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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, wheth

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.
  - krisoft 2y ago
    > You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained. That's not really true. At least in my experience. Since I graduated nobody cared about my grades at all. On the other hand everyone cared if I can do stuff. When I was applying for Uni my grades mattered very little and my performance on standarised and proctored tests mattered a lot. I guess it might be different where you have grown up?
  - ramblenode 2y ago
    > You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained. That's called "winning the battle and losing the war".
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  For "personal growth" contexts, yes. For "valedictorian and GPA for college" sort of contexts, no.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    OMG! I haven't understood the GGP's point of view until your comment. Those kids are competing by grade, not by knowledge! This is messed up to a different level than a lot of people here will expect.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  With a lot of caveats. You are in competition with these peers for grades, college admissions, and job applications. In many cases, the benefits of actually accruing knowledge and the consequences of failure to do so is delayed decades into the future.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    It is absolutely amazing just how long some people can "fake" it. Even in jobs that you would expect needing real expertise say being a medical doctor. And corporation can be even simpler if you get in right types of roles, where no hard skills might be needed.
    - taylodl 2y ago
      AI is "faking" it when you think about it. If a machine can "fake" skills and expertise, and we can measure its ability to fake it using the Turing Test, then why can't people fake it, too?
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        People may be able to fake it, but the opportunity to do so may go away. An idiot may be able to fake being a medical doctor with the right AI, but only until someone realizes they can fire the useless human.
  - nyrikki 2y ago
    Homework weights on grades is going to go down. Parents income and zip codes impact educational attainment more than class rank outside of the oligarchy anyways. Opportunity and social mobility is far more restricted in the US than most people realize. This is in part why the college debt is problematic, valuing a piece of paper over the education itself is already a bubble that has popped.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      The US is one of, if not the most, socially mobile countries in the west. Countries like the Nordics have much more equality of outcome, but the chances someone leaves the economic quintile they are born into is lower.
- mcny 2y ago
  I had an interesting conversation with a friend from India. He was talking to his daughter back home in first grade. He actively encouraged her to look around in an exam, to copy off of others, to cheat in an examination. I overheard him and asked him why he wants to put so much pressure on a child. Like even if you don't care about the ethics of cheating in an exam, wouldn't it be better to have less pressure as a child and have a good childhood? I clearly don't understand how difficult life is outside the US. Yes, it is important to know the material. However, it is also important to know your surroundings and what everyone else is doing. If you are in India and literally everyone else is cheating in exams, well you better start doing that as well just to keep up. If you are gen alpha and everyone else is using ChatGPT to polish essays, ...
  - fragmede 2y ago
    It's not, but (presumably) you're hearing about your one mentioned data point from a biased subset of people from India in English. How many people who didn't study English in school and dropped out there would you even have a chance of having talked to? And that's not to say the behavior doesn't exist in the US, just maybe in a different social strata or subculture than you're in. Specifically, the phrase "tiger mom" entered our lexicon due to a book written by a (ethnically) Chinese woman, but is not limited to it.
- taylodl 2y ago
  How long have we been saying that rote memorization is not learning? ChatGPT makes it clearer than ever that we need to focus on teaching children to be able to analyze and solve problems, not memorize a bunch of facts. What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution. Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.
- 6SixTy 2y ago
  In the US, this is not how things are done. Grades are literally everything within the education system. Learning how the system works and playing how your final grading is weighted including but not limited in regard to tests, assignments, and homework is a gigantic portion of how a student's aptitude is determined. A lot of the system is based off of memorization and paperwork anyways. Something an AI can do all day, every day.
wvenable 2y ago
I'm not sure how that would play out but I think there is some validness in that concern. It's the same with smartphones; you deny your kid one because you want them to socialize in person but if they're the only kid without a smartphone then they'll be socially isolated. Everything has to be managed in moderation. As for ChatGPT, I use it all the time for learning. And I've used it to help my kid study. But I wouldn't give my kid unfettered access to it just like I don't give him unfettered access to anything.
- florbo 2y ago
  It's almost as if we need to be actively parenting and engaged with our children! Who'd've thought! Sarcasm aside, making informed decisions on how to do those things can be a challenge.
  - wvenable 2y ago
    Even for the parents who know it's extremely difficult to really know if you're doing the right or wrong thing. And it's constant, you have to be eternally vigilant. My son brute-forced the downtime pin on his iPhone -- it took 6 months but he did it.
    - jayrot 2y ago
