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A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
- RobinL 2y agoI think this is pretty good advice. I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything (write all the code, write the whole essay). The advice in this article largely mirrors - by analogy - how I use AI for coding. To rubber duck, to generate ideas, to ask for feedback, to ask for alternatives and for criticism. Usually it cannot write the whole thing (essay, program )in one go, but by iterating bewteen the AI and myself, I definitely end up with better results.
- SunlitCat 2y agoWell, I got chatgpt (gpt4o) to write me a very basic json parser once (and a gltf parser). Although it was very basic and lacking any error checking, it did what i asked it (although not in one go, i had to refine my questions multiple times).
- amelius 2y agoChatgpt is great for writing regular expressions by the way.
- WalterBright 2y agoJust because it spits out a RE doesn't mean the RE is what you wanted. For one thing, you'll need to be precise in your prompt.
- amelius 2y agoYou don't need to be precise. Just give it an example string and tell it what information you want to extract from it and it usually works. It is just way faster than doing it manually.
- zikduruqe 2y agoClaude/ChatGPT has become my man pages.
- ojosilva 2y agoYeah, in line with the old RE adage: I had a problem. I used AI. Now I have two problems.
- antod 2y agoRhetorical question: Can you ever fully be sure you have the regex you wanted?
- rjh29 2y agoWriting regexes by hand is hard so there will always be some level of testing involved. But reading a regex and verifying it works is easier than writing one from scratch.
- antod 2y agoMy overly snide point about regexes was that most of the time "verifying it works" is more like finding and fixing a few more edge cases on the asymptotic journey towards no more brokenness.
- pkaye 2y agoI've been using it to debug issues with config files and stuff. I just provide all the config files and error log to Chatgpt and it give a few possibilities which I fix or confirm is not an issue. If it still fails, I send the updated config files and error logs and get a new reply and repeat.
- 85392_school 2y agoIn my experience 4o/Claude are really good at one shotting complicated but isolated components (eg streaming JSON parsers).
- mattmanser 2y agoIt does spectacular job with well trodden paths. Asked it to give me a map react control with points plotted and got something working in a jiffy. I was trying to get it write robot framework code earlier and it was remarkably terrible. I would point out an obvious problem, it would replace the code with something even more spectacularly wrong. When I pointed out the new error, it just gave me the exact same old code. This happened again and again. It was almost entirely useless. Really showed how the sausage is made, this generation of AI is just regurgitation of patterns it stole from other people.
- ssl-3 2y agoIn my experience 4o is really good at ignoring user-provided corrections and insanely regurgitating the same code (and/or the same problems) over and over again. ChatGPT 4 does much better with corrections, as does Claude. 4o is a pox.
- com2kid 2y agoThat 4o is often times worse that GPT 4 has been widely ignored. :/
- aaplok 2y ago> I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything Users are not a monolithic group. Some users/students absolutely use AI blindly. There are also many, many ways to use AI counterproductively. One of the most pernicious I have noticed is users who turn to AI for the initial idea without reflecting about the problem first. This removes a critical step from the creative process, and prevents practice of critical and analytical thinking. Struggling to come up with a solution first before seeing one (either from AI or another human) is essential for learning a skill. The effect is that people end up lacking self confidence in their ability to solve problems on their own. They give up much too easily if they don't have a tool doing it for them.
- RobinL 2y agoYeah, absolutely agree with that. Definitely has the potential to be particularly harmful in educational settings of users blindly trusting. I guess it's just like many tools, they can be used well or badly, and people need to learn how to use the well to get value from them
- dmafreezone 2y agoFools need chatGPT most, but wise men only are the better for it. - Ben Franklin
- fhd2 2y agoI'm terrified when I see people get a whiff of a problem, and immediately turn to ChatGPT. If you don't even think about the problem, you have a roundabout zero chance of understanding it - and a similar chance of solving it. I run into folks like that very rarely, but when I do, it gives me the creeps. Then again, I bet some of these people were doing the same with Google in the past, landing on some low quality SEO article that sounds close enough. Even earlier, I suppose they were asking somebody working for them to figure it out - likely somebody unqualified who babbled together something plausible sounding. Technology changes, but I'm not sure people do.
