My counter would be that AI is going to allow us to move forward with creativity. It’s going to effectively rewire our brains. In the past, we put a lot of emphasis on “random access memory” and memorization was actually a valued skill. Fast forward to today, and I think memorization is not all that useful. So what does AI chat do for us? Answering that is quite literally the next trillion dollar market in development right now.
Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
This completely misapprehends the point of writing essays.
Yeah, the point of writing essays is to fatten some college administrators paycheck.
Essay writing as a form of cultural and intellectual interchange predates college administrators by at least a couple of centuries.
Everyday here you'll find quality essays written by competent essay writers, those essays not being written for the benefit of a college administrator.
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#63I predict the rise of what I call "mental obesity". Once the need to perform physical work vanished, those who did not consciously decide to train had a much higher chance of becoming obese. I expect that the mental capacities of some people will become less by the same effect. What we will see is a separation between those who are taught why they write and decide to comply and those who just take the easy way out.
I like this term.
It even extends to concepts like hyper-palatable foods, with the equivalent being hyper-palatable entertainment (like TikTok, or Youtube Shorts) that similarly short-circuits the brains reward loop.
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#64You 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…
> after your primary school years, you get a calculator to work out the arithmetic
Do we? I do a lot of mental arithmetic as a software developer. When I was an exchange student my host-dad was an engineer and he was incredibly good at it. As he was thinking through a problem he'd do all sorts of ballpark math to get a feel for things. Eventually, yes, the numbers would all get crunched properly. But even then he'd also be doing the math mentally to make sure that something hadn't gotten screwed up. A person who uses a calculator for everything starting from a young age just doesn't develop that skill.
And I think there will be a similar problem with ChatGPT. Can an excellent writer get a performance boost starting with ChatGPT? The jury's out, but it's not impossible. But can one become an excellent writer by tarting up LLM-generated prose? I doubt it. Learning to write is a process of sweating the details. Especially so when the output is an essay. Real higher-level creativity requires foundational work. I think at best you'll get the sort of content that comes when an uninspiring politician hires a mediocre ghost writer.
That said, a lot of writing is bullshit. And I mean that both in the Frankfurt sense ("speech intended to persuade without regard for truth") [1] and in the Graeber sense ("completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious") [2]. And that's where I think ChatGPT will shine. Marketing copy to fill in the "lorem ispum" space on the product page? ChatGPT to the rescue. Long sections of TPS reports that nobody will read? ChatGPT again. And once they expand ChatGPT to being able to make PowerPoint decks, a zillion ineffective middle managers will be able to return their focus to Candy Crush, harassing the interns, and creating pointless meetings.
I think that's also bad, of course. Lowering the cost of bullshit production looks like a net societal negative to me. But it would be successful in the traditional tech industry metrics of "gains users" and "produces revenue".
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#65This thread is already full of people throwing in their cheap takes by reading the headline or not even that. Listen to his answers. He's not making controversial claims, excepting the one that LLMs teach us nothing about language. He says: - ChatGPT makes it easier to cheat. This is obviously true. - ChatGPT is a method of avoiding learning. In the context of the interview he's referring to its use not as an informa…
That ChatGPT is good at truthfully answering one kind of prompt (analytic, where the facts are contained in the prompt, so the task is translation) and bad at truthfully answering another kind of prompt (synthetic, where the facts are not contained in the prompt, so the task is synthesis), tells me something about the nature of language.
It turns out that setting up solutions to math problems is mainly a language translation task, followed by computation task as long as you have a way to eval() the resulting thunk:
Do not perform calculations. Do not compute the answer. Use Javascript Math and Date to perform calculations. Wait for further questions. Show your work in the DESCRIPTION. The number of steps in the %%%THUNK%%% should match the number of steps in the %%%DESCRIPTION%%%. Always answer with Javascript compatible code in the %%%THUNK%%%, including numerical form without commas (eg, 238572348723). Always answer with this JSON compatible object form, eg, {"key":%%%VALUE%%%}: { "question": "4 days a week, Laura practices martial arts for 1.5 hours. Considering a week is 7 days, what is her average practice time per day each week?", "description":["Multiplying 1.5 and 4", "Dividing the step 1 answer by 7"], "thunk": "(function() { const step1 = 1.5 * 4; const answer = step1 / 7; return answer; })()" }
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not just ok it's great. an enormous amount of progress in civilization is due to down skilling. Technology allows someone with 4 hrs of training to accomplish what it took a master with 20 years in close to the same time.
> Technology allows someone with 4 hrs of training to accomplish what it took a master with 20 years in close to the same time. Is this rhetorical hyperbole or do you have a real example of an endeavor where a four hour novice is now the equal of a 20 year master thanks to technology?
Assembly line work replacing artisans and craftsman. The skills required to build a desk 300 years ago are very different than the skill inputs.
Many construction jobs have seen a replacement of carpenters and masons with lower skilled workers due to pre-fabrication.
Fast food workers replacing chefs and cooks.
Taxi drivers being replaced with Uber drivers.
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#67I 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 ow…
> 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.
I think there's something to be said for the view that ChatGPT makes the sort of simplistic, tedious essays typically assigned to K-12 students obsolete. Essay writing is fun, but school essays take the fun out of it, much as is the case with school math. School is corrosive to enjoyment of intellectual activity. This is by design: the primary purpose of school in the USA is to break the students' individuality so they learn to obey commands and submit to authority. Vital skills in every industry from construction and manufacturing to high tech.
ChatGPT puts the lie to the idea that essays in standard formats on standard topics with standard argument structure should be how we teach kids to write, much like TI-83s put the lie to the idea that school-age math is mostly rote memorization and application with little conceptual thought. We will have to show them how to find their own personal voice and have it come through in their work.
The ChatGPT era will require adjustment from educators. Again, remember Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine, a 1950s kids' novel whose McGuffin was a supercomputer that functioned much like GPT: you asked it natural-language questions and it would type out answers. The computer was sabotaged such that it would answer in a way that was coherent and authoritative sounding, but wrong, challenging the young heroes to actually study to understand when and how the machine was wrong. ChatGPT poses similar challenges to today's kids, and if we want to teach them we will have to acknowledge and accommodate those challenges in the curriculum.
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, the point of writing essays is to fatten some college administrators paycheck.
Essay writing as a form of cultural and intellectual interchange predates college administrators by at least a couple of centuries. Everyday here you'll find quality essays written by competent essay writers, those essays not being written for the benefit of a college administrator.
My thoughts would probably be different towards this if we weren’t sending kids to school with predatory lending practices. (hence the administrator comment)
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#69People appear to be angry with Chomsky, but I do not understand the reason.
If you want to learn anything about a topic, even a Wikipedia article is superior to ChatGPT. The whole allure of ChatGPT is that people develop a parasocial relationship and feel that they learn by communicating. That is of course an illusion.
Re: Noam Chomsky on ChatGPT: High-Tech Plagiarism, Way of Avoiding Learning
#70this is a somewhat clickbaitified headline > That students instinctively employ high technology to avoid learning is "a sign that the educational system is failing." If it "has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out," just as he himself did when he borrowed a friend’s notes to pass a dull college chemistry class without attending it…
> "For years there have been programs that have helped professors detect plagiarized essays,” Chomsky says. “Now it’s going to be more difficult, because it’s easier to plagiarize. But that’s about the only contribution to education that I can think of.” He does admit that ChatGPT-style systems “may have some value for something,” but “it’s not obvious what.” The headline makes it seem like Chomsky hates ChatGPT when…
And enumerates the ways in which it could be disused. It is a nothing burger. It doesn't put Chomsky in a bad light at all.