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ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

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Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#21

Post by somytsu »

defnotahuman wrote: post #7
dumbfounder wrote: post #5

ChatGPT is just a tool, like a calculator. Calculators are banned in certain circumstances and required in others. At first they were probably seen as cheating, but then the system realized they could be used to enhance what kids learn. Why take away a tool that could be used everywhere in life? That's not how progress should work. The system should evolve to embrace such tools, but the obvious problem is that it jus…

The problem is that calculators are correct 100% of the time, ChatGPT is not. What makes it more difficult is that it's often really hard to tell when ChatGPT is correct or not.

This same argument is valid for people. That does not mean people are useless, for example as assistent. Maybe we should just use that knowledge and still try get the best out of it.

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#22

Post by xfz »

seydor wrote: post #11

I mean, something like chatGPT (that will refuse to invent things) is perfect for student companion. It's endlessly patient and willing to explain every word you don't understand. No teacher can do that to this degree. If i were a teacher i d want to offload work to it.

It was endlessly patient until they introduced rate limiting. :)

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#23

Post by visarga »

musingsole wrote: post #8
danieka wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My question is, did you learn the truth from ChatGPT? It seems like it will always give plausible sounding answer, that may or may not be correct. For example I asked it today to enumerate the rights given to all christians as part of the priesthood of believers according to Luther. It enumerate a couple of plausible sounding rights. Unfortunately none of them were correct.

It's less like finding a Wikipedia article and more like asking a gossipy cousin about a topic. It tends to land in the right ballpark and capture the tone of a thing.

> It tends to land in the right ballpark and capture the tone of a thing.

One weird trick is to use this text to search the web. Because it is already in the ballpark it will be a very good query. The model would bullshit "The height of Everest is 8,230 m", you take this string and search it, find "height of Everest is 8,849 m" -> correct the original response.

Now the problem is, how do you decide what information to trust in search?

AI needs a big push to index and do consistency checks for all facts. Let's have the model write a billion wiki entries and knowledge base concepts. Check for support, consistency, competing explanations - everything should be in there, we don't decide what is true. Then a language model can say when a topic is controversial, or when it doesn't know something.

Of course the goal is to find the truth, but we know it is going to be tricky. In the meantime we can have models that know when they don't know, or when the information is not certain.

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#24

Post by lolinder »

kypro wrote: post #10

I've said it in another thread, but if you have to ban a tool to preserve the value of some course or examination then it's likely they have little to no value in the real world. In most cases the courses are fine, but the examination probably isn't testing anything useful if it can be cheated with tools like ChatGPT. For example any maths test which only tests students on problems which are easily solvable by a calc…

> For example, I'm not sure if there's much value in learning things like basic SQL queries anymore which was something I had to learn when studying computer science. ChatGPT is great at writing SQL queries if you're able to tell it exactly what you need.

Using ChatGPT to generate something that you can't independently verify is a terrible idea. Most of the time it'll be fine, but when it's not you need to be able to recognize the flaws. Hopefully you at least test it before pushing, but if you don't know how to write the query you also don't know its failure modes, so your tests will likely miss important edge cases.

AI tools are great for speeding up processes you can do by hand, but because they're all statistics you can't count on them to do it alone: some percentage of the time they will inevitably be wrong.

EDIT: Note that this stands in contrast to a wholly deterministic tool like a calculator, which in most circumstances doesn't need to be second guessed.

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#25

Post by ww-picard-do »

kypro wrote: post #10

I've said it in another thread, but if you have to ban a tool to preserve the value of some course or examination then it's likely they have little to no value in the real world. In most cases the courses are fine, but the examination probably isn't testing anything useful if it can be cheated with tools like ChatGPT. For example any maths test which only tests students on problems which are easily solvable by a calc…

While I see your point, it is not hard to see the implications of your argument. Should students be allowed to use calculators in basic math? Don't you think they should learn arithmetic and be tested on that? What about reading? Why learn how to read when you can just use a device to read text to you?

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#26

Post by c0m »

defnotahuman wrote: post #7
dumbfounder wrote: post #5

ChatGPT is just a tool, like a calculator. Calculators are banned in certain circumstances and required in others. At first they were probably seen as cheating, but then the system realized they could be used to enhance what kids learn. Why take away a tool that could be used everywhere in life? That's not how progress should work. The system should evolve to embrace such tools, but the obvious problem is that it jus…

The problem is that calculators are correct 100% of the time, ChatGPT is not. What makes it more difficult is that it's often really hard to tell when ChatGPT is correct or not.

Neither is Wikipedia. While some vandalism might be obvious, more nefarious edits might not be. It's still an extremely useful tool.

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#27

Post by xwowsersx »

christopherwxyz wrote: post #18
dumbfounder wrote: post #5

ChatGPT is just a tool, like a calculator. Calculators are banned in certain circumstances and required in others. At first they were probably seen as cheating, but then the system realized they could be used to enhance what kids learn. Why take away a tool that could be used everywhere in life? That's not how progress should work. The system should evolve to embrace such tools, but the obvious problem is that it jus…

I see ChatGPT more akin to Wikipedia and Google than a calculator. We don't consider Wikipedia or Google as much of a tool as they are a knowledge reservoir of truthiness.

What is a "knowledge reservoir of truthiness"?

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#28

Post by SQueeeeeL »

defnotahuman wrote: post #17
kypro wrote: post #10

I've said it in another thread, but if you have to ban a tool to preserve the value of some course or examination then it's likely they have little to no value in the real world. In most cases the courses are fine, but the examination probably isn't testing anything useful if it can be cheated with tools like ChatGPT. For example any maths test which only tests students on problems which are easily solvable by a calc…

> I'm not sure if there's much value in learning things like basic SQL queries anymore which was something I had to learn when studying computer science. I really disagree, a major function of education is to teach concepts before introducing tools. I took a physics class in undergrad that required a graphing calculator, does that mean I wasted years learning all of the mathematical concepts that could be performed b…

Obviously it's nonsensical to say students should have access to all tools. In the real world every single idea and fact is easily look up able, but by teaching students to derive known facts gives them the skills to eventually derive unknown facts in the future. But most people have a super neoliberal view of education and pretty much want every American student to be an idiot who just can't think

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#29

Post by vgatherps »

kypro wrote: post #10

I've said it in another thread, but if you have to ban a tool to preserve the value of some course or examination then it's likely they have little to no value in the real world. In most cases the courses are fine, but the examination probably isn't testing anything useful if it can be cheated with tools like ChatGPT. For example any maths test which only tests students on problems which are easily solvable by a calc…

I don’t entirely agree with this. My math education relied way to heavily on mechanical substitute-and-compute, but there’s definitely value in making sure that children can actually do and understand what computations are actually happening.

I would imagine writing is similar - the endless essays full of bullshit I pumped out in high school were obviously pointless. But being forced to write much earlier in school was super foundational for having the skill in the first place.

As to the SQL example, I also think it’s flipped - learning the basic sql queries is probably the most valuable as it’s a foundation.

Re: ChatGPT banned from New York City public schools’ devices and networks

#30

Post by tootie »

seydor wrote: post #11

I mean, something like chatGPT (that will refuse to invent things) is perfect for student companion. It's endlessly patient and willing to explain every word you don't understand. No teacher can do that to this degree. If i were a teacher i d want to offload work to it.

When I was playing with extracting stories from ChatGPT my feeling was always that it writes like an 8th grade honors student.
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