AI Homework • Hacker News Board

Re: AI Homework

#191

Post by ghaff » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:27 PM UTC

UncleEntity wrote: post #130

JW_00000 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In fact, this is the same line of reasoning my teachers used in elementary school when we asked them "Why do we need to learn how to add/subtract/multiply/divide, when calculators can do it automatically for us?" And the answer is still the same: you need to have done it the "manual" way before you can understand what the machine is doing for you. I only understand what a compiler is doing after having writte…

> I only understand what a compiler is doing after having written one (albeit a tiny one) myself during my studies. How many people need to understand how a compiler works to sling some code for a paycheck or just for fun. I learned how compilers work purely for fun, it provides me absolutely no benefit in my day to day life, and before that I taught myself how to code for the exact same reason. If I had to go the op…

Back in grad school I took a robotics course and it involved doing all these big matrix multiplies--by hand given this was pre-MATLAB. The course was overall fun but that part definitely wasn't. A modern version would be more interesting.

Re: AI Homework

#192

Post by ghaff » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:30 PM UTC

HammadB wrote: post #27

soco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think what’s worth mentioning is that for people who grew up with google, schools already were having a bit of a panic with resources like wolfram alpha and Wikipedia. For this cohort of users, myself included, the idea of fact checking ”found” material and weaving it into a proper answer is very familiar. With this view, I think chatGPT is less of a novel UX shift than an accelerant on an existing one. I think it…

Of course, even back in the day, I'm sure many a school report cribbed heavily from Encyclopedia Brittanica etc.

Re: AI Homework

#193

Post by nicopappl » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:31 PM UTC

UncleEntity wrote: post #130

JW_00000 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In fact, this is the same line of reasoning my teachers used in elementary school when we asked them "Why do we need to learn how to add/subtract/multiply/divide, when calculators can do it automatically for us?" And the answer is still the same: you need to have done it the "manual" way before you can understand what the machine is doing for you. I only understand what a compiler is doing after having writte…

> I only understand what a compiler is doing after having written one (albeit a tiny one) myself during my studies. How many people need to understand how a compiler works to sling some code for a paycheck or just for fun. I learned how compilers work purely for fun, it provides me absolutely no benefit in my day to day life, and before that I taught myself how to code for the exact same reason. If I had to go the op…

I found that understanding compilers was precious at several occasions, especially for cross compilation and embedded programming. Even for Java, for uni assignments, I was completely flabbergasted and at a lost when my IDE stopped working with cryptic messages. Understanding the process of creating object files, what javac does, what goes into a jar helps. As much as understanding what a compiler does, its relationship wtih linkers, how libraries are "added" to an executable (dynamically or statically)

Beside, with ChatGPT in its current state, it's still absolutely impossible to get it to produce any useful code without knowing how code works. There is an advantage to the precise specification of a formal language. At least for the next decade, I think there will be human proof-reading AI output before generated code is ran, with catastrophic consequences when that doesn't happen.

What I've difficulties getting over right now is every time I write something (text or code) I ask myself "Could ChatGPT have written it better?"

Re: AI Homework

#194

Post by nicopappl » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

Like Stratechery, my immediate concern is education. But not just homeworks (which actually were already criticized, I think the gears are already moving with regard to relying less on this kind of assignments)

The real problem is entry-level opportunities. As a developer, I experienced first hand how great ChatGPT is. I can just submit an undecipherable bash one-liner I wrote 6 months ago and it will explain in details what it does.

I tell it "write a command line utility using libraries X and Y to convert MessagePack to JSON" and it writes it. It's pretty bad, so I type "refactor duplicate code into a single function" or "put that string into a constant" and it does it. Amazingly.

It's not perfect, sometimes it is completely wrong and persists in it, like Trurl's first machine in the Cyberiad, but my experience tells me what is credible and what isn't. What elements of the answer are total bullshit.

But to build that experience, I first had to write that code. How will a junior programmer find a job when all the menial labor can be done so easily in two seconds by an AI? This is not limited to programming, other domains where writing dominate are also a concern.

We need somehow a safe space for people to experiment and become experts. If we blindly use ChatGPT I fear we are going to cut out the opportunity to become an expert to a whole generation.

