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I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

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Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#111

Post by gigatree »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #89

> The best educators will adapt to AI. In some ways, the changes will be positive. Teachers must move away from mechanical activities or assigning simple summaries. So much of education always comes down to efficiency, scale, and standardization. The best way to teach or test someone is by having a one-on-one conversation with them, coincidentally the least standardized. The most scalable and standardized way to do i…

> It's frustrating as hell that so many of our teaching problems have obvious answers that are in many ways better for the students anyways, but those answers just aren't systemically or economically feasible. Maybe they'll have to become more viable as our current, ultra-mechanical system breaks.

I think it’s a lie that they aren’t feasible, just like it’s a lie that sustainable, small-scale agriculture isn’t feasible. It’s more that the powerful are only interested in developing centralized systems because those are the ones they can control and profit from. You can’t indoctrinate without a standardized education system, you can’t price-fix without a monopoly/oligopoly, you can’t brainwash an entire population unless everyone’s watching the same thing controlled by the same entity. That said, it’s true that decentralized, sustainable systems aren’t feasible so long as there are people on earth vying for power over others.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#112

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

blindhippo wrote: post #23
djcooley wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrifying. Our ability to think has been our biggest differentiator as a species. LLMs threaten this, and I'll die on that hill.

I think this is overestimating the impact of LLMs. Fact is, even if they are capable of fully replicating and even replacing actual human thought, at best they regurgitate what has come before. They are, effectively, a tutor (as another commentator pointed out). A human still needs to consume their output and act on it intelligently. We already do this, except with other tools/mechanisms (i.e. other humans). Nothing…

> A human still needs to consume their output and act on it intelligently. We already do this, except with other tools/mechanisms (i.e. other humans). Nothing really changes here...

What changes is the educational history of those humans. It's like how the world is getting obese. On average, we have areas we empirically don't choose our own long term over our short term. Apparently homework is one of those things, according to teachers like in TFA. Instead of doing their own homework, they're having their "tutor" do their homework.

Hopefully the impact of this will be like the impact of calculators, but I also fear that the impact will be like having tutors do your homework and take your tests until you hit a certain grade and suddenly the tools you're reliant on don't work, but you don't have practice doing things any other way.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#113

Post by [deleted] »

light_triad wrote: post #60

> With the easy temptation of AI, many—possibly most—of my students were no longer willing to push through discomfort. There's been an important shift in education in the last 20 years: a push for lessons to be short, entertaining and unchallenging. When students struggle with tasks, in many cases they are just told not to do them. LLMs are the next wave of this shift - what could be awesome tools for research and wr…

[deleted]

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#114

Post by Der_Einzige »

lucianbr wrote: post #88
Der_Einzige wrote: post #11

[flagged]

> 5-10 years from now Doesn't anyone think the future is unpredictable anymore? Does your life experience not include things tanking an unexpected turn, ever ? I can't believe how many commenters here and elsewhere take the future trajectory of AI for granted. Where are the flying cars, the moon bases, the nuclear powered appliances? Things don't always go up on an exponential curve, and even when they do, results ar…

Recursive self improvement is not a mirage.

Synthetic dataset generation which is actually good (i.e. adds meaningful information by probing a latent space in truly unique ways + very high temperature sampling + including outside feedback for diversity seeding) will solve the "internet is polluted now with LLM outputs" problem

Barring that, mass swarms of AI agents going into the world and retrieving new information, using weak/active learning to mass label, and improving themselves with increasingly less human intervention is INEVITABLE.

The issue with folks like yourselves and frankly most of mainstream ML research today is a failure of imagination. As it turns out, ML/AI Ph.D's seemed to be too busy lying about their models scores on NeurIPS papers to read sci-fi or other speculative fiction which imagines what technological changes will do to society. This a huge risk, as rich people with a lack of moral compass often view works of speculative fiction as blueprints.

Here's a few which imagined just a tiny bit of a world impacted by the exact sorts of AI systems which are moving far faster than we could have ever imagined:

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jetsons

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_World_(1934_film...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Shell_(1995_film)

The future is teleological (the academy unjustly treats that word like a slur), and you should listen a bit more to those who fear the AI and warn you about just how wrong you are about the claim that AI "won't go up on an exponential curve"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#115

Post by vel0city »

lucianbr wrote: post #110
adamc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most teachers have large classes. Their ability to monitor each kid and prevent them from using chatgpt or similar tools may be limited. I come from a family with many teachers. The harsh reality is that teachers can provide a conducive environment, but they just don't have enough time per kid to make nearly the impact that people expect, which is why your home environment is so critical. Teachers don't really teach.…

> Most teachers have large classes. Their ability to monitor each kid and prevent them from using chatgpt or similar tools may be limited. I'm not a teacher, and I very well may be missing your point due to my own shortcomings. But I have to ask, would this sentence not apply to people not wanting to learn math because it's hard? (or learn anything at all) > Most teachers have large classes. Their ability to monitor…

> But I have to ask, would this sentence not apply to people not wanting to learn math because it's hard?

