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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#61

Post by bonoboTP »

necovek wrote: post #52
bonoboTP wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Edit: I agree] I've also grown to dislike even this use case. I did this back in 2023 but as AI text is spreading, the style - yes, even with prompt adjustments it leaks through - is recognized by more and more people and it's a very very bad look. If I see AI-like text from someone, I take it as an insult. It means they don't feel that it's worth their time to brush up the text themselves. And sure, it may well be…

I think the poster you replied to said the same thing.

Yes, ironically I was too eager to comment before finishing the read. Let it be a confirmation then.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#62

Post by sebzim4500 »

xmorse wrote: post #20

I am thinking about creating a proof-of-writing signature. Basically an editor with an "anti-cheat", you can't paste text into it. It signs your text with a public key.

We're going to invent kernel level anticheat for text editors rather than just do in person exams.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#63

Post by jazzyjackson »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #56
andy99 wrote: post #6

I used to teach, years before LLMs, and got lots of copy-pasted crap submitted. I always marked it zero, never mentioning plagiarism (which would require some university administration) and just commenting that I asked for X and instead got some pasted together nonsense. As long as LLM output is what it is, there is little threat of it actually being competitive on assignments. If students are attentive enough to par…

Are you just assuming that a student who you think used an LLM would be unwilling to escalate? I would have thought that giving 0s to correct solutions would lead to successful complaints/appeals.

If it’s copy pasted it’s obvious, and the assignment isn’t to turn in a correct solution, but to turn in evidence that you are able to determine a correct solution. Automated answers deserve 0 credit.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#65

Post by [deleted] »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #36
robertlagrant wrote: post #18

Time to go back to writing essays in exams, live, on paper.

It's challenging. Assignments (and particularly programming assignments) were by far the larger and more difficult part of my CS degree, and also the place where I learned the most. I cannot imagine losing that portion of my education and just replacing it with a few exams.

[deleted]

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#66

Post by bee_rider »

mrweasel wrote: post #19
Ancalagon wrote: post #8

I fully support the author’s point but it’s hard to argue with the economics and hurdles around obtaining degrees. Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to getting a decent job, that’s just the economics of it. And unfortunately the employers these days are encouraging this kind of copy/paste work. Look at how Meta and Google claim the majority of the new code written there is AI created? The world…

> Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to getting a decent job Then fail to actually learn anything and apply for jobs and try to cheat the interviewers using the same AI that helped them graduate. I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first batch of developers who cannot function without it. I don't even mind that you use an LLM for parts of your job, but you need to be able to function witho…

I think, rather than saying they can’t do their job without an LLM, we should just say some can’t do their jobs.

That is, the job of a professional programmer includes having produced code that they understand the behavior of. Otherwise you’ve failed to do your due diligence.

If people are using LLMs to generate code, and then actually doing the work of understanding how that code works… that’s fine! Who cares!

If people are just vibe coding and pushing the results to customers without understanding it—they are wildly unethical and irresponsible. (People have been doing this for decades, they didn’t have the AI to optimize the situation, but they managed to do it by copy-pasting from stack overflow).

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#67

Post by Nezteb »

vunderba wrote: post #31
bost-ty wrote: post #4

I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like this week), it's that the thought that went into making the prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the output the LLM generates afterwards. In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't know what I…

This is the CRUX of the issue. Even with SOTA models (Sonnet 3.5, etc) - the more open-ended your prompt - the more banal and generic the response. It's GIGO turtles all the way down. I pointed this out a few weeks ago with respect to why the current state of LLMs will never make great campaign creators in Dungeons and Dragons. We as humans don't need to be "constrained" - ask any competent writer to sit quietly and…

Out of curiosity, I used your prompt but added "Do not make it a very formulaic physics-based puzzle."

The output is pretty non-sensical: https://pastebin.com/raw/hetAvjSG

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#68

Post by lionkor »

oncallthrow wrote: post #37

LLM cheating detection is an interesting case of the toupee fallacy. The most obvious ChatGPT cheating, like that mentioned in this article, is pretty easy to detect. However, a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce their LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect. I think if I was in the teaching profession I'd just leave, to be honest. The joy of reviewing student work will inevitably b…

You assume that the teachers job is to catch when someone is cheating; its not. The teachers job is to teach, and if the kids don't learn because their parents allow them to cheat, don't check them at all, and let them behave like shitheads, then the kids will fail in life.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#69

Post by ZeroSolstice »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #22

I think people who don’t like writing shouldn’t be forced to write, just like people who don’t like music shouldn’t be forced to play music. Ditto for math. Forcing people to do these things supposedly results in a better, more competitive society. But does it really? Would you rather have someone on your team who did math because it let them solve problems efficiently, or did math because it’s the trick to get the r…

Reading, writing and math have been the constants utilized throughout life and as such have been core subjects carried through educational systems. I'm not quite sure what subjects and topics we would be teaching future generations that didn't include reading, writing, math and science. At the very least writing should be included in more subjects. The hidden feature of including writing in all subjects, as you might have seen in your history endeavor's, is improvements in critical thinking, formulating cohesive arguments and a clearer understanding of topics.

There are greater difficulties that people will have to do in their daily lives than being "forced" to learn how to read, write and do arithmetic. Maybe learning the lesson of overcoming smaller, difficult tasks will allow them to adapt to greater difficulties in the future.

To quote Seneca:

  A gem can not be polished with friction, nor a man perfected without trials.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#70

Post by necovek »

mezyt wrote: post #39
mrweasel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to getting a decent job Then fail to actually learn anything and apply for jobs and try to cheat the interviewers using the same AI that helped them graduate. I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first batch of developers who cannot function without it. I don't even mind that you use an LLM for parts of your job, but you need to be able to function witho…

> I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first batch of developers who cannot function without it. Playing the contrarian here, but I'm from a batch of developers that can't function without a compiler, and I'm at 10% of what I can do without an IDE and static analysis.

That's really curious: I've never felt that much empowered by an IDE or static analysis.

Sure, there's a huge jump from a line editor like `ed` to a screen editor like `vi` or `emacs`, but from there on, it was diminishing returns really (a good debugger was usually the biggest benefit next) — I've also had the "pleasure" of having to use `echo`, `cat` and `sed` to edit complex code in a restricted, embedded environment, and while it made iterations slower, not that much more slower than if I had a full IDE at my disposal.

In general, if I am in a good mood (and thus not annoyed at having to do so many things "manually"), I am probably only 20% slower than with my fully configured IDE at coding things up, which translates to less than 5% of slow down on actually delivering the thing I am working on.

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