5 ms·

My wife is a university professor in the states, she said it's incredibly obvious who has started to use a GPT for the work they turn in. There is a lot of wres

by neom 4y ago

My wife is a university professor in the states, she said it's incredibly obvious who has started to use a GPT for the work they turn in. There is a lot of wrestling going on within the staff in her department on what they should do, some people want to outright ban anything that "seems" it was written by a LLM. As my wife discussed with me, it's hard to know how much was written by GPT and how much was edited by the student, maybe they asked 50 questions to the LLM and then copy/pasted it together themselves, maybe they used it for the outline, and filled in the details themselves. The lines can get pretty blurry. One thing that it seems most of the profs find annoying is... they're aware that GPT can invent convincing sounding sources, so they're doing a lot more work verifying sources. Commented this ^^ the other day on the UK students being able to use LLMs post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028224

euroderf 4y ago
Students should be rewarded for checking sources, and (moderately?) penalized for not doing so. I would say that at a minimum, every fictitious source knocks off a full letter grade. And make sure students know this. They will adapt. And it might get them to the sources, at least superficially (yeay?) to check for existence/non-existence.
hypertele-Xii 4y ago
Interview the student. That's literally all it takes... but oh no, it's too expensive, must figure out how to automate testing... while fighting against the automation of answering.
gimili 4y ago
I found it interesting that there start to be best-practices for professors and teachers on how to deal with ChatGPT in a class room [1]. One I really liked a lot: >And if you don't trust the AI to output correct content, teach your students critical thinking by using Assisted Teaching to write history essays and let your students find mistakes in it. Another way (if you want to go the more traditional way), is the Flipped Classroom [2] method, in which students self-teach at home and do the "homework" in the classroom. I agree with others here that there is no way to ban these technologies; there are just better and worse ways to deal with it. [1]: https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/the-age-of-assisted-everything https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/the-age-of-assiste... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
WolfOliver 4y ago
But there is also quillbot.com which is around for some time and used by students to paraphrase text which they copy & past from other sources. IMO this is worse.
908B64B197 4y ago
> some people want to outright ban anything that "seems" it was written by a LLM ... The false positives won't be pretty. Especially for ESL students whose grasp of the language might make them sound a little too artificial. > it's hard to know how much was written by GPT and how much was edited by the student The smartest students won't even be suspected of using an AI model. They'll use the AI to do directed work, proofread and re-write as needed. Not really different than going through three revisions with different mentors for their college entrance essay...
- noodlesUK 4y ago
  > The smartest students won't even be suspected of using an AI model. They'll use the AI to do directed work, proofread and re-write as needed. Not really different than going through three revisions with different mentors for their college entrance essay If that’s what they’re using it for I propose that they’re meeting the learning objectives just as much as someone who did those things in a study group with their friends. Of course how acceptable that is depends on the context of the work.
- TheJoeMan 4y ago
  As a recent graduate, I read plenty of my peer’s papers that were obviously written in 1 hour at 10pm, talking in circles with no substance. This is the level of output of these LLMs, and frankly I think all of them should be getting C’s.
noodlesUK 4y ago
I think one of the other things that could be valuable would be to ask students to write fewer longer form assignments. ChatGPT and friends aren’t very good at staying on topic for all that long without being very repetitive. I think that’s probably a side effect of the number of tokens available. I don’t think that chatGPT could reliably write a detailed 5k word essay or more. It might be able to make some useful snippets to copy and paste, but I think the tone would be weirdly disconnected and it might make it more obviously not written by a person. I’d be interested if anyone has tried this and what their experiences were.
lumost 4y ago
I’m in grad school right now. I use chatgpt to convert first drafts into polished final drafts by asking the following questions - is this text convincing? How can it be improved? - rewrite the following passage for clarity. Target an audience of X level. It’s like a more efficient version of grammarly, I don’t have any qualms with this use. Saves hours debating phrasing, and acts as a TA for getting initial feedback on whether you are missing the mark.
- noobermin 4y ago
  If you are in graduate school, you should learn how to write. You will not always be in the luxury to have an internet connection to clarify your point to your audience.
  - sebzim4500 4y ago
    It sounds to me that they are learning how to write, ChatGPT is the tool that they are using to do so.
  - lumost 4y ago
    aye - I learned that lesson the hard way many years ago. As with all things ChatGPT - it does better with an expert user. Prior to ChatGPT I learned how to write well both for my job, and then for grad school. ChatGPT is just a time saver.
  - cbozeman 4y ago
    LOL, anywhere on the planet where you would actually need to clarify a point to an audience, you'll have an Internet connection. Do you honestly think you'll get into a philosophical debate so incredibly challenging that you'd need to fall back upon ChatGPT to argue on your behalf in the middle of say, the Australian bush?? And even if you did, RV Starlink is there to save the day. ChatGPT doesn't "do work for you". ChatGPT is like having a subject matter expert by your side to guide you. And like every single person who has access to a subject matter expert, you're going to take away whatever you want, and leave whatever you don't. Lazy shitbags will be lazy shitbags with or without ChatGPT. But inquisitive people who want to soar with the eagles have an impossibly powerful tool at their disposal.
