Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

Original Source:

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/6/21/cs50-artificial...

This sounds to me like Harvard's now jumped the shark.

> “But the tools will only get better through feedback from students and teachers alike,” he said. “So they, too, will be very much part of the process.”

So the students will be guinea pigs, and they all work for OpenAI.

I will say one thing for this experiment: it is good to put this out in the open. I believe that if educators attempt to suppress LLM usage, or deride it in front of their students, or persecute students when they believe they have detected LLM usage in homework, then students will not stop using LLMs, but instead the students will internalize this illicit perspective, and they will conceal their usage of LLMs, and they will be unwilling to reveal or admit that they are using LLMs in their coursework. In this way, it will be not unlike Wikipedia: a forbidden, shameful, and fatally flawed tool that everyone uses anyway.

I believe it's very important to encourage students to be transparent and to cite their sources, and give credit where credit is due (even if that LLM is going to violate copyright at the drop of a hat). So, students, when you use ChatGPT, declare that you used it. Cite it as a source; cite it properly; you'll want to name the engine and its version number, the date you accessed it, and all prompts in that conversation.

I believe that educators who are introducing LLMs in their curriculum are making the right call. Meet this head-on, not as a threat, but as an emerging tool, and get ahead of the hype and the FUD. And I'm confident that students will find out for themselves about all the bullshitting and hallucinations that go on, for better or worse.

The preconditions for your vision simply cannot exist under capitalism.