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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

#211

Post by signaru »

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…

It gets worst when these users/students run to others when the AI generated code doesn't work. Or with colleagues who think they already "wrote" the initial essay then pass it for others to edit and contribute. In such cases it is usually better to rewrite from scratch and tell them their initial work is not useful at all and not worth spending time improving upon.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#212

Post by skydhash »

eszed wrote: post #195
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 o…

> We might as well feed everything back through the LLM to extract the "main ideas" for us.

And I wouldn't bother unless it's corporate memo. Which is already bland once it's past a certain length.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#213

Post by skydhash »

l33t7332273 wrote: post #33
idopmstuff wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that matter? LLMs are going to be increasingly important tools, so it's valuable for educators to help students understand how to use them well. If you choose to exclude modern tools in your teaching to avoid disadvantaging those who don't want to use them, you disadvantage all the students who do want to use them. To put it another way, modern high school level math classes disadvantage students who want to…

Many high school classes are taught in such a way that your calculator rarely helps you.

My high school math classes were mostly about solving problems. The most important was learning the formulas and the steps of the solution. The calculator was mostly a time saver for the actual computation. And once I move to university, almost all the numbers were replaced by letters.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#214

Post by abduhl »

kamaal wrote: post #180
treflop wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You currently can't trust AI to be right. Well that is because you ask a calculator to divide numbers. Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way. Ask the smallest possible for loop and if loop that AI can generate now you have the pocket calculator equivalent of programming.

>> Well that is because you ask a calculator to divide numbers. Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way.

Is it? What is 5/2+3?

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#215

Post by mav3ri3k »

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.

There is no easy way to share. I copied them in google docs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GidKFVgySgLUGlcDSnNMfMIu...

One with ChatGPT about dbms questions and one with claude about socket programming.

Looking back are some questions a little stupid ? Yes. But affcourse they are! I am coming with zero knowledge trying to learn how the socket programming is happening here ? Which functions are begin pulled from which header files, etc.

In the end I just followed along with a random youtube video. When you say, you can get LLM to do anything, I agree. Now that I know how socket programming is happening, for next question in assignment about writing code for crc with socket programming, I asked it to generate code for socket programming, made the necessary changes, asked it generate seperate function for crc, integrated it manually and voila, assignment done.

But this is the execution phase, when I have the domain knowledge. During learning when the user asks stupid questions and the LLM's answer keep getting stupider, then using them is not practical.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#216

Post by skydhash »

bigger_cheese wrote: post #196
SauntSolaire wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

For me, it's just that 20% is one fifth. One fifth of 20 is 4 and you add the remaining zeroes.

You mostly have common equivalences like this in your memory and you can be faster than computing the actual thing with arithmetic. Or have good approximations.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#217

Post by mav3ri3k »

Iulioh wrote: post #204
owenpalmer wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ele…

Yes. This is funny when I know what is happening and I can "guide" the LLM to the right answer. I feel that is the only correct way to use LLMs and it is very productive. However, for learning, I don't know how anyone can rely on them when we know this happens.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#218

Post by antasvara »

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…

The value isn't in rote calculation, but the intuition that doing it gives you.

So yes, it's pretty useless for me to manually divide arbitrarily large numbers. But it's super useful for me to be able to reason around fractions and how that division plays out in practice.

Same goes for bash. Knowing the exact syntax is useless, but knowing what that glue script does and how it works is essential to understanding how your entire program works.

That's the piece I'm scared of. I've seen enough kids through tutoring that just plug numbers into their calculator arbitrarily. They don't have any clue when a number is off by a factor of 10 or what a reasonable calculation looks like. They don't really have a sense for when something is "too complicated" either, as the calculator does all of the work.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#219

Post by bruce511 »

Baeocystin wrote: post #197
nkrisc wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

This gets to the root of the issue. The use case, and user experience, and thus outcome is, is remarkably different depending on your current ability.

Using AI to learn things is useful, because it helps you get terminology right, and helps you Google search well. For example say you need to know a Windows API, you can describe it snd get the name. Then Google how that works.

As an experienced user you can get it to write code. You're good enough to spot errors in the vote and basically just correct as you go. 90% right is good enough.

It's the in-between space which is hardest. You're an inexperienced dev looking to produce, not learn. But you lack the experience and knowledge to recognise the errors, or bad patterns, or whatever. Using AI you end up with stuff that's 'mostly right' - which in programming terms means broken.

This experience difference is why there's so much chatter about usefulness. To some groups it's very useful. To others it's a dangerous crutch.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#220

Post by cube00 »

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…

> Of course a student who would cheat may also lie about cheating, but in a few cases they were able to prove authorship using the history feature built into Google docs.

It's scary to see the reversal of the burden of proof becoming more accepted.

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