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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

#191

Post by alasdair_ »

treflop wrote: post #170
margalabargala wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The difference is that you can trust a good calculator.

I found a bug in the ios calculator in the middle of a masters degree exam. The answer changed depending on which way the phone was held. (A real bug - I reported it and they fixed it). So knowing the expected result matters even when using the calculator.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#192

Post by beckford »

lolinder wrote: post #130
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.

It's more complicated than that—this trade-off between using a tool to extend our capabilities and developing our own muscles is as old as history. See the dialog between Theuth and Thamus about writing. Writing does have the effects that Socrates warned about, but it's also been an unequivocal net positive for humanity in general and for most humans in particular. For one thing, it's why we have a record of the deba…

TIL: Another instance of history repeating itself.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#193

Post by Iulioh »

owenpalmer wrote: post #190
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is, your position is against a inherent characteristic of LLMs.

LLMs hallucinate.

That's true and by how they are made it cannot be false.

Anything they generate cannot bw trusted and have to be verified.

They are good at generating fluff but i wouldn't rely on them for anything.

Ask at that temperature glass melts and you will get 5 different answers, noone true.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#194

Post by fhd2 »

aaplok wrote: post #57
RobinL wrote: post #2

I think this is pretty good advice. I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything (write all the code, write the whole essay). The advice in this article largely mirrors - by analogy - how I use AI for coding. To rubber duck, to generate ideas, to ask for feedback, to ask for alternatives and for criticism. Usually it cannot write the whole thing (essay, program )in one go…

> 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…

I'm terrified when I see people get a whiff of a problem, and immediately turn to ChatGPT. If you don't even think about the problem, you have a roundabout zero chance of understanding it - and a similar chance of solving it. I run into folks like that very rarely, but when I do, it gives me the creeps.

Then again, I bet some of these people were doing the same with Google in the past, landing on some low quality SEO article that sounds close enough.

Even earlier, I suppose they were asking somebody working for them to figure it out - likely somebody unqualified who babbled together something plausible sounding.

Technology changes, but I'm not sure people do.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#195

Post by eszed »

GuB-42 wrote: post #185

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 eve…

Yeah, but that's the only actually creative part of writing. It's the bit that, once you reach a certain level of skill, becomes enjoyable.

I mean, I know what you've described is what everyone will do, but I feel sad for the students who'll learn like that. They won't develop as writers to the point of having style, and then - once everything written is a style-less mush of LLM-generated phrases - what's the point of reading it? We might as well feed everything back through the LLM to extract the "main ideas" for us.

I guess we're "saving labor" that way, but what an anti-human process we'll have made.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#196

Post by bigger_cheese »

SauntSolaire wrote: post #44
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 "mental math trick", it's a straightforward calculation you should be able to do in your head.

I don't know if this is a trick but the fast way I did that problem quickly in my head is 20% = (10% X 2) i.e calc 10% of the number then double it.

To quickly calc 10% just multiply the number by 0.1 which you can do by moving the decimal point one place 20,000.00 => 2,000.000 then it is easy to double that number.

to get 4,000.

17% for example is 1.7 x 10%

in this case 1.7 x 2,000 = 3,400

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#197

Post by Baeocystin »

nkrisc wrote: post #188
margalabargala wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sanity Checking Expected Output is one of the most vital skills a person can have. It really is. But knowing the general shape of the thing is different than any particular algorithm, don't you think?

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#198

Post by owenpalmer »

Iulioh wrote: post #193
owenpalmer wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The point is, your position is against a inherent characteristic of LLMs. LLMs hallucinate. That's true and by how they are made it cannot be false. Anything they generate cannot bw trusted and have to be verified. They are good at generating fluff but i wouldn't rely on them for anything. Ask at that temperature glass melts and you will get 5 different answers, noone true.

It got the question correct in 3 trials, with 1 of the trials being the smaller model.

GPT4o

https://chatgpt.com/share/673578e7-e34c-8006-94e5-7e456aca6f...

GPT4o

https://chatgpt.com/share/67357941-0418-8006-a368-7fe8975fbd...

GPT4o-mini

https://chatgpt.com/share/673579b1-00e4-8006-95f1-6bc95b638d...

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#199

Post by strken »

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…

How long are your progress reports? Mine are a one sentence message like "Hey, we've got a fix for the user profile bug, but we can't deploy it for an hour minimum because we've found an edge case to do with where the account signed up from" and I'm not sure where the AI comes in.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#200

Post by Fomite »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #81
youoy wrote: 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

It's as much of a source as (personal communication) is, and that's also a requirement if you just went and asked an expert.
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