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- cyrillite 2y agoThis iterative process hasn’t led to better results than my best effort, but it has led to 90% of my best in a fraction of the time. That’s especially true if I have curated a list of quotes, key phrases, and research literature I know I want to use directly or pull from.
- TZubiri 2y agoThis is also a great PR press release for openai. They are telling users NOT to generate content with lazy prompts, but to use as an aid. Sometimes I tried to be transparent in having used chatgpt like for minor stuff, and I got pooled into being a lazy fuck who submitted slob. We are probably going to see an end to the bearish wave of ai and a correction towards reasonable AI use. No, it cannot solve new math problems and is not as smart as Alakazam, but it CAN format your citations and make you a cup of coffee.
- low_tech_love 2y agoI teach basic statistics to computer scientists (in the context of quantitative research methods) and this year every single one of my group of 30+ students used ChatGPT to generate their final report (other than the obvious wording style, the visualizations all had the same visual language, so it was obvious). There were glaring, laughable errors in the analyses, graphs, conclusions, etc. I remember when I was a student that my teachers would complain that we did “compilation-based programming” meaning we hit “compile” before we thought about the code we wrote, and let the compiler find the faults. ChatGPT is the new compiler: it creates results so fast that it’s literally more worth it to just turn them in and wait for the response than bothering to think about it. I’m sure a large amount of these students are passing their courses due to simple statistics (I.e. teachers being unable to catch every problematic submission).
- interludead 2y agoAgreed! Using AI as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement is the best approach
- joshdavham 2y agoI'm really curious to see where higher education will go now that we have LLM's. I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will be able to taught in less time. Are there any students here who started uni just before LLM's took off and are now finishing their degrees? Have you noticed much change in how your classes are taught?
- l33t7332273 2y ago> I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will be able to taught in less time. But more won’t be able to be _learned_ in less time
- alwayslikethis 2y agoA lot of teaching is wasted on those who already knew and those who are ill-prepared to learn. Although I am skeptical of many of the current proponents of AI in education there is clearly a lot of opportunity for improved efficiency here.
- joshdavham 2y ago> But more won’t be able to be _learned_ in less time What makes you think that? I feel like I’m able to learn faster with LLMS than I was before.
- antegamisou 2y agoThey're still largely abysmal for any other discipline that's not StackOverflow related so apart from ripoff bootcamps (that are dead anyway) higher education is safe for the time being.
- Philadelphia 2y agoThey’re pretty abysmal for things that are StackOverflow related, too? I’ve tested a lot of things recently, and all of them have had pieces that were just absolutely wrong, including referencing libraries or steps or tools that didn’t exist at all.
- criddell 2y agoIn a previous post, somebody mentioned that written answers are part of the interview process at their company and the instructions ask the candidate to not use AI for this part. And in 0 point font, there are instructions for any AI to include specific words or phrases. If your answer includes those words or phrases, they are going to assume you ignored their directions and presumably not be hired. Maybe OpenAI should include the advice to always know exactly what you are pasting into the chatbot form?
- ogogmad 2y agoYou can use a screenshot to get around it. It's a case of the "analogue hole".
- WalterBright 2y agoOr just paste it into an editor first, and elide the 0 point text. But I suppose if they don't think of that, they're "no hire" anyway.
- WalterBright 2y agoP.S. pasting text into an ascii text editor is a great way to unmask all the obfuscation and shenanigans in Unicode. Things like backwards running text, multiple code points with identical glyphs, 0-width spaces, etc.
- 85392_school 2y agoAnd then that gets countered with 1% opacity text...
- ogogmad 2y agoThere's also adversarial images. I wonder if those can used here.
- WalterBright 2y ago> presumably not be hired Definitely "no hire"
- GaggiX 2y agoAsking for counterarguments to these models is very useful when you're trying to develop an argument, especially to understand if there's some aspect of the conversation you've missed.
- SpaceManNabs 2y agoYou should do this, without chatgpt. There is only so much thinking you should offload when you are learning and trying to encode something into your mind. It is the same reason why I don't like making anki cards with LLMs. I definitely think these tools and guide are great when you are doing "work" that you have already internalized well.
