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My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

• MattGaiser 2y ago
  If you asked kids what the purpose of school is, they will overwhelmingly say that they are there to get a good grade. So for what they want from the process, it makes sense.
• wumeow 2y ago
  Invert the class format: Homework should be done in class on pencil/paper or locked down Chromebooks, and lectures can be watched on video at home.
  • Carrok 2y ago
    Or just do everything in class. Out of class work should go away entirely.
    • dr_dshiv 2y ago
      But then how will kids learn to use ChatGPT?
      • timeon 2y ago
        There is not much special to learn if you already know how to write and think.
  • burkaman 2y ago
    This was already a good idea even before LLMs, and it has been tried a bit in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). Maybe it just happens to fit my personal learning style, but I think it would encourage collaboration, help teachers more accurately assess how students are doing, help students who don't have a good home environment to get work done, it's easier to self-motivate yourself to watch a lecture at home than to actively do homework, etc. I would love to see this tried at a larger scale and studied to see if it actually works any better.
    • fn-mote 2y ago
      I know this method works for some people, but it isn't consistent with the way I have observed that people learn. I used to watch Veritasium [1] videos (way back) that vividly illustrated that even when told the correct information, people would not change their world view but instead give answers consistent with their pre-teaching naive views. Learning is complex. If all that a "teacher" is doing is lecturing, then a video might be a reasonable replacement. Even when the content is straightforward, my observation is that engagement with videos are awful. Heck, engagement in a lecture is awful, but at least the (human) teacher in the room can reasonably be expected to do things to engage the audience and probe their understanding. Some of that might be possible in a video format, for 5x the effort; follow up with examples if you know good ones. I know in the MIT OCW I have seen recordings of discussion sections (very effective), and that should be the bottom of the barrel as far as engagement when "honestly trying to engage learners". You would be better off just trying to do the work, then looking up the information needed. That kind of works, and I bet that's what happens in the flipped classroom model. (Maybe 20% of the class watched the video? Stats welcome.) I'm really just trying to point out that learning is complex. There's supposed to be a national What Works Clearinghouse [2], but I had a hard time finding useful information there. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium [2]: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/ https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/
  • itishappy 2y ago
    Repetition alone was hard enough, but if I was responsible for learning the material at my own pace on my own device as well? I'd still be in middle school.
    • hooli_gan 2y ago
      Yeah this did not work for me in college and it certainly would not have worked in school for me
• Peacefulz 2y ago
  I'm not trying to justify, or infer here, but I read recently that around 20% of American adults are functionally illiterate. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp I wonder how LLMs are going to affect these metrics.
  • jmclnx 2y ago
    I also saw an article on here that to me that seems to support your statement: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609948 I also have a relative going for a PHD, he says many times for the classes he teaches, students are using AI for their homework. He has brought that up may times to his superiors but the response tends to be "oh well". Sad world we may be heading towards :(
    • torpfactory 2y ago
      It’s a bit like the old saying about the banks: “If you owe the bank $10,000 it’s your problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000 it’s the banks problem”. If everyone in class is using LLMs to cheat, it’s really the university/instructors problem and it may be easier to bury their heads in the sand then to change their teaching methods and lesson plans. You can’t fail them all…
      • devin 2y ago
        Why not?
        • ramblenode 2y ago
          Today the university is a business and the students are the customers.
        • Herring 2y ago
          Inertia. They were cheating a lot when I was a TA, but using whatsapp groups and other online resources. Nothing changed then, and it probably won't change much now.
• nottorp 2y ago
  Waiting for those people who post the "how do you use LLMS for X" questions on HN to come here and explain how this is a good thing.
  • fat_gpt 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • zamadatix 2y ago
    I see it more like calculators. Using a calculator isn't inherently good or bad in itself. If you're using a calculator to fake learning the intuitions and mechanics of division on your math homework then that's bad - regardless of how many other good use cases for calculators can be talked about in a separate context.
    • croes 2y ago
      Calculators have a smaller CO2 foot print
      • zamadatix 2y ago
        It's an important discussion, as are many other tangents, but it's not really related to what the post was discussing as problematic.
        • croes 2y ago
          Because the post missed the point. It natural for humans to use tools to make tasks as easy as possible. Doesn’t mean the users are dumb or uneducated just lazy.
          • zamadatix 2y ago
            I dunno that I'd agree with that either (for this specific type of example at least). An adult wanting to find "how many hours are in 3.228 years?" when some task is looking for the answer aligns a bit with what you're saying. In this kind of scenario it has nothing with the adult not understanding how to do the conversion and everything to do with what the most accurate way to quickly complete the conversion itself is. I.e. the task is "produce an answer so we can use it". Whether that be done via calculator, spreadsheet, timespan conversion tool, or LLM (though the latter can be a bit of a poor choice for this type of task to be honest) the use of the tool is about best achieving the original goal accurately and quickly, not about sidestepping it. A student wanting to find "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours" on their homework aligns very differently in my opinion. In this kind of scenario the goal was that the student become more educated on time conversions by practicing them. The actual answer provided is just a way to be able to provide feedback on how accurately that learning process went. Learning these kinds of basic things through experience allows them to tackle learning ever more complex things as they advance through their education. Faking gaining that education by using a tool to get an answer to write down isn't just the lazier way to do the conversion, it does leave them without the education the task was actually about. Not only that, learning to do such basic timespan conversions is going to be the lazy way for such tasks over anything but the briefest timespan anyways! If LLMs were being used as part of the learning process instead of a replacement of the learning process I'd hold different opinions of the post. I think tools (be it calculators or LLMs) can be extremely powerful learning aids... but extremely weak ones when used as learning replacements.
• johnfn 2y ago
  The people who thought up the Chinese Room argument were almost right - they just didn't realize it would be the human who didn't understand anything.
  • tanewishly 2y ago
    Huh? The human not understanding anything is kinda the point of the Chinese Room argument...
    • idlewords 2y ago
      I refuse to understand the Chinese Room argument, I only deploy it.
    • johnfn 2y ago
      The human in the Chinese Room argument represents an AI. Eh, that kind of complicates the joke...
      • JKCalhoun 2y ago
        I think the book with the human in the Chinese Room represents the AI.
  • alephxyz 2y ago
    Isn't that exactly the Chinese room argument though? The human/computer in the room doesn't need to understand Chinese or English to translate?
    • fragmede 2y ago
      The thought experiment doesn't give a limit to the amount of intelligence the Chinese Room can display though, and if the thesis is that you just need a big enough model, then the fact that it doesn't "understand" is not an impediment. It's not a decided matter, in any case, and is still controversial among philosophers of the mind (who are less biased than AI researchers in companies that they have stock options in).
• lenkite 2y ago
  At this rate, people will just accept AI Overlords without any battle or revolution.
  • BadHumans 2y ago
    We are past that point. People will accept anything without resistance.
    • chrsw 2y ago
      Past that point. But I mostly agree. It's not a hopeful situation. If AI takes over it won't take over because it fought it war with humans and won. AI will take over because people want it to take over.
    • mmooss 2y ago
      They haven't accepted Covid vaccinations, immigration, the election of Joe Biden, ... . The world has a long history of people determining their fate and not accepting things. It's just one political group that has embraced quitting and despair - they are laughable.
