8 ms·

This article is avoiding the elephant in the room. From talking to students it is quite clear to me that the main student use case for AI is as a homework assis

by lacker 3y ago

This article is avoiding the elephant in the room. From talking to students it is quite clear to me that the main student use case for AI is as a homework assistant. You tell ChatGPT your homework question and ask what's the answer. In some cases ChatGPT will simply give you the perfect answer and there's nothing more you need to do. In some cases ChatGPT will give you an incomplete answer and you need to finish it up yourself. Often here asking some followup related questions will be quite useful. In some cases ChatGPT will give you a subtly wrong answer and you need to figure that out. I think the toughest ethical situations arise when ChatGPT can give you a perfect answer to your homework problem. Is it unethical for a student to use ChatGPT in this case? Does superficially rewriting the answer to put it in your own words make it ethical? Is it appropriate for professors to give out A's to the students who cut and paste from GPT4, while giving lower grades to students who don't realize that such a tool is available, or who won't pay $20/month for the best homework tool?

knicholes 3y ago
Personally I think it just comes down to the student cheating themselves. If they're in a job interview and don't have ChatGPT handy AND they've been using ChatGPT to get answers directly instead of asking how to arrive at the answer, I think they're going to have a hard time getting that job. However, if they always have ChatGPT available and can always get the right answers (either by luck, prompt engineering skills, or an ability to determine if an answer is correct), I don't see them having a hard time competing in the workplace at all for most commonly solved problems. Hopefully the teacher would do a sufficient job teaching such that if the non-ChatGPT-using student puts forth adequate effort, they'll be able to get the answers as well, but maybe not as quickly as those using ChatGPT.
- foobarian 3y ago
  And then the kid who refrained from cheating themselves by using ChatGPT arrives at the job interview, gets asked to answer a bunch of difficult questions with the help of ChatGPT, and fails because of lack of modern computer skills. :-)
- WendyTheWillow 3y ago
  Yeah, if you take school as an adversarial system, you might see LLMs as a threat, but Harvard doesn’t see it that way. To them, college is a chance to grow your understanding of a wide variety of topics, and to gain expertise in one (or two) topics. Nobody thinking like that would see LLMs as a risk.
- bick_nyers 3y ago
  To me this seems a very similar argument to when Google/Wikipedia were gaining relevance. Many IT professionals agree that most of their job is knowing how to Google things. Sure they need to know how to read manuals, forum posts, find product numbers/specs., simplify the information for the end user, etc., but at the end of the day the skill is mostly knowing how to properly and effectively leverage an external source of knowledge/wisdom/intelligence in a occupational domain. ChatGPT is just Google on steroids in this respect.
  - palata 3y ago
    > ChatGPT is just Google on steroids in this respect. Which doesn't mean it is not creating a new problem, does it? "A car is just a skateboard on steroids", still we created many laws around the use of cars.
n4r9 3y ago
> In some cases ChatGPT will give you a subtly wrong answer and you need to figure that out. The interesting question here is whether figuring out whether an answer is subtly wrong is more efficient/effective than writing the answer yourself. It's probably more fun though.
tester457 3y ago
> or who won't pay $20/month for the best homework tool? That much isn't necessary, GPT4 api costs $0.03-$0.06 for what's more than an essay of text. It's affordable and accessible to anyone with a credit card. Ethically this is more fair than having to pay for over-priced textbooks.
- diogenes4 3y ago
  llama is free and is trivial to install. Chatgpt doesn't offer good enough answers to pay for.
  - nomel 3y ago
    > and is trivial to install The average person/studen can't install a llama 2 model (70 billion parameter) that can compete with ChatGPT-4 (the paid version), considering most students have notebooks, and lack top tier GPUs. Most would have to go to a "free" cloud providers. ChatGPT-3.5 is also free, and compares favorably against the lower parameter llama 2 models. But, llama 1, lower parameter/heavily quantized llama 2, and ChatGPT-3.5, are not practically comparable to ChatGPT-4, for most tasks [1]. I haven't found a use for those, in this sort of context, except for increasing my blood pressure, with the time wasted being my justification for paying $.70/day. [1] https://www.promptengineering.org/how-does-llama-2-compare-to-gpt-and-other-ai-language-models/#:~:text=Llama%202%20demonstrates%20impressive%20accuracy,helpfulness%2036%25%20of%20the%20time https://www.promptengineering.org/how-does-llama-2-compare-t....
