them to do a certain quantity of "repetitions" as exercise in that; the essay was just a token to signify that the exercise was done and get feedback on its form. And as you say, "only results matter" and the result obviously wasn't achieved if this was written by an AI. It's like having a weightlifter come in to a gym to repeatedly lift barbells with a crane - he's getting no results out of that.
  - adamsmith143 4y ago
    Another poster made an analogy to the introduction of cheap calculators and it does make me wonder. If the AI tools get to the point where they really can do the analysis better, with more clarity, better logic, deeper understanding, and output true information then why DO we want to train humans to do this? It's no longer a valuable skill to be able to calculate by hand the square root of arbitrary numbers when a calculator can do it far faster with basically 100% fidelity. If AI tools get this way for other mental work then why should we train people to do it at all? >It's like having a weightlifter come in to a gym to repeatedly lift barbells with a crane - he's getting no results out of that. To use your own analogy, the weightlifter doesn't NEED to get physically strong anymore, they do it for competitive reasons or as a personal challenge. Chess may also be a good example, currently no human can beat the best Chess AIs but since Chess isn't a particularly important Economic endeavor it just exists as a game and the chess AIs are kind of a novelty. But if chess were super critical to Economies then its unlikely humans would be involved in it at all for anything other than fun. The chess AIs would dominate completely.
anon7725 4y ago
This comment makes a valid point, so I don’t know why it’s attracting downvotes. > like this This is the key phrase. There are ways to use LLMs to help with both research and writing that don’t involve surrendering your own part in the process. Research with LLMs is often much better than search engines for surface level information. You should accept nothing that they say as truth, but they will often turn up names, book titles, etc that you can follow for more information. Editing with LLMs is great - they were born for it. “What is a more expressive way to say ‘Lincoln’s presidency was a time of great change for the United States’?”, etc.
kerpotgh 4y ago
The kids are definitely going to have a lack of critical thinking skills. But the cat is out of the bag. If I think back to my days in university, I would have definitely used chatGPT, especially when deadlines were a few hours away. It takes an inordinate amount of self discipline to not use a tool when it’s right there and the alternative is failing the class. You’re never going to be able to use the honor system effectively here. It’s going to devolve into students submitting chatGPT essays and professors using chatGPT to grade them. From there the only logical step is to have AI be a generally accepted tool in everyone’s life like we have smartphones now. The extremely long term view on this is the lack of need for education at all as soon as we get the future AGI version of chatGPT directly plugged into our brains.

b112 4y ago

No defending, merely pondering. It may be, and this part horrifies me, like using a calculator. I remember when they first became affordable, and at that time, the same horror. And from what I've seen, that horror came to fruition, as I see younger(20s to 40s) adults sometimes struggling with simple math. EG, if the power is out, and manually handling change at a cash register. Yes, there is intelligence, but also the honing and application of the same. And calculators reduced some of that. Now enter chatgpt. Here goes the ability to hone arguments, forge essays, etc, etc. Gone! Imagine when everyone gets a brain link, I bet all long term menory will fall into ruin, too.

adamsmith143 4y ago
I'm not sure the analogy is the same. To me it seems more like plagiarizing an essay or copying homework answers from Chegg or something like that. You haven't gained a new skill, you've just mindlessly pasted an answer from somewhere else. You CAN certainly use tools like ChatGPT in a powerful and useful way that amplifies your own abilities instead of atrophying them. >Now enter chatgpt. Here goes the ability to hone arguments, forge essays, etc, etc. Gone! It's just not the same. If you take an essay prompt and just paste it into ChatGPT and then paste the output into your homework submission what skill exactly are you exercising or learning? There IS value in having to think about a problem and make a coherent argument in text form and you certainly lose that if you never practice it because you just let ChatGPT do it. At least with some of the current models, e.g. ChatGPT, we can't even be sure of the veracity of it's outputs so not only are you not learning any skills you can potentially output blatantly false information as well.

HDThoreaun 4y ago

First, I'd say that using chatGPT actually lead to more critical thinking here since the essay had to be proofread for mistakes. More importantly though using ai to assist in writing is the future, there's no point in ignoring that. And as the OP points out, getting good output isn't that simple, it is a skill that needs to be trained.