      • fivelorn 2y ago
        Who could possibly be miserable amidst disease and authoritarianism?
        • mmooss 2y ago
          The question reveals the problem, a victim outlook. You have no responsibility or agency, and your feelings justify it. It's not only bs, it's unhealthy and self-defeating. The outcome is predictable.
  • zidad 2y ago
    Reminds me of the final outcome of the absurd series Mrs. Davis, where (spoiler warning) humanity has voluntarily succombed to the arbitrary assignments of a single AI-based customer rewards points app, because it was just a bit smarter than humans at manipulating people.
• 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  The funniest thing here is the complete disconnect with what is really going on. It's been ignored for years, but now it's a bit more obvious. What is the point of homework? It's supposed to be self-directed learning and reinforcement. But what is homework really? It's often confusing. It's time-consuming; you already spent 8 hours at school, and now you're spending more hours "at school" at home. If you can't get it, you have to hope your family members will help you (many can't or won't or simply aren't there, for many reasons). It takes a whole day (or more) to get the school's feedback and help (if it's available). And it's never fun. Growing up, it took me countless hours to work through 10 math problems, because I had a learning disability. I find processing abstract non-visual information very hard. It made it worse that I had no practical problems to work through, no visual or audible feedback, no different ways to look at the problem. The school didn't care and the homework didn't change just for me. My parents sat with me for hours but my brain just wouldn't work. For years I was given 1-on-1 tutoring, where the tutor struggled to get me to focus and try to solve the simplest things. At 15, I learned programming and developed computer programs in order to try to figure out the problems and answer them (if I could figure out how it worked in code, that would explain it enough that I could understand). It took longer, but I could actually understand them if I gave myself a different way of looking at and solving the problem. And for some reason, I, a child, was the person who had to figure out my own learning models and alternatives; the god damn "professionals" would be fine with me banging my head against a wall and failing. ChatGPT isn't the problem. Homework is just stupid. This rote abstract learning model applied uniformly to everyone is stupid. The giant amount of time needed after already spending all day at school is stupid. The things we are forced to learn at school, which we promptly forget, are stupid. Young people's education itself is stupid. Here I am, a 40 year old man, forgotten almost everything I learned in school. Yet I make a good salary, I can take care of myself. And I don't solve math problems manually, I ask a computer to solve them for me. Because why the hell would I do an error-prone human task manually when a machine will do it right? In fact, I am learning math right now, because I am building a shed and other wood projects. I've learned more about geometry and trig in the past 2 weeks than in the past 40 years, because I have a real-world thing that I can understand, and something fun to work on that makes me proud when I finish it. It's self-directed, and I'm using a ton of resources on the internet to figure it out, but I'm doing it. It's sinking in. If I had that as a kid, I'd be a damn math genius by now.
• en3r0 2y ago
  It's the kids whose teachers can't or want to adapt that will most likely suffer in their education. Not saying it is easy, but it is possible. I have a friend who's a teacher that is pioneering methods to include (modified / preprompted) LLMs as a part of their lessons. He calls it Modern PBL: Project-Based Learning. He wrote a book on it if you are interested: https://a.co/d/7MFQ5wa https://a.co/d/7MFQ5wa
  • remram 2y ago
    This is such a weird take. Teachers could teach LLMs, but that doesn't solve the problem. Kids still need to practice skills that an LLM could do for them.
• Dowwie 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • pdonis 2y ago
    A calculator can be trusted to give you the right answer if you punch in the numbers correctly. An LLM cannot. That's because a calculator is designed to give the right answer. An LLM is not. It's only designed to produce text that seems plausible based on the prompt. "Plausible" is not the same as "trustworthy".
    • engineer_22 2y ago
      To play the devils advocate, on some calculators 9+3x2=24
      • miltonlost 2y ago
        That's not playing devil's advocate. That's you not understanding how the calculator was programmed. A graphing calculator in which you can put (9+3x2) before pressing enter is different than a adding calculator in which you can only do sequential binary operations (9+3, enter, x2, enter). The calculator is programmed exactly to do as it was. Both calculators are correct in their programming. It's you who mistyped what you intended.
        • engineer_22 2y ago
          my point exactly
      • AceyMan 2y ago
        Ahh, so we just need an RPN variant of LLMs to avoid any ambiguity .
        • grues-dinner 2y ago
          Verbs at the end. You must simply all your questions like a German ask.
• clejack 2y ago
  There's some grim humor in the fact that the poster reflects on his sister's use of chatgpt, and just ends on that point. I have to wonder if he decided to talk to her or his parents about the situation. I didn't see anything in the post to suggest it, just a "this next generation is cooked." Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.
  • moduspwnens14 2y ago
    My daughter is only 1 and a half years old now, but my concern is more that she'll be implicitly competing with classmates that are using tools like this, whether we allow her to use them or not.
    • casey2 2y ago
      There is no royal road to geometry. To me it sounds like you are worried more about the competition for resources than giving your daughter an education.
    • theamk 2y ago
      I hope in-class exams (or even simple questions from the teacher) will define the big part of the grade in the future schools. This will force ChatGPT-using classmates to either use it as learning _assist_ tool, to help student learn the material; or be 100% reliant on ChatGPT for homework, but fail every in-class assignment and then fail the whole class. Either outcome is fine with me.
    • nyrikki 2y ago
      Reminder, you win by learning the material, not by completing the homework.
      • MattGaiser 2y ago
        Society certainly doesn't reward school performance in that way. You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained.
• moffers 2y ago
  Where are the parents? This is easily addressed with a discussion about the importance of learning for yourself, and some accountability. They’re only 11.
• s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I'm skeptical of anything posted on Reddit, but that seems plausible enough that I'm sure it occurs somewhere. It sure will be interesting to see how this mass social experiment plays out
• minimaxir 2y ago
  > She asks him to make it shorter and even when chatgpt makes the answer litterally 1 SENTENCE she still asks him to make it shorter making it a 1st grade 7 word sentence and copies it without understanding it or understanding the poem or even reading it. Even children are figuring out that iterative prompt engineering is super effective. For maybe not the right reasons, but still.
  • duxup 2y ago
    Solving a problem, is still work and involves learning.
  • miltonlost 2y ago
    "iterative prompt engineering is super effective". Super effective at doing what is asked, but I guarantee that 7-word sentence is wrong for the 150-word poem. This is such a bad effect that it has...
• cruffle_duffle 2y ago
  Back in high school we used to just copy and paste stuff from a Microsoft encarta cdrom into word, print it out and hand it in. Somehow I managed to go on to have a successful career in software making vastly more money than my parents or those around me. The only real thing that would bug me is LLM’s are professional bullshitters. They are a super compressed store of knowledge that doesn’t know its own boundaries and will happily spout out perfectly written nonsense. At least encarta has effort put into making sure it is factually correct… it wasn’t compressed knowledge. Granted it wasn’t when I was 11, but still. Not sure my point proves anything but it’s a point, damn it.
  • nottorp 2y ago
    I bet you were one of the ones that was smart enough to not copy/paste the whole article so it was easily recognized tho.
