This was already a good idea even before LLMs, and it has been tried a bit in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom). Maybe it just happens to fit my personal learning style, but I think it would encourage collaboration, help teachers more accurately assess how students are doing, help students who don't have a good home environment to get work done, it's easier to self-motivate yourself to watch a lecture at home than to actively do homework, etc.
I would love to see this tried at a larger scale and studied to see if it actually works any better.
I know this method works for some people, but it isn't consistent with the way I have observed that people learn.
I used to watch Veritasium [1] videos (way back) that vividly illustrated that even when told the correct information, people would not change their world view but instead give answers consistent with their pre-teaching naive views.
Learning is complex. If all that a "teacher" is doing is lecturing, then a video might be a reasonable replacement.
Even when the content is straightforward, my observation is that engagement with videos are awful. Heck, engagement in a lecture is awful, but at least the (human) teacher in the room can reasonably be expected to do things to engage the audience and probe their understanding. Some of that might be possible in a video format, for 5x the effort; follow up with examples if you know good ones. I know in the MIT OCW I have seen recordings of discussion sections (very effective), and that should be the bottom of the barrel as far as engagement when "honestly trying to engage learners".
You would be better off just trying to do the work, then looking up the information needed. That kind of works, and I bet that's what happens in the flipped classroom model. (Maybe 20% of the class watched the video? Stats welcome.)
I'm really just trying to point out that learning is complex. There's supposed to be a national What Works Clearinghouse [2], but I had a hard time finding useful information there.
Repetition alone was hard enough, but if I was responsible for learning the material at my own pace on my own device as well? I'd still be in middle school.
I also have a relative going for a PHD, he says many times for the classes he teaches, students are using AI for their homework. He has brought that up may times to his superiors but the response tends to be "oh well".
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…
Inertia. They were cheating a lot when I was a TA, but using whatsapp groups and other online resources. Nothing changed then, and it probably won't change much now.
When I taught a class of engineering students Python in 2015 they were all copying from each other, did some basic plagiarism checks and 40% had submitted identical code. The University then didn’t care, lots of international students paying higher fees than domestic students.
It is plagiarism, we’re not talking simple weekly assignment, it was a core course and it was a 40% of the module. They had to write a report along with it and two Chinese students had copied much of that from Wikipedia and had the same exact passages!
It has to be much higher than that. Look at the reddit op. I assume this person is nearly an adult and their writing is very broken and meandering. Sure you could argue “it’s just a reddit post”, but I find how people write informally is generally indicative of their overall writing ability.
> how people write informally is generally indicative of their overall writing ability
I don't think that's true... I personally change writing styles often depending on who I am talking to. It's effectively code switching but on the internet. Not to say that this redditor isn't like that - but there are more objective cues from the content of their post than from the spelling/grammar of their post (like how they choose to watch their sibling develop bad learning habits and rather than doing something about it, they make dramatic complaints about how her whole generation is screwed on Reddit).
In the context of discussing the American education system, the more relevant figure is the number of native born functionally illiterate adults which, according to that source, is roughly 14%.
Almost 30 years ago, at my first job, a coworker got mad at someone and broke a broom. He was trying to write a letter to apologize and he couldn't. Couldn't meaning he was really trying but he didn't have the writing skills to write "I'm sorry that I broke a broom." The rest of the employees helped him.
That is terrifying. But what is the trend? Maybe it’s historically low. I tried Googling around and could only find recent data of that same 2019 report.
I see it more like calculators. Using a calculator isn't inherently good or bad in itself. If you're using a calculator to fake learning the intuitions and mechanics of division on your math homework then that's bad - regardless of how many other good use cases for calculators can be talked about in a separate context.
I dunno that I'd agree with that either (for this specific type of example at least).
An adult wanting to find "how many hours are in 3.228 years?" when some task is looking for the answer aligns a bit with what you're saying. In this kind of scenario it has nothing with the adult not understanding how to do the conversion and everything to do with what the most accurate way to quickly complete the conversion itself is. I.e. the task is "produce an answer so we can use it". Whether that be done via calculator, spreadsheet, timespan conversion tool, or LLM (though the latter can be a bit of a poor choice for this type of task to be honest) the use of the tool is about best achieving the original goal accurately and quickly, not about sidestepping it.
A student wanting to find "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours" on their homework aligns very differently in my opinion. In this kind of scenario the goal was that the student become more educated on time conversions by practicing them. The actual answer provided is just a way to be able to provide feedback on how accurately that learning process went. Learning these kinds of basic things through experience allows them to tackle learning ever more complex things as they advance through their education. Faking gaining that education by using a tool to get an answer to write down isn't just the lazier way to do the conversion, it does leave them without the education the task was actually about.
Not only that, learning to do such basic timespan conversions is going to be the lazy way for such tasks over anything but the briefest timespan anyways!
