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"AI", students, and epistemic crisis

miniver.blogspot.com

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Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#81

Post by lionkor »

par1970 wrote: post #65
lionkor wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

In this context an axiom is a nonlogical axiom, in other words an assumption, one that is not to be questioned or discussed

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#82

Post by drivingmenuts »

Kiro wrote: post #39

Am I the only one who almost never experience any hallucinations when talking to ChatGPT? I have to really push it into a corner with trick questions and conflicting instructions about obscure topics in order to trigger hallucinations. That it would just come up with random false facts about something as common and "basic" as the history of the Greek language sounds like a made-up issue.

Hallucinations come in all sizes. I wouldn't worry about the big hallucinations - those are easy to spot. I worry about the small, incremental hallucinations - the ones you don't notice until several have happened. It might not be possible to even recognize that sort of thing yourself, if you've been effectively gaslighted by AI.

Since there's no actual knowledge on the part of the AI, it doesn't know that it's doing it, so it's not malicious (the designers are a separate question). But it is still entirely possible, and even somewhat likely.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#83

Post by relaxing »

Semaphor wrote: post #13
lionkor wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it happened, I've had conversations with younger people that went like that. They pick this up before they start learning critical thinking

And you didn’t get the idea to just show them, as I said, either? I’m not saying it’s impossible for little kids not to know about it, I’m saying it’s very straightforward to show them why that’s wrong by using the one tool they seem to believe.

You don’t work with kids as public school teacher.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#84

Post by xg15 »

BlaDeKke wrote: post #70
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.

Yup, no question here why he believes ChatGPT's initial statements. I'm more baffled that when the teacher corrects him, he goes on and defends ChatGPT.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#85

Post by jodrellblank »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #64
jodrellblank wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ 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-buildi…

> “it knows that it doesn't know”

No it doesn’t; it isn’t an intelligence, it’s a token generator based on patterns in the inputs it was trained on (and those are explanations and answers, not millions of people writing “I don’t know”).

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#86

Post by shzhdbi09gv8ioi »

pitt1980 wrote: post #68

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.

They trained on copyrighted material and scraped stuff they shouldn't have.

That's why they "cant" show sources.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#87

Post by elforce002 »

pitt1980 wrote: post #68

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.

Brave AI search engine gives you various sources if you want to dig deeper.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#88

Post by allsummer »

pitt1980 wrote: post #68

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.

You can just ask it "What scholars or source material books could I check out to verify these linguistics facts?".

Many facts and answers are gathered/aggregated from many different (sometimes conflicting) sources. It won't link the internet page where it found the information, because it didn't find the information on a single internet page.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#89

Post by [deleted] »

sieste wrote: post #23

Like probably many people here I still remember having to find facts in books in libraries, before the internet made this skill mostly redundant. Then, as a student I remember having to put together facts from various (internet) sources into a coherent narrative. Now chatbots can just generate text and that skill seems less valuable. I use both the internet and GenAI extensively now. But I feel that having gone throu…

[deleted]

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#90

Post by sieste »

roenxi wrote: post #61
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.

Current LLMs are lacking introspection, plausibility checking, consulting external sources, and belief updating in the presence of new evidence. All of these you'd need to replace human teachers and it's not clear that the next token prediction paradigm can ever emulate these features reliably. So "outperforming teachers", while not impossible, is a very optimistic expectation as it requires more than mere improvement on existing methodology.
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