  - m348e912 3y ago
    >>llama is free and is trivial to install. Chatgpt doesn't offer good enough answers to pay for. It may be free, and easy enough to install. But to get it working, well I still have been unable to figure it out.
  - whimsicalism 3y ago
    Not only is it not trivial to install, it is nowhere even remotely close to GPT4.
whimsicalism 3y ago
My hot take is this is not a bad thing. American education prior to GPT had increasingly taken a turn in emphasizing homework over testing. My former high school, for instance, reduced the impact of testing to ~15% of total grade and made homework/classwork the vast majority. This steals time from the rest of kids lives, makes high school performance more a function of “time spent” than understanding, and completely misses the mark of what the goal of schooling ought to be in my view. I think GPT4 and the like spell the end of homework and that is a good thing.
- nomel 3y ago
  It will force a measure of actual aptitude, with proctored exams, with some lady with a ruler slapping your desk if you look at your neighbor. What's old is new!
  - TheHypnotist 3y ago
    That lady is called lockdown browser.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - nomel 3y ago
      There are physical things that can be done. Currently, people get around video proctors by taping things to their monitor, then the camera can't see. A lockdown browser would assume the person owned exactly one computing device.
  - palata 3y ago
    > It will force a measure of actual aptitude Which is almost impossible. Exams just measure your aptitude at passing exams, with the hope that they somehow don't generalize too badly. If we had a way to measure "actual" aptitude, job interviews would be very different. But we don't. The ideal school system is one where students want to learn, as opposed to one where students want to make good grades. Unfortunately that's hard to get, but it should not be forgotten.
diogenes4 3y ago
The real question is how quickly professors will adapt. The ethics went out the window when schools started ramping up tuition in the 90s.
haliskerbas 3y ago
This basically already existed in the form of course hero and chegg.com Before that you would get the solutions from your fraternity brother or sorority sister who took the course before you. So for anyone who feels this is a new issue, it’s the same issue as any cheating as old as time.
- palata 3y ago
  I feel like the one thing that is systematically missed about generative AI is the scale. Yes, one could ask their older brother to help. But not everyone, not for every single homework. Yes, one could manually find information about a target and forge a phishing e-mail. But generative AI make it much faster/easier. The scale means that it is different. Saying "it is not a new issue" is a bit like saying (for the lack of a better example): "well children could always throw stones at each other, letting them have machine guns is not a new issue".
allturtles 3y ago
> I think the toughest ethical situations arise when ChatGPT can give you a perfect answer to your homework problem. Is it unethical for a student to use ChatGPT in this case? Does superficially rewriting the answer to put it in your own words make it ethical? Is it appropriate for professors to give out A's to the students who cut and paste from GPT4, while giving lower grades to students who don't realize that such a tool is available, or who won't pay $20/month for the best homework tool? How are any of these tough ethical situations? The obvious answers are "yes", "no", and "that's moot." (Moot because the ethical onus is on the student, not the professor. It's not the professor's fault that the student is benefiting from unethical behavior.)
- pixl97 3y ago
  If everyone is doing it is a valid question if a behavior is unethical or not when viewed at society level. Eventually the actual answer becomes "homework doesn't work" at some point and new methodology of determining competency must be found.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    People get assistance in homework/problem sets/take home tests using lots of different resources and tools. What’s allowed and not allowed varies based in the “rules” and common conventions.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    Homework doesn't asses competency, it's practice. Testing tests for competency.
    - allturtles 3y ago
      GP's framing assumes that the homework is being graded to assess competency: "Is it appropriate for professors to give out A's..." If that's not the case, no ethical questions are involved in using Chat GPT to complete your homework, although it would seem to be a pointless exercise, since you are neither getting practice nor cheating the assessment mechanism.
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Schools haven't caught up, but it will be possible to adapt to new forms of assessment that test the merits of this new type of human who probably has a personal assistant who knows almost everything with them at all times. It should probably look pretty different to how we've done things up till now.