      I truly am hesitant to ever criticize someone else's parenting style since if I've learned anything, it's that kids personalities can be very different and circumstances are always more complicated than you might think. That said, I hear stories like yours (from friends) and it always baffles me because that's just now how our family operates. I have a downtime pin on devices for the same reason I lock the door to my car even though it's like 50% breakable glass windows. My kids know the rules. One of them for sure knows the pin. But they also know that if they use the device outside of our agreed upon guidelines, they're in trouble. I'm sincere in asking, aren't behavior controls a lot better than technological ones?
      - wvenable 2y ago
segasaturn 2y ago
I don't understand this sentiment, even though it is common among Americans. Why is education seen as a competition between students, even in the younger grades? I've even heard stories of parents of young children fighting with each other over their children's grades.
- moduspwnens14 2y ago
  That seems to be a common theme in the responses to me here. The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades. Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?
  - wvenable 2y ago
    Teachers aren't dumb here; they know what's going on. And they're actively working to figure out how best to navigate this situation. They're not looking to grade how well ChatGPT does in their course.
    - Yoric 2y ago
      I have many teachers among my friends. So far, they're mostly powerless. If a student is creative, there is basically nothing that will prevent them from cheating at any homework/exam. My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.
      - lukeschlather 2y ago
        The problem is tests/quizzes and especially standardized ones. They have never been good teaching tools, and teachers have been railroaded into using them because they provide a blunt way to measure outcomes at a population level. But real teaching is 1:1 and teachers have a lot of power, it's just stuff that doesn't scale and you can't mandate organizationally. But this has mostly always been the case. Trying to measure student performance with a student who is more interested in gaming the process than learning is a fools' errand.
Freak_NL 2y ago
It's not a competition. Teach her to use her brain, and hope school will end up being a net positive. You can't fix other parents and their children. It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will gain you. If you do it right it won't matter whether she is allowed to use those tools or not, she'll use her own brain because that will allow her to get ahead by the time it really matters.
- ikiris 2y ago
  Suggest watching the movie gattaca to understand what happens to kids of parents who think like this in an extreme version. The problem is if you ignore the reality of the competition it’s basically setting your kid up to fail due to prisoner dilemma dynamics.
  - casey2 2y ago
    You have already failed your kid if you don't teach them to use their brain. Education is what let's people transcend the rat race of life, acquiring knowledge to use for the rat race isn't education in this sense. Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king. If you want your kids to be subservient to the king then of course they should use ChatGPT, and you should want schools to allow it otherwise we will just have more Asian and Indian students "getting ahead"
    - fivelorn 2y ago
      Hear me out: we could also build a more equitable society, one where the two choices aren't "live like an impoverished monk" and "win the Hunger Games".
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  > It's not a competition. As a parent whose child has been in two school systems, respectfully: yes, it is. And it begins earlier than you think.
MonkeyClub 2y ago
This will be "better in the long run" for her, in one way. I see such competition as hare vs tortoise races, where the students who get an early unfair advantage end up cheating themselves out of an education, in the sense that all they come to know is how to prompt an LLM, rather than break down and solve hard problems. It's still heartbreaking to consider both the early discrimination she will likely encounter, and the later failures that will anticipate her classmates, and the society that they will come to inhabit as adults.
fn-mote 2y ago
If the world has not figured out how to handle ChatGPT better by the time your child is 10, it's going to be an incredible disaster.
shprd 2y ago
> 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. What makes this different from competing with classmates that cheat in general? You also had parents that do most of the tasks for their kids since forever What makes LLMs stands out of the pack of other forms of assistance (parents, older siblings, software, online solutions, etc.)
- moduspwnens14 2y ago
  Cheating (at least when I was school age) was fairly rare and not terribly difficult to detect. My concern is that both of those might be false with LLMs, and that'd make the circumstances different.
jayrot 2y ago
I honestly wouldn't worry about that aspect of it too much. Effective understanding and use of tools is important for this next generation (which is why we have restrictive but reasonable rules for tech use for our kids). However, unless ChatGPT and other such tools start being allowed in SATs and in the classroom and etc, there's no substitute for true education and understanding. The essay my 8 year old can currently write in scribbly handwriting certainly won't compete with the essay a classmate "writes" using ChatGPT. But the facade is paper thin and ever so short lived. Seeing how much better my kids write now, vs 2 years ago, proves how much they're learning and the incredible power of practice. Someone relying on such a serious crutch will be left behind. I guarantee it. Unless there's some dystopian future where every aspect and communication in our lives are managed and filtered by some kind of AI middle layer. I doubt it. Tech advancements always lead to this struggle, but it's rarely as stark as you might think. My kids are still learning cursive in school, though I can't imagine when they'll ever use it.
_DeadFred_ 2y ago
Want to give them a leg up, get the 'What every first grader should know' books, and continue with the next one each year. There's way less friction in learning when your child experiences multiple exposures to the material being taught.
rolph 2y ago
