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AI Homework

stratechery.com

231–240 of 296 posts

Re: AI Homework

#231

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…

There's another way which doesn't involve knowing the relationship with Locke. Basically, in the response shown in the blog post, there's a bit of a contradiction. It says that Hobbes argued for a "strong, centralized government" and further it says "advocated for a separation of powers". When you see a nuance like this, a critical mind would like to explore this nuance deeper:

Q: Did Thomas Hobbes believe in a strong centralized government or in separation of powers? A: Thomas Hobbes was a philosopher who is best known for his work on political philosophy. He is often associated with the concept of a "social contract," which is the idea that individuals give up some of their natural rights to a central authority in order to better ensure the safety and stability of society as a whole.

Q: Is this central authority meant to be balanced by other powers for Thomas Hobbes? A: In Hobbes' view, the central authority, or the "Leviathan," as he called it, should have absolute power in order to effectively maintain social order and protect individuals from each other. He did not believe in the concept of separation of powers, or in limiting the power of the central authority in any way. Instead, he thought that the only way to ensure the safety and stability of society was for the central authority to have complete control.

Re: AI Homework

#232
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…

To put it with maximum extremity, should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class? I mean, human beings have produced a lot of tools for aiding themselves in tasks that were previously done by hand. Whether a given hand-skill should be learned and preserved kind of has to decided on a case-by-case basis. I learned cursive in school and I wouldn't object to that skill…

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

Re: AI Homework

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now, if you can explain to the AI why it is wrong, and if it could learn from that, it would be wild and even more human-like!

I was quite impressed by its capability to correct itself. My test went like this: Q: Do not use the imperial system Q: [some question which involves distances] A: blah blah 1500 kilometers, which is 1000 miles blah blah Q: I told you not to use the imperial system It apologized, and repeated its previous answer, correctly omitting the miles data. If you asked me to write a program that does that (without using ML),…

The US uses miles, they’re not just imperial. Maybe you needed to tell it not to use imperial units or US units.

Re: AI Homework

#234

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…

> How many people need to understand how a compiler works to sling some code for a paycheck or just for fun.

I think it's pretty important. I use my very basic knowledge of how compilers work occasionally in my mostly-interpreted code world to diagnose and debug performance issues.

I also used a low-level debugger and taint/trace method recently to diagnose Windows DLL issues that happened after X seconds of starting up a program that interfaced with specialty hardware. A couple young early-career technicians/engineers watched me do it and were incredibly flabbergasted and figured me for some sort of genius when in reality I kinda only know how it works and was just reading the stack/heap as I was paging through; knowledge I acquired from booting SoftICE a few times as a kid.

There's a real lack of simply knowing how a computer and/or a network works, which is to be expected since layers and layers of abstraction have made it very easy to teach computer literacy and even computer programming on many levels. The issue is that when things go wrong and Stack Overflow doesn't have the answers, almost all young engineers I work with have no experience at low-level analysis and debugging, very little knowledge of first principles, and don't know where to Google to start acquiring it.

This isn't me shaking my fist at the kids or anything. They're more productive than I was at their age/experience level with code, and that's due to better knowledge and integration using IDEs which I never had, plus likely better high-level understanding of what's going on. But I fear a generation of developers and technicians who largely have little understanding of how computers work is problematic.

Re: AI Homework

#235
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?

As per my example in another comment, it seems to be extremely easy to detect ChatGPT output today. Indeed, to me, surprisingly so.

keyword "today". This stuff will not be detectable in a few years.

Re: AI Homework

#236

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.

Note that chat gpt isn't deterministic. You can use the exact same prompt as someone else and get a different result.

Hell, you can ask chat gpt to create a prompt for itself. E.g.:

> create a prompt for summarizing the great gadsby

> Summarize the key events and themes of "The Great Gatsby" in a few sentences. Be sure to include information about the novel's characters and the setting, as well as any major conflicts or themes that are explored in the story.

Re: AI Homework

#237
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…

To put it with maximum extremity, should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class? I mean, human beings have produced a lot of tools for aiding themselves in tasks that were previously done by hand. Whether a given hand-skill should be learned and preserved kind of has to decided on a case-by-case basis. I learned cursive in school and I wouldn't object to that skill…

> should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class?

I did just that. It wasn't a life drawing class, just a drawing class. And it wasn't homework, but the do-it-at-home final. I photocopied my hand. Then I covered a sheet of paper with ground graphite (turning it all nearly black), and then used an eraser and a light-box to trace my photocopied hand. Did I cheat? Perhaps, but I used tools that I had access to. Did Vermeer cheat? [1] Perhaps, he may have used tools he had access to.

Afterwards, I framed that drawing and hung it up at work. It was stolen. Go figure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer

Re: AI Homework

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Who is going to write the content these AI are trained on?

I mean eventually AI will be writing most of the content.

Re: AI Homework

#239
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As per my example in another comment, it seems to be extremely easy to detect ChatGPT output today. Indeed, to me, surprisingly so.

I don't think it's as easy to detect ChatGPT output as you're making it out to be. Sure, it might be possible to detect it if you know what you're looking for, but to the average person, it's not that obvious.

There are already several services that claim to detect GPTx with high reliability. I’ve been testing originality.ai and it’s success rate at detecting unedited GPT3, Jasper, and ChatGPT output has been 100% so far.

Re: AI Homework

#240
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 did not go to a technical high school and therefore had no opportunity to learn technical drawing in school. When I when to university to study electronics and computer engineering, I had to take technical drawing as a required subject.

Needless to say, I sucked at it, and it was the one and only class that I ever failed. I passed with flying colours the second time around, and still graduated in minimum time, though it badly messed up my schedule in my second year.

I have never forgiven the department for putting me through that, given that AutoCAD existed at that time.

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