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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

#81
post #62

I actually think that this is the most important part of the article: > Similarly, it’s important to be open about how you use ChatGPT. The simplest way to do this is to generate shareable links and include them in your bibliography . By proactively giving your professors a way to audit your use of AI, you signal your commitment to academic integrity and demonstrate that you’re using it not as a shortcut to avoid doi…

I’ve seen a lot of places that require students to reference their ChatGPT use — and I think it is wrong headed. Because it is not a source to cite!

But, sharing links for helping teachers understand your prompting is great

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#82
I wonder if the next great competitive advantage will be the ability to write excellently; specifically the ability to articulate the problem domain in a manner that will yield the best results from LLMs. However, in order to offload a difficult problem to a LLM, you need to understand it well enough to articulate it, which means you'll need to think about it deeply. However, if we teach our students to offload the process of _THINKING_DEEPLY_ to LLMs, then we atrophy the _THINKING_DEEPLY_ circuit in their brain, and they're far less likely to use LLMs to solve interesting problems, because they're unable to grok the problem to begin with!

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#83

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 there is a bit of a 3rd category as well:

1. What can tools do better now that no human could hope to compete with?

2. Which other tasks are likely to remain human-led in the near term?

3. For the areas where tools excel, what is the optimum amount of background understanding to have?

E.g. you mention memorizing maps. Memorizing all of the countries and their main cities is probably not very optimal for 99.999%+ of people vs referencing a map app. At the same time needing to pull up a map for any mention of a location outside of "home" is not necessarily optimal just because the map will have it. And of course the other things about maps in general (types, features, limitations, ways to use them, ways they change) outside of a particular app implementation that would go along with general geography.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

When speaking of Math class, are you ignoring everything up to pre-calculus or do you think everything from addition flashcards, times tables, and long division is useless? I'd argue those exercises are invaluable. Seeing two numbers and just knowing the sum is always faster than plugging into a calculator.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#85

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'm not sure I understand the geography point - maps and indexes have been around for hundreds of years - what did the app add to make it not worthwhile learning geography?

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#86

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…

How did the people who wrote the LLM and associated software do it when they had no such thing to "just look it up"?

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#88

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.

The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster is another very good one:

https://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~koehl/Teaching/ECS188/PDF_files/...

And re-skimming it just now I noticed the following eerie line:

> There was the button that produced literature.

Wild that this was written in 1903.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#89
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this even realistic? The font wouldn't maintain its size in the ChatGPT box... It would take a large prompt or a careless person to not notice the extra instructions.

The careless people are probably exactly the ones they want to filter out.

I can't fathom a job applicant so careless they would not even attempt to read the prompt in full before regurgitating ChatGPT's response. Then again, I'm not one who deals with resumes. Nor one who would do something like that in the first place. Probably things like this causing people to apply for 500+ jobs and companies having to filter through thousands of applicants, neither one truly reading it in full...

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#90
post #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!

It would need to revise it, move text around, write and delete entire sections.
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