your daughter will smelt in that crucible and be cast of purified alloy, into whatever mold might be provided. she wont need a chatGPT, she will develop one in her nervous system, like a normally functioning human
frontporch 2y ago
competing with what? your score doesnt vary based on others. i came here to laugh at this thread.. no different than calculators and google both of which were misused in the same way. and then people who are "worried" about it and use that as an excuse to do it themselves. and now you know why the tech industry sucks
- fragmede 2y ago
  In some (college) classes it does. Some classes are graded on a curve, which means the bottom scoring kids automatically fail, some percentage passes.
- rtkwe 2y ago
  > competing with what? your score doesnt vary based on others. Grading on a curve is very much a thing. Rarer in lower levels but not completely unheard of. Even if it weren't GPA is still used for ranking students for opportunities like college or summer programs with limited slots. The effect of GPT'd homework depends on how well they perform on the tests though but some classes are predominantly take home work or at least were when I was going through school.
dowager_dan99 2y ago
That will make her better than them, what with some personal resiliency, autonomy and, for lack of a better term, grit. I would not worry about (1) the details of what your 1-yr-old 's world will look like in 10+ years, (2) that making a kid struggle and work a bit will put them at a disadvantage.
skywhopper 2y ago
Tbh, a kid who can do the work would accomplish the homework a lot faster than all the ChatGPT manipulation described here.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> my concern is more that she'll be implicitly competing with classmates that are using tools like this This isn’t a competing with kids issue, though. A kid handicapped by ChatGPT will fail in-class examinations.
DoctorOetker 2y ago
I believe uploading neural weights in the form factor of a reaction speed game will become the norm. Imagine the token weights etc to live an an N dimensional embedding. Consider a random 2D isometric projection, now imagine plotting (a subset of) the tokens on screen at their respective locations, with the background having patterns conveying the orientation of the projection. Imagine tokens appearing FIFO, and 95% or so of the tokens at their correct position, and 5% at incorrect positions. The user is expected to identify misplaced tokens in the projection. Each the frame the perspective slowly changes. Since we guarantee ~95% of the tokens on screen are correctly placed this enables the human to absorb their correct high dimensional location subconsciously. Imagine this game is made a bit addictive. Imagine eventually the user gets high scores and thus knows most of the coordinates of the token embeddings in a coordinate free way (no axes had to be drawn) At that point all the information the ANN required is undisputedly present in the humans brain, absent how those coefficients are used. This is where the fun starts. The alcorithm can calculate the likelihood of observing 2 tokens in a certain order. It can generate more probable pairs, this will correlate with the information in the brain. For example imagine the user knows some spanish, and that the language model was multilingual. Suddenly the brain starts picking up the correlation between close juxtapositions of certain tokens, and their positions learnt from the computer game. While playing and getting better scores in the game, the user starts noticing its own grammar and vocabulary improve, because the brain has been helped in better estimating next tokens... People will be able to learn math, languages, programmnig languages, tables of chemistry, etc... with substantially less effort.
fnordpiglet 2y ago
Competing with what? Homework is usually the minority of grade weight in almost every course and college entrance is largely based on entrance exams. Using AI to cheat on homework only cheats the students ability to complete and exam, let alone an entrance exam. People act as if cheating on homework is new with LLms. It’s not. The homework is there to guide you towards the exam, and exams are generally proctored to prevent cheating in ways homework is explicitly not. Generally teachers grade homework to create an incentive for students to practice rigorously for the in course and final exams. Any student who doesn’t avail themselves of that practice invariably flunks their exams. Your homework grade won’t help you then. So who cares? Sooner or later the cheating student either learns why it doesn’t pay to cheat or suffers the life consequences of not learning in school. This isn’t new with LLMs. What is new is you have a tool that you can get advice from on topics that are difficult or even get up front grading and advice on homework before turning it in that helps you master the material better. Students who use this will be able to master the material faster, even if their parents both work and can’t invest the time to tutor their children at night. (N.b., The threads here imply every parent works at a cushy tech job and has plenty of time to be invested in their kids education and any parent who isn’t is negligent - while the truth is many are just struggling to make ends meet - as my parents did … I didn’t get the investment my daughter gets not because they didn’t care but because they were busy feeding me and keeping us from being homeless. I would have loved to have ChatGPT help me as a kid)
- achierius 2y ago
  > college entrance is largely based on entrance exams Not in the US it isn't. Grades > Exams > Extracurriculars is the usual hierarchy.
  - fnordpiglet 2y ago
    Except with inflation almost everyone applying to a top school has perfect grades. So it’s not a factor.
ndriscoll 2y ago
Funny, I'm worried about classmates not being good enough for my girls. I'm worried that other kids will normalize bad ideas/behaviors growing up, and some day they'll end up in a dating scene that looks like today's, alone, or with a loser. I'd love to have them grow up into a world of strong, competent, conscientious, and honest peers. So this kind of development adds to my pile of worries about their future, but for exactly the opposite reason.
- fivelorn 2y ago
  Half of this website punches "Create a React app" into ChatGPT at work all day. I would make peace with the future.