afpx 3y ago
Why have school at all? Teach kids to read and how to use the internet. Give them a coach that trains them on how to achieve what they want using AI. And, when it's necessary, interview them for competency. I can't see how this isn't the future.
- visarga 3y ago
  People (especially kids) usually lack the personal will power to plough through a subject matter on their own. Having a real human placing demands and expecting results does wonders. Being part of a class taking the same subject also helps with motivation. Professors and other kids don't need to be prompted to talk to you, so they are not so easy to avoid as a chat bot.
  - pnut 3y ago
    So what you're saying is that education is basically vocational training? What if LLMs and AGI usher in an era where subsistence is a given?
    - visarga 3y ago
      You can outsource work but can't outsource wishing. You got to know how to demand and what to reject, or else, if you try to automate or outsource that, the other people and AIs won't necessarily work in your best interest. They follow their own interests, you got to do it yourself. Not knowing that something exists is a sure way of never demanding it. Having an education is even more useful today when all you need to do is knowing how to ask.
TheHypnotist 3y ago
I had a grad school class that involved some math (encryption algorithms). To help understand some concepts I would check in with Chat GPT and use it as another resource along with the text, lectures, and youtube. At one point I used it to check some of the math and I noticed was that it simply did not do math well. It seemed to understand the steps (or most), but the numbers would just be wrong. So if any students out there just blindly pasted the results without checking, they would be wrong. FYI - This was not GPT4.
palata 3y ago
> Is it unethical for a student to use ChatGPT in this case? I think this is the wrong question to ask. The real question is: "is it smart for a student to use ChatGPT instead of doing their homework?". And probably it is completely stupid. School is not an adversary, school is here to teach. If students manage to trick the system to get good grades while staying stupid, it doesn't really hurt anyone other than themselves.
- mdorazio 3y ago
  > School is not an adversary, school is here to teach. This is debatable, at least in the US. In many cases, higher ed is here to offer a credential and network regardless of true aptitude since many students will simply not use the majority of what they are supposed to be learning in their career. Put another way, students were already using things like ratemyprofessor to deliberately tailor their courses for easier grades back when I was in school, plus memorizing older exams rather than studying the core material in detail, or just straight up paying someone else to write papers for you. AI is an extension of this, not something new.
  - palata 3y ago
    > This is debatable, at least in the US. Then instead of fixing the AI problem in your broken system, maybe fix the system? Maybe I'm being naive here, and we're doomed anyway.
  - CptFribble 3y ago
    Some students will always try to cheat, that is inevitable. But saying that whether schools are for teaching is "debatable," while a popular meme, is a false and harmful assertion. Regardless of what you or any of us consider to be "proper education" or "good teaching," even if higher ed really is just about getting certified for jobs, the simple fact is that the purpose of school at any level is to learn various skills and facts, and any form of direct-to-the-answer interferes with that. I saw this a lot when GPT3 first came out, many people on HN and elsewhere decried the existence of book reports and essays, rejoicing that such "worthless" tasks would go the way of the dinosaur. However, all who say such things miss the crucial insight: the point of the book report is to learn and display reading comprehension. Similarly, essay writing is only about learning to communicate with essays specifically in the first one or two classes you encounter such tasks. After that, essays are used to communicate your command of the material for subjects that cannot be easily broken down into multiple-choice or short-form exams. Allowing students to use AI tools to do their homework for them is a massive step backwards, and an unimaginable risk to the future of our society. If we allow our children to use AI to do all their work for them, especially during crucial reading comprehension years, they will arrive at adulthood unable to process anything more complex than a menu. And relying on AI to summarize and communicate information that would otherwise be written into a document of some kind is an even bigger risk - then the controllers of the AI would essentially control how we process information in general, because no one would be able to do it themselves. 21% of adult Americans are already illiterate, pre-AI. 54% read below a 6th-grade level. What kind of world are we building if we push those numbers even higher?