neilv 4y ago
Some of the cheating using AI methods right now is very obvious because the writing is so poor. (For example, it's making things up, falling flat on argument, or using a grade school essay style.) But what happens if generated poor content like this becomes a high percentage of what people are reading? Will people start unconsciously mimicking the styles in their own writing? (This might be at least a temporary effect, as a technical writer mentioned they'd seen in their own work during a period they were reading Hunter S. Thompson heavily. Getting a bit punchy for tech doc.) And will people's cognitive and expression abilities outright decline? (Perhaps because they're exposed to lots of generated examples of argument and other communication, or because they leaned on an AI-method tool, rather than go through the thinking and perhaps learning exercise themselves?) Maybe these effects will begin, and even be noticed, but rather than try to fix it, society will just lower its standards, and then others will try to profit on the problem existing and continuing to exist? (Look at journalism and political discourse. Or at software development.)
- ChatGTP 4y ago
  I truly think this will happen. Most people I know, smart people included, really struggle with writing. People struggle to clearly communicate ideas, express themselves, form sentences and more. I'd say the majority of people I work with are actually poor communicators, especially via text (email, sms etc). Writing is a skill and no one is "perfect" at it, including me. It's only going to get worse without practice. I know this because I'm learning another language and if I take even a few weeks off, I lose it pretty quickly for being at an intermediate level. There was a period in my life where I picked up a pen to write something and I realized that it had been so long since I used one I was actually intimated and struggled. I was too used to keyboards. I don't see outsourcing writing itself to ChatGPT being much different. I cringe a little when I read all these messages like, "Oh, I just use ChatGPT to respond to everything now and write all my code etc". Well that's good it's saving you time, but you're also not exercising your ability to think anymore, and that will be detrimental. Many of those people probably didn't have a yardstick to measure there own writing ability by in the first place and now just assume they're better off outsourcing to ChatGPT. It's a questionable position to take. There might be a time in 10 years where people are told they should write because it's good for their brain, like how we have to tell people who don't do physical labor they need to exercise...funny stuff. Lastly, there must be truly something to be said for the fact that ChatGPT, at least currently (maybe it will train against itself soon) is trained off human inputs. If that trend continues and everything is ChatGPT, well where does that leave us? With a stagnant, flat way of communicating with stale ideas? I feel like everything is becoming a little dystopian lately, ha!
cbozeman 4y ago
I think your wife's collogues are missing the forest for the trees here. This isn't going away. You can't stop it. Her university can't win an AI arms race, nor should they even try to. I've already integrated ChatGPT into my workflow and not only is my boss thrilled about it, he's actively embracing it and encouraging the rest of the people at work to do it. We're discussing approaching OpenAI about enterprise pricing so everyone can have the Plus version. I'm able to take time doing the bullshit grunt work of my job and essentially outsource it to ChatGPT. Then I go in and fix everything it fucks up - not just code, but poor wording, incoherent / incongruent sentences, etc. University professors, high school teachers, middle school teachers - everyone - are all in for a rude awakening. You're going to have to get to know your students. You're going to have to scale down class sizes, because you have to now invest time in learning someone's writing style to know what's ChatGPT and what's their own voice. You're going to have to actually test for understanding, not just rote memorization. Our species is moving past that, thank God. And more importantly, we're going to see college scaled back like it should have already been. Most people are not only not college material, they don't need to be college material. The vast, vast majority of jobs in the world can be easily done without a four-year degree and with a few weeks to a few months on on-the-job training. We're long overdue to pass the buck back to companies to pay for training their workers, not dumping a $25,000 to $250,000 responsibility on would-be workers in the hopes they can stand out. ChatGPT will hopefully be a huge catalyst for this, and I think paired with crippling student loans, we will start to see a massive paradigm shift soon.
- lisasays 4y ago
  I've already integrated ChatGPT into my workflow And your line of work is?
- neom 4y ago
  I agree with you that it's here to stay, and I'm sure my wife does too... but it's not so simple. I can mostly figure out how to improve my work with modern ML, and I'm fairly tech literate... I think it's just a painful time for them. It's easy to say they're in for a rude awakening because it's obvious to us they are. However, she's a history professor who can hardly use a computer. Between dealing with bureaucracy of an inherently protectionist work environment, reading a zillion books, research, teaching, conferences, publishing, etc, etc, plus never really focusing on becoming technology literate, this is a lot to process. My wife is still young relatively to her colleagues so I think she can deal with the shift, but it doesn't negate the fact that she's (a junior) member of a team, and this conversation is happening in all departments, from architecture to philosophy to math. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.

