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I'd rather read the prompt

claytonwramsey.com

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Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#321

Post by EvgeniyZh »

fallinditch wrote: post #289
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 obvious since ChatGPT blew up in early 2023 that educators had to rethink how they educate. I agree that this situation that the author outlines is unsatisfactory but it's mostly the fault of the education system (and by extension the post author). With a class writing exercise like the author describes, of course the students are going to use an LLM, they would be stupid not to if their classmates are usin…

> they would be stupid not to if their classmates are using it.

Why would they be stupid? Were people before LLMs stupid for not asking smarter classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve the homework for them?

Large part of education is learning about things that can be easily automated, because you can't learn hard things without learning easy things. Nothing conceptually changed in this regard, like Wolfram Alpha didn't change the way differentiation is taught.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#322

Post by halfadot »

pton_xd wrote: post #280
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. There are lots of ways to challenge the mind even if you use llm’s to write some papers. Writing is hard. Sometimes it means sitting with yourself, for hours, without any progress. Leaning on an LLM to ease through those tough moments is 100% short circuiting the learning process. To your point, maybe you're learning something else instead, like…

> Leaning on an LLM to ease through those tough moments is 100% short circuiting the learning process.

Sounds like "back in my days" type of complaining. Do you have any evidence of this "100% reduction" or is it just "AI bad" bandwagoning?

> But you're definitely not learning how to write.

How would you know? You've never tested him. You're making a far-reaching assumption about someone's learning based on using an aid. It's the equivalent of saying "you're definitely not learning how to ride a bicycle if you use training wheels".

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#323

Post by satisfice »

bsder wrote: post #263
satisfice wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you present your AI-powered work to me, and I suspect you employed AI to do any of the heavy lifting, I will automatically discount any role you claim to have had in that work. Fairly or unfairly, people (including you) will inexorably come to see anything done with AI as ONLY done with AI, and automatically assume that anyone could have done it. In such a world, someone could write the next Harry Potter and it wi…

> someone could write the next Harry Potter and it will be lost in a sea of one million mediocre works that roughly similar. To be fair, the first Harry Potter is a kinda average British boarding school story. Rowling is barely an adequate writer (and it shows badly in some of the later books). There was a reason she got rejected by so many publishers. However, Netscape was going nuts and the Internet was taking off.…

I was surprised to find how not true that is when I eventually read the books for myself, long after they became a phenomenon. The books are well-crafted mystery stories that don't cheat the reader. All the clues are there, more or less, for you to figure out what's happening, yet she still surprises.

The world-building is meh at best. The magic system is perfunctory. But the characters are strong and the plot is interesting from beginning to end.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#324

Post by zamadatix »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #314
fallinditch wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been obvious since ChatGPT blew up in early 2023 that educators had to rethink how they educate. I agree that this situation that the author outlines is unsatisfactory but it's mostly the fault of the education system (and by extension the post author). With a class writing exercise like the author describes, of course the students are going to use an LLM, they would be stupid not to if their classmates are usin…

> The onus should be on the educators to reframe how they teach and how they test. It's strange how the author can't see this. > Universities and schools must change how they do things with respect to AI, otherwise they are failing the students. Hard disagree. Students need to answer a fundamental question of themselves; Am I here to learn or to get a passing grade? If it is the former, the latter doesn't really matt…

Why isn't both a valid option, can't one be at a university to both learn and get a degree+GPA showing they did well at doing so? In any case, why does a student selecting that they are there to learn negate the responsibility of the university to provide the best curricula for students to do so with?

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#325

Post by lazyasciiart »

prymitive wrote: post #109
ineptech wrote: post #86

Relatedly, there was a major controversy at work recently over the propriety of adding something like this to a lengthy email discussion: > Since this is a long thread and we're including a wider audience, I thought I'd add Copilot's summary... Someone called them out for it, several others defended it. It was brought up in one team's retro and the opinions were divided and very contentious, ranging from, "the summar…

I often find Copilot summaries to be more or less an attempt at mainsplaining a simple change. If my tiny PR with a one line description requires Copilot to output a paragraph of text about it it’s not a summary, it’s simply time wasted on someone who loves to talk.

How is mansplaining related to this? And saying that summaries of already short information are a waste of time is not really relevant to someone talking about summaries of long and probably repetitive/hard to read discussions.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#326

Post by strken »

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.

Yes, I too enjoy that universities never send students to pointless filler courses. I really enjoyed writing long essays about ethics in software engineering for people who'd barely even read them. I especially benefited from being told that "tell your boss, tell HR, then make a police report and quit if that didn't fix it" is not an appropriate response to being asked to break the law at work.

While we're talking about things we're grateful for, I am so glad that we've structured the education and employment systems such that not having a degree puts you at significant risk of unemployment, prevents you from ever immigrating anywhere for the first decade of your working life, and generally marks you as a failure.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#327

Post by zarathustreal »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #314
fallinditch wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been obvious since ChatGPT blew up in early 2023 that educators had to rethink how they educate. I agree that this situation that the author outlines is unsatisfactory but it's mostly the fault of the education system (and by extension the post author). With a class writing exercise like the author describes, of course the students are going to use an LLM, they would be stupid not to if their classmates are usin…

> The onus should be on the educators to reframe how they teach and how they test. It's strange how the author can't see this. > Universities and schools must change how they do things with respect to AI, otherwise they are failing the students. Hard disagree. Students need to answer a fundamental question of themselves; Am I here to learn or to get a passing grade? If it is the former, the latter doesn't really matt…

Universities do not provide knowledge, this is a romanticization of an ideal. They are about getting a passing grade and a certificate so that you can enter the workforce. The idea that you go to college to get an education is just a polite fiction to appease students and their parents

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#328

Post by halfadot »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #314
fallinditch wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been obvious since ChatGPT blew up in early 2023 that educators had to rethink how they educate. I agree that this situation that the author outlines is unsatisfactory but it's mostly the fault of the education system (and by extension the post author). With a class writing exercise like the author describes, of course the students are going to use an LLM, they would be stupid not to if their classmates are usin…

> The onus should be on the educators to reframe how they teach and how they test. It's strange how the author can't see this. > Universities and schools must change how they do things with respect to AI, otherwise they are failing the students. Hard disagree. Students need to answer a fundamental question of themselves; Am I here to learn or to get a passing grade? If it is the former, the latter doesn't really matt…

For almost everyone in the world, the answer is the latter.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#329

Post by jameshart »

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’ve come across this analogy that I think works well:

Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym.

If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you. The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.

Re: I'd rather read the prompt

#330

Post by myth2018 »

> Anecdotally, this phenomenon seems more common among English-as-a-second-language speakers

That part caught my attention. As an English-as-a-second-language speaker myself, I find it so difficult to develop any form of "taste" in English the same way I have in my mother tongue. A badly written sentence in my mother tongue feels painful in a sort of physical way, while bad English usually sound OK to me, especially when asserted in the confident tone LLMs are trained in. I wish I could find a way to develop such sense for the foreign languages I currently use.

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