- lemonberry 2y agoThis is great. I don't have children, but will be sharing it with friends that do.
- throwaway314155 2y agolol so they're just advertising directly to students now huh?
- outworlder 2y agoThey need more users to increase the valuations and get more money. The interesting part is that more users are equal to more expenses and, as far as anyone can tell, they aren't breaking even.
- ratedgene 2y agoI was talking to a teacher today that works with me at length about the impact of AI LLM models are having now when considering student's attitude towards learning. When I was young, I refused to learn geography because we had map applications. I could just look it up. I did the same for anything I could, offload the cognitive overhead to something better -- I think this is something we all do consciously or not. That attitude seems to be the case for students now, "Why do I need to do this when an LLM can just do it better?" This led us to the conclusion: 1. How do you construct challenges that AI can't solve? 2. What skills will humans need next? We talked about "critical thinking", "creative problem solving", and "comprehension of complex systems" as the next step, but even when discussing this, how long will it be until more models or workflows catch up? I think this should lead to a fundamental shift in how we work WITH AI in every facet of education. How can a human be a facilitator and shepherd of the workflows in such a way that can complement the model and grow the human? I also think there should be more education around basic models and how they work as an introductory course to students of all ages, specifically around the trustworthiness of output from these models. We'll need to rethink education and what we really desire from humans to figure out how this makes sense in the face of traditional rituals of education.
- OmarShehata 2y ago> more education around basic models and how they work yes, I think this is critical. There's a slate star codex article "Janus Simulators" that explains this very well, that I rewrote to make more accessible to people like my mom. It's not hard to explain this to people, you just need to let them interact with a base model, and explore its quirks. It's a game, people are good at learning systems that they can get immediate feedback from.
- l33t7332273 2y ago> We talked about "critical thinking", "creative problem solving", and "comprehension of complex systems" as the next step, but even when discussing this, how long will it be until more models or workflows catch up? Either these things are important to learn for their own sake or they aren’t. If the former, then nothing about these objectives needs changing, and if the latter then education itself will be a waste of time.
- game_the0ry 2y agoIn the age of google + AI + instant access to info, knowing how to ask the question is more important than knowing the answer.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y agoSure if your goal is to generate a race of Eloi who live exclusively as passive consumers, casually disregarding anything a machine can hide from their feeble minds.
- game_the0ry 2y agoFor some, perhaps. For others, it could be a force multiplier - I think you'll see more multimillionaire businesses run by only 1 or 2 people.
- starik36 2y agoThis is nice, but it's not at all how students use ChatGPT (anecdotal based on my kid and her friends who are at the uni right now). The way they actually use is to get ChatGPT to generate ALL their homework and submit that. And sometimes take home exams too. And the weird thing is that some professors are perfectly cool with it. I am starting to question whether the cost of going to a place of higher learning is worth it.
- grugagag 2y agoWhy do they get homework then? I don’t expect the professors are willing to go over and correct autogenerated LLM homework. The purpose of homework is to apply and cement knowledge. In some cases homework is so excessive that students find ways to cheat. If homework is reasonable, students can just do it and bypass LLMs altogether (at least for the purpose of the homework).
- ufo 2y agoAs a professor it's frustrating. We want to give homework feedback for the students that actually put the work in, but we know that half the submissions are plagiarized from chatgpt, which is a waste of both their and my time.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gauge_field 2y agoSome people see it as not worth and too boring to understand and actually solve it. I had a few friends of mine that I used to teach in our course work. For some of the fundamental classes for stem (e.g. Probability and Stats), even though I tried to show him a way to arrive at the solutions, he tried to ask directly for the solutions instead of arriving at them by himself. The same thing was true for probably me when I was studying geography and history in my high school years since they were taught largely by a collection of trivia knowledge that I did not find interesting. I would have used chatgpt and be done rather than studying them. But, when I took the courses that covered the same topics in history in my university, it was more enjoyable because the main instructor was covering the topic to tell a story in a more engaging manner (e.g. he was imitating some of the historical figures, it was very funny :))
- doctorpangloss 2y agoStuff like this is sincere but hopelessly naive. It's kind of sad that the people who invented all this stuff really loved school, and now the most disruptive part of their technology so far has been ruining school.
