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AI Homework

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Re: AI Homework

#61

Post by theptip »

ThalesX wrote: post #8

I love talking to GPT, but I've tried using it for some serious stuff (research, biz-dev) and less than serious stuff (Dungeons & Dragons) and the magic is still there but it has obvious blind spots which might be solved in the future but we're talking about the present. I am wholly amused how everyone got on that dude from Google that accused the AI of being sentient and Google about not caring, and now you have hug…

> drooling over this with what I believe to be the same passion.

Lemoine didn't get fired and mocked for being "passionate" about LaMDA, he got fired for breaching NDA and mocked for claiming that a LLM is sentient.

Ben Thompson isn't claiming ChatGPT is sentient, or that it has personhood, and that is the categorical difference. It's a far, far weaker claim that ChatGPT's text output is (perhaps) good enough to fool a school teacher in a school essay.

Re: AI Homework

#62

Post by ghaff »

qsort wrote: post #30
pdonis wrote: post #16

"The solution will be to start with Internet assumptions, which means abundance, and choosing Locke and Montesquieu over Hobbes: instead of insisting on top-down control of information, embrace abundance, and entrust individuals to figure it out." While this sounds good, it depends on a crucial assumption: that there are places on the Internet where people can go to find content that is not generated by an AI, but by…

> what happens when all of the content on the Internet (or at least the vast majority of it) is generated by AI? I don't find it credible that all content on the Internet is ever going to be generated by AI, and the two scenarios are wildly different. What happens is you pick and choose, in the same way the fact that 99% of the books in any bookstore aren't worth the paper they're printed on doesn't make reading wort…

>99% of the books in any bookstore aren't worth the paper they're printed on doesn't make reading worthless.

That seems a pretty extreme claim especially in the context of "in a bookstore." You may not be interested in a lot of the content but some publisher thought it worthwhile to edit and publish a given book and a bookstore thought it worth buying copies to take up shelf space. There may be a lot of mediocre content out there but a book on a bookshelf did pass hurdles to get there even if it's not to your taste or interest.

Re: AI Homework

#64

Post by agomez314 »

I do have a problem with accepting "the deluge of information" which is that it will flood over any human-made postings with ease, and we'd be left with low-quality content everywhere we look. "Safe havens" of human-only forums will be left where people can interact with other people and be assured that they are making a connection together. Hacker News is in a way a modern forerunner of such a human-only community (well, mostly ;) )

Re: AI Homework

#65

Post by adamsmith143 »

ghaff wrote: post #48
314 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they would need to know something about the topic. The easiest way for them to do this would be to read about it. When picking what to read they would need to be able to estimate if it contained valid information. The meta-skills that would be developed would be: * Understanding the quality of sources * Understanding the different between primary and secondary sources. * Establishing chains of evidence and trac…

Someone was also demonstrating over the weekend that literally cut and pasted ChatGPT text output is easily detected as LLM output with near certainty. https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ That said, adult me could probably use ChatGPT to stitch together a 1000 word high school paper pretty easily (and probably evade plagiarism/LLM detectors). But, as you say, I could probably get a lot of the way there by other m…

Ironically inputting: "This is human generated text." generated an 86% probability of being fake text.

But it seems kind of dubious to begin with, I'm not sure why LLM output would be so easily detected.

Re: AI Homework

#66

Post by yamtaddle »

soco wrote: post #15
fellerts wrote: post #7

There has been a lot of "well, we had a good run" comments on ChatGPT threads from engineers lately. I get where this sentiment is coming from, but I also think that the article paints a good picture of how we must "pivot" as a species to avoid faceplanting completely. Zero Trust Homework sounds like a strategy we will be forced to implement: the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident…

I can imagine somebody knowing the answer being able to properly verify the output. But a student which is supposed to learn something form that homework? We're missing the entire point of homework here.

I'm expecting this whole thing to deepen educational class divides.

Public schools will struggle to teach kids anything, and to distinguish between A grades that were earned and those achieved largely through cheating, while parents will resist efforts to switch to grading schemes that can't be trivially gamed (just try switching to only-in-person-tests-count grading and witness the rage that follows when Little Johnny's grades plummet). Kids who lean on the motivation from graded homework to get themselves to do the work (and so, learn the material) will struggle, as well, even if that is allowed to happen.

