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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

#181

Post by Eisenstein »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #150
alwayslikethis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Do you advocate that students learn without the help of teachers until they exhaust their own efforts?

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#182

Post by kamaal »

throttlebody wrote: post #68

Looking up stuff, with any efficiency, requires a significant amount of prior knowledge to ask the right question.

Prior knowledge part becomes important as you realise, verifying the output of an LLM to be right requires the same too.

In fact you can only ask the smallest possible increment so that the answer can be verified to be true with least possible effort, and you can build from there.

The same issue happens with code. Its not like total beginners will be able to write replacement for the Linux kernel in the first 5 mins of use. Or that a product manager will just write a product spec and a billion dollar product will be produced magically.

You will still do most of the code work, AI will just do the smart typing work for you.

Perhaps it all comes down the fact that, you have to verify the output of the process. And you need to be aware of what you are doing at a very fundamental level to make that happen.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#183

Post by jaimex2 »

jancsika wrote: post #163

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…

The real hack is you give it an example of previous work you have done and ask it to write in that style.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#184

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

owenpalmer wrote: post #176
mav3ri3k wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 learni…

I'm starting to suspect that people generally have poor experiences with LLMs due to bad prompting skills. I would need to see your chats with it in order to know if you're telling the truth.

The simpler explanation is that LLMs are not very good.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#185

Post by GuB-42 »

Surprised that actual writing is not in the list.

By actual writing I simply mean finding the right words, with the right spelling, a good flow, and well constructed sentenced.

I found LLMs to be awesome at this job, which make sense, they are language models before being knowledge models. Their prose is not very exciting, but the more formal the document, the better they are, and essays are quite formal. You can even give it some context, something like: "Write an essay for the class of X that will have an A+ grade".

The idea is to let the LLM do the phrasing, but you take care of the facts (checking primary sources, etc...) and general direction. It is known that LLMs sometimes get their facts wrong, but their spelling and grammar is usually excellent.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#186

Post by Eisenstein »

wrp wrote: post #154

I have been working with colleagues to develop advice on how to adapt teaching methods in the face of widespread use of LLMs by students. The first point I like to make is that the purpose of having students do tasks is to foster their development. That may sound obvious, but many people don't seem to take notice that the products of student activities are worthless in themselves. We don't have students do push-ups i…

It is trivially easy to spot AI writing if you are familiar with it, but if it requires failing most of the class for turning in LLM generated material, I think we are going to find that abolishing graded homework is the only tenable solution.

The student's job is not to do everything the teacher says, it is to get through schooling somewhat intact and ready for their future. The sad fact is that many things we were forced to do in school were not helpful at all, and only existed because the teachers thought it was, or for no real reason at all.

Pretending that pedagogy has established and verified methodology that will result in a completely developed student, if only the student did the work as prescribed, is quite silly.

Teaching evolves with technology like every other part of society and it may come out worse or it may come out better, but I don't want to go back fountain pens and slide rules and I think in 20 years this generation won't look back on their education thinking they got a worse one than we did because they could cheat easier.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#188

Post by nkrisc »

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…

> If I ask you "what is 457829639 divided by 3454"

And if it spits out 15,395,143 I hope you remember enough math to know that doesn’t look right, and how to find the actual answer if you don’t trust your calculator’s answer.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#189

Post by cfmcdonald »

JadeNB wrote: post #132
dr_dshiv wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because otherwise it becomes convoluted. It is acceptable to cite and source published material. Having to account for the source of one’s ideas, however, citing friends and influences - it shouldn’t be a moral requirement, just imagine!

> Because otherwise it becomes convoluted. It is acceptable to cite and source published material. Having to account for the source of one’s ideas, however, citing friends and influences - it shouldn’t be a moral requirement, just imagine! But there is, I think, a big gap between "it is not a source to cite" from your original post, and "it shouldn't be a moral requirement" in this one. I think that, while not every…

The point of citing sources is so that the reader can retrace the evidential basis on which the writer's claims rest. A citation to "Chat GPT" doesn't help with this at all. Saying "Chat GPT helped me write this" is more like an acknowledgment than a citation.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#190

Post by owenpalmer »

WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #184
owenpalmer wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm starting to suspect that people generally have poor experiences with LLMs due to bad prompting skills. I would need to see your chats with it in order to know if you're telling the truth.

The simpler explanation is that LLMs are not very good.

I can get an LLM to do almost anything I want. Sometimes I need to add a lot of context. Sometimes I need to completely rewrite the prompt after realizing I wasn't communicating clearly. I almost always have to ask it to explain it's reasoning. You can't treat an LLM like a computer. You have to treat it like a weird brain.
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