Re: AI Homework

#195

Post by nekopa » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:36 PM UTC

UncleEntity wrote: post #130

JW_00000 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. In fact, this is the same line of reasoning my teachers used in elementary school when we asked them "Why do we need to learn how to add/subtract/multiply/divide, when calculators can do it automatically for us?" And the answer is still the same: you need to have done it the "manual" way before you can understand what the machine is doing for you. I only understand what a compiler is doing after having writte…

> I only understand what a compiler is doing after having written one (albeit a tiny one) myself during my studies. How many people need to understand how a compiler works to sling some code for a paycheck or just for fun. I learned how compilers work purely for fun, it provides me absolutely no benefit in my day to day life, and before that I taught myself how to code for the exact same reason. If I had to go the op…

First attempt it didn't try to respond, just said it didn't know anything about sparrows or coconuts.

I asked it to retry, and got this:

function calculateSparrowFlightVelocity(coconutWeight) { // Assume that a sparrow can carry a maximum of 1.5 ounces of weight if (coconutWeight > 1.5) { return 0; }

// Assume that the flight velocity of a sparrow is 5 meters per second // and the weight of a coconut is 0.5 ounces return 5 * (1 - (coconutWeight / 0.5)); }

// Example usage: console.log(calculateSparrowFlightVelocity(0.5)); // Output: 4 meters per second console.log(calculateSparrowFlightVelocity(1.0)); // Output: 3 meters per second console.log(calculateSparrowFlightVelocity(1.5)); // Output: 0 meters per second (sparrow cannot carry this weight)

Can any Monty Python fans confirm if this is correct?

Re: AI Homework

#196

Post by 1wheel » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:38 PM UTC

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…

Here's an example of that with a smaller BERT model: https://pair.withgoogle.com/explorables/fill-in-the-blank/

Re: AI Homework

#197

Post by shon » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:41 PM UTC

AFAIK this isn’t just 2-year-old-GPT3, it’s been referenced as “GPT3.5” the model much more up to date (2021) and it clearly has some new capabilities.

Good point in the article regarding confidence/accuracy though.

That said, I’ve been impressed with its usefulness as a spam filter as the first page of any web search is often heavily saddled with SEO-baggage.

Answers to simple questions like “how do you make a Sazarac? Is a much nicer experience than on web search.

Re: AI Homework

#198

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:45 PM UTC

acdha wrote: post #122

weatherlite wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But then a bot would say that. (I feel like these tools are incredibly neat to see but also likely to lead to a corrosive effect on trust as people no longer know who's real — and that'll get worse the first time someone launches a good AI assistant to handle email / chat trained on your writing style)

> and that'll get worse the first time someone launches a good AI assistant to handle email / chat trained on your writing style

That one might actually be easy to solve: all we need is to normalize the idea that you're personally responsible for whatever your email/chat assistant AI says or does in your name. After all, it's you who are making a decision to reroute other people to a bot.

(Many would say just using such assistant in the first place is disrespectful towards the people trying to reach you. I personally don't agree, because in my experience, those who'd complain about it are exactly those I find even more disrespectful, as they tend to impose themselves, interrupting me with random inane nonsense. Yes, I suck at chit-chat.)

I think this idea is actually the default, so all we need is to keep it alive, to protect it from all kinds of AI assistant startups willing to dump billions of dollars on marketing campaigns trying to convince everyone that half-broken assistants are good and fine, you should use them and should not be blamed for occasional mishaps.

Re: AI Homework

#199

Post by amrrs » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:47 PM UTC

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…

This is called Hallucinations in the world of NLP. https://youtu.be/dtLsrLoopl4

ChaTGPT Hallucinations

Re: AI Homework

#200

Post by tshadley » Mon, Dec 05, 2022, 8:49 PM UTC

killerdhmo wrote: post #150

notdang wrote: post #148

After I corrected the chat bot: Q: this is wrong, John Locke believed in separation of powers, Hobbes was a proponent of absolutism. A: I apologize if my response was not accurate. Thomas Hobbes was indeed a proponent of absolutism, which is the belief that a single, central authority should have complete control over a country. Hobbes believed that this central authority should be an absolute monarch, who would have…

You’d think it would be smart enough to know that for this particular question, the details of the answers have not changed since 2021.

The model is trained to, essentially, fabulate an excuse in response to correction; which also gets to a major limitation: it is not learning truth from falsehood but rather learning what human evaluators like or dislike.

"ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows."

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/