If LLMs were being used as part of the learning process instead of a replacement of the learning process I'd hold different opinions of the post. I think tools (be it calculators or LLMs) can be extremely powerful learning aids... but extremely weak ones when used as learning replacements.
There difference is between "check" and "do" - verifying your work is a helpful use of feedback, not being able to multiply single digits without a calculator is a failed skill without a crutch to rely on.
Calculators in the 70s were a huge subject of debate and there were precise rulings, standard models, definitions and codes of ethics around them. It didn't just solve itself.
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.
>Perfect performance would simulate semantic understanding, no?
The thought experiment argues the exact opposite. The idea is you can have perfect Chinese but not understand a single word of what you are saying. The argument is that syntax (procedure based operation) and semantics (understanding) are distinct and separable.
As you extend the scope of the Chinese room from a single task (e.g. Chinese conversation) to human behavior in general, it converges with the question of if philosophical zombies can exist.
In terms of the Chinese room, the distinction IS the difference.
That's what Searle's argument is, but it's a thought experiment and there's no consensus among professional philosophers as to whether or not to believe it is true.
The Chinese room metaphor is an argument about AI, or computation more generally, attempting to distinguish the difference between performance metrics and "understanding".
There is the role of the human within the metaphor, and the argument/position of the metaphor as a whole. I don't think it makes much sense to talk about the "point/argument/position of a single component of the metaphor. At least, that wasn't how it was originally structured.
The Chinese Room metaphor is yet another one of those arguments that fails to take into account that humans are a bag of functional proteins. There is no soul anywhere in the human body.
In other words: it's an argument that would work perfectly fine to defend the idea that humans have no consciousness.
Ergo it can only really prove that either humans have no consciousness/soul/... (whatever you name the magical human property) or that it doesn't exist at all.
That is a pretty simple grasp of the example. It doesn't claim that no system can have understanding or consciousness. It just demonstrates that performance alone is insufficient to conclude consciousness and understanding. A calculator or abacus can add 2 + 2 but instead self aware
I kinda interpreted it as: "Here's an example of something which we would not call intelligence if you knew how it worked, therefore our definition of intelligence must somehow involve process or understanding, not just results."
But the human-ness of the person inside the room is not important. It's just there to follow simple instructions. I think Searle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle) put a human in the room to help us empathize and understand that the person in the room doesn't understand Chinese. It simplifies the argument by avoiding the introduction of computers into the setup.
The Chinese Room was a lame thought experiment. It requires a book so wondrous that any question looked up has an answer convincingly human (it's just that both the question and reply are in a language the person shuffling pages doesn't understand). The Book can be seen by a modern audience as equivalent to the distillation of all that LLM training.
It's odd to me to present an argument on human vs. machine intelligence and completely skip over what human intelligence is — exactly what it is about human intelligence that is so distant from this "trained" (educated?) book.
(I think I am also speaking for Karl Pilkington when I say that I have no way to know that the little man in my head that is busy flipping through the Calhoun Book has a clue as to what I am on about either.)
But I mostly agree. It's not a hopeful situation. If AI takes over it won't take over because it fought it war with humans and won. AI will take over because people want it to take over.
They haven't accepted Covid vaccinations, immigration, the election of Joe Biden,
... . The world has a long history of people determining their fate and not accepting things. It's just one political group that has embraced quitting and despair - they are laughable.
The question reveals the problem, a victim outlook. You have no responsibility or agency, and your feelings justify it. It's not only bs, it's unhealthy and self-defeating. The outcome is predictable.
Reminds me of the final outcome of the absurd series Mrs. Davis, where (spoiler warning) humanity has voluntarily succombed to the arbitrary assignments of a single AI-based customer rewards points app, because it was just a bit smarter than humans at manipulating people.
Eventually they’ll do a better job than us, so maybe why not. People are very bad at managing themselves and the world. Leave a final prompt to take care of the biosphere, clean up the environment, and manage the humans but let them live happily.
It's the kids whose teachers can't or want to adapt that will most likely suffer in their education. Not saying it is easy, but it is possible.
I have a friend who's a teacher that is pioneering methods to include (modified / preprompted) LLMs as a part of their lessons. He calls it Modern PBL: Project-Based Learning. He wrote a book on it if you are interested:
https://a.co/d/7MFQ5wa
This is such a weird take. Teachers could teach LLMs, but that doesn't solve the problem. Kids still need to practice skills that an LLM could do for them.
A calculator can be trusted to give you the right answer if you punch in the numbers correctly. An LLM cannot.
That's because a calculator is designed to give the right answer. An LLM is not. It's only designed to produce text that seems plausible based on the prompt. "Plausible" is not the same as "trustworthy".
That's not playing devil's advocate. That's you not understanding how the calculator was programmed.