This will enhance the reputations of schools that can buck the trend, applying more resources (mostly more teachers, for smaller class sizes, to make it easier to keep an eye on everything and really gauge & guide learning progress for each student) and an "if you don't like it, fuck off to somewhere else" attitude to parent complaints about grading practices. Which means, elite private schools will benefit.

I expect that a 4.0 from a public school will mean almost nothing, while at the same time coming in under a 4.0 will look terrible ("everyone cheats and you still couldn't get a 4.0? How dumb are you!?") which will just worsen the cheating problem.

Maybe parents will surprise me and not throw shit-fits over solutions to this, and public schools will be able to implement them. But I doubt it.

Re: AI Homework

#67

Post by ghaff »

coffeefirst wrote: post #59

Well, suppose there's two reasons his daughter has this assignment. 1. To learn the content of European history. For this, a chatbot is no different than Google, Wikipedia, or a dusty leather almanac. They do a job, they have known limitations, and you can use them deliberately. This doesn't concern me. 2. To learn how to write, capturing complex ideas and presenting them clearly. This is a skill that takes decades t…

Yeah, even if the student took the trouble to look up a couple Wikipedia articles or whatever and got the model to make changes so that it was factually correct, they still mostly wouldn't have constructed and written the output which, at least at a high school level, is probably at least 50% of the point of the exercise.

Re: AI Homework

#68

Post by acdha »

thundergolfer wrote: post #32
fellerts wrote: post #7

There has been a lot of "well, we had a good run" comments on ChatGPT threads from engineers lately. I get where this sentiment is coming from, but I also think that the article paints a good picture of how we must "pivot" as a species to avoid faceplanting completely. Zero Trust Homework sounds like a strategy we will be forced to implement: the system will frequently give the wrong answers (and not just on accident…

Over the weekend Twitter was 30% ChatGPT screenshots and 20% engineers frothing about how ChatGPT would replace programming, article writing, even Google Search. Such engineers must be juniors, or have persisted in their life with a totally wrong idea of how engineering is done and engineering is built. I can't imagine thinking that one could build software systems or essay arguments by trusting an AI system you don'…

I agree that there’s a lot of panic but I would have some sympathy: consider how this could turn out for someone who works at large corporation where they have to worry about some senior manager deciding that this is the way to avoid pricey staff, and their job turns into herding bots and fixing up the output while getting blamed for problems. That kind of thing is also easier to laugh off if you’re 25 and single than 50 with a mortgage and college funds.

Re: AI Homework

#69

Post by ghaff »

adamsmith143 wrote: post #65
ghaff wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone was also demonstrating over the weekend that literally cut and pasted ChatGPT text output is easily detected as LLM output with near certainty. https://huggingface.co/openai-detector/ That said, adult me could probably use ChatGPT to stitch together a 1000 word high school paper pretty easily (and probably evade plagiarism/LLM detectors). But, as you say, I could probably get a lot of the way there by other m…

Ironically inputting: "This is human generated text." generated an 86% probability of being fake text. But it seems kind of dubious to begin with, I'm not sure why LLM output would be so easily detected.

One short sentence isn't enough.

If you play with it a bit, there are definitely patterns.

Here's one I did over the weekend: 99.98% fake.

The Battle of Agincourt was a significant event in English and French history, as it was a major victory for the English army against the French during the Hundred Years' War. The battle took place on October 25, 1415, near the town of Agincourt in northern France.

The English army, led by King Henry V, was vastly outnumbered by the French forces, which were estimated to be around 30,000 soldiers compared to the English army of just 6,000. Despite the odds, the English were able to emerge victorious thanks to their superior tactics and weaponry.

The English army was composed of mostly longbowmen, who were able to shoot arrows with great accuracy and power. The French, on the other hand, relied heavily on heavily-armored knights, who were less effective in the muddy and wet conditions of the battlefield. The English were also able to take advantage of the narrow front of the battlefield, which allowed them to focus their firepower and overwhelm the French forces.

Whereas the first couple paragraphs from a book I'm working on came out 0.02% fake.

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