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I mentioned ChatGPt to my non techie wife. To my shock, She started explaining to me how awesome it is and how all of her teacher friends are using it to offlo

I mentioned ChatGPt to my non techie wife. To my shock, She started explaining to me how awesome it is and how all of her teacher friends are using it to offload a lot of the boring work like writing comments and stuff for students report cards. They are required to write numerous paragraphs for each student several times. Something in the past I would take my wife an entire week each time. These are people that need help setting up Wi-Fi on a laptop. And they are in love with ChatGPT.

wpietri 4y ago
Sure. Prose generation is a use case I'm hearing a lot. I'm just not convinced that it's value generating. E.g., ChatGPT doesn't know shit about the students, so it is being used as a bullshit generator here. If I were a parent, I would be incandescent with rage to learn that one of the few communications I got from a teacher all year was machine-generated bullshit.
- treeman79 4y ago
  Cuts an every other monthly task from 40 hours to 4 hours. Still need to give it general points that are relevant. She manages 80 students. Alternate would be school hire a lot more staff.
  - baumy 4y ago
    Wouldn't the alternative be to reconsider the merits of the 40 hour bimonthly task? If I'm understanding right, your wife is coming up with some bullet point style feedback about each of her students as part of a recurring evaluation, then using ChatGPT to generate lengthy prose from those bullet points. Hailing ChatGPT as a savior here feels something like the tail wagging the dog. Why not just change the nature of the task so that what's required is to provide the quick bullet points, instead of using language model prose generation as a go-between for communication from teacher to student? What value is being added by the middle ChatGPT layer? More importantly, what value was being added by the 36 hours of marginal effort previously spent doing this manually? That's one of my main hang ups with all the proposed use cases of ChatGPT - it seems we've created arbitrary problems and now have this complicated tool to solve them. Which in turn will enable us to keep making bigger and more arbitrary problems. But the problems don't need to exist in the first place
    - wpietri 4y ago
      Exactly. If the only valuable part is the "general points that are relevant", then I would much rather receive those. As you say, perhaps in bullet points. Adding a bunch of utterly predictable prose around that doesn't make it better for me, it makes it worse, because it just dilutes the signal.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    Alternate would be that she write the actual comments that she has, and not puff them out to meet some artificial "must be multiple paragraphs even if the information to be conveyed doesn't justify it". Concise communication is the only thing that isn't wasting effort for both the writer and the reader. Reducing internal pushback to customer hostile bureaucratic requirements imposed by management on employees is a harmful effect of ChatGPT, not a benefit.
    - treeman79 4y ago
      She would be fired for refusing. She’s a teacher. She has almost no freedom in anything. It’s also an international standard for her school. It would require an uprising of tens of thousands of teachers world wide. I agree with what you say. However she is not willing to a fight worldwide bureaucracy.
      - dragonwriter 4y ago
        Teachers are very often unionized, and very often the non-economic demands of their contract negotiations include changes in policies of this kind. Employee pushback isn’t just individual.
  - lelanthran 4y ago
    > Alternate would be school hire a lot more staff. What were they doing before ChatGPT?
    - edanm 4y ago
      From my experience with education - probably doing the work themselves, often by working way longer hours than any person should. Teachers tend to work very long hours because of having to grade work, write these kinds of reports, etc, all in their "non-teaching" time.
- ushtaritk421 4y ago
  As soon as people figure out teachers are using this, schools will either ban it or come up with another useless but time-consuming task to signal to parents that the teacher cares individually about their child enough to do the time-consuming task.
- ushtaritk421 4y ago
  Prose writing used to be a fairly honest signal that someone smart spent time writing it for you. Now it's not, so we will invent another signal that someone smart spent time on you.
bagacrap 4y ago
This sounds like grounds for dismissal...
Jevon23 4y ago
This is completely insane and only reinforces my belief that this technology is a net negative for society.
- treeman79 4y ago
  As a programmer, I get paid huge amounts of money to automate tasks that others or myself would normally do.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Sure, but we should only automate the tasks that are of net benefit to society. Automating robocalls freed up lots of schmucks from having to manually bother people all day. But that didn't make the world better. It made it worse.
joshstrange 4y ago
Yep, when I went home for christmas and mentioned it off-hand my BIL was like "Oh yeah, we use that for our business to write tweet and some other things" (self-employed, online fitness trainer with multiple coaches working under him and my sister). I talked with him last night and they are paying for Jasper.ai for their team to collaboratively work on documents. All of this with zero input from me. My parents also recently started playing with ChatGPT after a very basic crash course and the next day they were gushing about how easy it was and how helpful it was for repetitive text they have to write. My entire family fully understands it's just a tool, you need to check it's output, and it's not perfect but it's saved them a bunch of time and allows them to focus on what they are best at by getting a good starting point from *GPT.

