4 ms·

The title could be worded better. Kids using "base" GPT4 performed poorly but the ones with access to a finely-tuned "tutor" GPT4 did okay. The study was purpos

The title could be worded better. Kids using "base" GPT4 performed poorly but the ones with access to a finely-tuned "tutor" GPT4 did okay. The study was purposefully done in a domain the current SoTA LLMs struggle in (Math). From the (draft!) paper's abstract: A key remaining question is how generative AI affects learning, namely, how humans acquire new skills as they perform tasks. This kind of skill learning is critical to long-term productivity gains, especially in domains where generative AI is fallible and human experts must check its outputs. .. Consistent with prior work, our results show that access to GPT-4 significantly improves performance (48% improvement for GPT Base and 127% for GPT Tutor). However, we additionally find that when access is subsequently taken away, students actually perform worse than those who never had access (17% reduction for GPT Base). That is, access to GPT-4 can harm educational outcomes. These negative learning effects are largely mitigated by the safeguards included in GPT Tutor. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4895486 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4895486

tripletao 2y ago
To emphasize, the "GPT Tutor" kids didn't do worse on the exam than the control kids, but they didn't do better either. The effect was slightly negative, statistically insignificant: > Student performance in the GPT Tutor cohort was statistically indistinguishable from that of the control cohort, and the point estimate was smaller by an order of magnitude (-0.004), suggesting minimal impact to performance in the unassisted exam. "GPT Base" would provide complete answers, but "GPT Tutor" was prompted to provide only hints. So the result is perhaps that: 1. Given the option to let a machine ("GPT Base") do their homework, many kids will lazily take it. These kids won't learn as much. 2. A machine that refuses to do their homework ("GPT Tutor") doesn't cause that problem. It doesn't seem to help either, though. I'd guess that laziness would explain most of the harm rather than mistakes made by "GPT Base", though I have no particular evidence for that. Maybe someone will repeat this study in a domain where "GPT Base" makes fewer mistakes, allowing those two effects to be distinguished. (Though would that pass ethics review, now that "GPT Base" is known to impair learning in at least some cases?)

tripletao 2y ago

To emphasize, the "GPT Tutor" kids didn't do worse on the exam than the control kids, but they didn't do better either. The effect was slightly negative, statistically insignificant: > Student performance in the GPT Tutor cohort was statistically indistinguishable from that of the control cohort, and the point estimate was smaller by an order of magnitude (-0.004), suggesting minimal impact to performance in the unassisted exam. "GPT Base" would provide complete answers, but "GPT Tutor" was prompted to provide only hints. So the result is perhaps that: 1. Given the option to let a machine ("GPT Base") do their homework, many kids will lazily take it. These kids won't learn as much. 2. A machine that refuses to do their homework ("GPT Tutor") doesn't cause that problem. It doesn't seem to help either, though. I'd guess that laziness would explain most of the harm rather than mistakes made by "GPT Base", though I have no particular evidence for that. Maybe someone will repeat this study in a domain where "GPT Base" makes fewer mistakes, allowing those two effects to be distinguished. (Though would that pass ethics review, now that "GPT Base" is known to impair learning in at least some cases?)