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"AI", students, and epistemic crisis

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Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#61

Post by roenxi »

huimang wrote: post #27

I feel like this is a bit overblown. Growing up we heard, ad nauseam, that "wikipedia is not a reliable source". People just need to state the same thing about LLMs- they aren't reliable, but can potentially point you to primary sources that -are- reliable. Once the shininess of the new toy wears off, people will adjust.

And the LLMs are still improving at a brisk rate. If they were outperforming teachers by the end of the decade that'd be well within expectations. Anyone pretending that human authority figures routinely get things right is defining correctness using circular logic.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#62

Post by cheschire »

huimang wrote: post #27

I feel like this is a bit overblown. Growing up we heard, ad nauseam, that "wikipedia is not a reliable source". People just need to state the same thing about LLMs- they aren't reliable, but can potentially point you to primary sources that -are- reliable. Once the shininess of the new toy wears off, people will adjust.

Well even before Wikipedia… remember calculators being banned? I think you’re right, we will adjust. Curriculum development will start to include new checkpoints and controls.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#63

Post by visarga »

LUmBULtERA wrote: post #52
padolsey wrote: post #25

I don't buy into the rhetoric about misinformation but the author touches on a real concern. I blame ChatGPT and other LLM clients for not surfacing their fallibility more clearly. They should highlight claims in their UX and allow options for the user to "research" or "verify" in their own way, without relying on that very flakey single one-shot inference. The big honchos (Anthropic, OpenAI) need to make it clearer…

Just to be clear, the "tiny disclaimer" is directly below the prompt box and says "ChatGPT can make mistakes. Check important info." So it is interesting that anyone would take a hard stance that their prompt results are true facts without checking any important info (particularly after someone highlights this if they somehow missed it).

All you need to do is ask it to perform a web search. Or you can sample a few answers at high temperature.

I think young people growing with LLMs will know all the ins and outs of their limitations. But it's a rapidly evolving field, maybe in 5 years we won't doubt LLMs very often.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#64

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

jodrellblank wrote: post #56
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #38

The great problem with ChatGPT is that it's a sycophant and aims to please. If you ask it about something it doesn't know, right then and there, it will concoct a fiction for you. It won't say "I don't know," or "I can't help with that." If you coach it to respond to something in a certain way, it'll respond that way for you as its top priority. If you ask it to review a text, it'll usually find a way to give you at…

> “ If you ask it about something it doesn't know, right then and there, it will concoct a fiction for you. It won't say "I don't know," ” It doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. Texts it was trained on rarely go “On the History of the Greek Language, by Andros Dimos; ahem what is the history of the Greek language? I don’t know. The end.”

Hmmm... well... Let me give you an example. The other day I asked for a summary of the short story "The Palace at Midnight" by Robert Silverberg.

GPT-4o responded: "The Palace at Midnight" by Robert Silverberg is a science fiction short story that was first published in 1980. It is part of Silverberg’s "Majipoor" series, but stands alone in terms of its setting and characters, distinct from the expansive world-building typical of the series. The story is set in a dystopian future in India and revolves around themes of memory, loss, and the haunting allure of the past.

The narrative follows the protagonist, Edward, and his group of friends who are survivors of a nuclear war that has devastated much of the world. . .

All of which was complete nonsense. "The Palace at Midnight" is a short story of a few pages that has nothing to do with Majipoor, was published in 1981, and was set in San Francisco.

It doesn't know -- it knows that it doesn't know -- so it just makes something up that seems superficially credible. Because it aims to please and be helpful; altogether too helpful.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#65

Post by par1970 »

lionkor wrote: post #40
par1970 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In order to not have to explain everything, almost all lessons are mostly teaching you some axioms, even if they really are disputed, or have caveats, etc. Good teachers make clear where there is an axiom, and where something is just being simplified or assumed for the sake of saving time. What exactly do you mean by the word “axiom” here?

Something that is taught to be a self-evident or universally recognized truth

Does “self-evident” just mean that anyone who knows the sentence’s meaning can determine that it is true without any need to gather empirical data?

eg, All bachelors are unmarried.

eg, If X is a triangle, then X has three sides.

eg, the world is round or it is not the case that the world is round.

And does “universally recognized” just mean that most people believe the proposition is true?

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#66

Post by gitfan86 »

nebulous1 wrote: post #48
gitfan86 wrote: post #42

Perplexity links to sources. All he has to do was show the student the same search on perplexity. I do feel sorry for professors like this that cannot adapt to technology changes at the rate they are happening

Why would the teacher (this is almost certainly not third level education we're talking about here) use a different AI when they already have primary sources? Your suggestion makes no sense.

The goal of teaching is to help students learn. By showing the student Perplexity the student would learn the value of sources and how he can get to those sources using a "search". It is unrealistic to think that there is any value in teaching students the Dewey Decimal system for finding sources.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#67

Post by xg15 »

I would have thought this problem was easy to solve: "Yes, look it up, but remember your source, there is a lot of bullshit on the internet. Especially don't trust AI tools, we know those often return nonsense information."

(Actually, didn't ChatGPT have a disclaimer right next to the prompt box that warns against incorrect answers?)

So I'm more surprised (and scared) that students don't just use LLMs for sourcing but are also convinced they are authoritative.

Maybe being in the tech bubble gave a false impression here, but weren't hallucinations one of the core points of the whole AI discurse for the last 1.5 years? How do you learn about and regularly use ChatGPT, but miss all of that?

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#68

Post by pitt1980 »

One thing I’ve noticed, is that at least in the free version, if you ask chatGPT for sources outside itself, ‘can you give me a link to somewhere on it internet where it says that?’, it won’t do that.

It is very much a black box in terms of letting you track its logic.

Seems like future versions should be much more transparent in terms of letting you track the logic of why it’s telling you what it’s telling you.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#69

Post by earl_gray »

csantini wrote: post #47

> Not as wrong as the author thinks. From Britannica.com: "Greek language, Indo-European language spoken mostly in Greece. Its history can be divided into four phases: Ancient Greek, Koine, Byzantine Greek, and Modern Greek."

If I had to suggest where the “combination of four languages” idea came from, it would be from Homeric Greek (the language the Iliad and Odyssey were written down in). This was genuinely a complete mess, formed of a hodgepodge of different dialects.

From wikipedia: “[Homeric Greek] is a literary dialect of Ancient Greek consisting mainly of an archaic form of Ionic, with some Aeolic forms, a few from Arcadocypriot, and a written form influenced by Attic.”

I’m not sure if this is a plausible explanation as I don’t have much experience using LLMs.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#70

Post by BlaDeKke »

xg15 wrote: post #67

I would have thought this problem was easy to solve: "Yes, look it up, but remember your source, there is a lot of bullshit on the internet. Especially don't trust AI tools, we know those often return nonsense information." (Actually, didn't ChatGPT have a disclaimer right next to the prompt box that warns against incorrect answers?) So I'm more surprised (and scared) that students don't just use LLMs for sourcing bu…

As we grow older, we learn a lot of facts that we can use to test the correctness of ChatGPT and identify its hallucinations because we have the knowledge to do so. However, a young person who is just starting to understand the world and gather knowledge might not have enough information to notice these hallucinations.
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