A graphing calculator in which you can put (9+3x2) before pressing enter is different than a adding calculator in which you can only do sequential binary operations (9+3, enter, x2, enter).
The calculator is programmed exactly to do as it was. Both calculators are correct in their programming. It's you who mistyped what you intended.
I don’t think things would be different if the LLM gave answers that were 100% reliable and correct, it would still be sad that the kid is having someone else do their homework for them with no effort on their part. What you say is true but irrelevant.
The real difference is that calculation isn’t the important part of math above a certain level.
I don't think what I said is irrelevant. A calculator is a reliable tool. When used properly it can be helpful. The same would apply to more sophisticated tools that are available now with computers to help with math, such as tools that can quickly graph equations, or show the results of complex numerical simulations. There is certainly an argument for not allowing the use of such tools in certain learning environments, but if the tools are reliable, there will come a point where their usefulness outweighs their disadvantages.
An LLM is not a reliable tool, and that is a huge difference. It's not just that the students are asking "someone else" to do their homework for them. It's that they're being lied to by the proponents of LLMs, who are telling them the answers the LLM gives them are reliable, when they're not. Nobody made claims about what calculators can do that weren't justified by their actual design.
At some point we have to stop reaching for these lazy "it's like a past change" quips. Not just regarding LLMs, but everything of the format "people who criticize the new thing are all luddites/fogies".
X may in fact be like Y. But make the argument - don't just sarcastically imply it.
Using a calculator to answer "how many seconds are in 3 minutes" requires you to understand that that problem can be modeled as 60 * 3. Using ChatGPT doesn't.
I mean, it's still a valid argument, isn't it? If an 11 year old kid can't answer the question "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours" without a calculator, that's a bad thing. But even adapting the plain english question into something that they can enter into a calculator might soon become too difficult for the ChatGPT generation.
Teachers were well aware of calculators and had methods to prevent their usage/dependency, like showing all the intermediate steps and banning them in-class for tests.
And in right context specially later they were useful tools. Hand drawing graphs for example is not exactly most useful use of time. Maybe a few times, but beyond that...
At a certain point a tool can coddle you too much and start to impede your... humanity. If I am trying to learn woodworking a robot that will build whatever I tell it to is not a great tool. There is some perfect middle point where tools allow you to channel your creative vision without imposing on it. LLMs for homework take it too far, the kid in this example is just copying text between a computer and a piece of paper, the human input is totally gone.
There's some grim humor in the fact that the poster reflects on his sister's use of chatgpt, and just ends on that point. I have to wonder if he decided to talk to her or his parents about the situation. I didn't see anything in the post to suggest it, just a "this next generation is cooked."
Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.
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.
I hope in-class exams (or even simple questions from the teacher) will define the big part of the grade in the future schools.
This will force ChatGPT-using classmates to either use it as learning _assist_ tool, to help student learn the material; or be 100% reliant on ChatGPT for homework, but fail every in-class assignment and then fail the whole class. Either outcome is fine with me.
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?
The US is one of, if not the most, socially mobile countries in the west. Countries like the Nordics have much more equality of outcome, but the chances someone leaves the economic quintile they are born into is lower.
Paging through the Brookings document, it tracks pretty closely with what I have seen before. I dont see anything that contradicts what I have said (mobility is higher in the US than elsewhere).
1) Do you have a comparison with European countries that makes you think the US is worse?
2) What do you think US mobility numbers should look like? Pure randomness is not desirable either.
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 child and have a good childhood?
I clearly don't understand how difficult life is outside the US. Yes, it is important to know the material. However, it is also important to know your surroundings and what everyone else is doing. If you are in India and literally everyone else is cheating in exams, well you better start doing that as well just to keep up. If you are gen alpha and everyone else is using ChatGPT to polish essays, ...
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.
How long have we been saying that rote memorization is not learning? ChatGPT makes it clearer than ever that we need to focus on teaching children to be able to analyze and solve problems, not memorize a bunch of facts.
What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution.
Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.
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.
I'm not sure how that would play out but I think there is some validness in that concern. It's the same with smartphones; you deny your kid one because you want them to socialize in person but if they're the only kid without a smartphone then they'll be socially isolated.
Everything has to be managed in moderation.
As for ChatGPT, I use it all the time for learning. And I've used it to help my kid study. But I wouldn't give my kid unfettered access to it just like I don't give him unfettered access to anything.
Even for the parents who know it's extremely difficult to really know if you're doing the right or wrong thing. And it's constant, you have to be eternally vigilant. My son brute-forced the downtime pin on his iPhone -- it took 6 months but he did it.
I truly am hesitant to ever criticize someone else's parenting style since if I've learned anything, it's that kids personalities can be very different and circumstances are always more complicated than you might think.