by lacker 3y ago

knicholes 3y ago

Personally I think it just comes down to the student cheating themselves. If they're in a job interview and don't have ChatGPT handy AND they've been using ChatGPT to get answers directly instead of asking how to arrive at the answer, I think they're going to have a hard time getting that job. However, if they always have ChatGPT available and can always get the right answers (either by luck, prompt engineering skills, or an ability to determine if an answer is correct), I don't see them having a hard time competing in the workplace at all for most commonly solved problems. Hopefully the teacher would do a sufficient job teaching such that if the non-ChatGPT-using student puts forth adequate effort, they'll be able to get the answers as well, but maybe not as quickly as those using ChatGPT.

foobarian 3y ago
And then the kid who refrained from cheating themselves by using ChatGPT arrives at the job interview, gets asked to answer a bunch of difficult questions with the help of ChatGPT, and fails because of lack of modern computer skills. :-)
WendyTheWillow 3y ago
Yeah, if you take school as an adversarial system, you might see LLMs as a threat, but Harvard doesn’t see it that way. To them, college is a chance to grow your understanding of a wide variety of topics, and to gain expertise in one (or two) topics. Nobody thinking like that would see LLMs as a risk.
bick_nyers 3y ago
To me this seems a very similar argument to when Google/Wikipedia were gaining relevance. Many IT professionals agree that most of their job is knowing how to Google things. Sure they need to know how to read manuals, forum posts, find product numbers/specs., simplify the information for the end user, etc., but at the end of the day the skill is mostly knowing how to properly and effectively leverage an external source of knowledge/wisdom/intelligence in a occupational domain. ChatGPT is just Google on steroids in this respect.
- palata 3y ago
  > ChatGPT is just Google on steroids in this respect. Which doesn't mean it is not creating a new problem, does it? "A car is just a skateboard on steroids", still we created many laws around the use of cars.

n4r9 3y ago

> In some cases ChatGPT will give you a subtly wrong answer and you need to figure that out. The interesting question here is whether figuring out whether an answer is subtly wrong is more efficient/effective than writing the answer yourself. It's probably more fun though.

tester457 3y ago

> or who won't pay $20/month for the best homework tool? That much isn't necessary, GPT4 api costs $0.03-$0.06 for what's more than an essay of text. It's affordable and accessible to anyone with a credit card. Ethically this is more fair than having to pay for over-priced textbooks.

diogenes4 3y ago
llama is free and is trivial to install. Chatgpt doesn't offer good enough answers to pay for.
- nomel 3y ago
  > and is trivial to install The average person/studen can't install a llama 2 model (70 billion parameter) that can compete with ChatGPT-4 (the paid version), considering most students have notebooks, and lack top tier GPUs. Most would have to go to a "free" cloud providers. ChatGPT-3.5 is also free, and compares favorably against the lower parameter llama 2 models. But, llama 1, lower parameter/heavily quantized llama 2, and ChatGPT-3.5, are not practically comparable to ChatGPT-4, for most tasks [1]. I haven't found a use for those, in this sort of context, except for increasing my blood pressure, with the time wasted being my justification for paying $.70/day. [1] https://www.promptengineering.org/how-does-llama-2-compare-to-gpt-and-other-ai-language-models/#:~:text=Llama%202%20demonstrates%20impressive%20accuracy,helpfulness%2036%25%20of%20the%20time https://www.promptengineering.org/how-does-llama-2-compare-t....
- m348e912 3y ago
  >>llama is free and is trivial to install. Chatgpt doesn't offer good enough answers to pay for. It may be free, and easy enough to install. But to get it working, well I still have been unable to figure it out.
- whimsicalism 3y ago
  Not only is it not trivial to install, it is nowhere even remotely close to GPT4.

