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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

#141

Post by selcuka »

brookst wrote: post #139
booleandilemma wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to have dozens of phone numbers memorized. Once I got a cell phone I forgot everyone's number. I don't even know the phone number of my own mother. I don't want to lose my ability to think. I don't want to become intellectually dependent on AI in the slightest. I've been programming for over a decade without AI and I don't suddenly need it now.

Interesting perspective. I read your first line about phone numbers as a fantastic thing -- people used to have to memorize multiple 10 digit phone numbers, now you can think about your contacts' names and relationships. But... I think you were actually bemoaning the shift from numbers to names as a loss?

These things are not mutually exclusive. Remembering numbers didn't hinder our ability to remember our contacts' names.

We don't know how brain exactly works, but I don't think we can now do some things better just because we are not using another function of our brains anymore.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#142

Post by [deleted] »

ufo wrote: post #119
grugagag wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

As a professor it's frustrating. We want to give homework feedback for the students that actually put the work in, but we know that half the submissions are plagiarized from chatgpt, which is a waste of both their and my time.

[deleted]

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#143

Post by ssl-3 »

booleandilemma wrote: post #123
wcfrobert wrote: post #120

Lots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning? For 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 jo…

I used to have dozens of phone numbers memorized. Once I got a cell phone I forgot everyone's number. I don't even know the phone number of my own mother. I don't want to lose my ability to think. I don't want to become intellectually dependent on AI in the slightest. I've been programming for over a decade without AI and I don't suddenly need it now.

Well, sure. I can remember phone numbers from 30+ years ago approximately instantly.

I don't have to remember most of them from today, so I simply don't. (I do keep a few current numbers squirreled away in my little pea brain that will help me get rolling again, but I'll probably only ever need to actually use those memories if I ever fall out of the sky and onto a desert island that happens to have a payphone with a bucket of change next to it.)

On a daily, non-outlier basis, I'm no worse for not generally remembering phone numbers. I might even be better off today than I was decades ago, by no longer having to spend the brainpower required for programming new phone numbers into it.

I mean: I grew up reading paper road maps and [usually] helping my dad plan and navigate on road trips. The map pocket in the door of that old Chevrolet was stuffed with folded maps of different areas of the US.

But about the time I started taking my own solo road trips, things like the [OG] MapBlast! website started calculating and charting driving directions that could be printed. This made route planning a lot faster and easier.

Later, we got to where we are today with GPS navigation that has live updates for traffic and road conditions using systems like Waze. This has almost completely eliminated the chores of route planning and remembering directions (and alternate routes) from my life, and while I do have exactly one road map in my car that I do keep updated I haven't actually ever used it for anything since 2008 or so.

And am I less of a person today than I was back when paper maps were the order of the day? No, I don't think that I am -- in fact, I think these kinds of tools have made me much more capable than I ever was.

We call things like this "progress."

I do not yearn for the days before LLM any more than I yearn for the days before the cotton gin or the slide rule or Stack Overflow.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#144

Post by joshdavham »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #30
joshdavham wrote: post #4

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 imagine the bar will just keep getting higher and more will be able to taught in less time. But more won’t be able to be _learned_ in less time

> But more won’t be able to be _learned_ in less time

What makes you think that? I feel like I’m able to learn faster with LLMS than I was before.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#145

Post by shiomiru »

WalterBright wrote: post #47
l33t7332273 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a sort of mental math trick that isn’t incredibly useful in day to day engineering. Now if they say 16,000 or something then maybe there’s an argument against them, but being able to calculate a tip on the fly isn’t really something worth selecting for imo

It's not a "trick". And yes, it's incredibly useful in enabling recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error. When you've got zero feel for numbers, you're going to make bad engineering decisions. You'll also get screwed by car dealers every time, and contractors. You won't know how far you can go with the gas in your tank. It goes on and on. Calculators are great for get…

> it's incredibly useful in enabling recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error.

Humans are much better at pattern matching than computation, so the safest solution is probably to just double check if you've typed in the right numbers.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#146

Post by gauge_field »

grugagag wrote: post #52
starik36 wrote: post #41

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).

Some people see it as not worth and too boring to understand and actually solve it. I had a few friends of mine that I used to teach in our course work. For some of the fundamental classes for stem (e.g. Probability and Stats), even though I tried to show him a way to arrive at the solutions, he tried to ask directly for the solutions instead of arriving at them by himself.

The same thing was true for probably me when I was studying geography and history in my high school years since they were taught largely by a collection of trivia knowledge that I did not find interesting. I would have used chatgpt and be done rather than studying them. But, when I took the courses that covered the same topics in history in my university, it was more enjoyable because the main instructor was covering the topic to tell a story in a more engaging manner (e.g. he was imitating some of the historical figures, it was very funny :))

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#147

Post by ssl-3 »

mattmanser wrote: post #133
85392_school wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience 4o/Claude are really good at one shotting complicated but isolated components (eg streaming JSON parsers).

It does spectacular job with well trodden paths. Asked it to give me a map react control with points plotted and got something working in a jiffy. I was trying to get it write robot framework code earlier and it was remarkably terrible. I would point out an obvious problem, it would replace the code with something even more spectacularly wrong. When I pointed out the new error, it just gave me the exact same old code…

In my experience 4o is really good at ignoring user-provided corrections and insanely regurgitating the same code (and/or the same problems) over and over again.

ChatGPT 4 does much better with corrections, as does Claude. 4o is a pox.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#148

Post by sbuttgereit »

wcfrobert wrote: post #120

Lots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning? For 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 jo…

"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..."

"You don't want to over-rely on AI because a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential for learning something deeply."

These two ideas are closely related and really just different aspects of the same basic frailty of the human intellect. Understanding that I think can really inform you about how you might use these tools in work (or life) and where the lines need to be drawn for your own personal circumstance.

I can't say I disagree with anything you said and think you've made an insightful observation.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#149

Post by James_K »

> Compare your ideas against history’s greatest thinkers

What made these people great thinkers is their minds rather than their writing styles. I'm not sure that chatbots get smarter when you tell them to impersonate someone smart, because in humans, this usually has the reverse effect.

> AI excels at automating tedious, time-consuming tasks like formatting citations

Programs like LaTeX also excel at this kind of work and will probably be more reliable in the long run.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#150

Post by skeeter2020 »

alwayslikethis wrote: post #135
wcfrobert wrote: post #120

Lots of interesting debates in this thread. I think it is worth placing writing/coding tasks into two buckets. Are you producing? Or are you learning? For 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 jo…

> a certain degree of "productive struggle" is essential Honestly, I'm not sure this would account for most of the difficulty in learning. In my experience most of the difficulty involved in learning something involved a few missing pieces of insight. It often took longer to understand the few missing pieces than the rest of the topic. If they are accurate enough, LLMs are great for getting yourself unstuck and keep…

ideally you look and fail and exhaust your own efforts, then get unblocked with a tool or assistant or expert. With LLMs at your finger tips who has both the grit to struggle and the self discipline not to quit early? at the age of the typical student - very few.
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