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.
- krisoft 2y ago
  > You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained. That's not really true. At least in my experience. Since I graduated nobody cared about my grades at all. On the other hand everyone cared if I can do stuff. When I was applying for Uni my grades mattered very little and my performance on standarised and proctored tests mattered a lot. I guess it might be different where you have grown up?
- ramblenode 2y ago
  > You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained. That's called "winning the battle and losing the war".
ceejayoz 2y ago
For "personal growth" contexts, yes. For "valedictorian and GPA for college" sort of contexts, no.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  OMG! I haven't understood the GGP's point of view until your comment. Those kids are competing by grade, not by knowledge! This is messed up to a different level than a lot of people here will expect.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
With a lot of caveats. You are in competition with these peers for grades, college admissions, and job applications. In many cases, the benefits of actually accruing knowledge and the consequences of failure to do so is delayed decades into the future.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  It is absolutely amazing just how long some people can "fake" it. Even in jobs that you would expect needing real expertise say being a medical doctor. And corporation can be even simpler if you get in right types of roles, where no hard skills might be needed.
  - taylodl 2y ago
    AI is "faking" it when you think about it. If a machine can "fake" skills and expertise, and we can measure its ability to fake it using the Turing Test, then why can't people fake it, too?
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      People may be able to fake it, but the opportunity to do so may go away. An idiot may be able to fake being a medical doctor with the right AI, but only until someone realizes they can fire the useless human.
- nyrikki 2y ago
  Homework weights on grades is going to go down. Parents income and zip codes impact educational attainment more than class rank outside of the oligarchy anyways. Opportunity and social mobility is far more restricted in the US than most people realize. This is in part why the college debt is problematic, valuing a piece of paper over the education itself is already a bubble that has popped.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    The US is one of, if not the most, socially mobile countries in the west. Countries like the Nordics have much more equality of outcome, but the chances someone leaves the economic quintile they are born into is lower.
mcny 2y ago
I had an interesting conversation with a friend from India. He was talking to his daughter back home in first grade. He actively encouraged her to look around in an exam, to copy off of others, to cheat in an examination. I overheard him and asked him why he wants to put so much pressure on a child. Like even if you don't care about the ethics of cheating in an exam, wouldn't it be better to have less pressure as a child and have a good childhood? I clearly don't understand how difficult life is outside the US. Yes, it is important to know the material. However, it is also important to know your surroundings and what everyone else is doing. If you are in India and literally everyone else is cheating in exams, well you better start doing that as well just to keep up. If you are gen alpha and everyone else is using ChatGPT to polish essays, ...
- fragmede 2y ago
  It's not, but (presumably) you're hearing about your one mentioned data point from a biased subset of people from India in English. How many people who didn't study English in school and dropped out there would you even have a chance of having talked to? And that's not to say the behavior doesn't exist in the US, just maybe in a different social strata or subculture than you're in. Specifically, the phrase "tiger mom" entered our lexicon due to a book written by a (ethnically) Chinese woman, but is not limited to it.
taylodl 2y ago
How long have we been saying that rote memorization is not learning? ChatGPT makes it clearer than ever that we need to focus on teaching children to be able to analyze and solve problems, not memorize a bunch of facts. What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution. Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.
6SixTy 2y ago
In the US, this is not how things are done. Grades are literally everything within the education system. Learning how the system works and playing how your final grading is weighted including but not limited in regard to tests, assignments, and homework is a gigantic portion of how a student's aptitude is determined. A lot of the system is based off of memorization and paperwork anyways. Something an AI can do all day, every day.

