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Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

independent.co.uk

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Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#61

Post by agumonkey »

userbinator wrote: post #3

Professor Malan said students would be warned of the pitfalls of the AI, saying they should “always think critically” when presented with information. I want to believe that this will actually happen, but my experience with people blindly trusting what a tool (not even an AI-based one) says, including but not limited to students, suggests that's not going to happen.

Depending on the level of pupils it can be safe, but after taking part in moocs with people of various skill levels, it's fair to assume that a lot will be lost in confusion without the ability to discern correct from incorrect.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#62

Post by ekianjo »

RyanAdamas wrote: post #60

This is a terrible indication of what is to come. Cheap, accessible, and fully featured instructors that would otherwise be free and open source, contained and used for profit by in-name-only institutions, organizations and corporations for the purpose of increased profit from the reduction in human labor. Every ounce of AI should be open source and free to the public. This is absolutely technological terrorism on th…

Latin was not used to keep things away from people. It was the de facto international language of the time.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#63

Post by ekianjo »

grumpyprole wrote: post #39
latexr wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Always think critically” is poised to become the “drink responsibly” of AI. A convenient and counterproductive way to push responsibility onto the users. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_advertising#Drink_resp... https://youtube.com/watch?v=DnSp2S7vzH4&t=31s

Agreed, and due to the way LLM works, misinformation tends to look very plausible.

Misinformation was never a problem on the provider end but the receiver

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#64

Post by ekianjo »

Lio wrote: post #26
userbinator wrote: post #3

Professor Malan said students would be warned of the pitfalls of the AI, saying they should “always think critically” when presented with information. I want to believe that this will actually happen, but my experience with people blindly trusting what a tool (not even an AI-based one) says, including but not limited to students, suggests that's not going to happen.

My experience with LLMs so far is that they very confidently give you an answer and very convincingly explain that answer but for certain portion of the time that answer is very wrong. You can even get it to break its reasoning down into little convincing but, none the less, incorrect steps. If I was running this course I would make that "artefact" part of the process. i.e. I would tell students that the chatbot will…

> My experience with LLMs so far is that they very confidently give you an answer and very convincingly explain that answer but for certain portion of the time that answer is very wrong.

This is true of humans just as well

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#65

Post by denotational »

ekianjo wrote: post #62
RyanAdamas wrote: post #60

This is a terrible indication of what is to come. Cheap, accessible, and fully featured instructors that would otherwise be free and open source, contained and used for profit by in-name-only institutions, organizations and corporations for the purpose of increased profit from the reduction in human labor. Every ounce of AI should be open source and free to the public. This is absolutely technological terrorism on th…

Latin was not used to keep things away from people. It was the de facto international language of the time.

Indeed, and when modern languages replaced Latin as the lingua franca, institutions continued to use Latin, or Latin derived terms of art, rather than move with the time.

One could draw a comparison and suggest that institutions that fail to adapt to developments in AI might be making the same mistake; only time will tell.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#66

Post by thumbuddy »

RyanAdamas wrote: post #60

This is a terrible indication of what is to come. Cheap, accessible, and fully featured instructors that would otherwise be free and open source, contained and used for profit by in-name-only institutions, organizations and corporations for the purpose of increased profit from the reduction in human labor. Every ounce of AI should be open source and free to the public. This is absolutely technological terrorism on th…

Imagine going to an ivy League school and paying 10,000$ for a chat bot to teach you. What a racket

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#67

Post by moffkalast »

tempodox wrote: post #6

> “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.

"As a student employed by OpenAI, I cannot..."

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#68

Post by RyanAdamas »

ekianjo wrote: post #62
RyanAdamas wrote: post #60

This is a terrible indication of what is to come. Cheap, accessible, and fully featured instructors that would otherwise be free and open source, contained and used for profit by in-name-only institutions, organizations and corporations for the purpose of increased profit from the reduction in human labor. Every ounce of AI should be open source and free to the public. This is absolutely technological terrorism on th…

Latin was not used to keep things away from people. It was the de facto international language of the time.

How something starts and is intended to be used becomes corrupted for the purposes of power and control; its clockwork and it absolutely happened with Latin. We could say the same thing about Medicine and Law today. All those technical terms in Latin are just for cohesion, right? Just coincidence they happen to be for the two largest union based professions in the west? I don't think so. Perhaps, they started out oriented on codification and categorization, but ultimately it's used as barriers to entry for the purpose of containing who has what knowledge.

AI is the digital wheel and the powers that be are intentionally altering it's ability to free us, to contain us for themselves. Labor is a powerful tool for vote motivation and instilling dependency. It is hard to watch them do to AI what they did to Bitcoin because they are afraid of what humanity will become without them.

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#69

Post by eesmith »

vanviegen wrote: post #27
eesmith wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it hard to reconcile "The weekly help sessions ended up being a million lost students in a giant hall waiting to see one of a few dozen TAs offering uneven pedagogical quality." with "very, very well-funded class". Why didn't the funding go to hiring more staff? My experience in a state school had far more access to education staff than what you describe, and for less funding.

My reading is that this class just has a huge number of students, each bringing in a bit of funding. This allows for relatively large investments in the quality of the teaching materials, but teacher/student ratios will probably not be great. Hiring capable teachers is hard, especially at scale.

I must be missing something. Harvard has 7,153 undergrads says Wikipedia. At most that's 1,790 students per year taking the class each year. But surely not everyone is taking the course? So why does it need to scale?

Harvard tuition is $54,269, says https://registrar.fas.harvard.edu/tuition-and-fees .

Assuming it's a 3 hour class with a 120 credit hours to graduate, that's 30 hours per year, so each student pays about $5,000 for what seems to be a horrible staff/student ratio.

FWIW, I found https://cse.engin.umich.edu/stories/popular-intro-cs-course-... as a comparison, the EECS 183 course at the University of Michigan.

Three professors (Dr. Dorf, Dr. Bill Arthur, and Dr. Héctor García-Ramírez), and 24 student instructors for the 870 students who finished the course. (It doesn't say how many started the course.)

Full-time tuition at UMich is $8,780/in-state and $27,663/out-of-state.

Without class size numbers for Harvard, I can't directly compare the two.

I can understand that the distance learning version of the course does need to scale. But chefandy was talking about the in-person version of the course. (Unless "in a giant hall waiting" means some sort of VR-based course. :)

Re: Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot

#70

Post by est31 »

ekianjo wrote: post #62
RyanAdamas wrote: post #60

This is a terrible indication of what is to come. Cheap, accessible, and fully featured instructors that would otherwise be free and open source, contained and used for profit by in-name-only institutions, organizations and corporations for the purpose of increased profit from the reduction in human labor. Every ounce of AI should be open source and free to the public. This is absolutely technological terrorism on th…

Latin was not used to keep things away from people. It was the de facto international language of the time.

> of the time.

Latin looks back on two thousand years of history. You probably mean the middle ages/renaissance, when Latin was indeed used by travellers to get around. At least some of the local elites in the bigger villages spoke it.

But even during the classical period of the roman empire, Latin might not have actually been spoken by people on the streets of Rome. Instead, people theorize that a simpler version was spoken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin

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