It is pretty easy for a teacher to find a student not learning math; they'll fail the test.

I wouldn't fault a teacher for not reliably detecting every student using a lot of LLMs to write their longer papers.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#116

Post by Der_Einzige »

ffujdefvjg wrote: post #82
Der_Einzige wrote: post #11

[flagged]

> Current AI systems are by far the worst that they will ever be. 5-10 years from now, I will trust AI tutor/teachers and will make sure my kids is on the right side of the achievement curve. Pretty sure I read that line about self driving cars 8 or 9 years ago. Realistically, kids will always take the easiest path, why learn when AI will do all the thinking for them? And if AI does all the thinking and people begin…

That's just an example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox

The lack of knowledge about this among the general public is (ironically), a failure of the current education system

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#117

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

golergka wrote: post #7
djcooley wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrifying. Our ability to think has been our biggest differentiator as a species. LLMs threaten this, and I'll die on that hill.

What's your opinion on calculators? Update: I meant to compare calculators to something like a slide ruler for logarithms. I'm not from US and I tend to forget that some people use calculators to take 20% of 500.

Calculators are reliable and predictable, so losing skill at that kind of calculation is a safe, compartmentalized offloading. We offload an extremely clearly defined set of tasks, and it gets executed cheaply, immediately, and perfectly.

LLMs are different.

A closer analogy would be something like computer algebra systems, especially integration. We can offload differentiation cheaply, immediately, and perfectly, but integration will frequently have a "unable to evaluate" result. I genuinely wonder whether integral-requiring-workers are better or worse at it as a result of growing up with CAS tools. People on the periphery (a biologist, for example) are undoubtably better off since they get answers they couldn't get before, but people on the interior (maybe a physicist) might be worse at some things they wish they could do better, relative to those who came up without those tools.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#118

Post by mjevans »

SoftTalker wrote: post #105
mjevans wrote: post #42

IMO most of the reason this teacher quit is students using ChatGPT to get around the puffery and wasteful production assigned. It is important to have the skills to be able to do that kind of task, and transforming information rather than just transcribing it is a key way of training our biological supercomputers. However I can't recall even one example of that being the case when I was in school at any level. I thin…

> I think if it ever did happen it was as an accidental side effect rather than an intended part of the process. It's a side-effect but it's not accidental. The objective of most school work (below PhD-level research) is knowledge mastery and skill development. This comes from repeated "practice" assignments. Look at any code you wrote as an undergrad compared to what you write today. You weren't inventing anything n…

The rote repetition for math is more obvious. Drilling in the repeated proof that yes, this is how things proceeded from start to finish and it is known.

However at least my History classes wanted to instill trivia, rather than a general overview and mastery of the general course of events and knowledge. Precise dates and figures, rather than knowing what to lookup if I ever did need __specific__ data. Which is exactly what I'd want to do if I did have a need for that data, to make sure I had the correct date, spelling, and maybe refresh my context years or decades later.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#119

Post by Der_Einzige »

realce wrote: post #25
Der_Einzige wrote: post #11

[flagged]

With this progress, what will be the point of being in any upper percentile at all? Everyone will be in it if they have access to the LLM wizard. We're outsourcing our sovereignty to a machine blob in a black box, the blob will do the thinking for all of those children. edit: for the authoritarian tyrants that they are (mass reflexive downvotes) Your response is to rely on opaque knowledge agents produced by the larg…

What's opaque about mistral large? https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-Large-Instruct-2407

I have total control over the model, literally dozens of generation parmaters to play with, literally thousands of open source projects like this

https://github.com/Mihaiii/llm_steer or https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1a-aQvKC9avdZpdyBn4j...

which allow me to jailbreak the model to my hearts content - except I didn't need to do that since Mistral isn't actually aligned anyway!

While you're the one relying on "opaque" knowledge agents, I will have DPO'd my open access model with my custom huge debate evidence dataset to be a better competitive debater than any living human on the planet.

Good luck.

Re: I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT

#120

Post by FrustratedMonky »

deegles wrote: post #35
FrustratedMonky wrote: post #18

Is this all bad? The conversational model of learning, the dialectic, can be better for learning than just reading walls of text. Instant access to a lot of information, in a more conversational model. I've found it to be more natural. Are we reaching the stage where every kid has a "Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" from the Diamond Age? That would be a good thing.

If they can solve the hallucination problem, sure. Otherwise we're going to have a lot of people who "know" things about the world that are simply made up.

Was going to say it was getting better. But all the articles I could find said GPT-4o was worse than previous versions.
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