6 ms·

The author sort of hints at this in a roundabout way, but the problem for education - until the systems stop lying about things they don't actually know, or usi

The author sort of hints at this in a roundabout way, but the problem for education - until the systems stop lying about things they don't actually know, or using "facts" that are wildly inaccurate or out-of-date, they are not reputable/reliable enough to use at all. Right now it's like we're in 2001-2005 for wikipedia. It's probably a good tool for basic, basic, basic beginnings of your work in the classroom, but you're going to get things wrong in surprising ways if you use it without verifying.

bannedbybros 3y ago
[dead]
pixl97 3y ago
Schoolbooks for example have wildly out of date facts, or are brief to the point of inaccuracy. Much less watching any history channel show as those tend to suck badly. One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask questions without fear of judgement. I've not seen one scowl and call a kid an idiot yet (though I'm sure someone has a jailbreak for that). Having an AI trained to take these kids off the wall (and often based on historical inaccuracies) questions would be a really interesting tool. Just not the only tool, and not really one that should be fully authoritative in itself.
- lobsterthief 3y ago
  Right, but when a schoolbook-writer doesn’t know something, they don’t just make up an outrageous lie. Not saying LLMs don’t have a place in education, but they have a long way to go.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Feynman would have disagreed with you https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html >The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.
    - dinvlad 3y ago
      Gonna adopt this paragraph for describing LLMs
    - Loughla 3y ago
      [1964] Not to be snarky, but education has come quite far since the 60's.
      - Calamitous 3y ago
        Has it? From what I’ve heard about the textbook industry, I feel like it hasn’t.
- Guthur 3y ago
  Oh sure, a human might hurt your feels so you should only talk to a mechanical turk. We are all clearly going mad.
  - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
    Oh sure, someone talking to a mechanical turk might hurt your feels so you should only talk to a human. We are all clearly going mad.
    - Guthur 3y ago
      Lol thanks I feel you helped my point
      - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
        As a large language model, I cannot help points as they may be harmful to humans.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Based on the number of replies you've made that have been downvoted, I think maybe as a child you are one of those people that would have benefitted from a mechanical turk guiding you how to behave. Maybe you should reflect on the abuses some humans have received from other humans. For example like your^H their own parents and teachers? Not all of us have had great lives. People that have been abused tend to abuse others unless someone/something breaks that cycle (and it's almost never about pulling up your own bootstraps).
    - batch12 3y ago
      This was a very rude response coming from a person feeling superior enough to lecture someone else on proper behavior. You could have set an example of the behavior you'd like to see instead of being a jerk.
- kmeisthax 3y ago
  > One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask questions without fear of judgement. Search engines have been around for almost 30 years now and they do this job better than spicy autocomplete. I type stupid questions into Google all the time and get good answers. The "AI" version of this involves strapping a search engine onto a language model, ostensibly to summarize results, but in practice there are examples of the language model just lying instead of doing the actual search for you.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - thfuran 3y ago
    >I type stupid questions into Google all the time and get good answers. I type questions into Google and frequently get misleading or outright incorrect answers directly in their BS summaries.
    - jrflowers 3y ago
      > I type questions into Google and frequently get misleading or outright incorrect answers directly in their BS summaries. This is a good point. If you treat a search engine as a language model and vice versa you will run into issues. These issues compound even further for users that decline to scroll down and click the links that search engines return
  - dopidopHN 3y ago
    I started doing both. Some result or tasks are better fitted for LLM. Or you want a bullet point response that Google can’t do anymore.
BiteCode_dev 3y ago
Giving the load of bollocks teachers propagate themselves, I suspect the first problem after automated homework will be students calling out the BS. I recall the system really didn. T likd it.
raincole 3y ago
> use it without verifying There isn't a single general source of truth that we can use without verifying. Human teachers especially aren't such sources.
stinkbutt 3y ago
gpt4 needs better marketing. its not perfect but its without a doubt the best learning tool humans have achieved. its better than books, wikipedia, libraries, etc. its basically your personal college professor with 24/7 office hours on practically any subject. using it in combination with other tools is the best approach, but this has always been the best approach for every learning tool.
- RecycledEle 3y ago
  As a teacher, I agree.
  - stinkbutt 3y ago
    if i had this when i was in school im certain i would have been an A student. my biggest hangup has always been fear of looking dumb, asking dumb questions, holding up the class to clarify things...gpt4 eliminates all these problems
  - staticman2 3y ago
