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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#71

Post by AstroBen »

Retr0id wrote: post #58
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…

> a decent cheater will quickly discover ways to conduce their LLM into producing text that is very difficult to detect Do you have any examples of this? I've never been able to get direct LLM output that didn't feel distinctly LLM-ish.

this immediately comes to mind https://regmedia.co.uk/2025/04/29/supplied_can_ai_change_you...

A study on whether LLMs can influence people on r/changemymind

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#73

Post by person3 »

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.

It is challenging. In my CS degree grading for programming questions fell into two areas

1. Take home projects where we programmed solutions to big problems. 2. Tests where we had to write programs in the exam on paper during the test.

I think the take home projects are likely a lot harder to grade without AI being used. I'd be disappointed if schools have stopped doing the programming live during tests though. Being able to write a program in a time constrained environment is similar to interviewing, and requires knowledge of the language and being able to code algorithms. It also forces you to think through the program and detect if there will be bugs, without being able to actually run the program (great practice for debugging).

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#74

Post by jsheard »

I'm far from the first to make this observation but LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, then sent to someone else who runs it through another LLM to summarize it back to something approximating the original prompt. Nobody benefits aside from Sam Altman and co, who get to pocket a cool $0.000000001 for enabling this pointless exercise.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#75

Post by afavour »

ChatGPT English is set to be the a ubiquitous, remarkably inefficient data transmission format that sits on top of email.

I wish to communicate four points of information to you. I’ll ask ChatGPT to fluff those up into multiple paragraphs of text for me to email.

You will receive that email, recognize its length and immediately copy and paste it into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize the points provided.

Somewhere off in the distance a lake evaporates.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#76

Post by ZeroSolstice »

cryptozeus wrote: post #23

Yes writing in lots of form is thinking, we are loosing the ability to think

I found that the book "Writing to Learn" by William Zinsser was excellent in convening this process. As noted in the book the author advocated for more writing to be included in all subjects.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#77

Post by closewith »

bee_rider wrote: post #66
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 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 pe…

> That is, the job of a professional programmer includes having produced code that they understand the behavior of.

I have met maybe two people who truly understood the behaviour of their code and both employed formal methods. Everyone else, including myself, are at varying levels of confusion.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#78

Post by _qswe »

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…

I think the author has a fair take on the types of LLM output he has experience with, but may be overgeneralizing his conclusion. As shown by his example, he seems to be narrowly focusing on the use case of giving the AI some small snippet of text and asking it to stretch that into something less information-dense — like the stereotypical "write a response to this email that says X", and sending that output instead of just directly saying X.

I personally tend not to use AI this way. When it comes to writing, that's actually the exact inverse of how I most often use AI, which is to throw a ton of information at it in a large prompt, and/or use a preexisting chat with substantial relevant context, possibly have it perform some relevant searches and/or calculations, and then iterate on that over successive prompts before landing on a version that's close enough to what I want for me to touch up by hand. Of course the end result is clearly shaped by my original thoughts, with the writing being a mix of my own words and a reasonable approximation of what I might have written by hand anyway given more time allocated to the task, and not clearly identifiable as AI-assisted. When working with AI this way, asking to "read the prompt" instead of my final output is obviously a little ridiculous; you might as well also ask to read my browser history, some sort of transcript of my mental stream of consciousness, and whatever notes I might have scribbled down at any point.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#79

Post by Swizec »

afavour wrote: post #75

ChatGPT English is set to be the a ubiquitous, remarkably inefficient data transmission format that sits on top of email. I wish to communicate four points of information to you. I’ll ask ChatGPT to fluff those up into multiple paragraphs of text for me to email. You will receive that email, recognize its length and immediately copy and paste it into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize the points provided. Somewhere off…

Just send the damn bullet points! Everyone will thank you

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#80

Post by iddan »

afavour wrote: post #75

ChatGPT English is set to be the a ubiquitous, remarkably inefficient data transmission format that sits on top of email. I wish to communicate four points of information to you. I’ll ask ChatGPT to fluff those up into multiple paragraphs of text for me to email. You will receive that email, recognize its length and immediately copy and paste it into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize the points provided. Somewhere off…

Jokes aside, I’m building a product for this for sales. If this is relevant to you: https://closer.so
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