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Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

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Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

#21
You learn a lot from ChatGPT though. If you want to know the ordinary answer to some essay question, cgpt will give you that. If you leave it at that and hand it in, maybe Chomsky is right.

But it's also a essay writing productivity tool. You sketch out what you want mentioned and cgpt will fill in the gaps, like those apprentices that helped the renaissance masters. I keep coming back to the phrase "small intentions" when I discuss cgpt: both in essays and code, it is already quite good at filling in details.

With less time spent on details, students can spend more time on the architecture. Ultimately, we'll have more people able to practice higher level creativity. This is already a thing that you do in math class; after your primary school years, you get a calculator to work out the arithmetic.

Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

#23
post #13

If a dumb robot can write your college essay for you, maybe we shouldn't be wasting time writing essays.

This is easy to say once you already understand how to write essays.

If someone wants to learn how to write an essay they can more easily look it up on the most vast interconnected knowledge base that has ever existed.

I don’t understand the continued need for knowledge/educational gatekeepers.

Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

#24

If a dumb robot can write your college essay for you, maybe we shouldn't be wasting time writing essays.

I don’t get this, that dumb robot got trained and so is doing the job. There are some fundamental building blocks that every human needs to be trained in. We can question what these building blocks are but never apply a blanket statement that “if a robot can do it we don’t need to learn it”. We will end up with severely challenged humans and that would be the manifestation of robots taking over not because the AI became sentient but because we humans gave up learning.

Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

#26

You learn a lot from ChatGPT though. If you want to know the ordinary answer to some essay question, cgpt will give you that. If you leave it at that and hand it in, maybe Chomsky is right. But it's also a essay writing productivity tool. You sketch out what you want mentioned and cgpt will fill in the gaps, like those apprentices that helped the renaissance masters. I keep coming back to the phrase "small intentions…

The problem with using ChatGPT for "filling in details" is how often it is confidently, utterly wrong.

My friend tried to use it to write a legal letter and it completely invented a state law and cited it very specifically.

For him, it was annoying and amusing. For other people, mistakes like that could be very serious.

Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

#29
I don't think the view that just because we can automate the creation of a simple essay makes writing essays for students obsolete. It's not what Chomsky said but I've heard the argument a lot in the context. We are not requiring it because everyone is writing essays all the time but because it's an important, basic skill.

We can automate many math exercises, but it's still important to let students do it on their own.

One absolutely need to learn to communicating their thoughts in a coherent way. To argument and to develop thoughts. If plagiarism is a overwhelming problem we will just see students having to write an essay with pen and paper just like you do our math exam. Then ChatGPT won't help you.

Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning

#30
post #22

If a dumb robot can write your college essay for you, maybe we shouldn't be wasting time writing essays.

This completely misapprehends the point of writing essays.

Yeah, the point of writing essays is to fatten some college administrators paycheck.
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