whimsicalism 3y ago

My hot take is this is not a bad thing. American education prior to GPT had increasingly taken a turn in emphasizing homework over testing. My former high school, for instance, reduced the impact of testing to ~15% of total grade and made homework/classwork the vast majority. This steals time from the rest of kids lives, makes high school performance more a function of “time spent” than understanding, and completely misses the mark of what the goal of schooling ought to be in my view. I think GPT4 and the like spell the end of homework and that is a good thing.

nomel 3y ago
It will force a measure of actual aptitude, with proctored exams, with some lady with a ruler slapping your desk if you look at your neighbor. What's old is new!
- TheHypnotist 3y ago
  That lady is called lockdown browser.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - nomel 3y ago
    There are physical things that can be done. Currently, people get around video proctors by taping things to their monitor, then the camera can't see. A lockdown browser would assume the person owned exactly one computing device.
- palata 3y ago
  > It will force a measure of actual aptitude Which is almost impossible. Exams just measure your aptitude at passing exams, with the hope that they somehow don't generalize too badly. If we had a way to measure "actual" aptitude, job interviews would be very different. But we don't. The ideal school system is one where students want to learn, as opposed to one where students want to make good grades. Unfortunately that's hard to get, but it should not be forgotten.

diogenes4 3y ago

The real question is how quickly professors will adapt. The ethics went out the window when schools started ramping up tuition in the 90s.

haliskerbas 3y ago

This basically already existed in the form of course hero and chegg.com Before that you would get the solutions from your fraternity brother or sorority sister who took the course before you. So for anyone who feels this is a new issue, it’s the same issue as any cheating as old as time.

palata 3y ago
I feel like the one thing that is systematically missed about generative AI is the scale. Yes, one could ask their older brother to help. But not everyone, not for every single homework. Yes, one could manually find information about a target and forge a phishing e-mail. But generative AI make it much faster/easier. The scale means that it is different. Saying "it is not a new issue" is a bit like saying (for the lack of a better example): "well children could always throw stones at each other, letting them have machine guns is not a new issue".

allturtles 3y ago

> I think the toughest ethical situations arise when ChatGPT can give you a perfect answer to your homework problem. Is it unethical for a student to use ChatGPT in this case? Does superficially rewriting the answer to put it in your own words make it ethical? Is it appropriate for professors to give out A's to the students who cut and paste from GPT4, while giving lower grades to students who don't realize that such a tool is available, or who won't pay $20/month for the best homework tool? How are any of these tough ethical situations? The obvious answers are "yes", "no", and "that's moot." (Moot because the ethical onus is on the student, not the professor. It's not the professor's fault that the student is benefiting from unethical behavior.)

pixl97 3y ago
If everyone is doing it is a valid question if a behavior is unethical or not when viewed at society level. Eventually the actual answer becomes "homework doesn't work" at some point and new methodology of determining competency must be found.
- ghaff 3y ago
  People get assistance in homework/problem sets/take home tests using lots of different resources and tools. What’s allowed and not allowed varies based in the “rules” and common conventions.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Homework doesn't asses competency, it's practice. Testing tests for competency.
  - allturtles 3y ago
    GP's framing assumes that the homework is being graded to assess competency: "Is it appropriate for professors to give out A's..." If that's not the case, no ethical questions are involved in using Chat GPT to complete your homework, although it would seem to be a pointless exercise, since you are neither getting practice nor cheating the assessment mechanism.

