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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#251

Post by throwing_away »

palata wrote: post #230
eric_cc wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using llm’s for papers does not mean your brain is atrophying though. There are lots of ways to challenge the mind even if you use llm’s to write some papers.

> Using llm’s for papers does not mean your brain is atrophying though. It means that you are losing your time. If you are a university student and use LLMs for your classes while "challenging your mind" for stuff outside of class, maybe you should just not be studying there in the first place.

If you want the certificate, it must be issued by the certificate authority.

If you want to make your own certificates, good luck getting them on the trusted list.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#252

Post by sensanaty »

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…

We had a town hall type of thing recently with some of our investors, and some of the answers they gave were hilarious, if it weren't so depressing that those people are the ones with most of the money in this world.

The worst was the answer to the question "How can we utilize AI to greater effect in our work?". A nice open-ended question where they had a beautiful opportunity to show off how knowledgeable and forward thinking they are, right? Especially considering they're the ones behind the massive AI push our product has gone with as of late.

"You can ask it to write emails for you!" Was the one and only thing these multi-milli/billionaires could come up with. Our core product itself is literally an email interface, and we have an AI email generation feature built in...

I had to turn my webcam off because I genuinely laughed out loud at that response for how insanely elementary and useless it was as an answer. It also showed me these people do literally nothing other than answer emails - and even then they're too bloody lazy and give so little of a shit they can't even do that part themselves.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#253

Post by soerxpso »

sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think

I'm there for the degree. If I wanted to learn and engage with material, I could save $60,000 and do that online for free, probably more efficiently. The purpose of a class writing exercise is to get the university to give me the degree, which I cannot do by actually learning the material (and which, for classes I care about, I may have already done without those exercises), but can only do by going through the hoops that professors set up and paying the massive tuition cost. If there were a different system where I could just actually learn something (which probably wouldn't be through the inefficient and antiquated university system) and then get a valid certificate of employability for having actually learned it, that would be great. Unfortunately, however, as long as university professors are gatekeepers of the coveted certificate of employability, they're going to keep dealing with this incentive issue.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#254

Post by GuB-42 »

Just paste the full text and ask a LLM to summarize it for you.

It feels like we are getting to this weird situation where we just use LLMs as proxies, and the long, boring text is just for LLMs to talk to each other.

For example:

Person A to LLM A: Give me my money.

LLM A to LLM B: Long formal letter.

LLM B to Person B : Give me my money.

Hopefully, nothing is lost in translation.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#255

Post by zeroq »

sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

You're missing trees for forest.

When I was a kid and got an assignement for writing an essey about "why good forces prevailed in Lords of the Rings" as a gate check to see if I actually read the novel I had three choices: (a) read the novel and write the essey myself (b) find an already written essey - not an easy task in pre-internet era but we had books with esseys on most common topics you could "copy-paste" - and risk that the professor is familiar with the source or someone else used the same source (c) ask class mate to give me their essey as a template and rephrase it as my own

A and C would let me learn about the novel and let me polish my writing skills.

Today I can ask ChatGPT to write me a 4 pages essay about a novel I've never heard of and call it a day. There's no value gained in the process.

That's a simple example. The problem is that the same applies to programming. Novice programmer will claim that LLM give them power to take on hard tasks and programm in languages they were not familiar before. But they are not gaining any skill nor knowledege from that experience.

If I ask google maps to plot me a directions from Prague to Brussels it will yield a list of turns that will guide me to my destinations, but by any means I can't claim I've learned topography of Germany in the process.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#256

Post by palata »

theturtletalks wrote: post #249

AI has changed how we learn by making the process of improving work much easier. Normally, learning involves writing a draft, finding mistakes, and fixing them over time. This helps build critical thinking. AI, trained on tons of refined data, can create polished work right away. While this seems helpful, it can skip the important step of learning through trial and error. The question is: Should we limit AI to keep t…

I would argue that if you are losing a consequent amount of your time fixing grammar, then it sounds like you need to spend that time to improve your grammar skills.

> We need to teach students to use AI for deeper thinking by asking better questions.

Same thing here: the whole point of learning critical thinking is that you don't need to ask someone/something else. Teaching you how to ask the LLM to do it for you is not the same as teaching you how to actually do it.

In my opinion, we need to make students realise that their goal is to learn how to do it themselves (whatever it is). If they need an LLM to do it, then they are not learning. And if they are not learning, there is no point in going to school, they can go work in a field.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#257

Post by milesrout »

ponector wrote: post #199
necovek wrote: post #54

I'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).

Chatgpt very useful for adding softness and politeness to my sentences. Would you like more straight forward text which probably will be rude for regular american?

[dead]

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#258

Post by Nathanba »

squigz wrote: post #116
bruce511 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get what you measure, and you should expect people to game your metric. Once upon a time only the brightest (and / or richest) went to college. So a college degree becomes a proxy for clever. Now since college graduates get the good jobs, the way to give everyone a good job is to give everyone a degree. And since most people are only interested in the job, not the learning that underpins the degree, well, you get…

> you get a bunch of students that care only for the pass mark and the certificate at the end. This is because that is what companies care about. It's not a proxy for cleverness or intelligence - it's a box to check.

right and getting a family is also just a box to check and eating food is a box to check and brushing my teeth is just a box to check and on it goes for every single thing in life. If we all just checked boxes then we'd not be human anymore.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#259

Post by johnea »

eric_cc wrote: post #243
pessimizer wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you used a wheelchair every day, your legs would atrophy. Regardless of the existence of other ways to exercise your legs which you also will not do, because you're a person with working legs who chooses to use a wheelchair.

You’re describing an extreme so let me counter with a different “what if” extreme: If , every day, you use a wheel chair for five minutes and run for several hours followed by 200 squats then your legs will not atrophy. My point is that writing papers is only one way to work your mind and using llm’s for this does not indicate how you use your mind overall.

> which you also will not do, because you're a person with working legs who chooses to use a wheelchair.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#260

Post by Aeolun »

sn9 wrote: post #221

> I should hope that the purpose of a class writing exercise is not to create an artifact of text but force the student to think; a language model produces the former, not the latter. It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this, especially in education and academia. They see work as the mere production of output, without ever thinking about how that…

> It's been incredibly blackpilling seeing how many intelligent professionals and academics don't understand this

I figured this out in high school. It can’t be all that uncommon of a thought that if you are already in school and paying and given time to learn, you might as well do so?

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