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A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

openai.com

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Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#71

Post by achierius »

thadGX10 wrote: post #69
doctorpangloss wrote: post #46

Stuff like this is sincere but hopelessly naive. It's kind of sad that the people who invented all this stuff really loved school, and now the most disruptive part of their technology so far has been ruining school.

A lot of them are from Russia/Europe/China, at least the most successful implementers. My guess is that at least Russia/China will continue with the traditional education while watching with glee that the West is dumbing itself down even further.

By what means will -they- avoid hitting the same issues? Neither Russia nor China have magic detectors for is-this-essay-written-by-AI either.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#72

Post by gkbrk »

thadGX10 wrote: post #64
cmontella wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If ChatGPT suddenly is able to put a project like that together, then I'll ask for even more. Is having a paid subscription with a company that potentially tracks and records every keystroke a requirement for future courses?

GPT-4o-mini costs $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.6 per million output tokens. I'm sure most schools have the budget to allocate many millions of tokens to each student without a sweat.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#73

Post by cyrillite »

RobinL wrote: 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…

This iterative process hasn’t led to better results than my best effort, but it has led to 90% of my best in a fraction of the time. That’s especially true if I have curated a list of quotes, key phrases, and research literature I know I want to use directly or pull from.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#74

Post by Der_Einzige »

thadGX10 wrote: post #65
russfink wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No they won't. It takes 10 min to be "effective" with an "AI", it takes 10 years to be effective with TAOCP.

The people who become truly effective with AI, i.e., the folks who write truly good code with it, make truly beautiful art, spend closer to effectively 10 years of man-hours than 10 mins with it.

Using AI is a skill too. People who use it every day quickly realize how poor they are at using it vs the very skilled when they compare themselves. Ever compared your own quality AI art vs the top rated stuff on Civit.AI? Pretty sure your stuff will be garbage, and the community will agree.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#75

Post by RobinL »

aaplok wrote: post #57
RobinL wrote: 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 proces…

Yeah, absolutely agree with that. Definitely has the potential to be particularly harmful in educational settings of users blindly trusting.

I guess it's just like many tools, they can be used well or badly, and people need to learn how to use the well to get value from them

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#76

Post by dr_dshiv »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #66
ratedgene wrote: post #25

I was talking to a teacher today that works with me at length about the impact of AI LLM models are having now when considering student's attitude towards learning. When I was young, I refused to learn geography because we had map applications. I could just look it up. I did the same for anything I could, offload the cognitive overhead to something better -- I think this is something we all do consciously or not. Tha…

The correct answer, and you'd see it if folks paid attention to the constant linkedin "AI researcher/ML Engineer job postings are up 10% week over week" banners, is to aggressively reorient education in society to education about how to use AI systems. This rustles a TON of feathers to even broach as a topic, but it's the only correct one. The AI engineer will eat everything, including your educational system, in 5-1…

Times tables aren’t the problem. Memorizing is actually fun and empowering if done right.

But I agree that the “learning is pain” is just not my experience.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#77

Post by Der_Einzige »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #35
idopmstuff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that matter? LLMs are going to be increasingly important tools, so it's valuable for educators to help students understand how to use them well. If you choose to exclude modern tools in your teaching to avoid disadvantaging those who don't want to use them, you disadvantage all the students who do want to use them. To put it another way, modern high school level math classes disadvantage students who want to…

> but it would be quite odd to suggest that we should exclude calculators from math curricula as a result. That wouldn't be odd at all. Calculators have no place in a math class. You're there to learn how to do math, not how to get a calculator to do math for you.

Math class has no place without calculators. You're there to learn how to do math in the real world, not how to do math in a contrived world where we pretend that the ability to do calculations isn't ubiquitous. There are almost certainly more calculator capable devices on earth than people today. Ludditism is the human death drive expressed in a particularly toxic fashion.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#78

Post by nonameiguess »

ratedgene wrote: post #25

I was talking to a teacher today that works with me at length about the impact of AI LLM models are having now when considering student's attitude towards learning. When I was young, I refused to learn geography because we had map applications. I could just look it up. I did the same for anything I could, offload the cognitive overhead to something better -- I think this is something we all do consciously or not. Tha…

I think at a certain point, you either value having your own skills and knowledge, or you don't. You may as well ask why anyone bothers learning to throw a baseball when they could just offload to a pitching machine.

And I get it. Pitchers who go pro get paid a lot and aren't allowed to use machines, so that's a hell of an incentive, but the vast majority of kids who ever pick up a baseball are never going to go pro, are never even going to try to go pro, and just enjoy playing the game.

It's fair to say many, if not most, students don't enjoy writing the way kids enjoy playing games, but at the same time, the point was mostly never mastering the five paragraph thesis format anyway. The point was learning to learn, about arbitrary topics, well enough to the point that you could write a reasonably well-argued paper about it. Even if a machine can do the writing for you, it can't do the learning for you. There's either value in having knowledge in your own brain or there isn't. If there isn't, then there never was, and AI didn't change that. You always could have paid or bullied the smarter kids into doing the work for you.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#80

Post by dmonitor »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #35
idopmstuff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that matter? LLMs are going to be increasingly important tools, so it's valuable for educators to help students understand how to use them well. If you choose to exclude modern tools in your teaching to avoid disadvantaging those who don't want to use them, you disadvantage all the students who do want to use them. To put it another way, modern high school level math classes disadvantage students who want to…

> but it would be quite odd to suggest that we should exclude calculators from math curricula as a result. That wouldn't be odd at all. Calculators have no place in a math class. You're there to learn how to do math, not how to get a calculator to do math for you.

Calculators in early math classes, such as algebra, would be 100% detrimental to learning. Getting an intuitive understanding of addition and multiplication is invaluable and can only be obtained through repetition. Once you reach higher levels of math, the actual numbers become irrelevant so a calculator is fine. But for anything below that, you need to do it by hand to get any value.
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