    So if you're teaching, I dunno, Introduction to Physics, your claim is you'd rather assign students GPT 4 than a physics textbook if you could only assign them one educational tool? Because it's the best tool? If you were teaching fourth grade math, instead of assigning a workbook of math problems you'd prefer to tell the kids "Ask GPT to make up math problems" because it's the best tool, so if you could only pick one tool you'd go with that? If you were teaching history and had the choice of sending kids to the university library to write research papers of having them ask GPT 4 about history, you'd have them just ask GPT 4 about history, because it's the best educational tool? Bold claim.
    - objectivetruth 3y ago
      [dead]
    - stinkbutt 3y ago
      no one made the claim that gpt4 is the only tool that should be used
dangerwill 3y ago
Early wikipedia was flawed but c'mon, hoping that a probabilistic text generator happens to string together a series of correct statements is a fundamentally unserious way to gather information
- danielbln 3y ago
  Did you know that those text generators can invoke tools like web search, retrieval, and more to pull in external truth?
  - Capricorn2481 3y ago
    Using chatGPT's web search is the worst of both worlds. You get all the inefficiency of google with the potential of your text generation fucking up what you searched.
    - hack_edu 3y ago
      ChatGPT's search is powered by Bing.
      - Capricorn2481 3y ago
        Even worse
  - ifyoubuildit 3y ago
    This actually has made me less happy with chatgpt. If I wanted to google something (or bing, whatever), I would have done that. A major draw for me has been that chatgpt was providing a much better experience than search engines. Now it sometimes feels like a fancy lmgtfy.
    - RugnirViking 3y ago
      use chatgpt classic. It's faster, too. It's my default.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
>2001-2005 for wikipedia I was there [still am]. Recently, I provided an update to "transistor density," which was then cited by Perplexity.AI when I asked about a specific new processor type (eerie, having been an early adopter for both wiki and LLMs, from a user-perspective). I'm left wondering "how much an old wiki handle" [account] might be worth, if it is so-readily cited as "leading authority" (when in reality I was just a curious teenager, trying to figure out what made encyclopedia "so special," when wikipedia provides all these linkages FOR FREE). Half a lifetime ago, and I'm still curious how this whole "open source thing" is going to play out...
spullara 3y ago
This isn't as big a problem as you seem to think it is. Even if people need to verify facts maybe it will give them better judgement when other humans lie to them.
- thfuran 3y ago
  Yeah, I always gaslight the kids so that they'll be prepared for the team world.
sonicanatidae 3y ago
Remember, LLMs are purely language AIs. They can and will lie because "an answer " has been weighted high enough that it'll do anything to satisfy that requirement. The purpose of them is to create natural sounding language in response to what it parses the input to be. That's it. It's similar with what I call "action AIs", where an AI tries to learn to walk, or race a car, optimally, through a track. It will often repeat mistakes, because short term it gains a higher score and takes time to learn that short term gains, in some cases, harm long term gains. People are using a hammer to install screws. Technically it works, but that's not the droid they were really looking for.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  Which puts pathological liars into a new light, at least for me. They’re compulsively story completing.
happytiger 3y ago
This isn’t the problem people think it is. Chain-of-Verification, Process Supervision, encoder/decoder and a plethora of other models are quickly maturing, AND it’s important to remember the current systems ARE NOT particularly optimized in any way for objective accuracy but instead to carry on conversation. It’s a conversation bot. It’s also important to understand that most systems out there are building on top of the same AI APIs. There isn’t actually that much diversity in the ecosystem that’s broadly deployed yet, so problems with ChatGPT and Bard are “AI problems” and not limited in scope. As the market matures, solution diversity will increase dramatically and systems that solve these major challenges will emerge and not necessarily from the incumbents. That’s been the pattern in tech waves of the past and why Apple always takes the wait and see and implement the winning solution in the product strategy so often. These are early days and it’s important not to see the current generation as anything greatly exceeding the first demonstration level technology wave, hard as that is to imagine. It’s 2000, and we are looking at something like a Nokia 3210 (gpt 3.5) and 3310 (gpt 4) talking about how it has problems. Yep. It’s not a iPhone yet. And we still think Nokia is going to dominate. And the current systems just have problems that are kinda holding them back… but this is the way technology waves break…
gsuuon 3y ago
They're good for at least exploring the vocabulary of a new domain you're not familiar with. You can really dig into a topic and ask systematic things while jotting down new terms to look up and verify. It can help get you past the "don't know what you don't know" stage.
corethree 3y ago
We're at a strange place in computing right now. At one end of the spectrum we have machines that are fast and efficient. Able to store data, search for data and retrieve data as accurately as it was originally stored. On the other end of the spectrum we have machines that are so creative we can't control the creativity so it lies and is inaccurate. What's missing is the machine in the center of these two extremes. A machine that can be creative and factually exact at the same time. We're slowly converging on that goal right now as chatGPT can now use bing to look things up.
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  Altman has been recently talking about (basically) that continuum and the intention of making it configurable. Seems like an obvious goal to strive for.