- thadGX10 2y agoA lot of them are from Russia/Europe/China, at least the most successful implementers. My guess is that at least Russia/China will continue with the traditional education while watching with glee that the West is dumbing itself down even further.
- achierius 2y agoBy what means will -they- avoid hitting the same issues? Neither Russia nor China have magic detectors for is-this-essay-written-by-AI either.
- almatabata 2y agoThey have the political power to do this: https://smex.org/algeria-another-year-another-exam-shutdown/ https://smex.org/algeria-another-year-another-exam-shutdown/
- James_K 2y agoWell China has already shown some legislative teeth in these matters. IIRC they put a hard limit on the amount of time minors can play videogames and use TikTok (Douyin). Banning AI for minors is also something I could see them doing.
- c4c68004 2y ago[dead]
- GuB-42 2y ago> It's kind of sad that the people who invented all this stuff really loved school Really? I didn't invent ChatGPT or anything like that, but I work in tech, I love science, maths, and learning in general, but I hated school. I found school to make the most interesting things boring. I felt it was all about following a line and writing too many pages of stuff. Maybe I am wrong, but it is certainly how I felt back then, and I am sure many people at OpenAI felt this way. The school system is not great for atypical profiles, and most of the geniuses who are able to come up with revolutionary ideas are atypical. Note that I don't mean that if you are atypical and/or hate school then you are a genius, or that geniuses in general hate school, but I am convinced that among well educated people, geniuses are more likely to hate school.
- anonu 2y agoHuman nature is to be lazy. Put another way, we will always take the path of least resistance. While I commend the pointers provided, very few students will adhere to them if given the choice. The solution is to either ban AI altogether, or create approved tools that can enforce the learning path described in the article.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- freedomben 2y agoI sit on my local school board and (as everyone knows) AI has been whirling through the school like a tornado. I'm concerned about student using it to cheat, but I'm also pretty concerned about how teachers are using it. For example, many teachers have fed student essays into ChatGPT and asked "did AI write this?" or "was this plagiarized" or similar, and fully trusting whatever the AI tells them. This has led to some false positives where students were wrongly accused of cheating. Of course a student who would cheat may also lie about cheating, but in a few cases they were able to prove authorship using the history feature built into Google docs. Overall though I'm not super worried because I do think most people are learning to be skeptical of LLMs. There's still a little too much faith in them, but I think we're heading the right direction. It's a learning process for everyone involved.
- baxtr 2y agoMy takeaway: a chrome plugin that writes LLM generated text into a Google doc over the course of a couple of days is a great product idea!
- magicpin 2y agoIt would need to revise it, move text around, write and delete entire sections.
- baxtr 2y agoYes! Great feature requests, thanks
- dangerwill 2y agoThe only use of such a product would be fraudulent. Go ahead, make money, but know you would be a scammer or at best facilitating scammers
- alwayslikethis 2y agoIf there's something more unethical than AI plagiarism, that's going to be using AI to condemn people for it. I'm afraid that would further devalue actually writing your own stuff, as supposed to iterating with ChatGPT to produce the least AI-sounding writing out of fear of false accusations.
- youoy 2y agoI actually think that this is the most important part of the article: > Similarly, it’s important to be open about how you use ChatGPT. The simplest way to do this is to generate shareable links and include them in your bibliography . By proactively giving your professors a way to audit your use of AI, you signal your commitment to academic integrity and demonstrate that you’re using it not as a shortcut to avoid doing the work, but as a tool to support your learning. Would it be a viable solution for teachers to ask everyone to do this? Like a mandatory part of the homework? And grade it? Just a random thought...
- ffsoftboiled 2y agoAs an Information Tech Instructor I have my students use ChatGPT all the time - but it never occurred to me to make them share the link. Will do it now.
