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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

#251

Post by boredhedgehog »

WalterBright wrote: post #47
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 "trick". And yes, it's incredibly useful in enabling recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error. When you've got zero feel for numbers, you're going to make bad engineering decisions. You'll also get screwed by car dealers every time, and contractors. You won't know how far you can go with the gas in your tank. It goes on and on. Calculators are great for get…

> recognizing when your calculator gives a bogus result because you made a keyboarding error

It might be counterintuitive, but the cheaper (and therefore successful) solution will always be more technological integration, not less.

In this case, better speech recognition, so the user doesn't have to type the numbers anymore, and an LLM middleman that's aware of the real-world context of the question, so the user can be asked if he's sure about the number before it gets passed to the calculator.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#252

Post by isaacfrond »

mav3ri3k wrote: post #215
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.

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…

I had no idea what even the question was. I had chatgpt (4o) explain it to me, and solve it. I now know what candidate keys are, and that the question asks for AB and BC. I'd share the link, but chatgpt doesn't support sharing logs with images.

So you did not convince me that LLMs are not working (on the contrary), but I did learn something today! thanks for that.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#253

Post by reacharavindh »

8note wrote: post #225
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…

> But there is something to be said about atrophy. If you don't use it, you lose it. YMMV, but I didn't ride a bike for 10ish years, and then got back on and I was happily riding quickly after. I also use zsh and ctrl+r for every Linux command, but I can still come up with the command of I need to, just, slowly. Ive overall found that if I learn a thing, it's learnt. Stuff I didn't learn in university, but passed any…

Dont you see the survivorship bias in your thinking?

You learnt the bike and practiced it rigorously before stoppping for 10 years, and you're able to pick it up. You _knew_ the commands because you learned the them the manual/hard way, and then used assistance to to do it for you..

Now, do you think it will apply to someone who begins their journey with LLMs and doesnt quite develop the skill of "Does this even look right?!", and says to themselves "if LLMs could write this module why bother learning what that thing actually does?" and then get bitten by it due to LLM hallucinations and stare like a deer in headlights.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#254

Post by neilv »

IIUC, ChatGPT is making students dumber, as well as making them cheaters and liars.

There are some good ideas in the article, but are any of the cheaters going to be swayed, to change their cheating ways?

Maybe the intent of the article is to itemize talking points, to be amplified by others, to provide OpenAI some PR cover for the tsunami of dumb, cheating liars.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#255

Post by Moru »

brtkdotse wrote: post #248
Moru wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny you should say that. In Sweden, to get good grades in English you have to learn lots of facts about UK, like population, name of kings and so on. What does that have to do with english? It's spoken in many other countries too. And those facts change, the answers weren't even up to date now...

That’s odd. Outside of reading comprehension assignments I never had any fact memorization as part of any language course. Perhaps they changed the curriculum since the 90s

Yes, I was very confused when daughter came home with some bad scores on a test and couldn't understand what she meant. I had to call the teacher to get an explanation that it wasn't history lesson, it was english lesson... Really weird is just not covering it.

Swedish schools gets a makeover every time we change government. It's one of those things they just have to "fix" when they get to power.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#256

Post by gg82 »

QuarterReptile wrote: post #54
mewpmewp2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some parts of it were though.

Almost all parts require it, but none are about it. That's how background knowledge works. If you can't get over the drudgery of learning scales and chords, you'll never learn music. The fact that many learners never understand this end goal is sad but doesn't invalidate the methodology needed to achieve the progression.

It would be interesting to test adults with the same tests that students were given. Plus some more esoteric knowledge. What they learned at school could then be compared to see new information that they learned after school... as well as information, skills that they didn't use after school. It may help focus learning on useful skills knowledge that people have learned... as well as information that they didn't learn in school that would be useful for them!

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#257

Post by Moru »

TSP00N3 wrote: post #235
abduhl wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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?

There is only one correct way to calculate 5/2+3. The order is PEMDAS[0]. You divide before adding. Maybe you are thinking that 5/(2+3) is the same as 5/2+3, which is not the case. Improper math syntax doesn’t mean there are two potential answers, but rather that the person that wrote it did so improperly. [0] https://www.mathsisfun.com/operation-order-pemdas.html

Maybe user means the difference between a simple calculator that does everything as you type it in and one that can figure out the correct order. We used those simpler ones in school when I was young. The new fancy ones were quite something after that :)

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#258

Post by jay_kyburz »

low_tech_love wrote: post #236
Eisenstein wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a (senior) lecturer in a university, I’m with you on most of what you wrote. The truth is that every teacher must immediately think: if any of their assignments or examinations involve something that could potentially be GPT-generated, it will be GPT-generated. It might be easy to spot such a thing, but you’ll be spending hours writing feedback while sifting through the rivers of meaningless artificially-generated…

A genuine question, have you evaluated AI for marking written work?

I'm not an educator, but it seems to me like gippity would be better at analyzing a students paper than writing it in the first place.

Your prompt could provide the AI the marking criteria, or the rubric, and have it summarize how well the paper hits the important points.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#259

Post by WA »

mav3ri3k wrote: post #166
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 learni…

I've been programming for 20 years and mostly JS for the last 10 years. Right now, I'm learning Go. I wrote a simple CLI tool to get data from several servers. Asked GPT-4o to generate some code, which worked fine at first. Then I asked it to rewrite the code with channels to make it async and it contained at least one major bug.

I don't dismiss it as completely useless, because it pointed me in the correct direction a couple times, but you have to double-check everything. In a way, it might help me learn stuff, because I have to read its output critically. From my perspective, the success rate is a bit above 0, but it's nowhere close to "magical" at all.

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