by neom 4y ago

euroderf 4y ago

Students should be rewarded for checking sources, and (moderately?) penalized for not doing so. I would say that at a minimum, every fictitious source knocks off a full letter grade. And make sure students know this. They will adapt. And it might get them to the sources, at least superficially (yeay?) to check for existence/non-existence.

hypertele-Xii 4y ago

Interview the student. That's literally all it takes... but oh no, it's too expensive, must figure out how to automate testing... while fighting against the automation of answering.

gimili 4y ago

I found it interesting that there start to be best-practices for professors and teachers on how to deal with ChatGPT in a class room [1]. One I really liked a lot: >And if you don't trust the AI to output correct content, teach your students critical thinking by using Assisted Teaching to write history essays and let your students find mistakes in it. Another way (if you want to go the more traditional way), is the Flipped Classroom [2] method, in which students self-teach at home and do the "homework" in the classroom. I agree with others here that there is no way to ban these technologies; there are just better and worse ways to deal with it. [1]: https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/the-age-of-assisted-everything https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/the-age-of-assiste... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom

WolfOliver 4y ago

But there is also quillbot.com which is around for some time and used by students to paraphrase text which they copy & past from other sources. IMO this is worse.

908B64B197 4y ago

> some people want to outright ban anything that "seems" it was written by a LLM ... The false positives won't be pretty. Especially for ESL students whose grasp of the language might make them sound a little too artificial. > it's hard to know how much was written by GPT and how much was edited by the student The smartest students won't even be suspected of using an AI model. They'll use the AI to do directed work, proofread and re-write as needed. Not really different than going through three revisions with different mentors for their college entrance essay...

noodlesUK 4y ago
> The smartest students won't even be suspected of using an AI model. They'll use the AI to do directed work, proofread and re-write as needed. Not really different than going through three revisions with different mentors for their college entrance essay If that’s what they’re using it for I propose that they’re meeting the learning objectives just as much as someone who did those things in a study group with their friends. Of course how acceptable that is depends on the context of the work.
TheJoeMan 4y ago
As a recent graduate, I read plenty of my peer’s papers that were obviously written in 1 hour at 10pm, talking in circles with no substance. This is the level of output of these LLMs, and frankly I think all of them should be getting C’s.

noodlesUK 4y ago

I think one of the other things that could be valuable would be to ask students to write fewer longer form assignments. ChatGPT and friends aren’t very good at staying on topic for all that long without being very repetitive. I think that’s probably a side effect of the number of tokens available. I don’t think that chatGPT could reliably write a detailed 5k word essay or more. It might be able to make some useful snippets to copy and paste, but I think the tone would be weirdly disconnected and it might make it more obviously not written by a person. I’d be interested if anyone has tried this and what their experiences were.

lumost 4y ago

I’m in grad school right now. I use chatgpt to convert first drafts into polished final drafts by asking the following questions - is this text convincing? How can it be improved? - rewrite the following passage for clarity. Target an audience of X level. It’s like a more efficient version of grammarly, I don’t have any qualms with this use. Saves hours debating phrasing, and acts as a TA for getting initial feedback on whether you are missing the mark.

noobermin 4y ago
If you are in graduate school, you should learn how to write. You will not always be in the luxury to have an internet connection to clarify your point to your audience.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  It sounds to me that they are learning how to write, ChatGPT is the tool that they are using to do so.
- lumost 4y ago
  aye - I learned that lesson the hard way many years ago. As with all things ChatGPT - it does better with an expert user. Prior to ChatGPT I learned how to write well both for my job, and then for grad school. ChatGPT is just a time saver.
- cbozeman 4y ago
  LOL, anywhere on the planet where you would actually need to clarify a point to an audience, you'll have an Internet connection. Do you honestly think you'll get into a philosophical debate so incredibly challenging that you'd need to fall back upon ChatGPT to argue on your behalf in the middle of say, the Australian bush?? And even if you did, RV Starlink is there to save the day. ChatGPT doesn't "do work for you". ChatGPT is like having a subject matter expert by your side to guide you. And like every single person who has access to a subject matter expert, you're going to take away whatever you want, and leave whatever you don't. Lazy shitbags will be lazy shitbags with or without ChatGPT. But inquisitive people who want to soar with the eagles have an impossibly powerful tool at their disposal.

