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Today you learned a lesson. You will need to add to your course work how GPT can get things wildly wrong. Just a simple example should not be too terribly har

Today you learned a lesson. You will need to add to your course work how GPT can get things wildly wrong. Just a simple example should not be too terribly hard to find. Then plant the seed 'if it has that wrong what else is it getting wrong? It is a good tool of getting the general idea but one you need to audit. This class is where you are going to learn the basics and know when this thing is wrong when you use it' That thing is not going away any time soon.

tombert 3y ago
I actually did say something more or less exactly like that pretty early into the course. Something to the effect of "ChatGPT is pretty cool, I like it, but it will just make stuff up sometimes in extremely convincing way. It's a tool that's dangerous to newbies and powerful to professionals, and I'm hoping this class will help you get closer to the latter".
- sumtechguy 3y ago
  Ah good. A very small demonstration probably would drive the point home. It is one thing to hear that but another to see it yourself.
DangitBobby 3y ago
But clearly it gets things right often enough to be worth using to cheat on a test or assignment.
TheRealPomax 3y ago
Also, how GPT can get things right, and that if students use GPT (because it's the early days of the graphing calculator all over again but now for code) then the exercise is not "write the code" but "explain the conditions under which this code doesn't work, and why" because if you're taking a programming class it doesn't matter what writes the code, what matters is whether you understand that code. So if you're turning the exercise into a code audit by using GPT, you better damn well be able to explain what problems are left in the code it generated.
dataflow 3y ago
> You will need to add to your course work how GPT can get things wildly wrong. Just a simple example should not be too terribly hard to find. Then plant the seed 'if it has that wrong what else is it getting wrong? People did the same thing for Wikipedia and it was never convincing. And they eventually lost the battle. It's going to require more than that to do the same for GPT.

tombert 3y ago

I actually did say something more or less exactly like that pretty early into the course. Something to the effect of "ChatGPT is pretty cool, I like it, but it will just make stuff up sometimes in extremely convincing way. It's a tool that's dangerous to newbies and powerful to professionals, and I'm hoping this class will help you get closer to the latter".

sumtechguy 3y ago
Ah good. A very small demonstration probably would drive the point home. It is one thing to hear that but another to see it yourself.

DangitBobby 3y ago

But clearly it gets things right often enough to be worth using to cheat on a test or assignment.

TheRealPomax 3y ago

Also, how GPT can get things right, and that if students use GPT (because it's the early days of the graphing calculator all over again but now for code) then the exercise is not "write the code" but "explain the conditions under which this code doesn't work, and why" because if you're taking a programming class it doesn't matter what writes the code, what matters is whether you understand that code. So if you're turning the exercise into a code audit by using GPT, you better damn well be able to explain what problems are left in the code it generated.

dataflow 3y ago

> You will need to add to your course work how GPT can get things wildly wrong. Just a simple example should not be too terribly hard to find. Then plant the seed 'if it has that wrong what else is it getting wrong? People did the same thing for Wikipedia and it was never convincing. And they eventually lost the battle. It's going to require more than that to do the same for GPT.