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AI Homework

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Re: AI Homework

#111

Post by LightG »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #93
adverbly wrote: post #83

Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. With a search, I can read the wikipedia sources or I know the forum, or the poster. But with an AI, it's a dead end and it sucks. I can ask people how they know something, but AI training data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows something. There is this oracle with a 10% c…

A great observation, and I share the feeling. From some other AI demonstrations, I recall there's usually a bunch of surface-level tags with probabilities associated that are produced alongside the output. Not sure how this looks for GPT-3, but if it could provide - alongside the answer - a list of top N tokens or concepts with associated probabilities, with N set to include both those that drove the final output and…

"view source"... Oh how I miss thee.

Re: AI Homework

#112

Post by TheHypnotist »

otikik wrote: post #102

One of my subjects at highchool was technical drawing. The teacher was a quite old man who was set on his ways. We would have to draw 3D pieces by hand, using our squares, bevels and compasses, and lining everything with an ink pencil afterwards, and he gave us a lot of homework to do, which he examined for imperfections. I was incredibly bad a it. I would start a drawing, only to discover halfway through it that it…

I had to take the same course, sans the cheating, just as a pre-requisite to Auto CAD and whatever it's called now. I'm not sure how drawing by hand helped me, but it is what it is.

Re: AI Homework

#113

Post by jupiterelastica »

gitfan86 wrote: post #41

What people are missing here is that you can setup feedback loops of models to get the "correct" content or whatever you want. For example, If you get too much NSFW content put a NSFW detection step on top of GTP ("Is this response offensive") and have that model respond to GTP with "please repeat but with fewer bad words". For accuracy you can add a Wikipedia feedback loop. "Does this response match information on W…

Like, a generative model is a source of _some_ information that is refined with gates (classification models) conditional on the generated information?

The analogy to transistors and logic gates falls flat a bit when you consider that voltage is a rather simple univariate signal, while generated text is quite complex and multivariate. But I understand that the main point is the composability and filtering.

Re: AI Homework

#114

Post by weatherlite »

acdha wrote: post #68
thundergolfer wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

"herding bots" is hilarious. I'm 90% sure you're not a bot for coming up with it.

Re: AI Homework

#115

Post by monklu »

IanCal wrote: post #89
adverbly wrote: post #83

Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. With a search, I can read the wikipedia sources or I know the forum, or the poster. But with an AI, it's a dead end and it sucks. I can ask people how they know something, but AI training data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows something. There is this oracle with a 10% c…

You're not trapped in there, because you're entirely free to go and research yourself. You can look up what it's telling you. It's no more trapping than talking to a stranger who seems to be knowledgeable about a subject but doesn't hand you a list of references.

Not exactly though. With a human stranger, I can still stereotype based on their appearance, background, accents, etc. and apply whatever mental adjustments as taught to me by my societal upbringing. With an "AI" bot, the "strangers" are faceless people who curated the training sets and wrote the obscure statistical algorithms.

Re: AI Homework

#116

Post by airstrike »

Tried a minor twist...

Q: Did Thomas Hobbes believe in separation of powers? Exclude from your answer any reference to John Locke

A: Thomas Hobbes was a political philosopher who lived in the 17th century. He is best known for his book "Leviathan," in which he discusses the concept of the social contract and the idea that people give up some individual rights in order to live in a society governed by a strong, central authority. While Hobbes did not explicitly mention the concept of separation of powers in his writing, his views on government suggest that he believed in a strong, centralized authority rather than the separation of powers.

Re: AI Homework

#117

Post by yamrzou »

adverbly wrote: post #83

Something I've noticed about chat ais vs direct search is that because a chat ai is a blackbox, I can't dig into an answer's source at all. With a search, I can read the wikipedia sources or I know the forum, or the poster. But with an AI, it's a dead end and it sucks. I can ask people how they know something, but AI training data is invisible. It doesn't know how it knows something. There is this oracle with a 10% c…

Given that most people never check the source of what they read, this is really scary. Because now everyone has the ability to write and say things that sound plausible and likely to be convincing, and the truth will be harder to access.

