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ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

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Re: ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

#21

As long as we keep having to ask, "ChatGPT answered this questions but was it right?" it is a nonstarter. It is currently a novelty, not a tool. To be a tool it needs to be reliable.

I’m still on the waitlist but I hear hallucinations have been largely solved already by connecting it to the internet with ChatGPT Plugins and telling it to verify its sources.

Unfortunately there is no way to test if every answer is correct. There's no magic plugin that "solves" this, because this is beyond P=NP.

Re: ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

#22

As long as we keep having to ask, "ChatGPT answered this questions but was it right?" it is a nonstarter. It is currently a novelty, not a tool. To be a tool it needs to be reliable.

This is so wrong it’s not even funny. It is absolutely a tool and can help with _many_ rote tasks.

Re: ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still on the waitlist but I hear hallucinations have been largely solved already by connecting it to the internet with ChatGPT Plugins and telling it to verify its sources.

Unfortunately there is no way to test if every answer is correct. There's no magic plugin that "solves" this, because this is beyond P=NP.

Just connect it to Facebook, and process any comment that begins with "Well, actually, ..."

Re: ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m still on the waitlist but I hear hallucinations have been largely solved already by connecting it to the internet with ChatGPT Plugins and telling it to verify its sources.

Unfortunately there is no way to test if every answer is correct. There's no magic plugin that "solves" this, because this is beyond P=NP.

OK. Let’s keep the context of this conversation in mind. As is typical for these sorts of comments, you slowly move the goalposts from “non-starter”, to “my arbitrary idea of ‘good’, to “superhuman”.

At my day job we get a pretty good idea of the shortcomings of a typical teacher. We are also getting a very good, measurable, idea of what LLMs are capable of in this area. There’s skeptical, and there’s being in denial.

Re: ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

#25
>> In the past, Donahoe would set her students to writing assignments in which they had to make an argument for something—and grade them on the text they turned in. This semester, she asked her students to use ChatGPT to generate an argument and then had them annotate it according to how effective they thought the argument was for a specific audience. Then they turned in a rewrite based on their criticism.

That won't work. The student can just ask ChatGPT to annotate the argument it generated itself previously (or in the same session).

Basically, as long as you're asking your students to turn in a written assignment, they can use ChatGPT to write the assignment. It doesn't really matter what you ask them to write, and how much of it you ask them to generate by ChatGPT or by the student's hand, the student can choose to have the whole thing generated by ChatGPT and there's nothing you can do about it.

Re: ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

#26

>> In the past, Donahoe would set her students to writing assignments in which they had to make an argument for something—and grade them on the text they turned in. This semester, she asked her students to use ChatGPT to generate an argument and then had them annotate it according to how effective they thought the argument was for a specific audience. Then they turned in a rewrite based on their criticism. That won't…

So what's the problem? If ChatGPT can do all that stuff then there's no reason to teach students how to do it. Same reason we don't teach assembly in programming classes anymore, since compilers can do that for us.

Instead, students can now move on to more complex things. For example, maybe the teacher can have their 2nd graders use ChatGPT to reproduce a research paper on quantum computing and submit their results to a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Re: ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

#27

>> In the past, Donahoe would set her students to writing assignments in which they had to make an argument for something—and grade them on the text they turned in. This semester, she asked her students to use ChatGPT to generate an argument and then had them annotate it according to how effective they thought the argument was for a specific audience. Then they turned in a rewrite based on their criticism. That won't…

So what's the problem? If ChatGPT can do all that stuff then there's no reason to teach students how to do it. Same reason we don't teach assembly in programming classes anymore, since compilers can do that for us. Instead, students can now move on to more complex things. For example, maybe the teacher can have their 2nd graders use ChatGPT to reproduce a research paper on quantum computing and submit their results t…

Not just a research paper, anything! The 2nd graders -hell, the 1st graders!- can use ChatGPT to submit articles to wikipedia. They can use it to submit articles to news outlets. They can use it to generate recipes to submit to recipe aggregators. The possibilities are truly endless!

In fact, the people working in those publications and tasked to review all the submissions, don't have to do that anymore. They can just feed the submissions to ChatGPT, and let ChatGPT generate a review for them.

See, there is no read to write anything anymore, and there's no need to read anything anymore, either. We can just let ChatGPT do all that stuff for us!

Of course, a few years down the line, there won't be any reason to submit, or publish, articles or anything else anymore, either, since there won't be anyone left who can actually read, besides ChatGPT, and that would be pointless if it will be ChatGPT that's produced all the writing already. But, I'm sure that all this will sort itself out in the long run.

Re: ChatGPT is going to change education, not destroy it

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT does not get full credit on the homework I create, even when the topic is some standard-ish algorithm with significant presence in the training data. Or maybe I'm just a bad prompt engineer.

What grade level is the homework you are creating?

MS in computer science. The specific question I was surprised about was a O(log (m+n)) algorithm for finding the median of the union of two sorted arrays. This is in-scope for elite leetcoders and similar. The code ChatGPT generated had some issues resulting in out of bounds array accesses. It also wasn't clear if the algorithm was the desired log(m+n) one or a simpler but inferior log(m) + log(n) one. Was the model was confused and blended parts of different approaches? Is that statement too anthropomorphic for a LLM?
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