There's also strong inferiority complex. When you read and find out the output your motivation to at least paraphrase the prompt output instantly dive because it looks so good and proper whereas your original writing looks so dumb in comparison
I'd rather read the prompt
121–130 of 880 posts
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Do you really want to read the students original thought? Why else would you become a teacher, if you didn't care about what your students think?
Because you want to pass on knowledge? I am not saying there aren't ANY situations where a teacher cares about what their students think, but the example given isn't really one of those times. The question is not one that has many opportunities for original thought; it is a basic question that everyone who knows the answer will answer similarly. The entire purpose is to ascertain if the person understands what was ta…
It's not a "test", it's an "assignment". Assignment is a way to practice what you've learned, and a (good) teacher would want to get your original thoughts so they could adjust their instruction and teaching material to what they believe you missed in order to improve your mental model around the topic (or in other words, to teach you something).
Perhaps the problem is that they are "graded", but this is to motivate the student, and runs against the age-old problem of gamification.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#123> A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they shall receive a degree
Yes, totally. Unfortunately, it takes time and maturity to understand how this is completely wrong, but I feel like most students go through that belief.
Not sure how relevant it is, but it makes me think of two movies with Robin Williams: Dead Poet's Society and Will Hunting. In the former, Robin's character manages to get students interested in stuff instead of "just passing the exams". In the later, I will just quote this part:
> Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in.
I don't give a shit about whether a student can learn the book by heart or not. I want the student to be able to think on their own; I want to be able to have an interesting discussion with them. I want them to think critically. LLMs fundamentally cannot solve that.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#124I have a lot of sympathy for the author's position but I may have missed the point in the article where he explained why clarity of writing and genuineness of human expression was so vital to a robotics class. It's one thing for an instructor to appreciate those things; another for them to confound their own didactic purpose with them. This point seems obvious enough that I feel like I must have missed something. As…
I think they summed it up well in the section "Why do we write, anyway?" — they nowhere claimed it was vital for students' success in a robotic class. On the contrary as they title a subsection there with "If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing *badly*" (emphasis mine) — so what they are looking for is to peer into the author's mind and their original thoughts. The implication there is that this is acceptable to pass…
Who have you asked? What has been your experience observing professionals using LLMs?
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#125I'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 exercis…
Depends on what you are looking for. I’ve turned half baked ideas into white papers for plenty of praise. I’ve used them to make my Jira tickets seem complicated and complete. I’ve used them to get praised for writing comprehensive documentation.
Part of my performance review is indirectly using bloat to seem sophisticated and thorough.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#126Looks like a "GPT text output condenser" might be a good project to work on.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#127There are many ways to use LLMs.
The issue, IMO, is that some people throw in a one-shot, short prompt, and get a generic, boring output. "Garbage in, generic out."
Here's how I actually use LLMs:
- To dump my thoughts and get help organizing them.
- To get feedback on phrasing and transitions (I'm not a native speaker).
- To improve tone, style (while trying to keep it personal!), or just to simplify messy sentences.
- To identify issues, missing information, etc. in my text.
It’s usually an iterative process, and the combined prompt length ends up longer than the final result. And I incorporate the feedback manually.
So sure, if someone types "write a blog post about X" and hits go, the prompt is more interesting than the output. But when there are five rounds of edits and context, would you really rather read all the prompts and drafts instead of the final version?
(if you do: https://chatgpt.com/share/6817dd19-4604-800b-95ee-f2dd05add4...)
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#128I've already asked a number of colleagues at work producing insane amount of gibberish with LLMs to just pass me the prompt instead: if LLM can produce verbose text with limited input, I just need that concise input too (the rest is simply made up crap).
“Someone sent me this ai generated message. Please give me your best shot at guessing the brief prompt that originated the text”.
Done, now ai is just lossy prettyprinting.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#129It's actually doesn't matter. I hated this hassle of writing various texts while studying so much. Like does it really matter whether student would generate this text or just go google and copy paste some paragraphs from somewhere? And don't even hope for them to genuinely write all that stuff themselves because it's a huge waste of time even for those who actually cares and interested in the subject.
Re: I'd rather read the prompt
#130I 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 o…
> the exact inverse of how I most often use AI, which is to throw a ton of information at it in a large prompt
It sounds to me that you don't make the effort to absorb the information. You cherry-pick stuff that pops in your head or that you find online, throw that into an LLM and let it convince you that it created something sound.
To me it confirms what the article says: it's not worth reading what you produce this way. I am not interested in that eloquent text that your LLM produced (and that you modify just enough to feel good saying it's your work); it won't bring me anything I couldn't get by quickly thinking about it or quickly making a web search. I don't need to talk to you, you are not interesting.
But if you spend the time to actually absorb that information, realise that you need to read even more, actually make your own opinion and get to a point where we could have an actual discussion about that topic, then I'm interested. An LLM will not get you there, and getting there is not done in 2 minutes. That's precisely why it is interesting.