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

"AI", students, and epistemic crisis

miniver.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 136 posts

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#101

Post by pitt1980 »

allsummer wrote: post #88
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.

At on point I asked it for academic papers that said a particular thing, as best I can tell, only about 60% of the papers it cited actually existed

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#102

Post by tatrajim »

And, on a related note for education, AI is quickly obviating the need to master and plumb the depths of foreign languages. Dating myself, doubtless, but as an undergraduate, it was an unalloyed joy to study ancient Greek and read Plato and Euripides in the original, however haltingly. And later Korean, Japanese, and Chinese beckoned providing a lifetime of rich understanding of life outside the confines of English. For Americans, at least, perhaps ours is the last generation that will seek rewire our understanding of reality through linguistic hacking.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#103

Post by anal_reactor »

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…

> And I feel extremely snobbish and old for thinking that way.

Old people usually make correct assessments given their knowledge and experience. They know how to maximize their expected gains and play safe. The problem is, real life often rewards those who take risks, and make seemingly wrong decisions, that later turn out to be good.

For example, as a kid I loved playing video games, while my grandma yelled at me for not wanting to help her with work at the farm. She had absolutely no way of predicting that playing video games, which were essentially just toys, would teach me the right skills at the right time, allowing me to move up the social ladder. At the time, forcing the god damn lazy kid to milk the god damn cow was the sensible thing to do.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#104

Post by nathansherburn »

tatrajim wrote: post #102

And, on a related note for education, AI is quickly obviating the need to master and plumb the depths of foreign languages. Dating myself, doubtless, but as an undergraduate, it was an unalloyed joy to study ancient Greek and read Plato and Euripides in the original, however haltingly. And later Korean, Japanese, and Chinese beckoned providing a lifetime of rich understanding of life outside the confines of English.…

AI will always be far better at languages than I'll ever be and I expect it to get much better very quickly. But I'm still learning my partner's language and don't think I'll stop any time soon. I think it's interesting and fun in and of itself. It's also a great scaffold for learning about another culture and learning to respect and understand folks from different walks of life.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#105

Post by ninkendo »

cheschire wrote: post #98
nebulous1 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I can't defend that because in reality I'm talking purely from my subjective experience. I will say that in my experience it isn't close at all. However, I will also say that a lot of the things that chatgpt gets wrong for me, wikipedia just won't contain at all, but then chatgpt seeming confident when it's wrong is basically the whole problem.

Wikipedia has well documented and explored issues related to vandalism, bias, and misinformation. But don’t get me wrong, I also view ChatGPT conversations as being on par with pub chats as far as “confident facts” go. I think our difference may be in how we view Wikipedia.

> Wikipedia has well documented and explored issues related to vandalism, bias, and misinformation.

Last I read about this, the error rate in Wikipedia was actually lower than in the Encyclopedia Britannica, by a measurable amount.

This was a while back, and admittedly it only counted articles where there was an equivalent article in both (which probably gives a better picture of Wikipedia, as those kinds of “boring” articles have less vandalism…) but it’s not immediately a given that Wikipedia is just objectively bad at being accurate.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#106

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

jodrellblank wrote: post #85
A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”).

Right, but it may be a fixable problem, even under the circumstances. These token generators have vast databases at their disposal and have crawled the entire public-facing internet. They should be able to assign confidence values to their drafts/statements, and reject low-confidence drafts/statements before putting them in front of users. They could do this by fact-checking their drafts in an adversarial way.

For instance, a cursory check of isfdb.org would have given ChatGPT better information than I was provided with.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#107

Post by [deleted] »

allsummer wrote: post #100
watwut wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need corner. I asked him for valid IISExpress config file. Chatbots are great systetising in areas where there is a strong open source like culture - a lot of people writing tutorials and on stack overflow. The moment you move into area that is not popular to write about, they start making stuff up. And it sux massively. I would much rather seen "I don't know" then what ChatGPT produces currently.

Start small, like asking him to review your grammar.

[deleted]

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#108

Post by rchaud »

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…

ChatGPT is the search engine equivalent of those streaming sites that won't directly admit they don't have the show you explicitly searched for, but will instead show you a list of other shows they think will placate you, and pretend they're indistinguishable.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#109

Post by rchaud »

deadbabe wrote: post #22

I really don’t see any other solution to this kind of problem except for one: LLMs must become perfect, and never be wrong. Relying on kids to do cross referencing and deeper fact checks into everything they ask an LLM is just not going to happen at scale.

What's so hard about following the Wikipedia model of citing sources? Even 20 years ago, it was clear to college students that they cannot cite "Wikipedia", but they can cite the academic literature it referenced.

It would take seconds to figure out of the ChatGPT citation is real or made up.

Re: "AI", students, and epistemic crisis

#110

Post by sieste »

nebulous1 wrote: post #91
cheschire wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you can quantifiably prove Wikipedia is more accurate than ChatGPT, I’m not sure how you can say GP’s comparison doesn’t make sense.

Okay, I can't defend that because in reality I'm talking purely from my subjective experience. I will say that in my experience it isn't close at all. However, I will also say that a lot of the things that chatgpt gets wrong for me, wikipedia just won't contain at all, but then chatgpt seeming confident when it's wrong is basically the whole problem.

One way of looking at it is that Wikipedia has a transparent and auditable way of correcting and updating false information, which makes it inherently more reliable and trustworthy than tensor weights finetuned by unreproducible human feedback.
Post reply on HN