Live data from Hacker News

My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

old.reddit.com

61–70 of 523 posts

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#61
post #30
post #12

There's some grim humor in the fact that the poster reflects on his sister's use of chatgpt, and just ends on that point. I have to wonder if he decided to talk to her or his parents about the situation. I didn't see anything in the post to suggest it, just a "this next generation is cooked." Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.

It makes me think this whole article is maybe just rage bait.

Recently at the restaurant I saw a family with three kids, all with their own individual smartphones. One was a toddler barely a few months old, too young to even be able to understand how to use it, his smartphone was on a stand on the table, playing some of those coma inducing toddler videos that exist on the nightmare-ish corners of youtube.

There is a legitimate problem at hand here with our relationship with tech and how children.. are left to their own device with that stuff. On purpose, for the most part: the parents seem all too happy with the ability of those devices to make their kids shut up and stay constantly distracted. Doomscrolling habits makes for more "well behaved" children in public settings.

chatGPT is but one of the many symptoms, the root problem is that children should really have no business having unsupervised internet access.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#63
post #12

There's some grim humor in the fact that the poster reflects on his sister's use of chatgpt, and just ends on that point. I have to wonder if he decided to talk to her or his parents about the situation. I didn't see anything in the post to suggest it, just a "this next generation is cooked." Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.

My daughter is only 1 and a half years old now, but my concern is more that she'll be implicitly competing with classmates that are using tools like this, whether we allow her to use them or not.

It's not a competition. Teach her to use her brain, and hope school will end up being a net positive. You can't fix other parents and their children.

It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will gain you. If you do it right it won't matter whether she is allowed to use those tools or not, she'll use her own brain because that will allow her to get ahead by the time it really matters.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#64
I think her parents are not doing what they should be doing. And I also think, that it is partially their parents fault but much more the fault of the education and social system the parents has been brought up and currently working and existing, because they are missing the resources (time and knowledge, etc) to attend to their child needs in this regards. And I'm also 100% sure they are not missing those resource because they are not doing their best to get what they need to meet with their child's needs.

It would be really easy for me to blame her for choosing the easiest things to do, her teacher to not giving homework which cannot be solved with chatgpt, her brother for letting her using his account, her parents for not being there and overseeing how she does her homework, but I very much think that each and every person is in this story is exhausted by just simply trying to exists in systems which are not setup for this 11 years old to meet what she needs with her homework and every person either still fighting the systems or just gave up because they run out of steam and they are doing their best to keep their head above the water.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#65
post #5

The people who thought up the Chinese Room argument were almost right - they just didn't realize it would be the human who didn't understand anything.

Isn't that exactly the Chinese room argument though? The human/computer in the room doesn't need to understand Chinese or English to translate?

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#67
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A calculator can be trusted to give you the right answer if you punch in the numbers correctly. An LLM cannot. That's because a calculator is designed to give the right answer. An LLM is not. It's only designed to produce text that seems plausible based on the prompt. "Plausible" is not the same as "trustworthy".

To play the devils advocate, on some calculators 9+3x2=24

Ahh, so we just need an RPN variant of LLMs to avoid any ambiguity .

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#68
post #6

At this rate, people will just accept AI Overlords without any battle or revolution.

Eventually they’ll do a better job than us, so maybe why not. People are very bad at managing themselves and the world. Leave a final prompt to take care of the biosphere, clean up the environment, and manage the humans but let them live happily.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#69

I'm not trying to justify, or infer here, but I read recently that around 20% of American adults are functionally illiterate. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp I wonder how LLMs are going to affect these metrics.

It has to be much higher than that. Look at the reddit op. I assume this person is nearly an adult and their writing is very broken and meandering. Sure you could argue “it’s just a reddit post”, but I find how people write informally is generally indicative of their overall writing ability.

Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

#70
post #61
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes me think this whole article is maybe just rage bait.

Recently at the restaurant I saw a family with three kids, all with their own individual smartphones. One was a toddler barely a few months old, too young to even be able to understand how to use it, his smartphone was on a stand on the table, playing some of those coma inducing toddler videos that exist on the nightmare-ish corners of youtube. There is a legitimate problem at hand here with our relationship with tec…

> […] coma inducing toddler videos […]

Otherwise known as CocoMelon.

Post reply on HN