bannedbybros 3y ago

[dead]

pixl97 3y ago

Schoolbooks for example have wildly out of date facts, or are brief to the point of inaccuracy. Much less watching any history channel show as those tend to suck badly. One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask questions without fear of judgement. I've not seen one scowl and call a kid an idiot yet (though I'm sure someone has a jailbreak for that). Having an AI trained to take these kids off the wall (and often based on historical inaccuracies) questions would be a really interesting tool. Just not the only tool, and not really one that should be fully authoritative in itself.

lobsterthief 3y ago
Right, but when a schoolbook-writer doesn’t know something, they don’t just make up an outrageous lie. Not saying LLMs don’t have a place in education, but they have a long way to go.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Feynman would have disagreed with you https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html >The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.
  - dinvlad 3y ago
    Gonna adopt this paragraph for describing LLMs
  - Loughla 3y ago
    [1964] Not to be snarky, but education has come quite far since the 60's.
    - Calamitous 3y ago
      Has it? From what I’ve heard about the textbook industry, I feel like it hasn’t.
Guthur 3y ago
Oh sure, a human might hurt your feels so you should only talk to a mechanical turk. We are all clearly going mad.
- stuartjohnson12 3y ago
  Oh sure, someone talking to a mechanical turk might hurt your feels so you should only talk to a human. We are all clearly going mad.
  - Guthur 3y ago
    Lol thanks I feel you helped my point
    - stuartjohnson12 3y ago
      As a large language model, I cannot help points as they may be harmful to humans.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Based on the number of replies you've made that have been downvoted, I think maybe as a child you are one of those people that would have benefitted from a mechanical turk guiding you how to behave. Maybe you should reflect on the abuses some humans have received from other humans. For example like your^H their own parents and teachers? Not all of us have had great lives. People that have been abused tend to abuse others unless someone/something breaks that cycle (and it's almost never about pulling up your own bootstraps).
  - batch12 3y ago
    This was a very rude response coming from a person feeling superior enough to lecture someone else on proper behavior. You could have set an example of the behavior you'd like to see instead of being a jerk.
kmeisthax 3y ago
> One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask questions without fear of judgement. Search engines have been around for almost 30 years now and they do this job better than spicy autocomplete. I type stupid questions into Google all the time and get good answers. The "AI" version of this involves strapping a search engine onto a language model, ostensibly to summarize results, but in practice there are examples of the language model just lying instead of doing the actual search for you.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- thfuran 3y ago
  >I type stupid questions into Google all the time and get good answers. I type questions into Google and frequently get misleading or outright incorrect answers directly in their BS summaries.
  - jrflowers 3y ago
    > I type questions into Google and frequently get misleading or outright incorrect answers directly in their BS summaries. This is a good point. If you treat a search engine as a language model and vice versa you will run into issues. These issues compound even further for users that decline to scroll down and click the links that search engines return
- dopidopHN 3y ago
  I started doing both. Some result or tasks are better fitted for LLM. Or you want a bullet point response that Google can’t do anymore.

BiteCode_dev 3y ago

Giving the load of bollocks teachers propagate themselves, I suspect the first problem after automated homework will be students calling out the BS. I recall the system really didn. T likd it.

raincole 3y ago

> use it without verifying There isn't a single general source of truth that we can use without verifying. Human teachers especially aren't such sources.

stinkbutt 3y ago

gpt4 needs better marketing. its not perfect but its without a doubt the best learning tool humans have achieved. its better than books, wikipedia, libraries, etc. its basically your personal college professor with 24/7 office hours on practically any subject. using it in combination with other tools is the best approach, but this has always been the best approach for every learning tool.

RecycledEle 3y ago
As a teacher, I agree.
- stinkbutt 3y ago
  if i had this when i was in school im certain i would have been an A student. my biggest hangup has always been fear of looking dumb, asking dumb questions, holding up the class to clarify things...gpt4 eliminates all these problems
- staticman2 3y ago
  So if you're teaching, I dunno, Introduction to Physics, your claim is you'd rather assign students GPT 4 than a physics textbook if you could only assign them one educational tool? Because it's the best tool? If you were teaching fourth grade math, instead of assigning a workbook of math problems you'd prefer to tell the kids "Ask GPT to make up math problems" because it's the best tool, so if you could only pick one tool you'd go with that? If you were teaching history and had the choice of sending kids to the university library to write research papers of having them ask GPT 4 about history, you'd have them just ask GPT 4 about history, because it's the best educational tool? Bold claim.
  - objectivetruth 3y ago
    [dead]
  - stinkbutt 3y ago
    no one made the claim that gpt4 is the only tool that should be used

