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Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

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Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#41

Post by Sai_ »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #39
Sai_ wrote: post #34

I have an idea to improve recruiting of senior technical ICs and managers by having them "guide" an AI towards completing a project. Should reveal how well an IC understands and critiques the original submission by the AI, gives guidance towards identifying and rectifying wrong assumptions, and in general, helps a bright but flawed team-mate towards success. My sense is that this Professor's idea is somewhat analogou…

I was actually thinking about this today too, but more from the angle of "could I get chatGPT to build me a piece of software where I don't do any of the coding but just give it instructions, pointers and corrections." I definitely want to give this a try and see what level of complexity of software can I get it to build.

Do it! I’d be curious how it works out.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#42

Post by yyyk »

Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #35
yyyk wrote: post #13

One of my worries regarding AI is that we will decide to deskill ourselves instead of using the extra productivity to improve ourselves. In this case, students may end up with a smaller ability to write their own thoughts but in return get fill-in-the-blanks exercises.

Isn't that one of the arguments regarding our own evolution? I remember the whole argument around how since the invention of agriculture humans are less dextereous and have to be less alert cause we are mostly safe. Without that loss of hand eye coordination that followed the lack of daily hunting there is also no roman empire, no silk road, no pyramids, no three sisters in indegenous agriculture, no man on the moon,…

Yes, but all that was followed by a different human ability to compensate for the loss. Here we may be replacing this with AI, not with a human skill however indirect.

Also, this type of AI tech is trained from us, and therefore I'm unsure it can reach significant advancement over current human ability (ChatGPT won't create any new writing styles). We may just end up in a local maxima. Compare to Chess engines which could exceed human ability since they had an obviously good optimization criteria: winning games.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#44

Post by hooby »

Very clever idea!

Students can't quite use AI to complete this assignment, they have to do it themselves.

Along the way they get some insights into the limitations of AI-based text generation.

And they also learn how to write a good essay, by touching up an AI-generated baseline. Which is a skill that might become quite relevant in the near future.

Some might think "that's cheating - you have to write the entire essay yourself!" - and that might be true for a school setting. But in the workplace, only the results count (and how quickly/efficiently you got those). Just like using an automatic translator and manually fixing up the results now outperforms translating the entire text by hand.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#45

Post by kqr »

maegul wrote: post #6

Beyond the adaptation to AI angle on this, the idea is compelling in its own right I'd say. Anyone who's gone on to mark/grade or write assessments would probably attest to the perspective it provides. Whatever your opinion of assessment in academia/schooling (I, for one, am generally negative), there is something to seeing the difference between someone who actually understands and someone who is spamming to get the…

This comment is very insightful on many levels. Do you happen to have a blog or something where you write about stuff?

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#46

Post by maegul »

kqr wrote: post #45
maegul wrote: post #6

Beyond the adaptation to AI angle on this, the idea is compelling in its own right I'd say. Anyone who's gone on to mark/grade or write assessments would probably attest to the perspective it provides. Whatever your opinion of assessment in academia/schooling (I, for one, am generally negative), there is something to seeing the difference between someone who actually understands and someone who is spamming to get the…

This comment is very insightful on many levels. Do you happen to have a blog or something where you write about stuff?

Huh … Thanks for the praise, but I’m way too disorganised for that and hardly have thoughts worth more than a paragraph like above!

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#47

Post by egman_ekki »

OJFord wrote: post #29
anon___ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socrates was worried that writing, the then new invention, will cause forgetfulness. > The people who invent something new, create a new tool or technology, are not necessarily the people who are going to understand what the social impact of those inventions will be. >> And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If m…

Do we know it didn't?

We don't seem to remember.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#48

Post by earthnail »

yyyk wrote: post #42
Arkhaine_kupo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that one of the arguments regarding our own evolution? I remember the whole argument around how since the invention of agriculture humans are less dextereous and have to be less alert cause we are mostly safe. Without that loss of hand eye coordination that followed the lack of daily hunting there is also no roman empire, no silk road, no pyramids, no three sisters in indegenous agriculture, no man on the moon,…

Yes, but all that was followed by a different human ability to compensate for the loss. Here we may be replacing this with AI, not with a human skill however indirect. Also, this type of AI tech is trained from us, and therefore I'm unsure it can reach significant advancement over current human ability (ChatGPT won't create any new writing styles). We may just end up in a local maxima. Compare to Chess engines which…

Not necessarily. I don't think people were aware at each of these moments what ability they would compensate it with. Mostly they were just happy that tedious things got easier.

So many people here are worried about the essay with in-depth thought. But let's face it: a lot of written content isn't that valuable. A friend of mine had ChatGPT write his goodbye email for him, and the result was a) really good and b) really funny because it just illustrated how interchangeable these emails are.

Another example: at the large consultancy firms (McKinsey etc), they have a large number of "slide monkeys" that consultants can use to have their powerpoint slides made. Of course nobody officially admits to calling them slide monkeys (I mean, what a terrible term), but everyone unofficially does. These "slide monkeys" are basically low-wage support staff in developing nations like India. AI can automate that work.

That might maybe also make us consider whether the slide format is even an efficient one. Right now, slides imply value because of the time required to make them. Once that changes, we might focus our evaluation of value more on how much content they can deliver efficiently to their audience.

Re: Professor writes history essays with ChatGPT and has students correct them

#50

Post by roel_v »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #39
Sai_ wrote: post #34

I have an idea to improve recruiting of senior technical ICs and managers by having them "guide" an AI towards completing a project. Should reveal how well an IC understands and critiques the original submission by the AI, gives guidance towards identifying and rectifying wrong assumptions, and in general, helps a bright but flawed team-mate towards success. My sense is that this Professor's idea is somewhat analogou…

I was actually thinking about this today too, but more from the angle of "could I get chatGPT to build me a piece of software where I don't do any of the coding but just give it instructions, pointers and corrections." I definitely want to give this a try and see what level of complexity of software can I get it to build.

I've been using it that way for weeks, but it doesn't work as one would imagine it does. It's great for the higher level drudgery (typing in boilerplate of loops, imports/includes, data type definitions and so on), and for getting the basics of libraries you're unfamiliar with working. But it doesn't have any idea of what APIs actually do, so sometimes it'll make completely nonsensical calls that are (usually) grammatically correct, but just don't do what you want. So those you have to hunt down and correct manually. As a tool for someone who can't program, I don't see this as useful. Nor for someone just learning to program (although I can imagine how it would feel useful and productive). You actually have to know very well how things work to be able to spot the mistakes it makes. If you're a new programmer, you don't have the instinct yet for how APIs generally work to be able to sniff out what's going wrong in an AI generated program. I mean, of course with enough effort anyone can get it to work, what I mean is that I don't think it really enhances productivity in such cases.

Like, yesterday it switched two variables around in a loop, and that was somewhat obscured by the iterators in those loops being Series objects (numpy/pandas code) and needing some extra call on them (.any() or .bool() or something like that). It sounds obvious but it was fairly subtle, and it only came out after carefully reasoning through the whole function (20 or 30 lines or so). Still, it saved me a bunch of drudgery and reading of a 'getting started' guide - it was a net win.

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