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AI Homework

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Re: AI Homework

#151

Post by IanCal »

monklu wrote: post #115
IanCal wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure "yes but I can judge them on their appearance and accent" is a great reason, but regardless you could view it the same as an internet comment if you want.

Re: AI Homework

#152

Post by lowbloodsugar »

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…

Wasn't the very first point that ChatGPT got the homework answer completely wrong?

But I do agree with your overall point, that schools and universities will have to embrace these new tools. Vernor Vinge (who was an SDSU maths professor) wrote Rainbow's End on this very subject.

Re: AI Homework

#153

Post by HDThoreaun »

airstrike wrote: post #116

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, centra…

This example really drives Ben's point home. If you already know the answer you can get chatGPT to give it to you, but if you naively ask a question it can be extremely difficult to figure out if it's right or not. Honestly with the spread of disinformation training students to use resources in a zero trust way seems super valuable. I know that a lot of fake news spreads because people want to confirm their biases, but by training people to spot well worded falsehoods perhaps they will be more likely to spot it in other instances.

Re: AI Homework

#154

Post by aaroninsf »

This is an entertaining snapshot of ChatGPT a week odd in.

It suffers from what I have found a recurring issue on Stratechery, a failure to account for the cognitive error around our collective inability to project non-linearly from current state.

Think back to the grotesque comical and unsettling errors in the output of the first widely disseminated DALL-E level prompt to image generators.

Now compare MidJourney v4b, today's baseline.

There is no certainty that any particular aspect of ChatGPT will evolve with similar speed.

But there is no certainty that some many or most of its shortcomings will similarly be chipped relentlessly away, over a comparable timescale, i.e. something reasonably measured in months.

I don't know if this is the case, but I know enough to consider the possibility, which I would describe myself as a likelihood,

and to infer that when we think about the impacts tools like this are going to have on knowledge-inquiry and yes, homework,

it's a mistake to think, "ah, this is a new tool, that like Google web search, will undergo modest improvements but provide more or less the same value proposition for the next oh decade."

We're in a different moment with these technologies, and getting closes to what mechanically looks like singularity, their ability to make suggestions as to how better improve them.

Not too close. But closer than we think.

Let's not make assertions or spend too much speculating about modest, linear extrapolations.

We should be focused on the more troubling bewildering and hard to reason about non-linear ones.

Re: AI Homework

#155

Post by hansvm »

Making homework more secure seems like the wrong approach. The whole purpose of a grade is to certify fitness for the next course/year/job. Homework is exceptionally poor at that task even without AI, and overloading it with grades almost invariably makes it worse at its primary task of better educating the student. Larger projects will still need to reckon with AI somehow, but would it not make more sense to just push grading back to a more controlled environment (e.g., ~6 tests in a semester where you can drop the lowest grade so that you can reduce the variance induced by not understanding what a particular professor is looking for and from life issues or test anxiety)?

That'd have the added benefits of not wasting time giving individualized feedback for assignments where students know they half-assed it, not having to constrain assignments to those problems which can be fairly evaluated, not causing additional scheduling overhead and stress as students figure out how to hit so many minor deadlines with all-or-nothing impacts on each assignment, ....

Re: AI Homework

#156

Post by icelancer »

arcturus17 wrote: post #71
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 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…

>> 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 from it by writing prompts in a language that sometimes includes domain-specific language ("accounts", etc.) but still heavily leans on programming constructs ("write a map with a tuple of integers as a key, and a string as a value")

Hmm, this is a good point. I get incredible results from Copilot but I realized just now it's primarily because I have a fairly deep understanding of computer science as it pertains to the domain of code I'm writing in, and thus my comments that prompt the AI are quite accurate, fleshed out, and detailed.

If I didn't know any of the underpinning of the algorithms and data structures (like a new graduate from a code bootcamp for example), it might be much tougher to make hay out of Copilot's AI.

Never thought of it like that.

Re: AI Homework

#157

Post by HDThoreaun »

Jevon23 wrote: post #142
mytherin wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I can (unfortunately) see this happening - it seems incredibly futile and pointless to try and fight such an arms race. When AI-supported writing becomes the norm having students write essays without AI-assistance will be like trying to force students to do complex arithmetic without calculators. Universities and schools need to accept that writing essays without AI support will simply not be a useful skill any…

>Universities and schools need to accept that writing essays without AI support will simply not be a useful skill anymore It’s kind of mind-blowing that anyone could think this. You’re posting on a website for essays. Small essays, generally speaking, if we restrict ourselves to the comments section, but essays nonetheless. You yourself just wrote one, because you wanted to express your thoughts on an issue and you w…

> Would you be fine with a future where all written text on the internet, everywhere, was generated by AI?

The whole point of this thread is it doesn't really matter what we think is fine or what we want. The future is unstoppable and these tools especially so. Adapt or die.

Re: AI Homework

#158

Post by borroka »

nashashmi wrote: post #127
TheHypnotist wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know much about technical drawings by hand. But I am very experienced with AutoCAD. And I cannot appreciate much of what CAD has. On the contrary, having met senior people who took technical drawing, they could appreciate it very much so and were able to teach me concepts that I had a hard time understanding before. Nowadays, when I teach very young people what AutoCAD is, I make them use a mini rolling ruler…

I disagree. Senior professionals might have a better understanding because they have spent a lot of time drawing, but the specific tool is not relevant. It is like saying that playing tennis with a wooden racket gives you a better "feel" for the ball and therefore is preparatory to using modern rackets. No one does this because it is not true.

A similar line of thinking was popular in jiu jitsu, where veterans said that being competent with the gi was necessary to be competent in no-gi. Yet current no-gi winners basically never train with the gi.

Re: AI Homework

#159

Post by HDThoreaun »

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,…

Students will start adding "in the style of {insert writer}" on their prompts which will probably be enough to counteract this.

Re: AI Homework

#160

Post by darkwizard42 »

hansvm wrote: post #155

Making homework more secure seems like the wrong approach. The whole purpose of a grade is to certify fitness for the next course/year/job. Homework is exceptionally poor at that task even without AI, and overloading it with grades almost invariably makes it worse at its primary task of better educating the student. Larger projects will still need to reckon with AI somehow, but would it not make more sense to just pu…

I don't think homework is meant to educate the student. It is meant to help push repetition and mastery of concepts. It is likely very difficult for most students to master physics, mathematics, or other quantitative subjects with just 5 hours of instruction a week in person (and the large class sizes in the US and other countries probably don't help).
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