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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

#161

Post by 998244353 »

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…

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I wonder if this "missing piece of insight" is at least sometimes an illusion, as in the "monads are like burritos" fallacy [0]. Of course this does not apply if there really is just a missing fact that too many explanations glossed over.

[0] https://byorgey.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/abstraction-intuiti...

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#162

Post by girvo »

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?

Have you not run into trouble when your phone is dead but you have to contact someone? I have, it's frustrating. Thankfully I remember my partners number, though its the only one these days.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#163

Post by jancsika »

Anecdote-- every single high school student and college student I've talked to in the past year (probably dozens) use chatgpt to write their papers.

They don't even know how to write a prompt, or in some cases even what "writing a prompt" means. They just paste the assignment in as a prompt and copy the output.

They then feed that as input to some app that detects chatgpt papers and change the wording until it flows through undetected.

One student told me that, for good measure, she runs it twice and picks and chooses sentences from each-- this apparently is a speedup to beating the ai paper detector. There are probably other arbitrarily-chosen patterns.

I've never heard of any of these students using it in any way other than holistic generation of the end product for an assignment. Most of them seem overconfident that they could write papers of similar quality if they ever tried. But so far, according to all of them, they have not.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#164

Post by rjh29 »

antod wrote: post #153
WalterBright wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just because it spits out a RE doesn't mean the RE is what you wanted. For one thing, you'll need to be precise in your prompt.

Rhetorical question: Can you ever fully be sure you have the regex you wanted?

Writing regexes by hand is hard so there will always be some level of testing involved. But reading a regex and verifying it works is easier than writing one from scratch.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#165

Post by aquariusDue »

margalabargala wrote: post #156
sbuttgereit wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 th…

In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value. In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator. In a world where…

This is both inspiring and terrifying at the same time.

That being said I usually prefer to do something the long and manual way, write the process down sometimes, and afterwards search for easier ways to do it. Of course this makes sense on a case by case basis depending on your personal context.

Maybe stuff like crosswords and more will undergo a renaissance and we'll see more interesting developments like Gauguin[0] which is a blend of Sudoku and math.

[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.piepmeyer.gauguin/

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#166

Post by mav3ri3k »

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 current 3rd year college student here. I really want LLMs to help me in learning but the success rate is 0.

They often can not generate relatively trivial code When they do, they can not explain that code. For example, I was trying to learn socket programing in C. Claude generated the code, but when I stared asking about stuff, it regressed hard. Also, often the code is more complex than it needs to be. When learning a topic, I want that topic, not the most common relevant code with all the spagheti used on github.

For other subjects, like dbms, computer network, when asking about concepts, you better double check, because they still make stuff up. I asked ChatGPT to solve prev year question for dbms, and it gave a long, answer which looked good on surface. But when I actually read through because I need to understand what it is doing, there were glaring flaws. When I point them out, it makes other mistakes.

So, LLMs struggle to generate concise to the point code. They can not explain that code. They regularly make stuff up. This is after trying Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini with their paid versions in various capacities.

My bottom line is, I should NEVER use a LLM to learn. There is no fine line here. I have tried again and again because tech bros keep preaching about sparks of AGI, making startup with 0 coding skills. They are either fools or genius.

LLMs are useful strictly if you already know what you are doing. That's when your productivity gains are achieved.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#167

Post by antod »

rjh29 wrote: post #164
antod wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rhetorical question: Can you ever fully be sure you have the regex you wanted?

Writing regexes by hand is hard so there will always be some level of testing involved. But reading a regex and verifying it works is easier than writing one from scratch.

My overly snide point about regexes was that most of the time "verifying it works" is more like finding and fixing a few more edge cases on the asymptotic journey towards no more brokenness.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#168

Post by bokoharambe »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #77
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #35

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.

Incredible username. And as a current math student, I agree with you completely, for the simple fact that I can do proofs far easier than I can do arithmetic. Students like me who are fine at math generally but who are not great at arithmetic in particular really suffer in our current environment that rejects the use of machine assistance.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#169

Post by fn-mote »

nonameiguess wrote: post #78
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,…

> they could just offload to a pitching machine

Sure, but watch out for the game with a pitching machine, a hitting machine, and a running machine.

I do think there is a good analogy here - if you're making an app for an idea that you find important, all of the LLM help makes sense. You're trying to do a creative thing and you need help in certain parts.

> You always could have paid or bullied the smarter kids into doing the work for you.

Don't overlook the ease of access as being a major contributor. Paying $20/month to have all of your work done is still going to prevent students from using it. Paying $200/month would for sure bring the numbers of student users near to zero. When it's free you'll see more people using it. Just like anything else.

Totally agree with your main points.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#170

Post by treflop »

margalabargala wrote: post #156
sbuttgereit wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 th…

In the presence of sufficiently good and ubiquitous tools, knowing how to do some base thing loses most or all of its value. In a world where everyone has a phone/calculator in their pocket, remembering how to do long division on paper is not worthwhile. If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454", it is not worth your time to do that by hand rather than plugging it into your phone's calculator. In a world where…

Wait until AI prints out something that doesn't work and you can't figure out how to fix it because you don't know how it works so you do trial and error for 3 hours.

The difference is that you can trust a good calculator. You currently can't trust AI to be right. If we get a point where the output of AI is trustworthy, that's a whole different kind of world altogether.

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