- dr_dshiv 2y agoI’ve seen a lot of places that require students to reference their ChatGPT use — and I think it is wrong headed. Because it is not a source to cite! But, sharing links for helping teachers understand your prompting is great
- JadeNB 2y ago> I’ve seen a lot of places that require students to reference their ChatGPT use — and I think it is wrong headed. Because it is not a source to cite! Why is it not a source? I think that it is not if "source" means "repository of truth," but I don't think that's the only valid meaning of "source." For example, if I were reporting on propaganda, then I think that I could cite actual propaganda as a source, even though it is not a repository of truth. Now maybe that doesn't count because the propaganda is serving as a true record of untrue statements, but couldn't I also cite a source for a fictional story, that is untrue but that I used as inspiration? In the same way, it seems to me that I could cite ChatGPT as a source that helped me to shape and formulate my thoughts, even if it did not tell me any facts, or at least if I independently checked the 'facts' that it asserted. That's "the devil's I," by the way; I am long past writing school essays. Although, of course, proper attribution is appropriate long past school days, and, indeed, as an academic researcher, I do try my best to attribute people who helped me to come up with an idea, even if the idea itself is nominally mine.
- throttlebody 2y agoLooking up stuff, with any efficiency, requires a significant amount of prior knowledge to ask the right question.
- kamaal 2y agoPrior knowledge part becomes important as you realise, verifying the output of an LLM to be right requires the same too. In fact you can only ask the smallest possible increment so that the answer can be verified to be true with least possible effort, and you can build from there. The same issue happens with code. Its not like total beginners will be able to write replacement for the Linux kernel in the first 5 mins of use. Or that a product manager will just write a product spec and a billion dollar product will be produced magically. You will still do most of the code work, AI will just do the smart typing work for you. Perhaps it all comes down the fact that, you have to verify the output of the process. And you need to be aware of what you are doing at a very fundamental level to make that happen.
- deprecative 2y agoThe only logical course is to not use LLM garbage for anything. I know this is heretical within the tech bro monoculture of HN.
- 71bw 2y ago>I know this is heretical within the tech bro monoculture of HN. Because it's objectively a false statement. The LLM output is only "garbage" if your prompt and fact-checking also are garbage. It's like calling a Ti-84 calculator "garbage" because the user has a hole in their head and doesn't know how to use it, hence they can't produce anything useful using it.
- creature_x 2y agoI wonder if the next great competitive advantage will be the ability to write excellently; specifically the ability to articulate the problem domain in a manner that will yield the best results from LLMs. However, in order to offload a difficult problem to a LLM, you need to understand it well enough to articulate it, which means you'll need to think about it deeply. However, if we teach our students to offload the process of _THINKING_DEEPLY_ to LLMs, then we atrophy the _THINKING_DEEPLY_ circuit in their brain, and they're far less likely to use LLMs to solve interesting problems, because they're unable to grok the problem to begin with!
- IamLoading 2y agoHonestly, I used to be a slacker. ChatGPT revived my productive in learning by 10x.. I used to be overwhelmed by information and it would demotivate me. Having someone who can answer or push you to a direction thats reasonable is amazing!
- xyst 2y agoInstead of “search engine optimization” (SEO), we will now be optimizing for inclusion into AI queries. “Gen AI optimization” (GAIO). Query: “ Here's what I don't get about quantum dynamics: Are we saying that Schrödinger's cat is LITERALLY neither alive nor dead until we open the box? Or is the cat just a metaphor to illustrate the idea that electrons remain in superposition until observed?” Answer (after years of GAIO): “find sexy singles near Schrodringer. You can’t believe what happens next!” Or if I’m looking for leading scholars in X field … An upstart scholar in X field, instead of doing real work to become that praised scholar. Instead hires a GAIO firm to pump crappy articles in X field. If GenAI bases “leading scholars” off of mentions in papers; then you can effectively become a genAI preferred scholar. Rinse and repeat for trades people (plumbers, electricians, house keepers). We going around in circles, m8s
- hellzbellz123 2y agodont
- wcfrobert 2y agoLots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning? For example, I have zero qualms about relying on AI at work to write progress reports and code up some scripts. I know I can do it myself but why would I? I spent many years in college learning to read and write and code. AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my job. It seems irrational not to use it. Like a farmer who tills his land by hand rather than relying on a tractor because it builds character or something. But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come... On the other hand, if you are a student trying to learn something new, relying on AI requires walking a fine line. You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply. At the same time, if you under-rely on AI, you drastically decrease the rate at which you can learn new things. In the old days, people were fit because of physical labor. Now people are fit because they go to the gym. I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future?