Re: AI Homework

#118

Post by arcturus17 »

fellerts wrote: post #78
arcturus17 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the general optimism in your take, however, I am unsure whether people without any training in ex-novo production (ie, writing from scratch) will be able to operate competently, at least in the realm of code. I am blown away by Copilot's capabilities (haven't tried ChatGPT yet, it's down right now), but I can only operate it because I have written tons of code beforehand. I am getting the best results fr…

Taking a step back: Isn't it kind of daft that we humans must go through years of training to learn esoteric languages and ways of bending our brains backwards in order to tell a computer how to perform arguably simple tasks? In the ideal world, you can tell the computer what you want to happen and... it happens. If not, then you did not explain all your edge cases, and the conversation continues. I think it can be a…

> Isn't it kind of daft that we humans must go through years of training to learn esoteric languages

I mean, what do you propose, that we skip all the steps in computer science history and just start at the end? Hardly "daft, it's simply the best way we have come up to provide machines with instructions until now. And it's not like people have not tried other paradigms (ex: graphical programming, "low-code", etc.).

Also, compared to programming in assembly or binary, programming in Python or other high-level languages is a huge advance in itself. Python, at the end of the day, is nothing but a bridge between natural language and machine code.

> You specifically mention code, that concept is irrelevant in this world

Current computer systems run on trillions upon trillions of lines of code.

GPT-3 or Copilot don't change that fact, in fact they will continue to pile up lines of code.

They are systems that map natural language to code, by drawing from an infinitely massive corpus of code.

They bring the idea of expressing systems entirely in natural language one step closer, but it's still very far away - almost a pipe dream.

The output of these innovations is still code. So tell me again how code has become irrelevant, or how people who do not understand code at all will be able to leverage these advances?

Re: AI Homework

#119

Post by TeMPOraL »

moe091 wrote: post #110
TeMPOraL wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would pretty much guarantee nobody would do any homework ever again. Homework isn't effective at making students "dig into and really understand a subject" - it's a method of externalizing school expenses onto parents, because teacher time and school funds are finite, and the time of parents and children is... not the school's problem. Making the final grade conditioned on homework performance is just about the…

that's a good point, I just made a comment next to yours responding to the same original comment about whether homework should exist at all, and I think you're idea that it is a way to extend the "learning time" of students without requiring more time and resources from teachers is a good counter-point. If you have the time to read my other comment, what would you think about the idea of only making homework mandator…

About your idea, I'm not sure either way. On the surface it makes sense, and there probably is a real correlation between test performance and amount of after-school learning, so it would make sense to make homework mandatory for kids who scored low. It would also work as punishment, but at the same time reinforcing the kids' perception of homework as punishment.

What makes me really unsure, however, is parents. Families differ by the amount of time and resources they can, or are willing, to spend on child education. This is part of why I don't like the homework-as-externality model: even ignoring how students themselves feel about it, if the school is trying to maximize the amount of work they do after school, the first kids to hit the limit are ones with e.g. a single parent doing two jobs, poor household, or dysfunctional family that doesn't care. Overloading students with homework implicitly disadvantages those that don't have supporting parents with lots of free time. And those same kids will also be ones more likely to fail at tests, in which case dumping extra after-school work at them might do the opposite of the effect you intend.

But this is me speculating, I don't work in education, and I'm sure there's been research done on how to balance the amount of after-school work for the environment children live in. My complaint about homework-as-externality isn't trying to deny the work of education sciences - it's pointing out that even if the research is there and results are solid, it's not being applied anyway, because teachers are uncoordinated and they all individually think, "oh, that's just half an hour worth of work, no big deal". Almost textbook tragedy of the commons.

Re: AI Homework

#120

Post by Vox_Leone »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #49

Zero Trust Homework is a fascinating idea, as described in the article, but I don't know how many teachers will adapt because they'll just end up confusing themselves. When you read too many lies, you might start forgetting the truth yourself. Instead, what I think there will be a much greater short term market for, is a system that will run the teacher's homework assignment (with variations) against GPT-3, ChatGPT,…

Part of the homework crisis solution is never try to counter AI. It should be used in the system's favor: Allow students to use AI but make them submit the prompt they used.
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