Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

openai.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 318 posts

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#201

Post by Fomite »

cfmcdonald wrote: post #189
JadeNB wrote: post #132

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! 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.

Again, it is standard practice to cite things like (personal communication) or (Person, unpublished) to document where a fact is coming from, even if it cannot be retraced (which also comes up when publishing talks whose recordings or transcripts are not available).

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#202

Post by wrp »

Eisenstein wrote: post #186
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…

Does pedagogy have established and verified methodology that will result in a completely PHYSICALLY developed student, if only the student does the EXERCISE as prescribed? No, but we still see the value in physical activity to promote healthy development.

> many things we were forced to do in school were not helpful at all

I've never had to do push-ups since leaving school. It was a completely useless skill to spend time on. Gym class should have focused on lifting bags of groceries or other marketable skill.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#203

Post by Fomite »

I mostly teach graduate students, and in my first lecture, one of the slides goes through several LLMs attempts at a fairly simple prompt to write a seminar introduction for me.

We grade them in terms of factually correct statements, "I suppose" statements (yes, I've worked on influenza, but that's not what I'm best known for), and outright falsehoods.

Thus far none of them have gotten it right - illustrating at least that students need the skills to fact check their output.

I also remind them that they have two major oral exams, and failing them is not embarrassing, it's catastrophic.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#204

Post by Iulioh »

owenpalmer wrote: post #198
Iulioh wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The problem with these answers is that they are right but misleading in a way.

Glass is not a pure element so that temperature is the "production temperature" but as an amorphous material it ""melts"" in the way a plastic material ""melts"" and can be worked at temperature as low as 5-700c.

I feel like without a specification the answer is wrong by omission.

What "melts" means when you are not working with a pure element is pretty messy.

This came out in a discussion for a project with a friend too obsessed with GPT (we needed that second temperature and i was "this can't be right....it's too high")

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#205

Post by skydhash »

strken wrote: post #199
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.

I could probably copy it straight from my commits log if my team is amenable to bullet point format.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#206

Post by [deleted] »

Eisenstein wrote: post #186
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…

[deleted]

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#207

Post by dtnewman »

freedomben wrote: post #51

I sit on my local school board and (as everyone knows) AI has been whirling through the school like a tornado. I'm concerned about student using it to cheat, but I'm also pretty concerned about how teachers are using it. For example, many teachers have fed student essays into ChatGPT and asked "did AI write this?" or "was this plagiarized" or similar, and fully trusting whatever the AI tells them. This has led to som…

Nice! You should check out a free chrome plugin that I wrote for this called revision history. It’s organically grown to 140k users, so the problem obviously resonates (revisionhistory.com).

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#208

Post by skydhash »

kamaal wrote: post #177
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…

>>I wonder if my coding skill will deteriorate in the years to come... Well that's not how LLMs work. Don't use an LLM to do thinking for you. You use LLMs to work for you, while you tell(after thinking) it what's to be done. Basically things like- . Attach a click handler to this button with x, y, z params and on click route it to the path /a/b/c . Change the color of this header to purple. . Parse the json in param…

Maybe I'm too good at my editor (currently Emacs, previously Vim), but the fact is that I can type all of this faster than dictating it to an AI and verifying its output.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#209

Post by scruple »

strken wrote: post #199
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.

I keep mine pretty short and have been writing them up bullet-style in org-mode for like 15 years. I can scan back over the entire year when I need to deal with my annual review and I don't think I spend more than 5 minutes on this in any given week. Converting from my notes to something I would deliver to someone else might take a few minutes of formatting since I tend to write in full sentences as-is. I can't imagine turning to an AI tool for this shit.
Post reply on HN