Earlier quoted context omitted.
How did the people who wrote the LLM and associated software do it when they had no such thing to "just look it up"?
Stackoverflow/stack exchange was a proto-LLM. Basically the same thing but 1-2 day latency for replies. In 20 years we'll be able to tell this in a stereotypically old geezer way: "You kids have it easy, back in my day we had to wait for an actual human to reply to our daft questions.. and sometimes nobody would bother at all!"
A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
111–120 of 318 posts
Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
#112I 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,…
Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. This is certainly useful to a point, and I don't recommend memorizing a lot of trivia, but it's easy to go too far with it. Having a basic mental model about many asp…
Helpful in terms of what? Understanding some forced meme? "Force this meme so you can understand this other forced meme." is not education it's indoctrination. And even if you wanted to, for some unknown reason, understand the article you can look at a (changing and disputed) map as the parent said. This is the opposite of deep knowledge, this is API knowledge at best.
Perhaps, but in the case that you are I think it's a stretch to say that the only utility of this is 'indoctrination' or 'understanding this. other forced meme'. The point is that lookups (even to an AI) cost time, and if you have to do one for every other line in a document, you will either end up spending a ton of time reading, or (more likely) do an insufficient number of lookups and come away with a distorted view of the situation. This 'baseline' level of knowledge IMO is a reasonable thing to expect for any field, not 'indoctrination' in anything other than the most diluted sense of the term.
Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#115I 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…
This does not really lend great credence to the rest of your argument. Yes, Linkedin is hyping the latest job trend. But study after study shows that the bulk of engineers are not doing ML/AI work, even after a year of Linkedin putting up those banners -- and if there were even 2 ML/AI jobs at the start of such a period, then 10% week-over-week growth would imply that the entire population of the earth was in the field.
Clearly that is not the case. So either those banners are total lies, or your interpretation of exponential growth (if something grows exponentially for a bit, it must keep growing exponentially forever) is practically disjointed from reality. And at that point, it's worth asking: what other assumptions about exponential growth might be wrong in this world-view?
Perhaps by "AI engineer" you (like many publications nowadays) just mean to indicate "someone who works with computers"? In that case I could understand your point.
Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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? P…
Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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
#119This 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
#120For example, I have zero qualms about relying on AI at work to write progress reports and code up some scripts. I know I can do it myself but why would I? I spent many years in college learning to read and write and code. AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my job. It seems irrational not to use it. Like a farmer who tills his land by hand rather than relying on a tractor because it builds character or something. But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come...
On the other hand, if you are a student trying to learn something new, relying on AI requires walking a fine line. You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply. At the same time, if you under-rely on AI, you drastically decrease the rate at which you can learn new things.
In the old days, people were fit because of physical labor. Now people are fit because they go to the gym. I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future?