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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

#301

Post by margalabargala »

antasvara wrote: post #218
margalabargala wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I totally agree.

The neat thing about AI generated bash scripts, would be that the AI can comment their code.

So the user can 1) check if the comment for each step match what they expect to be done, and 2) have a starting point to debug if something goes wrong.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#302

Post by dawidloubser »

jbmilgrom wrote: post #292
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…

There's a new mode of programming (with AI) that doesn't require english and also results in massive efficiency gains. I now only need to begin a change and the AI can normally pick up on the pattern and do the rest, via subsequent "tab" key hits as I audit each change in real time. It's like I'm expressing the change I want via a code example to a capable intern that quickly picks up on it and can type at 100x my sp…

Provided that we ignore the ridiculous waste of energy entailed by calling an online LLM every time you type a word in your editor - I agree that the utility of LLM-assisted programming as "autocomplete on steriods" can be very useful. It's awfully close to that of a good editor using the type system of a good programming language providing suggestions.

I too love functional programming, and I'm talking about Haskell-levels of programming efficiency and expressiveness here, BTW.

This is quite a different use case than those presented by the post I was replying to though.

The Go programming language has this mantra of "a little bit of copy and paste is better than a little bit of dependency on other code". I find that LLM-derived source code takes this mantra to an absurd extreme, and furthermore that it encourages a though pattern that never leads you to discover, specify, and use adequate abstractions in your code. All higher-level meaning and context is lost in the end product (your committed source code) unless you already think like a programmer _not_ being guided by an LLM ;-)

We do digress though - the original topic is that of LLM-assisted writing, not coding. But much of the same argument probably applies.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#303

Post by cmontella »

globular-toast wrote: post #242
cmontella wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I teach at the university level, and I just expect more from my students. Instead of implementing data structures like we did when I was in school, something ChatGPT is very good at; my students are building systems, something ChatGPT has more trouble with. Instead of paper exams asking students "find the bug" or "implement a short function", they get a takehome exam where they have to write tests, integrate their pr…

University is supposed to be about dedicating one's life to learning and ultimately gaining brand new insights into the world. It's not supposed to be about training people to produce stuff in the exact same way everyone already produces stuff. Do you think this approach will help them come up with new stuff?

Well I don't agree with your premise on what University is supposed to be. There's a lot one has to learn about how things have been done before one can even conceive of whether or not an idea is new.

Today we stand on the shoulders of giants to create things previous generations could not, but we still have to climb up to their shoulders in order to see where to go. Without that perspective, people spend a lot of cycles doing things that have already been done, making mistakes that have already been made. There's value in gaining that knowledge yourself through trial and error but it takes much longer than a 4 year program if that's the way you want to learn.

My role is that of a ladder. People are free to do whatever they want, create whatever they want once they get to the top.

And anyway, we graduate students who go on to create new things every year. So proof is in the puddin.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#304

Post by nitwit005 »

azthecx wrote: post #244
nitwit005 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like gym classes are often justified based on "teaching healthy habits". That doesn't appear to work. You did stop the pushups. So did I. Which doesn't mean I'm against physical activities in school, but educationally, it does appear to be a failure.

But at the time it did contribute at least somewhat to your physical condition, I am not an expert, but physical condition indicators like VO2 max seem to be the best predictors of intelligence. We're all physical beings at the end of the day

Sure, but you're creating a new goal post, which is entirely different than the stated justification.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#305

Post by ieuanking »

I dont think chatbots like ChatGPT are productive for students at large. There is def an argument for high-performing students who understand how to use chatGPT productively but more importantly low-performing students struggle to get the most out of chatGPT due to bandwidth issues in the classroom. When I talk to teachers about AI in the classroom they prefer their students to stay as far away from chatGPT as they can because building a strong educational foundation with long lasting learning skills should come before using tools like ChatGPT. Once that foundation is there, generative AI tools are way more useful. In the classroom AI should be teacher facing, and not centralize around students and quick answers.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#306

Post by Auracle »

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 asked o1 to make an entire save system for a game/app I’m working on in Unity with some pretty big gotchas (Minecraft-like chunk system, etc) and it got pretty close to nailing it first try - and what it didn’t get was due to me not writing out some specifics.

I honestly don’t think we’re far out from people being able to write “Write me a todo app” and then telling it what changes to make after.

I recently switched back to software development from professional photography and I’m not sure if that’s a mistake or not.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#307

Post by behringer »

sam0x17 wrote: post #290
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…

A big one for me was nobody will know how to look up info in a dictionary or encyclopedia. Yep I guess that's true. And nobody would want to now either!

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#308

Post by behringer »

antasvara wrote: post #218
margalabargala wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Go ahead and ask chat gpt how that glue script works. You'll be incredibly satisfied at its detailed insights.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#309

Post by jay_kyburz »

low_tech_love wrote: post #294
jay_kyburz wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Never say never, but I do not plan on doing this. This sounds quite surreal: a loop where the students pretend to learn and I pretend to teach? I would… hm… I’ve never heard of such… I mean, this is definitely not how it is in reality… right… (Jokes aside, I have an unhealthy, unstoppable need to feel proud of my work, so no I won’t do that. For now…)

I would have thought that the teaching comes before the test, and that the test is really just a way to measure how well the student soaked up the knowledge.

You could take pride in a well crafted technology that could mark an assignment and provide feedback in far more detail that you yourself could ever provide given time constraints.

I asked my partner about it last night, she teaches at ANU and she made some joke about how variable the quality of tutor marking is. At least the AI would be impartial and consistent.

I have no idea how well an AI can assess a paper against a rubric. Might be a complete waist of time, but if there were some teachers out there who wanted to do some tests, I would be interested in helping set up the tests and evaluating the results.

Re: A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

#310

Post by code_for_monkey »

dawidloubser wrote: post #266
kamaal wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 set…

when you take energy into account its like anti engineering. What if we used a mountain of effort to achieve a worse result?
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