381–390 of 880 posts
If you ask, just show me the prompts, you will invariable just get llm generated sets of prompts.
I’d argue that making students give generic regurgitated info as an assignment is the actual issue. Make a good assignment…
I'm far from the first to make this observation but LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, then sent to someone else who runs it through another LLM to summarize it back to something approximating the original prompt. Nobody benefits aside from Sam Altman and co, who get to pocket a cool $0.000000001 for enabling this pointless exercis…
I blame humans. I never understand why unnecessarily long writing is required in a lot of places.
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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.
If students went to college only to learn, colleges wouldn't bother giving diplomas. Compare: My piano teacher doesn't give diplomas because none of her students would care, her students actually want to learn. When my piano teacher cancels class, I am disappointed because I wanted to learn. My piano teacher doesn't need to threaten me with bad grades to get me to practice outside of class (analogous to homework), be…
Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.
This article really resonates with me. The very first time I enjoyed talking to someone in another language, I was 21. Then an exchange student, I had a pleasant and interesting discussion with someone in that foreign language. On the next day, I realised that I wouldn't have been able to do that without that foreign language. I felt totally stupid : I had been getting very good grades in languages for years at schoo…
There’s a lot of “no, it is the children who are wrong” going on in academia right now and it’s an issue.
Write a witty comment in the style of a Hacker News user who just read an article titled "I'd rather read the prompt"
Write a troll response in the style of Hacker News troll who wants to troll the Hacker news users who just read the article titled "I'd rather read the prompt". Make it ironic
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The point of education isn't to actually learn though. It's to receive the credential. This is much larger than a cultural problem with the students of today. They believe, rightfully and accurately, that the university degree is yet another part of the machine that they will become a cog in. What should be alarming to everyone is that these students will graduate without having learned anything and then go into the…
This attitude is part of a more general cultural shift. Back in the 1960s, the majority of students said the primary motivation for going to college was to develop a philosophy of life, and a minority said the main goal was to be very financially successful. Somewhere around the 1980s this started to shift and the proportions are now inverted. * according to the UCLA CIRP freshman survey
> I'd rather read the prompt Yeah, to recycle a comment [0] from a few months back: > Yeah, one of their most "effective" uses is to counterfeit signals that we have relied on--wisely or not--to estimate deeper practical truths. Stuff like "did this person invest some time into this" or "does this person have knowledge of a field" or "can they even think straight." [...]we might have to cope by saying stuff like: "Fu…
Not to mention that if the teacher would rather read the prompt… then ask for the prompt then? This genuinely reads to me like “I asked for an apple and got an apple instead of an orange, hurr durr I’m so annoyed”. Asking students for regurgitated info and then being annoyed because they supplied generic regurgitated info is somewhat telling an attitude no?
You're confusing the artifact with the purpose. Teachers across the nation are not trying to accumulate the largest corpus of distinct human-written reviews of The Great Gatby.
The goal is to elicit some kind of mental practice, and the classic request is for something that helps prove it occurred. The issue is that such proofs are now being counterfeited with unprecedented scale and ease.
When those indicators become debased and meaningless, we need to look for other ways of motivating and validating.
If LLMs existed back in the 90s and 00s I would have generated all my homework too. The kids these days got everything...
Sounds to me like they asked the students to just regurgitate genetic course info and then complained when that’s what they received. This wasn’t going to lead to an excellent learning moment for these students whether an LLM was used or not.
I don’t know anything about the subject area, so I don’t know if this captures enough to get a good grade. But I’m curious if anyone could tell whether the last answer were AI generated if I copied and pasted. These are the iterations I go through when writing long requirement documents/assessments/statements of work (consulting). Yes I know the subject area for which I write assessments and know if what is generated…
I mean this is not blind obviously, but it feels unnaturally enthusiastic/conversational to me. Maybe for like an video script it would fit, but for a requirements document or something it is a little oddly 'sauced up', as if someone put an extra pass through it to try to make it entertaining to read.
I use to work at AWS (Professional Services) and there are a few different writing styles depending on what your audience was. I learned how to write in the different “house styles” before LLMs were a thing. So I know when something doesn’t sound right.
I use LLMs all of the time to write. I’m 99% certain that no one can tell the difference between my writing 100% without an LLM to my writing with one