The most likely eventual outcome of ChatGPT (and similar software) will be the elimination of graded homework/coursework, and a renewed emphasis on traditional in-person tests and exams.
My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
111–120 of 523 posts
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#112Back in high school we used to just copy and paste stuff from a Microsoft encarta cdrom into word, print it out and hand it in. Somehow I managed to go on to have a successful career in software making vastly more money than my parents or those around me. The only real thing that would bug me is LLM’s are professional bullshitters. They are a super compressed store of knowledge that doesn’t know its own boundaries an…
If that’s a point, I’m a line.
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a lot of caveats. You are in competition with these peers for grades, college admissions, and job applications. In many cases, the benefits of actually accruing knowledge and the consequences of failure to do so is delayed decades into the future.
It is absolutely amazing just how long some people can "fake" it. Even in jobs that you would expect needing real expertise say being a medical doctor. And corporation can be even simpler if you get in right types of roles, where no hard skills might be needed.
AI is "faking" it when you think about it. If a machine can "fake" skills and expertise, and we can measure its ability to fake it using the Turing Test, then why can't people fake it, too?
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#114My 13 y/o was lamenting something the other day and it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper and it returned a "B+". She was using GPT to basically pre-check the quality of her paper before submitting it after having actually written it herself. But it occurred to me that there are probably teachers out there who are taking the lazy route of using GPT to gra…
> it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper
that's one of the better uses of ChatGPT I've heard of
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminder, you win by learning the material, not by completing the homework.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend from India. He was talking to his daughter back home in first grade. He actively encouraged her to look around in an exam, to copy off of others, to cheat in an examination. I overheard him and asked him why he wants to put so much pressure on a child. Like even if you don't care about the ethics of cheating in an exam, wouldn't it be better to have less pressure as a c…
It's not, but (presumably) you're hearing about your one mentioned data point from a biased subset of people from India in English. How many people who didn't study English in school and dropped out there would you even have a chance of having talked to?
And that's not to say the behavior doesn't exist in the US, just maybe in a different social strata or subculture than you're in. Specifically, the phrase "tiger mom" entered our lexicon due to a book written by a (ethnically) Chinese woman, but is not limited to it.
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a bit like the old saying about the banks: “If you owe the bank $10,000 it’s your problem. If you owe the bank $10,000,000 it’s the banks problem”. If everyone in class is using LLMs to cheat, it’s really the university/instructors problem and it may be easier to bury their heads in the sand then to change their teaching methods and lesson plans. You can’t fail them all…
Why not?
Today the university is a business and the students are the customers.
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
My daughter is only 1 and a half years old now, but my concern is more that she'll be implicitly competing with classmates that are using tools like this, whether we allow her to use them or not.
Reminder, you win by learning the material, not by completing the homework.
In the US, this is not how things are done. Grades are literally everything within the education system. Learning how the system works and playing how your final grading is weighted including but not limited in regard to tests, assignments, and homework is a gigantic portion of how a student's aptitude is determined.
A lot of the system is based off of memorization and paperwork anyways. Something an AI can do all day, every day.
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#118The people who thought up the Chinese Room argument were almost right - they just didn't realize it would be the human who didn't understand anything.
Huh? The human not understanding anything is kinda the point of the Chinese Room argument...
The human in the Chinese Room argument represents an AI. Eh, that kind of complicates the joke...
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Reminder, you win by learning the material, not by completing the homework.
With a lot of caveats. You are in competition with these peers for grades, college admissions, and job applications. In many cases, the benefits of actually accruing knowledge and the consequences of failure to do so is delayed decades into the future.
Homework weights on grades is going to go down.
Parents income and zip codes impact educational attainment more than class rank outside of the oligarchy anyways.
Opportunity and social mobility is far more restricted in the US than most people realize.
This is in part why the college debt is problematic, valuing a piece of paper over the education itself is already a bubble that has popped.
Re: My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thought experiment doesn't give a limit to the amount of intelligence the Chinese Room can display though, and if the thesis is that you just need a big enough model, then the fact that it doesn't "understand" is not an impediment. It's not a decided matter, in any case, and is still controversial among philosophers of the mind (who are less biased than AI researchers in companies that they have stock options in)…
Maybe Im reiterating the same point as you, but the experiment is an illustration of distinction between understanding and performance. Size of the model or perfect performance does not negate the distinction. IMO, the line of thinking in the metaphor is contingent on unanswered questions about self-awareness, which seems to be a definitional prerequisite for semantic understanding.
If we hypothesis perfect performance, the philosophical question is if that's a distinction without (or with) a difference. Perfect performance would simulate semantic understanding, no? More relevant to the real world though, how do we rate imperfect performance? If a Chinese Room that I have access to can make some logical leaps but not others, how do we rate this artificial intelligence? We have words to describe humans with insufficient semantic understanding but they are not usually able to write/generate cromulent essays on basically every topic.