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CheatGPT

blog.humphd.org

311–320 of 544 posts

Re: CheatGPT

#311
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it just moves the definition of “learning” to a higher level of abstraction: so you know what AI tools to use, how to prompt them, and how to understand their output? I’m reminded of the time when graphing calculators were going to destroy math programs because nobody would “really know” how to do the work. And yet here we are, and math is fine, and calculators are just another tool.

I hear this argument a lot and I think that it's fallacious. Let's go ahead and extend it to another AI tool - in this case let's talk about stable diffusion. Let's say you teach a class on fine Art and painting, if you allow your students to use stable diffusion for all their drawings, would you make the case that they have learned how to paint? Likewise you can't really make the case that somebody understands how t…

> would you make the case that they have learned how to paint?

Not painters, but they would absolutely be digital artists. I’m not sure why a painting class would use digital anything.

Re: CheatGPT

#312
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the smartest I ever felt was hearing some teammates a cube wall over saying "this one customer from poland says he's crashing a lot" (in our ui). I was like "is he in the polish locale/language? They asked.... yes... "I bet polish has different seperators and our split("/")[1] is crashing"... they checked, had him change to english, crash went away. I felt real yoda like. We had customer on chat so much easier…

Debugging is easy when you know you are coding incorrectly. But why would Polish have a different path separator? That's a filesystem choice not a language choice.

This was actually on date/time I believe... we had the date in the path

Re: CheatGPT

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that I don't quite understand is why the tendency of ChatGPT to be inaccurate sometimes is a fundamental flaw rather than something that can be improved on iteratively if its just a matter of improving the statistical likelihood of accuracy. The question of whether its AGI or not is, to paraphrase the famous quote, a bit like the question of whether a submarine can swim.

The whole point of using a computer instead of doing something yourself is to do something quickly and accurately . If I need someone to give me maybe-correct-maybe-not information, I'll just ask one of my coworkers.

Well, that was the point of computers until now. That doesn't mean computers can't be other things, too. ChatGPT is a lot cheaper and faster than your coworker, and it's available (almost) 24 hours a day. And the accuracy may improve!

Re: CheatGPT

#314
People who use this are just robbing themselves of an education. It's the same as copying the answer from stack overflow or another student. Most problems are already online somewhere, chatgpt is just shortening the research time.

You can solve plenty of math problems by putting them in Wolfram alpha, but if you do that for every calculus assignment you won't learn calculus and you won't be able to apply it to solve problems. Same with programming; if you copy a fizzbuzz instead of learning how to write a fizzbuzz, you won't be able to do a more complicated problem or understand a loop when you need to.

Re: CheatGPT

#315

I don't understand how most of the comments here seem to be along the lines of "these interview questions are useless now" or "we need to rethink education, it hasn't kept up". These all seem absurdly myopic to me. What we're seeing is the first instance, still very limited and imperfect, of AGI. This is not going to make some interview questions obsolete, or give students more tools to cheat with their homework. It…

I think what an LLM is best at is fooling people into thinking it’s intelligent. It is really good at saying things in a natural sounding way, and statistically often getting it right, because certain strings of tokens are encoded. But it’s clear when you start poking that it just as easily tells you that 5/2=3, or that 2+2 != 4. it doesn’t model math or any sort of knowledge at all.

The best feature of this LLM is that it goes from fooling people into having people make fools of themselves when they turn around and predict the end of the world/education/programming/whatever thing they don't quite understand based on what a confidently incorrect charlatan machine told them. It's like a viral marketing gag.

Re: CheatGPT

#316

As a CS professor myself, I don't think ChatGPT really creates entirely new problems for assessment, but rather makes problems that we had been sweeping under the carpet more obvious and harder to ignore. Any assignment that can be cheated by using ChatGPT could already be cheated before by asking a friend, an expert or paying someone else to do it. But most teachers assumed this doesn't happen often, and thus acted…

> the continuous assessment fad that has always been rather disastrous for equity

Can you expand on this?

I lived the two models as a student and still can't make up my mind on which is best. I feel like it just takes catching some bad cold the week of the exams or a bad exam subject / topic to fail them which seems pretty unfair, but I also know my shit better and have more perspective the week of the exam and prefer not having to stress every week because of the continuous assessment.

Re: CheatGPT

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What we're seeing is the first instance, still very limited and imperfect, of AGI absolutely not. language-model text generation is actually about as non-general as it gets -- they are fundamentally incapable of understanding anything at all, ever. they can't do math, work through basic logic problems, or produce any output that isn't just an assumed logical continuation of the input.

Have you actually used any of these products? GPT et al are perfectly capable of taking knowledge from any one domain and applying it towards the solution of any other problem domain, through various kinds of data abstraction, reasoning by analogy, and other techniques similar to what humans do. It makes plenty of goofups along the way, just like humans do. But if your requirement is that it performs absolutely perfe…

> through various kinds of data abstraction, reasoning by analogy, and other techniques similar to what humans do.

No, that's exactly not how LLMs work. They are extremely good at predicting what sentences resemble the sentences in their training data and creating those. That's all.

People are getting tripped up because they are seeing legitimate intelligence in the output from these systems -- but that intelligence was in the people who wrote the texts that it was trained with, not in the LLM.

Re: CheatGPT

#318

What ChatGPT (and its cousins) expose is that the way humans have been taught in most schools - memorizing and regurgitating information - is now a commodity. What humans being to the table over ChatGPT is our ability to create new links between information, aka creativity. Teaching creativity, imo, will require a return to the methods like those of Sophocles and his contemporaries. I would rather this author be writ…

> memorizing and regurgitating information - is now a commodity.

Google Search already did this! Connections have been the value for a very long time.

Re: CheatGPT

#320
post #316

As a CS professor myself, I don't think ChatGPT really creates entirely new problems for assessment, but rather makes problems that we had been sweeping under the carpet more obvious and harder to ignore. Any assignment that can be cheated by using ChatGPT could already be cheated before by asking a friend, an expert or paying someone else to do it. But most teachers assumed this doesn't happen often, and thus acted…

> the continuous assessment fad that has always been rather disastrous for equity Can you expand on this? I lived the two models as a student and still can't make up my mind on which is best. I feel like it just takes catching some bad cold the week of the exams or a bad exam subject / topic to fail them which seems pretty unfair, but I also know my shit better and have more perspective the week of the exam and prefe…

There is also an option outside "one exam" and "many exams" — and that's "no exams." Obviously, this is spectacularly hard to fit into the current system, but you see this a lot in vocational schools where project-based work makes up the majority of the grade and exams are held to comply with regulatory requirements.

ChatGPT might just fit into an educational world that values outcomes over fact retention. One may dream.

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