wvenable 2y ago

I'm not sure how that would play out but I think there is some validness in that concern. It's the same with smartphones; you deny your kid one because you want them to socialize in person but if they're the only kid without a smartphone then they'll be socially isolated. Everything has to be managed in moderation. As for ChatGPT, I use it all the time for learning. And I've used it to help my kid study. But I wouldn't give my kid unfettered access to it just like I don't give him unfettered access to anything.

florbo 2y ago
It's almost as if we need to be actively parenting and engaged with our children! Who'd've thought! Sarcasm aside, making informed decisions on how to do those things can be a challenge.
- wvenable 2y ago
  Even for the parents who know it's extremely difficult to really know if you're doing the right or wrong thing. And it's constant, you have to be eternally vigilant. My son brute-forced the downtime pin on his iPhone -- it took 6 months but he did it.
  - jayrot 2y ago
    I truly am hesitant to ever criticize someone else's parenting style since if I've learned anything, it's that kids personalities can be very different and circumstances are always more complicated than you might think. That said, I hear stories like yours (from friends) and it always baffles me because that's just now how our family operates. I have a downtime pin on devices for the same reason I lock the door to my car even though it's like 50% breakable glass windows. My kids know the rules. One of them for sure knows the pin. But they also know that if they use the device outside of our agreed upon guidelines, they're in trouble. I'm sincere in asking, aren't behavior controls a lot better than technological ones?
    - wvenable 2y ago

segasaturn 2y ago

I don't understand this sentiment, even though it is common among Americans. Why is education seen as a competition between students, even in the younger grades? I've even heard stories of parents of young children fighting with each other over their children's grades.

moduspwnens14 2y ago
That seems to be a common theme in the responses to me here. The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades. Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?
- wvenable 2y ago
  Teachers aren't dumb here; they know what's going on. And they're actively working to figure out how best to navigate this situation. They're not looking to grade how well ChatGPT does in their course.
  - Yoric 2y ago
    I have many teachers among my friends. So far, they're mostly powerless. If a student is creative, there is basically nothing that will prevent them from cheating at any homework/exam. My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.
    - lukeschlather 2y ago
      The problem is tests/quizzes and especially standardized ones. They have never been good teaching tools, and teachers have been railroaded into using them because they provide a blunt way to measure outcomes at a population level. But real teaching is 1:1 and teachers have a lot of power, it's just stuff that doesn't scale and you can't mandate organizationally. But this has mostly always been the case. Trying to measure student performance with a student who is more interested in gaming the process than learning is a fools' errand.