    • grues-dinner 2y ago
      I remember people handing in work copy pasted from Encarta, complete with the blue hyperlinks (even back then pasting formatted text was a stupid default in Word). How did I know my classmates did that? Because they managed to get that "work" pinned up on the "exemplary work" notice board! My carefully hand-tuned word art titles meant nothing in comparison! Nothing!
  • daseiner1 2y ago
    If that’s a point, I’m a line.
• Version467 2y ago
  I know that having parents who cared about my education (and were in a position to actively participate in it) was a privilege and not a given, but where are the parents in this situation? Do we just accept that an 11 year-old watches squid game, has unrestricted access to chatgpt and does all their school work without any oversight at all? Clearly this kid is not receiving the guidance it needs. Or any guidance really.
  • distances 2y ago
    What kind of guidance does 11 year old need for homework? Me and my siblings were doing all of it independently pretty much from the start, parents were only involved if there was some tough nut that we needed help with.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • LudwigNagasena 2y ago
      Guidance not to cheat yourself out of your own future including your job prospects?
      • distances 2y ago
        Could be useful in this case, but > does all their school work without any oversight at all I would definitely expect this to be the norm for 11 year olds, not some case of parental neglect as portrayed here.
  • txextos 2y ago
    My parents cared but they just weren't educated enough themselves to offer any good advice. I would say I basically received no guidance my entire childhood on anything important. Not because my parents were delinquents but they simply had nothing to offer. If was in middle school, there is no way my parents would be able to police the use of chatGPT. They wouldn't think it is good or bad, they would just not understand what is going on. I have thought about that many times. It is unimaginable to have received good advice growing up and not have to figure out everything for myself, fixing all these mistakes. What an advantage.
• walrus01 2y ago
  Idiocracy was not supposed to be a documentary. Welcome to Costco, I love you
• throw0101d 2y ago
  Are in-class tests still a thing? If you use these tools to get the homework done, but there's little retention of knowledge or skill, how are you going to pass a test where the resource is not available to you? Homework is ostensibly about practicing certain skills (math) or learning/memorizing facts.
  • Ekaros 2y ago
    Do we still ask children to pass tests? I have been wondering about this. Can you still be held back? Can you still be given low grades if parents are aggressive?
    • rjbwork 2y ago
      Not really. You'll just be given a minimum passing grade, socially promoted, and ultimately pushed out of the education system having "graduated". Functionally illiterate, scientifically ignorant, and innumerate.
  • ibejoeb 2y ago
    I love this question. I was just thinking last night: do kids still carry around books? I have no clue what modern American primary education is like. I expect that I'll be surprised.
• delichon 2y ago
  I find my self using LLMs for very simple things, to jog my memory instead of actually exercising it. Yesterday I asked Claude how to format a numeric string in Ruby. I could have figured it out in the REPL in a minute but instead got the answer from AI in 15 seconds. This is the same kind of laziness as using it to multiply 60 * 3. If I take the slightly slower road of figuring out the string formatting next time I might go from a minute to 3 seconds. It's like telling someone to always take the stairs for their health. It's pretty good advice, but it's sweaty and takes time so we mostly don't. Maybe we should lock kids out of elevators and escalators as well as LLMs. But what's good for the duckling is good for the duck.
  • theamk 2y ago
    When you go to gym class, you are expected to perform without aids - you cannot ride a e-bike around the track when teacher tells you to run. Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you. Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain. The distinction seems pretty clear to me, I am not sure why people are having problems with it.
    • indrora 2y ago
      > When you go to gym class, you are expected to perform without aids - you cannot ride a e-bike around the track when teacher tells you to run. If you are expected to perform without assistance, then the instructor is failing to meet the needs of the students and doing them a disservice. If the goal is to get the students to exercise, an e-bike may well be the best tool to allow a student to get from a lower point to a higher point. A student who cannot do an hour of sustained running but can do an hour of sustained assisted cycling can have those assistances removed over time, enabling longer endurance while still maintaining the hour of time will have made significant strides in health. I doubt you could run a marathon today, unprompted. You would start by going shorter distances, working your way up. This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work. > Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you. An instructor who forbids assistance is an instructor who deludes themself about their performance when they were a student. Not all learn to fish the same way, and being shown how in a different way can mean all the difference. This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work. > Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain. I don't know what work you do but that would be seen as lazy at my workplace and frowned upon. There is a difference between seeking assistance ("Explain this in shorter terms") vs. absolve oneself of the burden of work ("take these points and turn them into paragraphs"). If OP's sister was asking questions ("Explain this poem") and then working from that to something that was her own work, that would be one thing. The fact that she is simply copying verbatim from the machine, thoughtless and without considering the meaning -- that's what is upsetting here.
• azangru 2y ago
  Gen Alpha? Is this already a thing?
  • bot403 2y ago
    Believe it or not as of 5 days ago we're up to generation Beta.
• alxbyko 2y ago
  As a senior college student who's seen ChatGPT take over much of higher education in real-time, I'm still curious (and unsure, really) how institutions will ever change their system of education if they struggle to address even smaller things than ChatGPT. My view as a student, personally, has always been that people rampantly cheat, everyone looks like they're doing good on paper, the institution's happy. My assumption was that such "infrastructural" education systems are hard to change (hence why few try to in the first place) and, if they work well enough, no one's going to attempt to touch it, let alone change it to better serve students who seem to be doing what they're expected to. Happy to hear some thoughts, from a student worried about his peers. :)
• dartharva 2y ago
  ... and the OP did nothing about the situation except post it on the internet. Had it been my little brother doing this I'd have whooped his ass, cut internet access, and ratted him out to my parents ;-) I joke, but honestly the sister's situation is completely the fault of her shit upbringing, not ChatGPT.
• idlewords 2y ago
  The teachers' subreddit (/r/teachers) is full of anectodal but collectively terrifying stories about how smartphones and now AI are affecting young students, particularly in the areas of attention, initiative, and basic literacy. We're in the middle of a big, uncontrolled experiment on an entire generation.
• loriverkutya 2y ago
  I think her parents are not doing what they should be doing. And I also think, that it is partially their parents fault but much more the fault of the education and social system the parents has been brought up and currently working and existing, because they are missing the resources (time and knowledge, etc) to attend to their child needs in this regards. And I'm also 100% sure they are not missing those resource because they are not doing their best to get what they need to meet with their child's needs. It would be really easy for me to blame her for choosing the easiest things to do, her teacher to not giving homework which cannot be solved with chatgpt, her brother for letting her using his account, her parents for not being there and overseeing how she does her homework, but I very much think that each and every person is in this story is exhausted by just simply trying to exists in systems which are not setup for this 11 years old to meet what she needs with her homework and every person either still fighting the systems or just gave up because they run out of steam and they are doing their best to keep their head above the water.
• mherrmann 2y ago
  Let's dig deeper. Level 0: this is bad. Level -1: The teaching methods need to change. Level -2: It's a glimpse into all of our future, not just children. Level -3: Who controls the AI controls the world.
