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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

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This never made sense to me, Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U? (Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)

How do you figure that? Isn't Harvard very much about the network of contacts?

‘The network of contacts’ isn’t some automatic mechanism that by default joins everyone in a class…?

By definition to join a network they need to be accepted by their class peers.

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

#142
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.

I don’t know. Ilya Sutskever’s legacy is going to be ruining education. Is that what he wants?

Now that’s Hacker News rage bait!

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

#143
post #4

Waiting for those people who post the "how do you use LLMS for X" questions on HN to come here and explain how this is a good thing.

Would you be upset if in the 70s you found out your sister was using a calculator to check her math homework?

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

#145

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.

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 g…

Suggest watching the movie gattaca to understand what happens to kids of parents who think like this in an extreme version. The problem is if you ignore the reality of the competition it’s basically setting your kid up to fail due to prisoner dilemma dynamics.

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

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grades determine what college you go to, which determines the connections you make, which determines the trajectory of your entire life.

This never made sense to me, Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U? (Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)

No one cares about your gpa after 2 years of experience. All they will see is Harvard or BU

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

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be a common theme in the responses to me here. The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades. Can you imagine that the coursework and education ove…

Teachers aren't dumb here; they know what's going on. And they're actively working to figure out how best to navigate this situation. They're not looking to grade how well ChatGPT does in their course.

I have many teachers among my friends. So far, they're mostly powerless. If a student is creative, there is basically nothing that will prevent them from cheating at any homework/exam.

My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.

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

#148
post #49

Back in high school we used to just copy and paste stuff from a Microsoft encarta cdrom into word, print it out and hand it in. Somehow I managed to go on to have a successful career in software making vastly more money than my parents or those around me. The only real thing that would bug me is LLM’s are professional bullshitters. They are a super compressed store of knowledge that doesn’t know its own boundaries an…

I bet you were one of the ones that was smart enough to not copy/paste the whole article so it was easily recognized tho.

I remember people handing in work copy pasted from Encarta, complete with the blue hyperlinks (even back then pasting formatted text was a stupid default in Word).

How did I know my classmates did that? Because they managed to get that "work" pinned up on the "exemplary work" notice board!

My carefully hand-tuned word art titles meant nothing in comparison! Nothing!

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

#149
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Verbs at the end. You must simply all your questions like a German ask.

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

#150
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My five year old son was watching Lankybox, that stuff is mindnumbing. I tried to control what he's able to watch, but next thing I know he's watching it again. I ended up removing Youtube, relying on PBS Kids. He protested though, PBS Kids is long format shows, and that's not stimulating enough for him.
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