Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 288 posts

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#201

Post by unsupp0rted »

bongobingo1 wrote: post #125
extr wrote: post #30

The amount of non-technical people who have very little intuition around the limitations of LLMs is actually fairly startling - and I like to think of myself of someone who is usually good at that kind of thing. The realistic/coherence of the output is just so convincing, people cannot seem to stop themselves from attributing a theory of mind to it. Just earlier this week I saw someone saying that they were creating…

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." While I don't think non-technical people think its "magic", you can hardly fault them considering 1) the "main stream media" hype around it and how it's going to be so transformative on jobs if nothing else, and 2) some people have been promised this kind of stuff since star trek or earlier, or their previous experience was having Siri say "sorry…

Any sufficiently advanced technology has emergent properties that might make it turn into a person

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#202

Post by flatline »

conductr wrote: post #172
flatline wrote: post #79

I really think we need a standard for citing AI generated/assisted content so people can use it in their work and call out that pieces of the work may be AI generated. It would be something of a gentleman’s agreement but it would make its use more transparent in academia and maybe even slow the current and ongoing onslaught of indeterminately generated content on the web. I also feel like any prof claiming cheating b…

Given misinformation provided in some GPT responses, what exactly are you citing? I think the method would be to use GPT for a rough draft, then do fact checking and/or find sources for the claims the GPT was using. In essence, it's a research tool. It seems like if people are just copy/pasting in results they aren't trying at all and very likely didn't even try to comprehend the outputs. It should be considered chea…

It would be plagiarism to copy much of anything from someone else’s original work without citation. Even using GPT as a drafting tool will result in a lot of AI content making it into the final work verbatim. I think citation would legitimize this process, to an extent. Right now I feel like using the tool at all would count as “cheating” in many people’s minds, and I share some of those feelings if there is no disclosure. I also think LLMs are a legitimate tool for many purposes and their widespread use is inevitable.

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#203

Post by indrora »

RheingoldRiver wrote: post #107
sidewndr46 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who was a student over a decade ago, I'd lose my fucking mind if I had to use physical books. There was simply not enough time to go get books off the shelf and complete all my assignments. Everything was done digitally, I can't think of a single exception in college. I once turned in a math exam written using LaTeX and the professor initially declined to grade it. I did concede that I hadn't followed the…

Huh what major were you? As a math major we used exclusively physical books and it was fine. There was one time that the professor wanted us to use a theorem in a homework assignment from a book he neglected to assign to us for the class. The entire class collaborated on that problem set and emailed him for help, and he admitted he'd made a mistake and lent us a copy of the book. That was probably the biggest can't-u…

By the time I graduated, 90% of my books were ebooks or pdfs the professor had samizdat'd from the publisher.

The other 10% were books the publisher only had physical prints of or which I could find pdf copies from other locales of.

> LaTeX

I submitted a lot of things done in LaTeX that professors hated grading for the sheer reason that I made them count words manually instead of letting them skim-count based on the number of words on a Word page. I eventually wrangled the `Geometry` and `mla.sty` packages into submission and even made my own custom version of Garamond that added an extra en-space to periods following a character followed by a space just to be boring.

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#204

Post by yamtaddle »

masswerk wrote: post #200
yamtaddle wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The majority of normal users haven't really grasped stuff like how to use the filesystem—and I mean at a very basic level—the entire time I've been computing (since the early '90s). Let alone how it works. I'm not sure it's a trend unless the trend is "more people using computers". More of a static state of most people not understanding or caring to understand stuff that geeks like us have long forgotten we ever had…

My favorite comparison has always been a basic working knowledge of how we go around in a kitchen. We need to know what an oven is, and what a refrigerator is, where the knives are and where the dishes, and what each of these tools are for and how they basically work and how to use them. In computing, we've had a strong trend towards the "magic cupboard", which "just knows" for you what is needed. No need to know wha…

> No need to know what's in the kitchen and how stuff works, this would be too much for your brain. Open the cupboard once and it's the oven, open it another time, there's your knife, open it yet another time and accidentally throw your freshly baked cake in the waste bin…

What's wild about that trend is that if you watch low-ability computer users interact with that crap, it confuses the absolute shit out of them. A bad UI that is consistent in behavior and appearance and layout is 100x better for them than "helpful" on-launch pop-ups that sometimes appear, "smart" screens that try to re-arrange things to be helpful, and better than that "improved UX" redesign that moves everything around. And an ugly-but-consistent UI is way better for them than pretty but less-clear or less-consistent.