12345hn6789 4y ago
Did it though? All I see here is having someone else do the work, and you making sure it looks about right. They found it some of it doesn't work properly so they had to actually do the work themselves. Seems all they learned was to improve the questions to feed the bot, not ant critical thinking skills.
- HDThoreaun 4y ago
  IMO making sure it looks right is just as much critical thinking as writing. The errors are quite insidious and hard to catch without paying close attention.
adamsmith143 4y ago
But OP didn't even intend to do that originally, he said they were about to submit a 100% fake essay before starting that proofread process.

xeyownt 4y ago

For me this is the wrong attitude. AI is there, and more of it will come. The best you can do as a parent is to help your children to use it correctly. I'm pretty sure that using it correctly will help to improve the critical thinking, and will help children to express themselves in a better way (by virtue of example, or correction, etc -- possibilities are countless). New technology doesn't mean people will regress.

smolder 4y ago
> New technology doesn't mean people will regress. It doesn't always, and the value of different skills change over time... But where horse riding is pretty well obsoleted by the alternatives, unassisted writing and the associated cognitive skills are unlikely to be. It's a good idea to be concerned with potential regression there.

welshwelsh 4y ago

Being able to effectively offload work to AI is an extremely valuable skill. The Washington Post and Associated Press use AI to generate articles. In the real world, only results matter. Using technology isn't cheating. The solution is not to make students manually do what AI can do perfectly well. Instead, give them assignments that are too complex for AI to solve unassisted. Raise the bar so high that a ChatGPT generated essay will earn them a C and they need to do substantially better than that to get an A.

PeterisP 4y ago
But in this case the essay isn't the required result. Someone in Washington Post needed an article and got one from AI, but in the students' case absolutely no-one needed that essay, it wasn't assigned because the teacher wanted to receive x essays on that topic, it wasn't even necessarily assigned with the intent to learn how to write good essays (sometimes they are, but usually not). That assignment was made with a goal of getting students practice doing careful reading, thinking and analysis, getting them to do a certain quantity of "repetitions" as exercise in that; the essay was just a token to signify that the exercise was done and get feedback on its form. And as you say, "only results matter" and the result obviously wasn't achieved if this was written by an AI. It's like having a weightlifter come in to a gym to repeatedly lift barbells with a crane - he's getting no results out of that.
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Another poster made an analogy to the introduction of cheap calculators and it does make me wonder. If the AI tools get to the point where they really can do the analysis better, with more clarity, better logic, deeper understanding, and output true information then why DO we want to train humans to do this? It's no longer a valuable skill to be able to calculate by hand the square root of arbitrary numbers when a calculator can do it far faster with basically 100% fidelity. If AI tools get this way for other mental work then why should we train people to do it at all? >It's like having a weightlifter come in to a gym to repeatedly lift barbells with a crane - he's getting no results out of that. To use your own analogy, the weightlifter doesn't NEED to get physically strong anymore, they do it for competitive reasons or as a personal challenge. Chess may also be a good example, currently no human can beat the best Chess AIs but since Chess isn't a particularly important Economic endeavor it just exists as a game and the chess AIs are kind of a novelty. But if chess were super critical to Economies then its unlikely humans would be involved in it at all for anything other than fun. The chess AIs would dominate completely.

anon7725 4y ago

This comment makes a valid point, so I don’t know why it’s attracting downvotes. > like this This is the key phrase. There are ways to use LLMs to help with both research and writing that don’t involve surrendering your own part in the process. Research with LLMs is often much better than search engines for surface level information. You should accept nothing that they say as truth, but they will often turn up names, book titles, etc that you can follow for more information. Editing with LLMs is great - they were born for it. “What is a more expressive way to say ‘Lincoln’s presidency was a time of great change for the United States’?”, etc.

kerpotgh 4y ago

The kids are definitely going to have a lack of critical thinking skills. But the cat is out of the bag. If I think back to my days in university, I would have definitely used chatGPT, especially when deadlines were a few hours away. It takes an inordinate amount of self discipline to not use a tool when it’s right there and the alternative is failing the class. You’re never going to be able to use the honor system effectively here. It’s going to devolve into students submitting chatGPT essays and professors using chatGPT to grade them. From there the only logical step is to have AI be a generally accepted tool in everyone’s life like we have smartphones now. The extremely long term view on this is the lack of need for education at all as soon as we get the future AGI version of chatGPT directly plugged into our brains.