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Can GPT pass my programming courses?
- vba616 4y agoSo what do you conclude from this? Here is a thing that has happened. At a mediocre state university, 10 or 20 years ago, a required course for a CS major was linear algebra. (I like this particular example, because math is as un-fuzzy as it gets and because of https://xkcd.com/1838/ https://xkcd.com/1838/ whether or not that's a strictly accurate characterization of modern AI) There are or were professors who taught linear algebra whose tests were all multiple choice. There are/were students who got As in such a course by applying test-taking skills (aka pattern recognition aka side channel leakage) rather than studying until they understood the math. In this situation, a few conclusions seem blindingly obvious to me: 1. A student who got a good grade without learning the material has done something, and arrived at an end state, completely different from another student who did, in fact, learn linear algebra. There is no philosophical issue, no doubt about reality, and no connection to the "Chinese room" thought experiment. 2. The student who avoided learning may or may not be considered a cheat or failure, but that has no bearing on the consequence that they do not know the math. The fact that they weren't tested on knowing the math doesn't cause confusion about whether there is a difference between knowing and not knowing it. 3. The professor is definitely negligent in using multiple choice tests in a math class. 4. If the professor does use multiple choice tests, they are further at fault if they do not take care to make wrong choices plausible. In summary, when you swap out an AI for a human doing what an AI does, solving problems without understanding, all of the philosophical confusion and imputed intelligence fades away. Perhaps this is something that AI experts can't understand because they all learned linear algebra...