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Schools haven't caught up, but it will be possible to adapt to new forms of assessment that test the merits of this new type of human who probably has a personal assistant who knows almost everything with them at all times. It should probably look pretty different to how we've done things up till now.

afpx 3y ago

Why have school at all? Teach kids to read and how to use the internet. Give them a coach that trains them on how to achieve what they want using AI. And, when it's necessary, interview them for competency. I can't see how this isn't the future.

visarga 3y ago
People (especially kids) usually lack the personal will power to plough through a subject matter on their own. Having a real human placing demands and expecting results does wonders. Being part of a class taking the same subject also helps with motivation. Professors and other kids don't need to be prompted to talk to you, so they are not so easy to avoid as a chat bot.
- pnut 3y ago
  So what you're saying is that education is basically vocational training? What if LLMs and AGI usher in an era where subsistence is a given?
  - visarga 3y ago
    You can outsource work but can't outsource wishing. You got to know how to demand and what to reject, or else, if you try to automate or outsource that, the other people and AIs won't necessarily work in your best interest. They follow their own interests, you got to do it yourself. Not knowing that something exists is a sure way of never demanding it. Having an education is even more useful today when all you need to do is knowing how to ask.

TheHypnotist 3y ago

I had a grad school class that involved some math (encryption algorithms). To help understand some concepts I would check in with Chat GPT and use it as another resource along with the text, lectures, and youtube. At one point I used it to check some of the math and I noticed was that it simply did not do math well. It seemed to understand the steps (or most), but the numbers would just be wrong. So if any students out there just blindly pasted the results without checking, they would be wrong. FYI - This was not GPT4.

palata 3y ago

> Is it unethical for a student to use ChatGPT in this case? I think this is the wrong question to ask. The real question is: "is it smart for a student to use ChatGPT instead of doing their homework?". And probably it is completely stupid. School is not an adversary, school is here to teach. If students manage to trick the system to get good grades while staying stupid, it doesn't really hurt anyone other than themselves.

mdorazio 3y ago
> School is not an adversary, school is here to teach. This is debatable, at least in the US. In many cases, higher ed is here to offer a credential and network regardless of true aptitude since many students will simply not use the majority of what they are supposed to be learning in their career. Put another way, students were already using things like ratemyprofessor to deliberately tailor their courses for easier grades back when I was in school, plus memorizing older exams rather than studying the core material in detail, or just straight up paying someone else to write papers for you. AI is an extension of this, not something new.
- palata 3y ago
  > This is debatable, at least in the US. Then instead of fixing the AI problem in your broken system, maybe fix the system? Maybe I'm being naive here, and we're doomed anyway.
- CptFribble 3y ago
  Some students will always try to cheat, that is inevitable. But saying that whether schools are for teaching is "debatable," while a popular meme, is a false and harmful assertion. Regardless of what you or any of us consider to be "proper education" or "good teaching," even if higher ed really is just about getting certified for jobs, the simple fact is that the purpose of school at any level is to learn various skills and facts, and any form of direct-to-the-answer interferes with that. I saw this a lot when GPT3 first came out, many people on HN and elsewhere decried the existence of book reports and essays, rejoicing that such "worthless" tasks would go the way of the dinosaur. However, all who say such things miss the crucial insight: the point of the book report is to learn and display reading comprehension. Similarly, essay writing is only about learning to communicate with essays specifically in the first one or two classes you encounter such tasks. After that, essays are used to communicate your command of the material for subjects that cannot be easily broken down into multiple-choice or short-form exams. Allowing students to use AI tools to do their homework for them is a massive step backwards, and an unimaginable risk to the future of our society. If we allow our children to use AI to do all their work for them, especially during crucial reading comprehension years, they will arrive at adulthood unable to process anything more complex than a menu. And relying on AI to summarize and communicate information that would otherwise be written into a document of some kind is an even bigger risk - then the controllers of the AI would essentially control how we process information in general, because no one would be able to do it themselves. 21% of adult Americans are already illiterate, pre-AI. 54% read below a 6th-grade level. What kind of world are we building if we push those numbers even higher?