dangerwill 3y ago

Early wikipedia was flawed but c'mon, hoping that a probabilistic text generator happens to string together a series of correct statements is a fundamentally unserious way to gather information

danielbln 3y ago
Did you know that those text generators can invoke tools like web search, retrieval, and more to pull in external truth?
- Capricorn2481 3y ago
  Using chatGPT's web search is the worst of both worlds. You get all the inefficiency of google with the potential of your text generation fucking up what you searched.
  - hack_edu 3y ago
    ChatGPT's search is powered by Bing.
    - Capricorn2481 3y ago
      Even worse
- ifyoubuildit 3y ago
  This actually has made me less happy with chatgpt. If I wanted to google something (or bing, whatever), I would have done that. A major draw for me has been that chatgpt was providing a much better experience than search engines. Now it sometimes feels like a fancy lmgtfy.
  - RugnirViking 3y ago
    use chatgpt classic. It's faster, too. It's my default.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago

>2001-2005 for wikipedia I was there [still am]. Recently, I provided an update to "transistor density," which was then cited by Perplexity.AI when I asked about a specific new processor type (eerie, having been an early adopter for both wiki and LLMs, from a user-perspective). I'm left wondering "how much an old wiki handle" [account] might be worth, if it is so-readily cited as "leading authority" (when in reality I was just a curious teenager, trying to figure out what made encyclopedia "so special," when wikipedia provides all these linkages FOR FREE). Half a lifetime ago, and I'm still curious how this whole "open source thing" is going to play out...

spullara 3y ago

This isn't as big a problem as you seem to think it is. Even if people need to verify facts maybe it will give them better judgement when other humans lie to them.

thfuran 3y ago
Yeah, I always gaslight the kids so that they'll be prepared for the team world.

sonicanatidae 3y ago

Remember, LLMs are purely language AIs. They can and will lie because "an answer " has been weighted high enough that it'll do anything to satisfy that requirement. The purpose of them is to create natural sounding language in response to what it parses the input to be. That's it. It's similar with what I call "action AIs", where an AI tries to learn to walk, or race a car, optimally, through a track. It will often repeat mistakes, because short term it gains a higher score and takes time to learn that short term gains, in some cases, harm long term gains. People are using a hammer to install screws. Technically it works, but that's not the droid they were really looking for.

JumpCrisscross 3y ago
Which puts pathological liars into a new light, at least for me. They’re compulsively story completing.

happytiger 3y ago

This isn’t the problem people think it is. Chain-of-Verification, Process Supervision, encoder/decoder and a plethora of other models are quickly maturing, AND it’s important to remember the current systems ARE NOT particularly optimized in any way for objective accuracy but instead to carry on conversation. It’s a conversation bot. It’s also important to understand that most systems out there are building on top of the same AI APIs. There isn’t actually that much diversity in the ecosystem that’s broadly deployed yet, so problems with ChatGPT and Bard are “AI problems” and not limited in scope. As the market matures, solution diversity will increase dramatically and systems that solve these major challenges will emerge and not necessarily from the incumbents. That’s been the pattern in tech waves of the past and why Apple always takes the wait and see and implement the winning solution in the product strategy so often. These are early days and it’s important not to see the current generation as anything greatly exceeding the first demonstration level technology wave, hard as that is to imagine. It’s 2000, and we are looking at something like a Nokia 3210 (gpt 3.5) and 3310 (gpt 4) talking about how it has problems. Yep. It’s not a iPhone yet. And we still think Nokia is going to dominate. And the current systems just have problems that are kinda holding them back… but this is the way technology waves break…

gsuuon 3y ago

They're good for at least exploring the vocabulary of a new domain you're not familiar with. You can really dig into a topic and ask systematic things while jotting down new terms to look up and verify. It can help get you past the "don't know what you don't know" stage.

corethree 3y ago

We're at a strange place in computing right now. At one end of the spectrum we have machines that are fast and efficient. Able to store data, search for data and retrieve data as accurately as it was originally stored. On the other end of the spectrum we have machines that are so creative we can't control the creativity so it lies and is inaccurate. What's missing is the machine in the center of these two extremes. A machine that can be creative and factually exact at the same time. We're slowly converging on that goal right now as chatGPT can now use bing to look things up.

germinalphrase 3y ago
Altman has been recently talking about (basically) that continuum and the intention of making it configurable. Seems like an obvious goal to strive for.