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A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

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Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#281

Post by [deleted] »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #276
Eisenstein wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't proved that it made a difference or that doing something else wouldn't have been as or more effective, which is my point. You did it, so these students must do it, with no other rationale than that.

You have forgotten that pedagogy is based on science and research. That is why it is effective for the masses . Anecdotal evidence will never refute the result. Take learning to read, for example. While you can learn to read in a number of ways, some of which are quite unusual, such as memorising the whole picture book and its sound, research has clearly shown that using the phonics approach is the most effective. Or…

[deleted]

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#282

Post by abduhl »

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

So we agree that there is more than one way to interpret 5/2+3 (a correct and an incorrect way) and therefore that the GP statement below is wrong.

“Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way.”

The question for calculators is then the same as the question for LLMs: can you trust the calculator? How do you know if it’s correct when you never learned the “correct” way and you’re just blindly believing the tool?

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#283

Post by ben_w »

nertirs1 wrote: post #264
ben_w wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Neither did University, for me.

I just liked learning as far back as my memories go, so I've been jumping into researching topics because I wanted to know things.

Universe just gave me course materials, homework, and a lot of free time.

Jobs took up a lot of time, but didn't make learning meaninfgully different than it always has been for me.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#284

Post by Eisenstein »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #276
Eisenstein wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You haven't proved that it made a difference or that doing something else wouldn't have been as or more effective, which is my point. You did it, so these students must do it, with no other rationale than that.

You have forgotten that pedagogy is based on science and research. That is why it is effective for the masses . Anecdotal evidence will never refute the result. Take learning to read, for example. While you can learn to read in a number of ways, some of which are quite unusual, such as memorising the whole picture book and its sound, research has clearly shown that using the phonics approach is the most effective. Or…

"Although some studies have shown various gains in achievement (Marzano & Pickering, 2007), the relationship between academic achievement and homework is so unclear (Cooper & Valentine, 2001) that using research to definitively state that homework is effective in all contexts is presumptive."

American Secondary Education 45(2) Spring 2017 Examining Homework Bennett

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#285

Post by freedomben »

wdutch wrote: post #174
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…

I imagine maths teachers had a similar dilemma when pocket calculators became widely available. Now, in the UK students sit 2 different exams: one where calculators are forbidden and one where calculators are permitted (and encouraged). The problems for the calculator exam are chosen so that the candidate must do a lot of problem solving that isn't just computation. Furthermore, putting a problem into a calculator an…

Thank you, you make an excellent point! I very much agree, and I think the idea of two exams is very interesting. The analogy to calculators feels very good, and is very much worth a try!

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#286

Post by kamaal »

abduhl wrote: post #282
TSP00N3 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So we agree that there is more than one way to interpret 5/2+3 (a correct and an incorrect way) and therefore that the GP statement below is wrong. “Which is a question that can be interpreted in only one way. And done only one way.” The question for calculators is then the same as the question for LLMs: can you trust the calculator? How do you know if it’s correct when you never learned the “correct” way and you’re…

>>How do you know if it’s correct when you never learned the “correct” way and you’re just blindly believing the tool?

This is just splitting hairs. People who use calculators interpret it in only one way. You are making a different and a more broad argument that words/symbols can have various meanings, hence anything can be interpreted in many ways.

While these are fun arguments to be made. They are not relevant to practical use of the calculator or LLMs.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#287

Post by JadeNB »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #269
cfmcdonald wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I always acknowledge ChatGPT in my writing and never cite it.

These are not the uses with which I am familiar—as Fomite says in a sibling comment, I am used to referring to citing personal communications; but, if you are using "cite" to mean only "produce as a reproducible testament to truth," and "source" only as "something that reproducibly demonstrates truth," which is a distinction whose value I can acknowledge making even if it's not the one I am used to, then your argument makes more sense to me.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#288

Post by freedomben »

voiper1 wrote: post #261
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-f…

Oh absolutely, I've spent hours explaining AI to teachers and most of them do seem to understand, but it takes some high-level elaboration about how it works before it "clicks." Prior to that, they are just humans like the rest of us. They don't read fine print or blogs, they just poke at the tool and when it confidently gives them answers, they tend to anthropomorphize the machine and believe what it is saying. It certainly doesn't help that we've trained generations of people to believe that the computer is always right.

> That detracts from any credibility the teachers have about AI usage!

I love teachers, but they shouldn't have any credibility about AI usage in the first place unless they have gained that in the same way the rest of us do. As authority figures, IMHO they should be held to an even higher standard than the average person because decisions they make have an out-sized impact on another person.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#289

Post by ctrl4th »

dasKrokodil wrote: post #271
dawidloubser wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 set…

At the time I'm writing this, there are over 260 comments to this article and yours is still the only one that mentions the enormous energy consumption. I wonder whether this is because people don't know about it or because they simply don't care... But I, for one, try to use AI as sparingly as possible for this reason.

You're not alone. With the inclusion of gemini generated answers in google search, its going down the road of most capitalistic things. Where you see something is wrong, but you have no option to use it even if you don't want it.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#290

Post by sam0x17 »

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…

> Are you producing? Or are you learning?

> AI makes me at least 2x more efficient at my job. It seems irrational not to use it

Fair, but there is a corollary here -- the purpose of learning at least in part is to prepare you for the workforce. If that is the case, then one of the things students need to get good at is conversing with LLMs, because they will need to do so to be competitive in the workplace. I find it somewhat analogous to the advent of being able to do research on the internet, which I experienced as an early 90s kid, where everyone was saying "now they won't know how to do research anymore, they won't know the Dewey decimal system, oh no!". Now the last vestiges of physical libraries being a place where you even can conduct up-to-date research on most topics are crumbling, and research _just is_ largely done online in some form or another.

Same thing will likely happen with LLMs, especially as they improve in quality and accuracy over the next decade, and whether we like it or not.

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