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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

#261

Post by voiper1 »

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…

:sigh:

With all the concern over AI, it's being used _against recommendations_ to detect AI usage? [0][1]

So while the concern for using AI is founded, teachers are so mistaken at understanding what it is and the tech around is that they are using AI in areas it's publicly acknowleded it doesn't work. That detracts from any credibility the teachers have about AI usage!

[0] https://openai.com/index/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai... openai pulled their AI classifier [1] https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/teach/ai-detectors-dont-wo...

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#262

Post by Eisenstein »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #258
low_tech_love wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know I would have had a blast finding ways to direct the model into giving me top scores by manipulating it through the submitted text. I think that without a bespoke model that has been vetted, is supervised, and is constrained, you are going to end up with some interesting results running classwork through a language model for grading.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#263

Post by ben_w »

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…

> I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future?

Already do — that's what "brain training" apps; consumer EdTech like Duolingo and Brilliant; and educational YouTube and podcasts like 3blue1brown, Easy German, ElectroBOOM, Overly Sarcastic Productions all are.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#264

Post by nertirs1 »

ben_w wrote: post #263
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…

> I wonder if there will be an analog for intellectual work. Will people be going to "mental" gyms in the future? Already do — that's what "brain training" apps; consumer EdTech like Duolingo and Brilliant; and educational YouTube and podcasts like 3blue1brown, Easy German, ElectroBOOM, Overly Sarcastic Productions all are.

AFAIK, none of these teach person, how to research a topic.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#265

Post by Miraltar »

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…

Using llm blindly will lead to poor results in complex tasks so I'm not sure how much of a problem it might be. I feel like students using it blindly won't get far but I might be wrong.

> One of the most pernicious I have noticed is users who turn to AI for the initial idea without reflecting about the problem first I've been doing that and it usually doesn't work. How can you ask an ai to solve a problem you don't understand at all ? More often than not, when you do that the ai throws a dumb response and you get back to thinking about how to present the problem in a clear way which makes you understand it better.

So you still end up learning to analyze a problem and solving it. But I can't tell if the solution comes up faster or not nor if it helps learning or not.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#266

Post by dawidloubser »

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…

I think that anybody who finds the process of clumsily describing the above examples to an LLM in some text box using english and waiting for it to spit out some code which you hope is suitable for your given programming context and codebase more efficient than just expressing the logic directly in your programming language in an efficient editor, probably suffers from multiple weaknesses:

- Poor editor / editing setup

- Poor programming language and knowledge thereof

- Poor APIs and/or knowledge thereof

Mankind has worked for decades to develop elegant and succinct programming languages within which to express problems and solutions, and compilers with deterministic behaviour to "do the work for us".

I am surprised that so many people in the software engineering field are prepared to just throw all of this away (never mind develop it further) in exchange for using a poor "programming language" (say, english) to express problems clumsily in a roudabout way, and then throw away the "source code" (the LLM prompt) entirely such to simply paste the "compiler output" (code the LLM spewed out which may or may not be suitable or correct) into some heterogenous mess of multiple different LLM outputs pasted together in a codebase held together by nothing more than the law of averages, and hope.

Then there's the fun fact that every single LLM prompt interaction consumes a ridiculous amount of energy - I heard figures such as the total amount required to recharge a smartphone battery - in an era where mankind is racing towards an energy cliff. Vast, remote data centres filled with GPUs spewing tonnes of CO₂ and massive amounts of heat to power your "programming experience".

In my opinion, LLMs are a momentous achievement with some very interesting use-cases, but they are just about the most ass-backwards and illogical way of advancing the field of programming possible.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#267

Post by chipweinberger »

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…

or submit a screen recording of their writing process.

seems hard to fake that. and you could randomly quiz them on it .

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#268

Post by setopt »

TSP00N3 wrote: post #239
Eisenstein wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That actually is an approach. Some teachers make you read the lesson before class, others give you homework on the lesson before lecturing it, and some even quiz you on it on top of that before allowing you to ask questions. I personal feel that trying to learn the material before class helped me learn the material better than coming into class blind.

That’s the “flipped classroom” approach to pedagogics, for those who might be interested.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#269

Post by dr_dshiv »

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.

This is my point and better stated. I always acknowledge ChatGPT in my writing and never cite it.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#270

Post by Wingy »

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…

Also anecdotally, I’m a college student and do not use LLMs to generate my papers.

I have however asked ChatGPT to cite sources for specific things, to varying success. Surprisingly, it returns sources that actually exist most of the time now. They often aren’t super helpful though because they either aren’t in my school’s library or are books rather than articles.

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