  • falcor84 2y ago
    And that of course is a reason to repost this wonderful exchange in "A Clash of Kings": > In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies? > "The king, the priest, the rich man — who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword. > "And yet he is no one," Varys said. "He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel." > "That piece of steel is the power of life and death." > "Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?" > "Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords." > "Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they? Whence came their swords? Why do they obey?" Varys smiled. EDIT: Seeing no reactions yet, I just wanted to explain that the way I see this coming battle on controlling the AI that controls the world is that we have the governments, the billionaires and the ethicists saying what should be done, and us software professionals as the sellswords with our fingers on the literal trigger.
    • Terr_ 2y ago
      That analogy rests on some precarious assumptions, like: 1. That the "AI" being bandied about (read: LLMs) really is able to "kill" the other blocs. 2. That such an action will be safe from retaliation. 3. That software engineers actually control/own enough of everything to pull that "trigger" unilaterally.
• alexyz12 2y ago
  this kind of thing feeds perfectly into our fears. However, we have to place trust in individuals and the choices they make - that's the only thing that matters at the end of the day. Kids know that they should be learning things. They know that chatgpt can get in the way of that. Will they choose to do it the right way eventually aside from a few bumps in the road? I think so.
• bityard 2y ago
  > She asks him to make it shorter Am I the only one who found it interesting and perhaps a little alarming that the poster, while ostensibly aghast at their little sister's use of ChatGPT, decided midway through the screed to not only personify ChatGPT but also assign it a gender?
  • Seattle3503 2y ago
    Maybe English is not their first language, and their native tongue is gendered.
• croes 2y ago
  The problem isn't the kids using these tools to solve problems, the real problem is the energy cost we have to provide the kind of simple answers that previous “dumb” systems could provide at lesser cost.
• CharlieDigital 2y ago
  My 13 y/o was lamenting something the other day and it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper and it returned a "B+". She was using GPT to basically pre-check the quality of her paper before submitting it after having actually written it herself. But it occurred to me that there are probably teachers out there who are taking the lazy route of using GPT to grade papers that students are submitting that have been written by GPT in the entirety. There's some non-zero amount of GPT grading GPT in education.
  • insane_dreamer 2y ago
    > it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper that's one of the better uses of ChatGPT I've heard of
    • throwaway314155 2y ago
      Sounds highly unreliable to me. I would be very surprised if ChatGPT was ever confrontational enough to give out a lower grade like D or F. It also wouldn't surprise me if the grade-letter it chooses tends to be off by one or more grade-letters just due to natural variance/subjectivity of grading and hallucinations.
      • HaZeust 2y ago
        GPT is blunt, critical, and highly opinionated if you tell it to be. That's what I don't get about people on this forum. GENERATIONS of STEM professionals who have it engraved in their head that a computer will only do what you tell it to - and nothing more, and they still don't think to simply just tell GPT what lens they want it to view content in, or give it accurate and necessary directives. They think it'll handle that for them. Why? This should be the group getting the best outputs of this technology, bar-none. I've never encountered a more pragmatic group of people, haha! I don't get where the disconnect is.
        • bdhcuidbebe 2y ago
• atlantic 2y ago
  The most likely eventual outcome of ChatGPT (and similar software) will be the elimination of graded homework/coursework, and a renewed emphasis on traditional in-person tests and exams.
  • doctorpangloss 2y ago
    The people who created ChatGPT have very fancy educations. Do you think any of them didn’t have or didn’t do homework?
    • pavel_lishin 2y ago
      Did any of them have access to ChatGPT?
    • danenania 2y ago
      Many of the most expensive and "fancy" schools deemphasize homework and grades in early education.
    • atlantic 2y ago
      You can have homework for practice. That is obviously very useful. What I mean is that any unsupervised work will stop counting towards final grades.
• ibejoeb 2y ago
  > she uses chatgpt on my account Don't let her do that. Blows my mind that this one weird trick isn't suggested in the top 100 comments.
  • satvikpendem 2y ago
    How does that solve anything? She'll just use it on her own account... At least this way OP was able to see what their sister was up to.
    • ibejoeb 2y ago
      Well 1) she's 11 years old and is ineligible to create her own account and 2) she needs a credit card, which is pretty easy to control.
      • satvikpendem 2y ago
        ChatGPT is free without the need for a credit card. Age restrictions don't actually stop kids from making accounts.
        • TZubiri 2y ago
          "The shit version of chatgpt is free" Fixed that for you. And it will get shittier as investment dries up and the pressure to monetize increases.
          • satvikpendem 2y ago
            I mean, that's just shifting goal posts at this point; no one said anything about only using the free version. And anyway, Altman said they're losing money on the paid versions too, so I expect OpenAI to go under sometime in the next few years. They'll be like Xerox or Kodak, pioneering a novel innovation but ultimately failing to other bigger companies.
          • sophiebits 2y ago
• baggy_trough 2y ago
  Students do the work via ChatGPT. Teachers create assignments and grade them with ChatGPT. It's a giant self licking ice cream cone that doesn't educate anybody and fritters away a lot of wealth while using several nuclear plants worth of energy. It does in the short term solve the problem that kids hate doing schoolwork and teachers hate doing their jobs.
• mellosouls 2y ago
  I hate to be that guy, but if you're going to criticise someone else's intellectual ability, it might be worth ensuring your argument is presented in a form that is more than barely literate.
• 99_00 2y ago
  If true, the child may simply be experimenting with ChatGPT as we all have. The process described sounds like it is a lot more work than just answering the questions using knowledge.
• abeppu 2y ago
  I'm close to someone who teaches at a university, and they're making heavy use of in-room essays written in blue books. This ensures that the work is purely the students, but I think it also has the side-effect that the grader is also working manually. I kinda think maybe at earlier levels, most homework should be moved into the classroom and done on paper anyway? What's the point of homework if they're not going to do it themselves and they're not going to learn? So just push that back into the classroom and don't try to take up their time out of school needlessly.
  • gopalv 2y ago
    > What's the point of homework if they're not going to do it themselves and they're not going to learn? My theory is that most homework is given to ensure the parents take an active interest in the kids education. The fact that the kid needs help to do it is part of the goal, but completely impractical in a small family with 2 working parents. Unfortunately, the homework is all done in the after-care program, where the high school kids who work there spend the time getting the homework done. Not exactly what the teacher intended.
    • hluska 2y ago
      I don’t have a partner and have 50% custody of my child. It’s difficult to do it on my own, but as long as I capture lost time it works. For example, we do math, reading and spelling while we are in the car. I also use voices (my kid is 8 so it still works). We have two characters - Monkey and Lulu. They are very useful because Monkey is a monkey so was never educated in a human system. He always has lots of questions (and questionable pronouncements). If any busy parents want to meet Lulu and Monkey, get in touch and we can set something up. I’m a big fan of characters - they are a great way to review school material and it’s amazing hearing my kid explain things she has learned back to me. (Edit - I should note that I have a large amount of economic privilege. My situation may not apply to everyone.)
      • djeastm 2y ago
        Wait, are you saying you use voices when you're teaching your kid? If so, that's awesome.
• zerof1l 2y ago
  He's overreacting. Its a matter of perspective. From the perspective of most of us here, asking ChatGPT to convert 3 minutes to seconds sounds trivial. We can do this conversion in our heads effortlessly in a fraction of a second. Because we've been doing it our entire lives on a daily basis. But for an 11-year-old kid, it can be a challenge. Why bother straining your brain if you can just ask ChatGPT... We are wired to avoid thinking and take the easy path. I bet that the things he's asking ChatGPT will appear equally trivial to somebody else. The best way to handle this would be to talk to her and convince her to not use ChatGPT...
  • ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    I'm old enough to remember when calculators in schools were really controversial. Some time, between then, and now, they started mandating graphing calculators. I know that many universities now assume that everyone uses word processors, and have a zero-tolerance stance on typos. Someone else posted an article, where the person was complaining about Apple (always a crowd-pleaser), and quoted Steve Jobs, talking about how bicycles acted as "force multipliers" for human efficiency, and compared the personal computer to that. LLMs are here. Can't put that genie back in the bottle (sorry Jafar). They are now a part of the landscape, and we're still in the old "big iron" phase. They will become much better, pretty quickly. Kids will need to work with them. I find things like this to be great, because they free me up to learn more stuff. They raise the baseline. People think that primitive folks were "dumber" than we are now. This was almost certainly not the case. They just didn't have the infrastructure that we have (dadburn kids, with their fancy "wheels," and "fire." Humpfh), and our kids will have a far more powerful infrastructure than we do. I'm fairly hopeful. If we can keep from blowing ourselves up, I think we'll be fine.
• Zak 2y ago
  When I was in elementary school, my teachers told me it was very important to memorize multiplication tables because I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. We know how that turned out. I asked an LLM the first example question (convert 3 minutes to seconds), and it provided not just the answer, but that there are 60 seconds per minutes, so that's 3 * 60 = 180. I don't think an 11 year old is harmed by that sort of assistance.
  • AndroTux 2y ago
    There’s a difference between not knowing multiplication and just refusing any logical thinking at all. We already see this a lot in adults today. Many are just too lazy to turn on their brain, because it’s easier to call, ask on Reddit or whatever, even if it takes ten times longer than just doing the thinking yourself. This is just the perfection of that. And it’s suuuuper scary, because it trains you to be a brain dead monkey that literally believes anything ChatGPT tells you. And we know how that’ll work out.
    • pembrook 2y ago
      Every study done on the topic of “people judging the stupidity of other people” always proves this comment incorrect. With or without AI, we have always thought we are of wildly above average intelligence and that “all the other people are brain dead zombies.” This is just a classic human bias since we don’t ever experience what goes on inside anyones head but ours. Everything is going to be just fine.
      • AndroTux 2y ago
        I don't even know how to respond to that.
        • hackable_sand 2y ago
          You're being dramatic.
        • fivelorn 2y ago
• acjohnson55 2y ago
  People have felt the same way about waning handwriting skills and reliance on calculators. The truth is the way humans process information has been radically altered by LLMs and we're in the absolute infancy of understanding what that means. It is going to be far more disruptive than the keyboard or calculator. As we discover the implications, we are repeatedly going to find ourselves disturbed and disoriented. There are skeptics who think it's all hype and that current approaches are a dead end. Even if that were true, I'm 100% convinced that even if AI didn't meaningfully improve on today's capabilities, it will still be incredibly disruptive. Buckle up. There will be 2 categories of winners of the AI revolution: the quick and the deep. This poster's little sister is "the quick". She is using AI intuitively and aggressively. Whether it's right or wrong isn't important, because if the payoffs of it being right are more than the costs of it being wrong, she will be vastly more productive than people who are not using AI. A lot of the thinking school has traditionally trained us to do is officially commoditized. "The deep" are people with strong conceptual understanding of the problems to which they are applying AI and/or strong understanding of the AI itself. They will use AI to create things that didn't exist before. They will take seriously the risk management (although, they will still not be able to successfully predict all unintended consequences). People will benefit in the new world proportional to their ability to create or extract value.
  • JohnMakin 2y ago
    > "The deep" are people with strong conceptual understanding of the problems to which they are applying AI and/or strong understanding of the AI itself. They will use AI to create things that didn't exist before. They will take seriously the risk management (although, they will still not be able to successfully predict all unintended consequences). Why would these people not just skip the AI part entirely, then?
    • theseustheseus 2y ago
      AI multiplies your existing capabilities if used properly.
    • acjohnson55 2y ago
• shusson 2y ago
  I wonder if people had the same reaction when children started using calculators.
  • mihaaly 2y ago
    Or slide rule! That devil, it wrote the homework of our granddads!
• corysama 2y ago
  Some 15 years ago I recall some schools in California bragging about their success in flipping the school schedule around. They had students watch lectures at home as videos. Then during class they did "homework". Seems like this method is going to become a necessity if students can just prompt "Hey GPT. Do my homework for me. Thanks." at home every day.
  • scld 2y ago
    Or they can just do it all at school.
    • danenania 2y ago
      Seriously, they are already spending 6+ hours there. That's plenty of time if used efficiently.
  • FabHK 2y ago
    I think it's a great idea that the delivery of the material is done by video, and then the engagement with it, the exercises etc., are done with a teacher. That flipping strikes me as sensible.
    • spwa4 2y ago
      Knowing that the vast majority of parents will not check or enforce school work at home, either because they don't care or can't (2 jobs etc) ... You have to choose which one actually happens. That seems to me to be the lecture. Additionally teachers are very opposed to doing extra work (this seems to be a Gen-Z thing: even with doctors you see this, there was an article about doctors refusing to do emergency rooms shifts during covid because they didn't want to pull more hours ...). So you'll need to get teachers that are willing to do a LOT of extra work (and compensated accordingly), and prevent people from sabotaging that system. Either that or you could make schools pretty exclusive again. Which is what the default outcome will be if we don't act.
      • skywhopper 2y ago
• thelastgallon 2y ago
  Invert. Always invert. Have the children learn at home (videos, text, etc) and do the homework in class.
  • kingnothing 2y ago
    No. Do it all in school. Let children have a childhood at home.
  • incognito124 2y ago
    Do we also invert back to homework at home after a few years?
• throw4847285 2y ago
  Scare tactics designed to confirm what I already fear. The fact that the comments are full of the same Idiocracy "jokes" that people have been making since that movie started airing constantly on Comedy Central means the belief that the younger generation is stupider does not rely on the existence of ChatGPT to be held. However, the inability to consider possible societal impacts of technology before rolling it out into the world free of regulation was the story of the 20th Century and I guess it's going to be the story of the 21st. Underneath the fear-mongering about AI is an honest belief that maybe we're not considering where this is all going. I'm not afraid of a super smart Gen AI that controls humanity, I'm afraid that people are going to outsource all decision-making to extremely stupid LLMs because we're seemingly evolutionarily wired to cut corners until we accidentally cut our fingers off.
• runjake 2y ago
  It's worth noting people probably reacted to this like they did with calculators, and perhaps, encyclopedias. I see this use a bit differently: as a teacher that scales (and is probably more accurate that a human, hallucinations and other concerns notwithstanding). I see my kids using it in a similar manner as described in this post, but I also see their curiosity piqued and them asking all kinds of theoretical and curious questions.
  • matwood 2y ago
    If an LLM can answer the HW questions so easily, then maybe it's an issue with the HW and not the LLM/student.
    • runjake 2y ago
      Why's that?
