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I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

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Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#41
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already see it in people who cannot navigate their automobile without google maps or some equivalent.

I think what is more readily apparent is that younger folks cannot reverse their car without looking at the camera. Older folks still turn around and look.

Nah, this "older folk" loves my cameras and it's an excellent enhancement

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#42
IMO most of the reason this teacher quit is students using ChatGPT to get around the puffery and wasteful production assigned.

It is important to have the skills to be able to do that kind of task, and transforming information rather than just transcribing it is a key way of training our biological supercomputers. However I can't recall even one example of that being the case when I was in school at any level. I think if it ever did happen it was as an accidental side effect rather than an intended part of the process.

It would be much harder for such generative tools to regurgitate accurate content for novel things. As an example, a report about what the student was presently working on or had just completed in labs, or a design for something they'd like to do. Maybe a focus on the hypothesis or 'request for funding' for a project would better model real world writing and have sufficient local focus to require human writing.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "cannot navigate"? I've been driving for decades, but where I live traffic is everywhere so I don't go more than a few miles without using Waze and its real-time traffic monitoring.

I can confidently say that a car would be useless to me without gps. I can navigate the small town (10k people) I grew up in, but that’s it. I wouldn’t try to navigate the city I live in now (~350k people) in a car, beyond the street I live on. If I had to and knew gps was broken (hypothetically), then I’d try to reschedule, instead of attempting to navigate with signs and a paper map. I could probably work with prin…

That's unfathomable to me. I live in a 1kk metropolitan area and I can go basically anywhere without a navigation system, in fact I'll only pull the GPS if I'm going to some remote neighborhood.

P.S: I was born here and lived here all my life.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#44

I don't trust LLM's to create novel ideas, and I'd never copy paste any AI output. Would I rework the output or maby use certain through processes, maby. But I'm not trusting an AI blindly, its a statistical capture of its training data not a magic wand. That said, most professors still force students to write code on paper with no autocorrect, google, or even access to the reference documentation which seems counter…

I'm probably in a small minority but I don't use auto-completion in code editors. I dislike it, and find it disrupts my thinking.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#45
post #7
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrifying. Our ability to think has been our biggest differentiator as a species. LLMs threaten this, and I'll die on that hill.

What's your opinion on calculators? Update: I meant to compare calculators to something like a slide ruler for logarithms. I'm not from US and I tend to forget that some people use calculators to take 20% of 500.

Depends on how far in basic arithmetic they get.

But, if symbolic manipulation is done by hand and then numbers just plopped in to get final result and estimation if answer is realistic enough. Well I think that is fair enough.

And spreadsheets are also useful when you need to add up bunch of things or multiply them.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#46
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can already see it in people who cannot navigate their automobile without google maps or some equivalent.

I think what is more readily apparent is that younger folks cannot reverse their car without looking at the camera. Older folks still turn around and look.

I wish I had a camera in my Jeep. As I get older it gets harder to just turn around, and new cars have pretty bad sight lines. I think this is just using the tools available to you.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#47

I don't trust LLM's to create novel ideas, and I'd never copy paste any AI output. Would I rework the output or maby use certain through processes, maby. But I'm not trusting an AI blindly, its a statistical capture of its training data not a magic wand. That said, most professors still force students to write code on paper with no autocorrect, google, or even access to the reference documentation which seems counter…

I agree with this. I'll use AI as a starting point to begin to understand a new topic or help flesh out definitions of things, but it's a starting point of knowledge not the final destination. Kind of like looking up something in an encyclopedia or Wikipedia; I'm using it for a quick essence of the knowledge, so I know more of what to dig into later.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#48
> I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as “delves into”). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students.

> So I quit.

This strikes me as a non-sequitur. Her students were making a certain class of mistakes, so... she quit? Don't students always make mistakes of one kind or another? Teach them to do better, in this case by not using AI, or revising manually the AI output, or some other way. Isn't that the job?

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#50
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrifying. Our ability to think has been our biggest differentiator as a species. LLMs threaten this, and I'll die on that hill.

I think this is overestimating the impact of LLMs. Fact is, even if they are capable of fully replicating and even replacing actual human thought, at best they regurgitate what has come before. They are, effectively, a tutor (as another commentator pointed out). A human still needs to consume their output and act on it intelligently. We already do this, except with other tools/mechanisms (i.e. other humans). Nothing…

I appreciate your faith in humanity. However you would be surprised to the lengths people would go to avoid thinking for themselves. Ex: a person I sit next to in class types every single group discussion question into chatgpt. When the teacher calls on him he word for word reads the answer. When the teacher follows up with another question, you hear "erh uhm I don't know" and fumbles an answer out. Especially in the context of learning, people who have self control and deliberate use of AI will benefit. But for those who use AI as a crutch to keep up with everyone else are ill prepared. The difference now is that shoddy work/understanding from AI is passable enough that somebody who doesn't put in the effort to understand can get a degree like everybody else.
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