4 ms·

Yes, but people misinterpret or reinterpret things all the time and I wanted to state why this should not be seen as a use case for LLMs.

raesene9 3y ago
In an ideal world where the incentive of a student is solely to broaden their understanding perhaps that's true (although I'd still be inclined to use an LLM for getting a broad brush overview of a new topic, or ideas of where to start investigating). However, the education system, as formulated in many countries, isn't solely focused on broadening understanding and instead on students getting a degree with a given grade to aid them in getting a job in their preferred career. With that goal in mind, their incentives may not be solely focused on learning and more on passing essay questions by creating texts. In that case, it's possible to see how their incentives might line up with the use of LLMs to partially or wholly create their essays. This is, of course, nothing new. There's a reason why universities have plagerism detection software and systems. Students often do not write essay purely themselves, and LLMs will be just one technique to allow them to do so more easily...
- mistrial9 3y ago
  in the 1980s at super-competitive UC Berkeley, where non-native English speakers have high stakes outcomes, many organized groups passed pre-written material, essay answers, multiple-choice answers etc among each other in multi-year organized cheating. Then, with prestigious and difficult degree in hand, proceeded to financially succeed. At the same time, UC Berkeley is a great research university with specialists in hundreds of fields doing post-doc expansion of human knowledge - on a competitive basis. Both of these true at the same time, integrated via finance. Fanciful ideas of pure education with its motives and methods are almost like fairy tales in this environment.
  - GeoAtreides 3y ago
    Where there are stakes, there's a game; where there's a game, there are players.
block_dagger 3y ago
Just because you didn’t comprehend the content doesn’t mean others didn’t. I also fundamentally disagree with your point. Producing good LLM output is an interactive intellectual process requiring expository writing skills.

raesene9 3y ago

In an ideal world where the incentive of a student is solely to broaden their understanding perhaps that's true (although I'd still be inclined to use an LLM for getting a broad brush overview of a new topic, or ideas of where to start investigating). However, the education system, as formulated in many countries, isn't solely focused on broadening understanding and instead on students getting a degree with a given grade to aid them in getting a job in their preferred career. With that goal in mind, their incentives may not be solely focused on learning and more on passing essay questions by creating texts. In that case, it's possible to see how their incentives might line up with the use of LLMs to partially or wholly create their essays. This is, of course, nothing new. There's a reason why universities have plagerism detection software and systems. Students often do not write essay purely themselves, and LLMs will be just one technique to allow them to do so more easily...

mistrial9 3y ago
in the 1980s at super-competitive UC Berkeley, where non-native English speakers have high stakes outcomes, many organized groups passed pre-written material, essay answers, multiple-choice answers etc among each other in multi-year organized cheating. Then, with prestigious and difficult degree in hand, proceeded to financially succeed. At the same time, UC Berkeley is a great research university with specialists in hundreds of fields doing post-doc expansion of human knowledge - on a competitive basis. Both of these true at the same time, integrated via finance. Fanciful ideas of pure education with its motives and methods are almost like fairy tales in this environment.
- GeoAtreides 3y ago
  Where there are stakes, there's a game; where there's a game, there are players.

block_dagger 3y ago

Just because you didn’t comprehend the content doesn’t mean others didn’t. I also fundamentally disagree with your point. Producing good LLM output is an interactive intellectual process requiring expository writing skills.