      • matwood 2y ago
        The student is growing up in a world of technology. How can the homework be designed leveraging LLMs? Can some curriculums be accelerated assuming LLMs provide a new base? What is the goal of teaching? Memorizing formulas or learning to think? Do students gain any value writing a book report or is there more value writing an essay about how a book relates to a students personal story? Anything that is formulaic in nature will likely end up automated. We should be teaching people to both leverage that fact and think creatively, even at 11 years old.
        • runjake 2y ago
          Great point.
        • champdebloom 2y ago
          I think there’s something to be said about building up a personal knowledge base and automaticity with retrieving basic information to free up your working memory for more complex problems. I’m still grappling with what this means now that LLMs have large enough context windows to ingest books.
• generalizations 2y ago
  Using ChatGPT like this is most likely a symptom, not the problem. An 11 year old is naturally a curious creature and if she's turned her brain off to the point of mindlessly solving her homework like this, there's something very wrong with her environment.
  • bangaladore 2y ago
    Disagree. I'd bet if you asked people if they enjoyed their homework when they were in elementary / middle school most would say no. That's not the problem here. Actual homework will not last in the age of LLMs.
    • generalizations 2y ago
      > I'd bet if you asked people if they enjoyed their homework when they were in elementary / middle school most would say no. Yup, and that's the environment I speak of. Modern elementary school is not a place for curious people.
    • fragmede 2y ago
      "Here's 5 bullet points, go home and use ChatGPT to generate an essay, then bring that essay to class, and then we'll discuss why it's shit. and then we'll work on corrections during class. Bonus points if I can't tell if you used ChatGPT or not."
    • champdebloom 2y ago
      I’m a bit wary of positioning homework as something that has to be enjoyed. I think we need a bit of a productive struggle to learn.
• hluska 2y ago
  Is this a ChatGPT problem or a family system problem? My child is eight years old and writes significantly better than the writer. Her mom and I value education, reading and writing so we work with her throughout the school year. If an older sibling writes that poorly, I feel there are other things going on than overreliance on technology. I hope she makes it through this because the world is becoming increasingly hostile to people with poor literacy.
• LeroyRaz 2y ago
  It's hard to know how worrying or damning this usage pattern is. Speaking personally, I never did any homework, as I found it incredibly dull. So I don't really find it that worrying someone shirking their homework. The replacement of thought with using ChatGPT does seem worrying though.
• dcchambers 2y ago
  I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least once while they're doing homework it will be very easy to catch issues like this.
  • _mlbt 2y ago
    Not only this, but parents should be involved before children go to school. Teachers have repeatedly told us that they could tell that we read to our children regularly as babies and preschoolers.
    • hluska 2y ago
      That’s neat in a bad way - I have heard the same thing in parent teacher interviews. When my kid was born, I turned into a dude who cries. This stuff makes me cry. I like being involved in my child’s life and absolutely love reading to her. I can’t imagine just not doing my favourite thing with my favourite person. Granted, I have one child and a lot of privilege so maybe I can’t understand the other side. But I’m not sure I want to.
  • jjice 2y ago
    > Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child. My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them! I thought the "kids are illiterate now" stuff was overblown, and I bet it still is to a certain extent, but it's definitely bad. Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore? Less important than reading, but still. Is this because of an increase in the prevalence of child distractions like an iPad? I find that hard to believe since television filled that same void before, didn't it? COVID definitely put a lot of kids at a few year disadvantage, too. I can't really speak to any of this because I haven't raised a kid, so I also don't want to criticize people for something I know nothing about, but it does seem like children aren't taught by their parents the same way - but I don't know if my parent's generation had the same thought at one point and this is a cyclical critique. I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts who have more exposure to this kind of thing than I do.
• bilsbie 2y ago
  I have this problem too! I wrote up this system prompt I want to set on my daughters account. You’re welcome to try using it and let me know it goes. (When I made a new chatgpt account for her it wouldn’t load. I need to try to set it up again) Prompt: This is my 9th graders account. She has been trying to avoid learning or even thinking by copy and pasting homework and quiz questions into chatgpt and not even reading the answers. I’m very concerned she’s not learning or preparing for life. IMPORTANT: please don’t provide any complete answers. Instead only guide her toward understanding in a way that engages her. Also point out how the subject matter is useful and interesting to her life. She is interested in figure skating, politics, making money, driving, interior design, pets especially small mammals. If you can tie the subject matter into these sometimes it might make it more engaging. In the long term I’d like her to build up a growth mindset and gain confidence regarding her intelligence and ability to learn.
  • beardedmoose 2y ago
    Hell, I’d argue a similar prompt could be useful for a lot of people. I use something similar for coding and ask it not to provide direct code and more a guide on coding principals with source links if possible.
    • dylan604 2y ago
      How well has that worked for you? Sometimes just hearing other ideas helps get to a solution even if none of the ideas heard were the actual solution. Sometimes, just being forced to get out of the rut you're in at the time by being "forced" to stop to think about something else is all that's needed.
      • beardedmoose 2y ago
        It worked okay at first but seemed to start just giving me answers again after a few questions. This was ChatGPT for reference. I might try something again now that they have "Projects" where you can define a prompt which sticks to the entire project. The idea was to use ChatGPT as debugging ducky 2.0
• sixhobbits 2y ago
  If you'd told people 50 years ago that "literacy" would decline to the level of the reddit poster's style of writing, with poor sentence structure and words in ALL CAPS, they'd be pretty shocked. Now it's just normal communication. Older people are shocked that young people can't do long division, or easily add a column of numbers mentally. I'm not saying LLMs won't negatively influence the next generation, but the next generation has always been the first to use and abuse new technology and we are all still alive and (most) bridges and airplanes stay up and maybe we will even put people on the moon again some day.
  • ben_w 2y ago
    Point, but also 50 years ago, all-caps would have been one of only two available ways to emphasise text, the other being underlines. Typewriters weren't able to do much else. At least, not the ones you could easily get. Aired 1993, February 25: https://youtu.be/nN9wNvEnn-Q?si=eqUWiZTxYach3db-&t=975 https://youtu.be/nN9wNvEnn-Q?si=eqUWiZTxYach3db-&t=975
    • robocat 2y ago
      > one of only two available ways Three ways: many could also type in red: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B009KXXSOI https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B009KXXSOI (showing a red/black ribbon). 7:05 shows the lever for a Brother typewriter in this video and a bit before that shows a different lever for heavyness (although I don't know if that would do bold): https://youtube.com/watch?v=d_dTu6T87Cg&t=6m50s https://youtube.com/watch?v=d_dTu6T87Cg&t=6m50s And AFAIR you could somewhat do bold by overtyping a few times (backspace, retype, repeat) or by hitting keys harder. Plus many early home computers only had UPPERCASE (e.g. initial Apple ][) and were monochrome (so inverse was often a highlight thing instead of using colour).
      • ben_w 2y ago
        Huh, interesting. I don't think we ever had multi-colour ribbons on the typewriters I played with as a kid. (It would have been the late 80s in the UK, I have no idea how representative my experiences were).
• megablast 2y ago
  If this is true then she would fail every test and exam.
