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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, s

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.

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.