wpietri 4y ago

Sure. Prose generation is a use case I'm hearing a lot. I'm just not convinced that it's value generating. E.g., ChatGPT doesn't know shit about the students, so it is being used as a bullshit generator here. If I were a parent, I would be incandescent with rage to learn that one of the few communications I got from a teacher all year was machine-generated bullshit.

treeman79 4y ago
Cuts an every other monthly task from 40 hours to 4 hours. Still need to give it general points that are relevant. She manages 80 students. Alternate would be school hire a lot more staff.
- baumy 4y ago
  Wouldn't the alternative be to reconsider the merits of the 40 hour bimonthly task? If I'm understanding right, your wife is coming up with some bullet point style feedback about each of her students as part of a recurring evaluation, then using ChatGPT to generate lengthy prose from those bullet points. Hailing ChatGPT as a savior here feels something like the tail wagging the dog. Why not just change the nature of the task so that what's required is to provide the quick bullet points, instead of using language model prose generation as a go-between for communication from teacher to student? What value is being added by the middle ChatGPT layer? More importantly, what value was being added by the 36 hours of marginal effort previously spent doing this manually? That's one of my main hang ups with all the proposed use cases of ChatGPT - it seems we've created arbitrary problems and now have this complicated tool to solve them. Which in turn will enable us to keep making bigger and more arbitrary problems. But the problems don't need to exist in the first place
  - wpietri 4y ago
    Exactly. If the only valuable part is the "general points that are relevant", then I would much rather receive those. As you say, perhaps in bullet points. Adding a bunch of utterly predictable prose around that doesn't make it better for me, it makes it worse, because it just dilutes the signal.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  Alternate would be that she write the actual comments that she has, and not puff them out to meet some artificial "must be multiple paragraphs even if the information to be conveyed doesn't justify it". Concise communication is the only thing that isn't wasting effort for both the writer and the reader. Reducing internal pushback to customer hostile bureaucratic requirements imposed by management on employees is a harmful effect of ChatGPT, not a benefit.
  - treeman79 4y ago
    She would be fired for refusing. She’s a teacher. She has almost no freedom in anything. It’s also an international standard for her school. It would require an uprising of tens of thousands of teachers world wide. I agree with what you say. However she is not willing to a fight worldwide bureaucracy.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      Teachers are very often unionized, and very often the non-economic demands of their contract negotiations include changes in policies of this kind. Employee pushback isn’t just individual.
- lelanthran 4y ago
  > Alternate would be school hire a lot more staff. What were they doing before ChatGPT?
  - edanm 4y ago
    From my experience with education - probably doing the work themselves, often by working way longer hours than any person should. Teachers tend to work very long hours because of having to grade work, write these kinds of reports, etc, all in their "non-teaching" time.
ushtaritk421 4y ago
As soon as people figure out teachers are using this, schools will either ban it or come up with another useless but time-consuming task to signal to parents that the teacher cares individually about their child enough to do the time-consuming task.
ushtaritk421 4y ago
Prose writing used to be a fairly honest signal that someone smart spent time writing it for you. Now it's not, so we will invent another signal that someone smart spent time on you.

bagacrap 4y ago

This sounds like grounds for dismissal...

Jevon23 4y ago

This is completely insane and only reinforces my belief that this technology is a net negative for society.

treeman79 4y ago
As a programmer, I get paid huge amounts of money to automate tasks that others or myself would normally do.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Sure, but we should only automate the tasks that are of net benefit to society. Automating robocalls freed up lots of schmucks from having to manually bother people all day. But that didn't make the world better. It made it worse.

joshstrange 4y ago

Yep, when I went home for christmas and mentioned it off-hand my BIL was like "Oh yeah, we use that for our business to write tweet and some other things" (self-employed, online fitness trainer with multiple coaches working under him and my sister). I talked with him last night and they are paying for Jasper.ai for their team to collaboratively work on documents. All of this with zero input from me. My parents also recently started playing with ChatGPT after a very basic crash course and the next day they were gushing about how easy it was and how helpful it was for repetitive text they have to write. My entire family fully understands it's just a tool, you need to check it's output, and it's not perfect but it's saved them a bunch of time and allows them to focus on what they are best at by getting a good starting point from *GPT.