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

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

#101
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder, you win by learning the material, not by completing the homework.

With a lot of caveats. You are in competition with these peers for grades, college admissions, and job applications. In many cases, the benefits of actually accruing knowledge and the consequences of failure to do so is delayed decades into the future.

It is absolutely amazing just how long some people can "fake" it. Even in jobs that you would expect needing real expertise say being a medical doctor.

And corporation can be even simpler if you get in right types of roles, where no hard skills might be needed.

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

#102
post #2

Invert the class format: Homework should be done in class on pencil/paper or locked down Chromebooks, and lectures can be watched on video at home.

Repetition alone was hard enough, but if I was responsible for learning the material at my own pace on my own device as well? I'd still be in middle school.

Yeah this did not work for me in college and it certainly would not have worked in school for me

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

#103
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Reminder, you win by learning the material, not by completing the homework.

How long have we been saying that rote memorization is not learning? ChatGPT makes it clearer than ever that we need to focus on teaching children to be able to analyze and solve problems, not memorize a bunch of facts.

What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution.

Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.

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

#104
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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. What makes this different from competing with classmates that cheat in general? You also had parents that do most of the tasks for their kids since forever What makes LLMs stands out of the pack of other forms of assistance (parents, older siblings, software, online solutio…

Cheating (at least when I was school age) was fairly rare and not terribly difficult to detect. My concern is that both of those might be false with LLMs, and that'd make the circumstances different.

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

#105
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?

The Chinese room metaphor is an argument about AI, or computation more generally, attempting to distinguish the difference between performance metrics and "understanding".

There is the role of the human within the metaphor, and the argument/position of the metaphor as a whole. I don't think it makes much sense to talk about the "point/argument/position of a single component of the metaphor. At least, that wasn't how it was originally structured.

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

#106
My 13 y/o was lamenting something the other day and it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper and it returned a "B+". She was using GPT to basically pre-check the quality of her paper before submitting it after having actually written it herself.

But it occurred to me that there are probably teachers out there who are taking the lazy route of using GPT to grade papers that students are submitting that have been written by GPT in the entirety.

There's some non-zero amount of GPT grading GPT in education.

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

#107
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost as if we need to be actively parenting and engaged with our children! Who'd've thought! Sarcasm aside, making informed decisions on how to do those things can be a challenge.

Even for the parents who know it's extremely difficult to really know if you're doing the right or wrong thing. And it's constant, you have to be eternally vigilant. My son brute-forced the downtime pin on his iPhone -- it took 6 months but he did it.

I truly am hesitant to ever criticize someone else's parenting style since if I've learned anything, it's that kids personalities can be very different and circumstances are always more complicated than you might think.

That said, I hear stories like yours (from friends) and it always baffles me because that's just now how our family operates. I have a downtime pin on devices for the same reason I lock the door to my car even though it's like 50% breakable glass windows.

My kids know the rules. One of them for sure knows the pin. But they also know that if they use the device outside of our agreed upon guidelines, they're in trouble.

I'm sincere in asking, aren't behavior controls a lot better than technological ones?

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

#108

I know that having parents who cared about my education (and were in a position to actively participate in it) was a privilege and not a given, but where are the parents in this situation? Do we just accept that an 11 year-old watches squid game, has unrestricted access to chatgpt and does all their school work without any oversight at all? Clearly this kid is not receiving the guidance it needs. Or any guidance real…

What kind of guidance does 11 year old need for homework? Me and my siblings were doing all of it independently pretty much from the start, parents were only involved if there was some tough nut that we needed help with.

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

#109
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder, you win by learning the material, not by completing the homework.

Society certainly doesn't reward school performance in that way. You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained.

> You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained.

That's called "winning the battle and losing the war".

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

#110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The thought experiment doesn't give a limit to the amount of intelligence the Chinese Room can display though, and if the thesis is that you just need a big enough model, then the fact that it doesn't "understand" is not an impediment. It's not a decided matter, in any case, and is still controversial among philosophers of the mind (who are less biased than AI researchers in companies that they have stock options in)…

Maybe Im reiterating the same point as you, but the experiment is an illustration of distinction between understanding and performance. Size of the model or perfect performance does not negate the distinction.

IMO, the line of thinking in the metaphor is contingent on unanswered questions about self-awareness, which seems to be a definitional prerequisite for semantic understanding.

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