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A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

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Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#51
I sit on my local school board and (as everyone knows) AI has been whirling through the school like a tornado. I'm concerned about student using it to cheat, but I'm also pretty concerned about how teachers are using it.

For example, many teachers have fed student essays into ChatGPT and asked "did AI write this?" or "was this plagiarized" or similar, and fully trusting whatever the AI tells them. This has led to some false positives where students were wrongly accused of cheating. Of course a student who would cheat may also lie about cheating, but in a few cases they were able to prove authorship using the history feature built into Google docs.

Overall though I'm not super worried because I do think most people are learning to be skeptical of LLMs. There's still a little too much faith in them, but I think we're heading the right direction. It's a learning process for everyone involved.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#52

This is nice, but it's not at all how students use ChatGPT (anecdotal based on my kid and her friends who are at the uni right now). The way they actually use is to get ChatGPT to generate ALL their homework and submit that. And sometimes take home exams too. And the weird thing is that some professors are perfectly cool with it. I am starting to question whether the cost of going to a place of higher learning is wor…

Why do they get homework then? I don’t expect the professors are willing to go over and correct autogenerated LLM homework. The purpose of homework is to apply and cement knowledge. In some cases homework is so excessive that students find ways to cheat. If homework is reasonable, students can just do it and bypass LLMs altogether (at least for the purpose of the homework).

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#53
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use a screenshot to get around it. It's a case of the "analogue hole".

And then that gets countered with 1% opacity text...

There's also adversarial images. I wonder if those can used here.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I refused to learn geography because we had map applications Which is ironic, because geography isn’t about memorizing maps

Some parts of it were though.

Almost all parts require it, but none are about it. That's how background knowledge works. If you can't get over the drudgery of learning scales and chords, you'll never learn music. The fact that many learners never understand this end goal is sad but doesn't invalidate the methodology needed to achieve the progression.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#55

I sit on my local school board and (as everyone knows) AI has been whirling through the school like a tornado. I'm concerned about student using it to cheat, but I'm also pretty concerned about how teachers are using it. For example, many teachers have fed student essays into ChatGPT and asked "did AI write this?" or "was this plagiarized" or similar, and fully trusting whatever the AI tells them. This has led to som…

My takeaway: a chrome plugin that writes LLM generated text into a Google doc over the course of a couple of days is a great product idea!

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We talked about "critical thinking", "creative problem solving", and "comprehension of complex systems" as the next step, but even when discussing this, how long will it be until more models or workflows catch up? Either these things are important to learn for their own sake or they aren’t. If the former, then nothing about these objectives needs changing, and if the latter then education itself will be a waste of…

There's so much dystopian science fiction about people being completely helpless because only machines know how to do everything. Then the machines break down.

Pump Six (by Paolo Bacigalupi) comes into my mind.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#57
post #2

I think this is pretty good advice. I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything (write all the code, write the whole essay). The advice in this article largely mirrors - by analogy - how I use AI for coding. To rubber duck, to generate ideas, to ask for feedback, to ask for alternatives and for criticism. Usually it cannot write the whole thing (essay, program )in one go…

> I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything

Users are not a monolithic group. Some users/students absolutely use AI blindly.

There are also many, many ways to use AI counterproductively. One of the most pernicious I have noticed is users who turn to AI for the initial idea without reflecting about the problem first. This removes a critical step from the creative process, and prevents practice of critical and analytical thinking. Struggling to come up with a solution first before seeing one (either from AI or another human) is essential for learning a skill.

The effect is that people end up lacking self confidence in their ability to solve problems on their own. They give up much too easily if they don't have a tool doing it for them.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#58

I'm really curious to see where higher education will go now that we have LLM's. I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will be able to taught in less time. Are there any students here who started uni just before LLM's took off and are now finishing their degrees? Have you noticed much change in how your classes are taught?

I teach at the university level, and I just expect more from my students. Instead of implementing data structures like we did when I was in school, something ChatGPT is very good at; my students are building systems, something ChatGPT has more trouble with. Instead of paper exams asking students "find the bug" or "implement a short function", they get a takehome exam where they have to write tests, integrate their pr…

I also teach in a university. There are two concepts: teaching with the AI, and teaching against it. At first, I want my students to gain a strong grasp of the basics, so I teach “against” it - warnings for cheating, etc. This semester, I’m also teaching “with” it. Write an algorithm that finds the cheapest way to build roads to every one of a set of cities, given costs for each street segment. I tell them to test it. Test it well. Then analyze its running time. What technique did it pick? What are the problems with this technique? Are there any others? What input would cause it to break? If I assumed (some different condition), would this change the answer?

Students today will be practitioners tomorrow, and those that know how to work with AI will be more effective than those who do not.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#59

This is nice, but it's not at all how students use ChatGPT (anecdotal based on my kid and her friends who are at the uni right now). The way they actually use is to get ChatGPT to generate ALL their homework and submit that. And sometimes take home exams too. And the weird thing is that some professors are perfectly cool with it. I am starting to question whether the cost of going to a place of higher learning is wor…

The point of the article is to highlight how students should be using ChatGPT.

Now it's up to you to share it with your kid and convince them they shouldn't cheat themselves out of an education by offloading the learning part to an LLM.

This doesn't change the value provided by the institution they're enrolled in unless the teachers are offloading their jobs to LLMs in a way that's detrimental to the students.

Cheating has been and will always be a thing.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#60

I'm really curious to see where higher education will go now that we have LLM's. I imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will be able to taught in less time. Are there any students here who started uni just before LLM's took off and are now finishing their degrees? Have you noticed much change in how your classes are taught?

They're still largely abysmal for any other discipline that's not StackOverflow related so apart from ripoff bootcamps (that are dead anyway) higher education is safe for the time being.

They’re pretty abysmal for things that are StackOverflow related, too? I’ve tested a lot of things recently, and all of them have had pieces that were just absolutely wrong, including referencing libraries or steps or tools that didn’t exist at all.
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