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#205

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

TheCleric wrote: post #128
CydeWeys wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about LLMs that a lot of people haven't cottoned onto yet is that they're essentially constantly lying. They have no concept of truth and also no concept of certainty. This makes them much less useful for a lot of tasks then people realize.

I wouldn't say lying as I think lying has a knowing quality to it (i.e., you have to know the statement you are making is incorrect). I think you are dead on though that they have no concept of truth nor certainty. It also seems to be highly confident in everything it outputs. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen people use it as a search engine and are shocked that it was wrong. ChatGPT should be treated…

> I wouldn't say lying as I think lying has a knowing quality to it (i.e., you have to know the statement you are making is incorrect).

Yeah, this is the difference between lies and bullshit. Lies are specifically not the truth (possibly selective truths instead) and bullshit doesn't care what's true.

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#206

Post by [deleted] »

hnfong wrote: post #161
AJ007 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people believe horoscopes and astrology carry any meaning? Most will never comprehend LLMs or even the simplest concepts of machine learning.

While we're on the topic of stroking our epeens, do you know how horoscopes and astrology work? Most people here with that condescending attitude will never comprehend it either. FWIW, it's one of the topics I've been trying to understand and come up with a consistent theory for a while. (Not to say those who believe in horoscopes and astrology know how it works though...)

[deleted]

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#207

Post by kevviiinn »

akiselev wrote: post #180
arp242 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to ChatGPT I'm an OpenBSD developer. I have never submitted any patches to OpenBSD.

It keeps telling me you're a Mongolian warlord from the 13th century [1]. [1] https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Mr_Prosser

Why not both?

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#208

Post by hammock »

macleginn wrote: post #48
thadt wrote: post #28

The ability to 'cheat' on written assignments has always been a possibility. With the rise of the Internet, it became easier to source it from more places - with a counter balancing rise of plagiarism detectors. Now with Google, Grammarly and ChatGPT, it is trivial to copy/paste a pipeline with enough entropy to defeat many if not most detectors. I suspect the next generation of tools will be finish this cycle - we w…

Seriously, though. Q to ChatGPT: ‘Was this text generated by ChatGPT? "The ability to 'cheat' on written assignments has always been a possibility. With the rise of the Internet, it became easier to source it from more places - with a counter balancing rise of plagiarism detectors. Now with Google, Grammarly and ChatGPT, it is trivial to copy/paste a pipeline with enough entropy to defeat many if not most detectors.…

ChatGPT’s house style doesn’t really use single quotes, slashes or dashes like that though. I’m skeptical

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#209

Post by circuit10 »

JohnFen wrote: post #194
circuit10 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But LLMs use and reason with the data, so the word “know” is probably appropriate. Think of it as a analogy, if you want, but it’s reasonable to draw a comparison with what humans do. Even without the reasoning part I’m sure people already use the word “know” to describe how software is able to perform a task or make use of information. “It has no understanding” I keep seeing this claim, I don’t understand what it’s…

I would say that "understanding" something means that you have a mental model of that thing. The more accurate and complete that mental model is, the "deeper" the understanding. LLMs, as I (ahem) understand them, do not have models of the things they're writing about. They do have a model of language (or whatever symbolic system they were trained on), but that's where it ends.

If it had no model of what it was writing about it wouldn’t be able to write anything coherent. It obviously has a world model, it’s not as advanced as what a human has but it’s there

Re: Texas professor fails entire class from graduating- claiming they used ChatGTP

#210

Post by circuit10 »

emptysongglass wrote: post #189
circuit10 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s wrong with the word “know”? And with Eliezer Yudkowsky?

He's a self-appointed expert who is neither an AI researcher, computer scientist, or any other accredited title you'd expect someone loudly yelling, “WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE” on a technical topic like the fundamentals of AI and its dangers to hold. You and others continue to foist human qualities on LLMs because it looks like magic. To know is to know oneself. LLMs do not know themselves. In fact, there is no “self” t…

I don’t know much about him but I thought he was a researcher? There is an “Academic publications” section on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky and it says “He is a co-founder and research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute”

LLMs are not self aware, I agree, but there is clearly some reasoning going on and you could argue that its model of human behaviour can somewhat simulate self awareness

Post reply on HN