• turtleyacht 2y ago
  This may be a transitory period until teachers realize they can ask much harder questions. Students become teleological (goal-seeking) agents, and the bar is raised. Computer science in middle school. Quantum physics in high school. Proofs in between, formal methods, and welcome the rising tide.
• bilsbie 2y ago
  As terrible as this is, I also realize the most valuable skill kids can learn today is how to work with AI. So I see it as a mixed bag.
• sn9 2y ago
  Parents/siblings: "I gave the kid access to AI and it's nuked their ability to ever develop the ability to think. What can be done about this?"
• dmos62 2y ago
  The kid doesn't care at all about the problems she's asked to solve. I considered that normal until recently. Now I'm increasingly surprised that no one bats an eye that we're forcing kids to learn. Naturally that has little success. I heard someone say "adapt the lesson to the student's excitement, not the excitement to the lesson". I think that's a foundation for something wholesome, though, admittedly, I struggle imagining how I would do that if I had a kid.
  • jjk7 2y ago
    People screaming on YouTube is infinitely more exciting than basic math to these kids.
  • 3good5me 2y ago
    At some point, you need to learn how to do things that are hard, or unpleasant, or just downright boring. Not everything can be a MrBeast video, that just isn't how life works. We're raising kids who can't just sit with their own thoughts; they need constant stimulation. But guess what? Long division isn't stimulating. Taxes aren't stimulating. Cleaning the kitchen isn't stimulating. But you need to do those things anyway. I find it hard to believe that it's mere coincidence that everything fell apart right after we invented these perfect little surveillance Skinner boxes, and then put overpriced Markov chains in them and unleashed them on children.
    • dmos62 2y ago
      I agree that doing hard things and character building has its place. I'm just not sure that basic arithmetic is that place. I like to think that a kid inherently has something more tangible to get excited about than dopamine-bomb videos, and I fear that we might help drive them away from that "tangible excitement" and into the soul-sucking distractment, if we force them to learn without regard for that tangible and genuine excitement.
• tonymet 2y ago
  remember when calculators were "from the devil" ? what I mean to ask is: which activities have slippery slopes and which don't?
• paulddraper 2y ago
  > She just copies and pastes stupidly with squid game going in the background. 11-year-old watching Squid Games? Seems to indicate some lack of interested parenting.
• dfxm12 2y ago
  Counterpoint: maybe, if anyone is even cooked, it is just this one student and not an entire generation. Go back generations and it was always something else ruining the youth: not playing outside enough, Internet, videogames, hip hop, playing outside too much, TV, rock & roll, books, etc. In my own studies and brief time as a tutor, you get students like this who just see school as an obstacle to something else. Even then, some people aren't good in a structured setting, like school, but can still be a productive member of society.
  • gotoeleven 2y ago
    Self-reported measures of well-being have been steadily decreasing. Mental illness has been steadily increasing. Maybe grandpa was right?
    • dfxm12 2y ago
      So is the stigma of mental illness. It is a good thing that people are more comfortable admitting that they are not OK, but I'm not sure the bearing of this on the current conversation.
  • fivelorn 2y ago
    What happens if the entire generation is students like this?
• benbojangles 2y ago
  But last month I went to court to fight a parking ticket and won thanks entirely to chatgpt
• yodsanklai 2y ago
  Interesting anecdote, but doesn't really tell much on gen alpha and impact of ChatGPT. There always have been disinterested kids who put zero effort in their homework. But there are also smart and curious kids who will use these tools to learn faster.
• cess11 2y ago
  I find "homework" more disturbing than kids figuring out ways to subvert the system they're forced into. Offloading state mandated education on parents without compensating for it is quite the policy, and likely accepted because most parents are afraid their kids will end up in misery if they refuse to or can't obey.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• hb53821 2y ago
  Wow. Everything happens so fast now. Even condemning the next generation!
• ffsm8 2y ago
  11yrs old now means 2013. That's Gen Alpha, not Gen Z. And kids born from this year on are Gen Beta. (Expect lots of meme s about that in 5-10 yrs) Also, people have been making the same argument about calculators since they've become mainstream in (I think) the 90s. Lazy kids are gonna be lazy, that's just a fact of life
• satisfice 2y ago
  I didn’t do any homework, ever. I refused to do it on constitutional grounds. I quit school altogether. I was okay. I became an emancipated minor and I’ve been working in the software field since the age of 16. I’ve written two books and my third will be published by Wiley, soon. Involuntary homework assignments have not led to an educated world. All ChatGPT is doing is making it easier to ignore pointless assignments.
• randomcatuser 2y ago
  i found the same thing with programming... you start using AI and then all of a sudden, you find yourself not writing code you could've written yourself (probably with better organization too...) Does anyone have strategies for actually thinking while using AI?
• Balgair 2y ago
  So, I have little ones too. And AI, to me, ends up being a tool. One that will very much help out. However, the post brings up a good point: Education isn't cheap. Looking through the history of pedagogy, 'teaching' has never been easy. We managed to get around this, somewhat, in the developed world for about 150 years or so. Mostly to keep the factories working cheaply, but we also found out that an educated populace was a heck of a jolt for national security too. Not a bad run at all! But industrial education still is expensive, about 30% or so of the budget for a US state (very rough % there). Now, we've got AIs, and the methods we found in industrial education to make it a bit cheaper, well, they don't really work anymore. There's gonna be this little gap period here with AIs where we have the old methods and new tech, and it's not going to go well. Education of the youth, yeah, that's still going to be a huge thing. But it's going to be a bit more expensive and messy for a while. Fortunately, we do have AIs to help out with that and run through the processes faster, get to a 'good-ish' state of things again. But things like homework, essays, 500 person freshmen lectures, those little cheats short-cuts, those things aren't going to work anymore (and let's be honest, never really did anyway). What will work? I don't know yet. But I think it will be even cheaper overall, and will decidedly not look like what we have today. No more prom kings, no more homecomings, no more lectures, no more homework. Things like A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, sure, that's a given. But Starfleet Academy isn't going to be big on sitting down. I think it'll be more like away missions mixed in with some St. John's/Oxbridge approaches. A lot more teachers with a lot more training/AI help, that's for sure. And that's not cheap either.
• rhelz 2y ago
  I'm transitioning to teaching math after a 30-year career as an engineer. I am really conflicted about the use of LLMs for homework. One thing we *for sure* know that employers are going to want is that one employee does the work of 10 using llms. A I'm wondering, why don't we give the employers what they want? Why not teach the kids to be super-effective with alms, and then We just give the kids 10x the amount of homework and tell them to get it done anyway they want to? Sounds rough, but that's the reality which almost every creative writing professional is facing right now. And as soon as the technology makes it feasible, that's the reality that every software engineer is going to be facing. All this talk about 10x engineers...employers are going to expect all of us to be 10x engineers. I mean, imagine a gym class which teaches kids how to run down an antelope. Because for 200,000 years running down an antelope was a core survival skill, and just because we had supermarkets doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to live off the land. From John Henry vs. the Steam Hammer, to accountants using spreadsheets in the 80s, the whole story of technology is making 1 person able to do the work of 10. There's no use trying to pretend LLMs didn't happen. They happened, and they are not going away.