neilv 4y ago

Some of the cheating using AI methods right now is very obvious because the writing is so poor. (For example, it's making things up, falling flat on argument, or using a grade school essay style.) But what happens if generated poor content like this becomes a high percentage of what people are reading? Will people start unconsciously mimicking the styles in their own writing? (This might be at least a temporary effect, as a technical writer mentioned they'd seen in their own work during a period they were reading Hunter S. Thompson heavily. Getting a bit punchy for tech doc.) And will people's cognitive and expression abilities outright decline? (Perhaps because they're exposed to lots of generated examples of argument and other communication, or because they leaned on an AI-method tool, rather than go through the thinking and perhaps learning exercise themselves?) Maybe these effects will begin, and even be noticed, but rather than try to fix it, society will just lower its standards, and then others will try to profit on the problem existing and continuing to exist? (Look at journalism and political discourse. Or at software development.)

ChatGTP 4y ago
I truly think this will happen. Most people I know, smart people included, really struggle with writing. People struggle to clearly communicate ideas, express themselves, form sentences and more. I'd say the majority of people I work with are actually poor communicators, especially via text (email, sms etc). Writing is a skill and no one is "perfect" at it, including me. It's only going to get worse without practice. I know this because I'm learning another language and if I take even a few weeks off, I lose it pretty quickly for being at an intermediate level. There was a period in my life where I picked up a pen to write something and I realized that it had been so long since I used one I was actually intimated and struggled. I was too used to keyboards. I don't see outsourcing writing itself to ChatGPT being much different. I cringe a little when I read all these messages like, "Oh, I just use ChatGPT to respond to everything now and write all my code etc". Well that's good it's saving you time, but you're also not exercising your ability to think anymore, and that will be detrimental. Many of those people probably didn't have a yardstick to measure there own writing ability by in the first place and now just assume they're better off outsourcing to ChatGPT. It's a questionable position to take. There might be a time in 10 years where people are told they should write because it's good for their brain, like how we have to tell people who don't do physical labor they need to exercise...funny stuff. Lastly, there must be truly something to be said for the fact that ChatGPT, at least currently (maybe it will train against itself soon) is trained off human inputs. If that trend continues and everything is ChatGPT, well where does that leave us? With a stagnant, flat way of communicating with stale ideas? I feel like everything is becoming a little dystopian lately, ha!

cbozeman 4y ago

I think your wife's collogues are missing the forest for the trees here. This isn't going away. You can't stop it. Her university can't win an AI arms race, nor should they even try to. I've already integrated ChatGPT into my workflow and not only is my boss thrilled about it, he's actively embracing it and encouraging the rest of the people at work to do it. We're discussing approaching OpenAI about enterprise pricing so everyone can have the Plus version. I'm able to take time doing the bullshit grunt work of my job and essentially outsource it to ChatGPT. Then I go in and fix everything it fucks up - not just code, but poor wording, incoherent / incongruent sentences, etc. University professors, high school teachers, middle school teachers - everyone - are all in for a rude awakening. You're going to have to get to know your students. You're going to have to scale down class sizes, because you have to now invest time in learning someone's writing style to know what's ChatGPT and what's their own voice. You're going to have to actually test for understanding, not just rote memorization. Our species is moving past that, thank God. And more importantly, we're going to see college scaled back like it should have already been. Most people are not only not college material, they don't need to be college material. The vast, vast majority of jobs in the world can be easily done without a four-year degree and with a few weeks to a few months on on-the-job training. We're long overdue to pass the buck back to companies to pay for training their workers, not dumping a $25,000 to $250,000 responsibility on would-be workers in the hopes they can stand out. ChatGPT will hopefully be a huge catalyst for this, and I think paired with crippling student loans, we will start to see a massive paradigm shift soon.

lisasays 4y ago
I've already integrated ChatGPT into my workflow And your line of work is?
neom 4y ago
I agree with you that it's here to stay, and I'm sure my wife does too... but it's not so simple. I can mostly figure out how to improve my work with modern ML, and I'm fairly tech literate... I think it's just a painful time for them. It's easy to say they're in for a rude awakening because it's obvious to us they are. However, she's a history professor who can hardly use a computer. Between dealing with bureaucracy of an inherently protectionist work environment, reading a zillion books, research, teaching, conferences, publishing, etc, etc, plus never really focusing on becoming technology literate, this is a lot to process. My wife is still young relatively to her colleagues so I think she can deal with the shift, but it doesn't negate the fact that she's (a junior) member of a team, and this conversation is happening in all departments, from architecture to philosophy to math. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.