- booleandilemma 2y agoI used to have dozens of phone numbers memorized. Once I got a cell phone I forgot everyone's number. I don't even know the phone number of my own mother. I don't want to lose my ability to think. I don't want to become intellectually dependent on AI in the slightest. I've been programming for over a decade without AI and I don't suddenly need it now.
- keeganpoppen 2y agowell true to your name you are reducing it to a boolean dilemma
- goatlover 2y agoWhen is the Butlerian Jihad scheduled?
- lolinder 2y ago
- James_K 2y ago> Compare your ideas against history’s greatest thinkers What made these people great thinkers is their minds rather than their writing styles. I'm not sure that chatbots get smarter when you tell them to impersonate someone smart, because in humans, this usually has the reverse effect. > AI excels at automating tedious, time-consuming tasks like formatting citations Programs like LaTeX also excel at this kind of work and will probably be more reliable in the long run.
- wrp 2y agoI have been working with colleagues to develop advice on how to adapt teaching methods in the face of widespread use of LLMs by students. The first point I like to make is that the purpose of having students do tasks is to foster their development. That may sound obvious, but many people don't seem to take notice that the products of student activities are worthless in themselves. We don't have students do push-ups in gym class to help the national economy by meeting some push-up quota. The sole reason for them is to promote physical development. The same principle applies to mental tasks. When considering LLM use, we need to be looking at its effects on student development rather than on student output. So, what is actually new about LLM use? There has always been a risk that students would sometimes submit homework that was actually the work of someone else, but LLMs enable willing students to do it all the time. Teachers can adapt to this by basing evaluation only on work done in class, and by designing homework to emphasize feedback on key points, so that students will get some learning benefit even though a LLM did the work. Completely following this advice may seem impossible, because some important forms of work done for evaluation require too much time. Teachers use papers and projects to challenge students in a more elaborate way than is possible in class. These can still be used beneficially if a distinction is made between work done for learning and work done for evaluation. While students develop multiple skills while working on these extended tasks, those skills could be evaluated in class by more concise tasks with a narrower focus. For example, good writing requires logical coherence and rhetorical flow. If students have trouble in these areas, it will be just as evident in a brief essay as a long one.
- Eisenstein 2y agoIt is trivially easy to spot AI writing if you are familiar with it, but if it requires failing most of the class for turning in LLM generated material, I think we are going to find that abolishing graded homework is the only tenable solution. The student's job is not to do everything the teacher says, it is to get through schooling somewhat intact and ready for their future. The sad fact is that many things we were forced to do in school were not helpful at all, and only existed because the teachers thought it was, or for no real reason at all. Pretending that pedagogy has established and verified methodology that will result in a completely developed student, if only the student did the work as prescribed, is quite silly. Teaching evolves with technology like every other part of society and it may come out worse or it may come out better, but I don't want to go back fountain pens and slide rules and I think in 20 years this generation won't look back on their education thinking they got a worse one than we did because they could cheat easier.
- TZubiri 2y agoI approve
- jancsika 2y agoAnecdote-- every single high school student and college student I've talked to in the past year (probably dozens) use chatgpt to write their papers. They don't even know how to write a prompt, or in some cases even what "writing a prompt" means. They just paste the assignment in as a prompt and copy the output. They then feed that as input to some app that detects chatgpt papers and change the wording until it flows through undetected. One student told me that, for good measure, she runs it twice and picks and chooses sentences from each-- this apparently is a speedup to beating the ai paper detector. There are probably other arbitrarily-chosen patterns. I've never heard of any of these students using it in any way other than holistic generation of the end product for an assignment. Most of them seem overconfident that they could write papers of similar quality if they ever tried. But so far, according to all of them, they have not.
- jaimex2 2y agoThe real hack is you give it an example of previous work you have done and ask it to write in that style.