Freak_NL 2y ago

It's not a competition. Teach her to use her brain, and hope school will end up being a net positive. You can't fix other parents and their children. It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will gain you. If you do it right it won't matter whether she is allowed to use those tools or not, she'll use her own brain because that will allow her to get ahead by the time it really matters.

ikiris 2y ago
Suggest watching the movie gattaca to understand what happens to kids of parents who think like this in an extreme version. The problem is if you ignore the reality of the competition it’s basically setting your kid up to fail due to prisoner dilemma dynamics.
- casey2 2y ago
  You have already failed your kid if you don't teach them to use their brain. Education is what let's people transcend the rat race of life, acquiring knowledge to use for the rat race isn't education in this sense. Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king. If you want your kids to be subservient to the king then of course they should use ChatGPT, and you should want schools to allow it otherwise we will just have more Asian and Indian students "getting ahead"
  - fivelorn 2y ago
    Hear me out: we could also build a more equitable society, one where the two choices aren't "live like an impoverished monk" and "win the Hunger Games".
pavel_lishin 2y ago
> It's not a competition. As a parent whose child has been in two school systems, respectfully: yes, it is. And it begins earlier than you think.

MonkeyClub 2y ago

This will be "better in the long run" for her, in one way. I see such competition as hare vs tortoise races, where the students who get an early unfair advantage end up cheating themselves out of an education, in the sense that all they come to know is how to prompt an LLM, rather than break down and solve hard problems. It's still heartbreaking to consider both the early discrimination she will likely encounter, and the later failures that will anticipate her classmates, and the society that they will come to inhabit as adults.

fn-mote 2y ago

If the world has not figured out how to handle ChatGPT better by the time your child is 10, it's going to be an incredible disaster.

shprd 2y ago

> 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. What makes this different from competing with classmates that cheat in general? You also had parents that do most of the tasks for their kids since forever What makes LLMs stands out of the pack of other forms of assistance (parents, older siblings, software, online solutions, etc.)

moduspwnens14 2y ago
Cheating (at least when I was school age) was fairly rare and not terribly difficult to detect. My concern is that both of those might be false with LLMs, and that'd make the circumstances different.

jayrot 2y ago

I honestly wouldn't worry about that aspect of it too much. Effective understanding and use of tools is important for this next generation (which is why we have restrictive but reasonable rules for tech use for our kids). However, unless ChatGPT and other such tools start being allowed in SATs and in the classroom and etc, there's no substitute for true education and understanding. The essay my 8 year old can currently write in scribbly handwriting certainly won't compete with the essay a classmate "writes" using ChatGPT. But the facade is paper thin and ever so short lived. Seeing how much better my kids write now, vs 2 years ago, proves how much they're learning and the incredible power of practice. Someone relying on such a serious crutch will be left behind. I guarantee it. Unless there's some dystopian future where every aspect and communication in our lives are managed and filtered by some kind of AI middle layer. I doubt it. Tech advancements always lead to this struggle, but it's rarely as stark as you might think. My kids are still learning cursive in school, though I can't imagine when they'll ever use it.

_DeadFred_ 2y ago

Want to give them a leg up, get the 'What every first grader should know' books, and continue with the next one each year. There's way less friction in learning when your child experiences multiple exposures to the material being taught.

rolph 2y ago

your daughter will smelt in that crucible and be cast of purified alloy, into whatever mold might be provided. she wont need a chatGPT, she will develop one in her nervous system, like a normally functioning human

frontporch 2y ago

competing with what? your score doesnt vary based on others. i came here to laugh at this thread.. no different than calculators and google both of which were misused in the same way. and then people who are "worried" about it and use that as an excuse to do it themselves. and now you know why the tech industry sucks

fragmede 2y ago
In some (college) classes it does. Some classes are graded on a curve, which means the bottom scoring kids automatically fail, some percentage passes.
rtkwe 2y ago
> competing with what? your score doesnt vary based on others. Grading on a curve is very much a thing. Rarer in lower levels but not completely unheard of. Even if it weren't GPA is still used for ranking students for opportunities like college or summer programs with limited slots. The effect of GPT'd homework depends on how well they perform on the tests though but some classes are predominantly take home work or at least were when I was going through school.

dowager_dan99 2y ago

That will make her better than them, what with some personal resiliency, autonomy and, for lack of a better term, grit. I would not worry about (1) the details of what your 1-yr-old 's world will look like in 10+ years, (2) that making a kid struggle and work a bit will put them at a disadvantage.

skywhopper 2y ago

Tbh, a kid who can do the work would accomplish the homework a lot faster than all the ChatGPT manipulation described here.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> my concern is more that she'll be implicitly competing with classmates that are using tools like this This isn’t a competing with kids issue, though. A kid handicapped by ChatGPT will fail in-class examinations.