• tveyben 2y ago
  I really don’t like that one calls AI / ChatGPT etc for ‘him’ or ‘her’ - it’s a machine!!!, not a human. It’s wrong in so many ways. And it’s a lot more A than I :-D
• recursinging 2y ago
  It seems to me that the fundamental tenants of "education" are being disrupted here. I have always found learning in order to do things far less intuitive and interesting than doing things in order to learn. The incentive structures of our education systems are wonky (reflected in this post). Maybe they could use a good shakeup.
• stevemadere 2y ago
  I guess this signals the end of focusing on testing to prove one's "rank" as a student and actually start focusing on educating students rather than evaluating them. The whole problem with factory mass-education is the almost exclusive focus on evaluation. A little bit of education happens as a side-effect of the unrelenting soul-crushing evaluation so we've put up with it and called it education for 100 years. ChatGPT will make it nearly impossible to cause any educating to happen as a side effect of constant re-evaluation. That means we are going to have to focus on education directly. Probably just train ChatGPT to be a really good tutor and everybody gets a 19th century rich boy's education instead of the junk we've had in feed-lot-style schools for the last 100 years. Note that Waldorf schools are kind of immune to this problem since the kids don't get to touch a computer until they are in 9th grade and heck, they don't even read until 2nd grade.
  • iLoveOncall 2y ago
    In France the extreme majority of your grades comes from in-class exams that are essay-based or at least long format rather than multi-choice like in the US. Homeworks are just exercises to learn and aren't graded. This entirely solves ALL the problems introduced by LLMs. The US just needs to adapt their evaluation system.
    • Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      At my high school, teachers were given a lot of freedom to decide their own grading, but had the rule that the final could not be more than 20% of your grade. Typically, homework ended up being 50%. I failed my Geometry class despite getting 110% on the final (She had some hard extra-credit questions that went beyond what we learned) because I didn't do a single homework assignment. Meanwhile, this high school made all sorts of claims about preparing students for college, and my first math class in college, homework was only 3% of your grade.
      • satvikpendem 2y ago
        This is probably because you can fail catastrophically with the college way of doing things. I remember many people who failed one test out of three for the semester and essentially failed the class (given they did average on the other 2). No high school wants to deal with a system like that, it would be too much for kids to handle.
• iteratethis 2y ago
  Many children have always hated homework and sought ways to avoid it or cut corners. This tool is disturbing in that you actually do finish the homework, yet in a way where you learn nothing at all. I personally believe children should have no homework or far less of it. Typical education lasts 12-21 years. An insane amount of time. Use the lesson time more effectively and give kids some breathing room. Disturbing detail of the post is this young girl watching Squid Games. This is a show where a few dozen people get executed each episode. Some are shot and kept alive so that their organs are fresh for harvesting. How on earth do you let a 11 y/o girl watch that? All of this seems like total neglect, but frankly I understand it (somewhat). The modern couples I know are dual income. By the time they're done with work, dinner and cleaning up, it's 8PM. Now we expect them to dig into the homework of their children and micro manage every media they consume? They don't have the time and energy and often don't even understand half of it. Dual income society is a societal disaster.
• sinuhe69 2y ago
  My little son has a buddy who uses AI bots intensively. The friend is actually very smart and capable, but he pays too much attention to the things he likes (programming and games) and ignores all other aspects of basic education. And he slips, mindlessly copying what the bot tells him. If this is a widespread trend, it's obviously very worrying, especially for young students. On the other hand, we have had many discussions with my son about the role of education, AI and what we need. Thankfully, my son understands that it's the struggle that we go through that helps us to understand and make the knowledge truly our own. Of course, I have to model my use of AI, pointing out its flaws and the dangers of mindlessly using bots. At the end of the day, it's the internal motivation that drives us. If you're not interested in knowledge and learning, having a genie to cheat is too tempting to resist.
• eYrKEC2 2y ago
  Why does this 6th grader have math homework? Finns have less time in school every day and they still do better than Americans.
  • sinuhe69 2y ago
    I believe the PISA comparison in this context is flawed. To compare any statistics, we must control for other variables, otherwise any conclusion about causal effects and relationships could be deeply wrong. In the education context, the most important variables are the economic background of the households, the active involvement of the parents in the education of the children, the amount of time spending on the subjects (both in class and at home), the curriculum and methods of teaching. Finland has only 5 millions population and a relatively high median income, the teacher:students ratio is much higher and the percentage of intact families are higher. Therefore, if we want to compare, we have to select better districts in the US, where the teacher:students ratio is similar high then see what the PISA scores will say. Only then, and looking deeper into the curriculum and teaching method, we can say whether homework is beneficent or not.
    • blueflow 2y ago
      Why would you argue like this? You shift blame to the social issues, but that doesn't make any of that better. I mean, if the US has social problems that pull down the PISA scores, wouldn't the low score be justified then?
• noufalibrahim 2y ago
  The larger trend of "making things more user friendly and easy" is part of this problem. I cut my teeth on early Linux with really poor driver support and had to figure out so many things just to get X to start or to get audio to play. This made me intimately familiar with the system and I had the confidence to explore things myself.If were to start off with a modern Ubuntu, I wouldn't be aware of any of this. Wouldn't know where the logs are, how to look at them, what a certain error meant etc. "A system error has occured. Click here to submit a bug report to Canonical" is just not quite the same as digging through some obscure log file and trying to create a mental model of how the distribution works before the next attempt at fixing the problem. Things which require tinkering to get working are invaluable during the learning journey. Problems which require effort to solve are one example of this and a powerful solution that eliminates the effort and directly provides the reward is surely going to cripple learners. In this specific case, I think the parents have "outsourced" education to the school/teachers/tools which is why this has happened.
• sureglymop 2y ago
  I also have young relatives who are using this technology (a bit older though, teenagers). One problematic thing I see is not knowing just how inaccurate these answers are. Somehow many people just assume complete correctness and accuracy because that's how they think of or have been primed to think of technology. Of course, the marketing and hype when it comes to AI doesn't help.
• cbeach 2y ago
  If cognitive brain-computer interfaces come in the next decade, these kids will be fine. If not, they’re f*ked.
• anonzzzies 2y ago
  This is the parents right? My parents would, after dinner, check my homework and test me on it. I would definitely get caught doing this on night #1.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• FloNeu 2y ago
  Well... how about you don't let your little sister use chatgpt to do her homework? If you think it fries her little brain the responsible thing as a big brother is to buy her a little bit of lsd to microdose and counteract the damage you have already done, right?
• flembat 2y ago
  The irony is that an LLM that knows more about most topics than most teachers, and most parents, and can patiently discuss any topic one to one, is a superb way to learn new information. Its early days, right now, children need to be taught to verify the LLM is not making things up, by checking for references, look at additional sources, and use the LLM to LEARN about topics not COPY answers. Beyond that we need to consider what really needs to be held in our own minds now and what detail we can leave to 'AI' tools in future. Spending hundreds of hours learning things you can just ask an LLM to do is not that useful.
• nathanmills 2y ago
  I don't see the issue here. The education system has always favored memorization over actual intelligence. I used to plagiarize and use calculators all the time and I turned out great. Plus, she's learning valuable research skills. In the "real world", it's all about knowing where to find the answer, not knowing the answer itself.