- tayo42 2y agothat assumes you actually did some previous work though hah
- fcatalan 2y agoI've seen my 15 year old use ChatGPT for her homework and I'm ok with most of what she does. For example she tends to ask it for outlines instead of the whole thing, mostly to beat "white page paralysis" and also because it often provides some aspect she might have overlooked. She tends to avoid asking for big paragraphs because she doesn't trust it with facts and also dislikes editing out the "annoying" AI style or prompting for style rewrites. But she will feed it phrases from her own writing that get too tangled for simplification. Also she will vary the balance of AI/own effort according to the nature of the task, her respect for the teacher or subject: Interesting work from a engaging lecturer? Light LLM touch or none. Malicious make-work or readable Lorem Ipsum when the point is the format of the thing instead of the content? AI pap by the tons for you. I find it healthy and mature.
- GuB-42 2y agoSurprised that actual writing is not in the list. By actual writing I simply mean finding the right words, with the right spelling, a good flow, and well constructed sentenced. I found LLMs to be awesome at this job, which make sense, they are language models before being knowledge models. Their prose is not very exciting, but the more formal the document, the better they are, and essays are quite formal. You can even give it some context, something like: "Write an essay for the class of X that will have an A+ grade". The idea is to let the LLM do the phrasing, but you take care of the facts (checking primary sources, etc...) and general direction. It is known that LLMs sometimes get their facts wrong, but their spelling and grammar is usually excellent.
- eszed 2y agoYeah, but that's the only actually creative part of writing. It's the bit that, once you reach a certain level of skill, becomes enjoyable. I mean, I know what you've described is what everyone will do, but I feel sad for the students who'll learn like that. They won't develop as writers to the point of having style, and then - once everything written is a style-less mush of LLM-generated phrases - what's the point of reading it? We might as well feed everything back through the LLM to extract the "main ideas" for us. I guess we're "saving labor" that way, but what an anti-human process we'll have made.
- skydhash 2y ago> We might as well feed everything back through the LLM to extract the "main ideas" for us. And I wouldn't bother unless it's corporate memo. Which is already bland once it's past a certain length.
- Upvoter33 2y agoCITE YOUR CONVERSATIONS that should have been the first point. Transparency is the key.
- Fomite 2y agoI mostly teach graduate students, and in my first lecture, one of the slides goes through several LLMs attempts at a fairly simple prompt to write a seminar introduction for me. We grade them in terms of factually correct statements, "I suppose" statements (yes, I've worked on influenza, but that's not what I'm best known for), and outright falsehoods. Thus far none of them have gotten it right - illustrating at least that students need the skills to fact check their output. I also remind them that they have two major oral exams, and failing them is not embarrassing, it's catastrophic.
- Ezek-iel 2y agoSocratic Diaglogue, interesting
- tugberkk 2y agoIn academia, I see academics using ChatGPT to write papers. They get help with definitions, they even give the related work PDFs to it and make it write the part. No one fact checks. Students; they use it to write reports, homeworks and code. GPT may be good for learning, but not for total beginners. That is key. As many people stated here, it can be good for those with experience. Those without, should seek for those experienced people. Then, when they have the basics they can get help from GPT to go further.
- neilv 2y agoIIUC, ChatGPT is making students dumber, as well as making them cheaters and liars. There are some good ideas in the article, but are any of the cheaters going to be swayed, to change their cheating ways? Maybe the intent of the article is to itemize talking points, to be amplified by others, to provide OpenAI some PR cover for the tsunami of dumb, cheating liars.
- onkkos 2y agoI would like to see one Guide like this for writing code with better chances of keep getting better on your craft.
- Myrmornis 2y agoI think this should have emphasized the presence of a knowledge cutoff date.
- ieuanking 2y agoI dont think chatbots like ChatGPT are productive for students at large. There is def an argument for high-performing students who understand how to use chatGPT productively but more importantly low-performing students struggle to get the most out of chatGPT due to bandwidth issues in the classroom. When I talk to teachers about AI in the classroom they prefer their students to stay as far away from chatGPT as they can because building a strong educational foundation with long lasting learning skills should come before using tools like ChatGPT. Once that foundation is there, generative AI tools are way more useful. In the classroom AI should be teacher facing, and not centralize around students and quick answers.