DoctorOetker 2y ago

I believe uploading neural weights in the form factor of a reaction speed game will become the norm. Imagine the token weights etc to live an an N dimensional embedding. Consider a random 2D isometric projection, now imagine plotting (a subset of) the tokens on screen at their respective locations, with the background having patterns conveying the orientation of the projection. Imagine tokens appearing FIFO, and 95% or so of the tokens at their correct position, and 5% at incorrect positions. The user is expected to identify misplaced tokens in the projection. Each the frame the perspective slowly changes. Since we guarantee ~95% of the tokens on screen are correctly placed this enables the human to absorb their correct high dimensional location subconsciously. Imagine this game is made a bit addictive. Imagine eventually the user gets high scores and thus knows most of the coordinates of the token embeddings in a coordinate free way (no axes had to be drawn) At that point all the information the ANN required is undisputedly present in the humans brain, absent how those coefficients are used. This is where the fun starts. The alcorithm can calculate the likelihood of observing 2 tokens in a certain order. It can generate more probable pairs, this will correlate with the information in the brain. For example imagine the user knows some spanish, and that the language model was multilingual. Suddenly the brain starts picking up the correlation between close juxtapositions of certain tokens, and their positions learnt from the computer game. While playing and getting better scores in the game, the user starts noticing its own grammar and vocabulary improve, because the brain has been helped in better estimating next tokens... People will be able to learn math, languages, programmnig languages, tables of chemistry, etc... with substantially less effort.

fnordpiglet 2y ago

Competing with what? Homework is usually the minority of grade weight in almost every course and college entrance is largely based on entrance exams. Using AI to cheat on homework only cheats the students ability to complete and exam, let alone an entrance exam. People act as if cheating on homework is new with LLms. It’s not. The homework is there to guide you towards the exam, and exams are generally proctored to prevent cheating in ways homework is explicitly not. Generally teachers grade homework to create an incentive for students to practice rigorously for the in course and final exams. Any student who doesn’t avail themselves of that practice invariably flunks their exams. Your homework grade won’t help you then. So who cares? Sooner or later the cheating student either learns why it doesn’t pay to cheat or suffers the life consequences of not learning in school. This isn’t new with LLMs. What is new is you have a tool that you can get advice from on topics that are difficult or even get up front grading and advice on homework before turning it in that helps you master the material better. Students who use this will be able to master the material faster, even if their parents both work and can’t invest the time to tutor their children at night. (N.b., The threads here imply every parent works at a cushy tech job and has plenty of time to be invested in their kids education and any parent who isn’t is negligent - while the truth is many are just struggling to make ends meet - as my parents did … I didn’t get the investment my daughter gets not because they didn’t care but because they were busy feeding me and keeping us from being homeless. I would have loved to have ChatGPT help me as a kid)

achierius 2y ago
> college entrance is largely based on entrance exams Not in the US it isn't. Grades > Exams > Extracurriculars is the usual hierarchy.
- fnordpiglet 2y ago
  Except with inflation almost everyone applying to a top school has perfect grades. So it’s not a factor.

ndriscoll 2y ago

Funny, I'm worried about classmates not being good enough for my girls. I'm worried that other kids will normalize bad ideas/behaviors growing up, and some day they'll end up in a dating scene that looks like today's, alone, or with a loser. I'd love to have them grow up into a world of strong, competent, conscientious, and honest peers. So this kind of development adds to my pile of worries about their future, but for exactly the opposite reason.

fivelorn 2y ago
Half of this website punches "Create a React app" into ChatGPT at work all day. I would make peace with the future.