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GPT makes learning fun again

vipshek.com

21–30 of 243 posts

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#21
post #13

You can downvote me but I think OP hasn't learned how to learn yet. If OP reads Wikipedia by understanding every sentence and clicking on every link, that's deliberately sabotaging his own learning. Attitudes like "I don't really feel like spelunking through a ton more articles" simply shows OP isn't interested in learning per se, just quick answers. OP learns in a way that's very child-like. When you are a five-year…

I notice that this contains only criticism and comparison to children, without offering a better way to learn.

If OP reads your comment, they will be no better at learning than they were before. In that way, it's a pretty unhelpful comment.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#22
post #12
post #6

It’s nice to be able to ask ChatGPT a half baked, poorly researched, poorly worded question with bad grammar yet get a totally good faith response back that’s a springboard for follow up questions. Whereas if you did the same thing on any stack exchange site you get downvotes and comments like “please read the guidelines and edit your question.”

Kindness and patience have always been in short supply on the public internet, but AI can simulate them in infinite amounts. That’s a positive thing about this generative AI revolution that I haven’t really thought about in those terms until now.

That is actually the killer feature of interactive AIs.

People go on and on and on about "accuracy", completely ignoring that accuracy is irrelevant to 99.9% of things that humans do in their everyday lives.

Simulating (positive) human interaction is far more impactful than getting facts correct.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#23
This is incredibly, incredibly naive. "Within minutes, I learned" -- absolutely nothing. At most you've learned how the answers to your question would sound like. They are not the answers.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#24
post #7

I'm in two minds about it. On one hand the internet (in general) has become so hard to find information on, and I agree with the author that GPT is a breath of fresh air. On the other hand I've seen GPT fail so miserably at topics that I'm knowledge about that I have a very hard time trusting anything it tells me. I'm not sure what the answer really is, but I'm not sure it's GPT. I wish we could go back to having sea…

"I'm not sure what the answer really is, but I'm not sure it's GPT."

My suggestion is to stick with it and get a feel for what it's good at.

I've found that after a few months of using ChatGPT every day I've developed a pretty solid intuition for which questions are likely to get good answers and which are likely to trigger hallucinations.

It's difficult to describe what those intuitions are though!

One rule of thumb I've developed: if something is likely to be "common knowledge" - if it's something that is likely to have been discussed accurately on the internet by many different people - then ChatGPT is very likely to answer questions about it accurately.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#25
post #7

I'm in two minds about it. On one hand the internet (in general) has become so hard to find information on, and I agree with the author that GPT is a breath of fresh air. On the other hand I've seen GPT fail so miserably at topics that I'm knowledge about that I have a very hard time trusting anything it tells me. I'm not sure what the answer really is, but I'm not sure it's GPT. I wish we could go back to having sea…

I'm curious about what topics you have knowledge of where it's failed. Does it seem like there's a pattern to the failures? I've been using GPT for coding help, and it it is very helpful in ruby and bash, though it often delivers buggy software: Badly handled non-happy-path conditions, mostly, which when I tell it to handle the case, it may. It's a huge help for me finding gems and showing me standard ruby library syntax. On the other hand, it's been useless when I try to get it to write Applescript for me. I believe that says more about AppleScript than about GPT. Sigh.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#26
post #23

This is incredibly, incredibly naive. "Within minutes, I learned" -- absolutely nothing. At most you've learned how the answers to your question would sound like. They are not the answers .

How sure are you about that?

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#27
This is so ridiculous.

GPT is like that "know-it-all" friend we have who just has something to say about anything, with knowledge skimmed from the internet.

GPT is a language model. It outputs what you want to hear, not what is correct.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#28
Shortly before GPT and friends burst on the scene, I was looking for a website which would meet me where I am as an engineer - I've written reams of code in various languages.

If I want to try Rust, I don't want to be taught uint8 v uint16 or that you shadow variables. I want to know the interesting parts.

ChatGPT is pretty good at this and the other thing I want: pandas training. You can ask it to generate exercises at any difficulty and also provide test data!

This tool is the biggest mind expander for me since search engines.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#29
post #23

This is incredibly, incredibly naive. "Within minutes, I learned" -- absolutely nothing. At most you've learned how the answers to your question would sound like. They are not the answers .

> They are not the answers.

You can't possibly know that.

Re: GPT makes learning fun again

#30
post #29
post #23

This is incredibly, incredibly naive. "Within minutes, I learned" -- absolutely nothing. At most you've learned how the answers to your question would sound like. They are not the answers .

> They are not the answers. You can't possibly know that.

I can.

Even if the answers accidentally happen to be correct, that's just the broken clock happens to be correct twice a day. The information value of answers by ChatGPT is zero.

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