That said, I hear stories like yours (from friends) and it always baffles me because that's just now how our family operates. I have a downtime pin on devices for the same reason I lock the door to my car even though it's like 50% breakable glass windows.
My kids know the rules. One of them for sure knows the pin. But they also know that if they use the device outside of our agreed upon guidelines, they're in trouble.
I'm sincere in asking, aren't behavior controls a lot better than technological ones?
He absolutely got into trouble for breaking past the downtime pin. Although, not in that much trouble because I was honestly a little impressed.
Punishment and technological locks are both tools in the toolkit.
Ultimately you want your children to find the right balance with technology and that's difficult because most parents struggle with that balance. The world has moved very quickly and it is very hard to keep up. My kids are 12 years apart in age and they couldn't have had more different childhoods -- that's how quickly things have changed. Less than a generation.
And it even drastically varies between children. My two kids' (6 and 4) interests are vastly different which makes balancing difficult. My oldest is thankfully starting to understand that the rules apply to them equally. Consistency goes a long way.
My optimistic hope is that for the more basic skills, teachers can adjust grading so that more easily-cheated homework provides less credit, and in-person work (such as a pop quiz) is weighed more heavily. Then, you're effectively setting yourself a time bomb by using LLMs on homework to avoid learning the material.
For higher-level skills, I think using LLMs will probably just become another skillset and part of the toolbox, just like the Internet was for my generation. But I guess we'll see.
I don't understand this sentiment, even though it is common among Americans. Why is education seen as a competition between students, even in the younger grades? I've even heard stories of parents of young children fighting with each other over their children's grades.
That seems to be a common theme in the responses to me here.
The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades.
Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?
Why have grades like this that then still move everyone on to the next class. Don't move on until you've mastered the prerequisite. Why have a track of people making C's moving on from Algebra I to algebra II with the same people making A's. Get to college earlier by mastering, rather than a weird compounding competition that kicks off in middleschool.
Something like that was advocated by the Khan academy guy, but I'm not sure if he worked out a full replacement system. There are some things in the current system like honors classes or retaking the classes for people who got an F, but why have the F ruin their chance at college if they later master it and get an A? If they always lag but eventually get there, I guess an argument is college would be too expensive if it took them a long time to get through it.
Teachers aren't dumb here; they know what's going on. And they're actively working to figure out how best to navigate this situation. They're not looking to grade how well ChatGPT does in their course.
I have many teachers among my friends. So far, they're mostly powerless. If a student is creative, there is basically nothing that will prevent them from cheating at any homework/exam.
My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.
The problem is tests/quizzes and especially standardized ones. They have never been good teaching tools, and teachers have been railroaded into using them because they provide a blunt way to measure outcomes at a population level. But real teaching is 1:1 and teachers have a lot of power, it's just stuff that doesn't scale and you can't mandate organizationally. But this has mostly always been the case. Trying to measure student performance with a student who is more interested in gaming the process than learning is a fools' errand.
I skimmed the linked material and that's not my conclusion. Practice tests are better teaching tools than just memorizing the material and then taking a real test, but on an absolute scale, I'm convinced that they're pretty terrible for most types of material.
Throughout my education I've come across countless people who could memorize the material and recite it with relative ease but they didn't have any intuitive understanding so they couldn't use that "knowledge" to solve real problems. Much like ChatGPT itself.
Equating good memorization and recall performance with good education and knowledge seems like a form of cargo culting to me, it's missing the essence of what makes knowledge powerful in the first place.
What kind of school did you go to where you needed to memorize things? That's not how schools usually are these days. Tests don't test memorization, they ask you to solve problems.
Reading the abstracts and introduction of the linked articles: the testing literature focuses on recall performance, no? It's only part of the picture of "learning'. Of course, any good educator will interleave quizzes with integrative projects, chances to review past work, etc.
That is true, but the problem shows up even with open-ended tests. In my country, we generally don't use tests/quizzes, and nevertheless, every year, many students attempt to cheat – and some of them undoubtedly get away with it.
Regardless, I agree, attempting to assess the progress of a cheater is a fool's errand.
Are you suggesting that in general and over the longer term teachers are going to advocate for changing curriculum and grading standards in such a way that students outsourcing their homework to ChatGPT (or whatever popular LLM comes after) would be advantageous in some way?
I would not wish to live in a society where “can bullshit an assignment with ChatGPT” is generally competitive in education.
Why wouldn't it be? Education's job is to prepare students for life in the real world, and life in the real world is often a competition with your peers. When I was in grade school (admittedly close to 20 years ago) we had accelerated and slowed tracks for students starting in 5th grade.
> I mean, they should probably prepare people with knowledge of taxes and investing then.
Fully agree.
> The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
Fascinating observation! Wonder if that shows up at the school level as well? For example, In the US the highest/lowest performing schools tend to correlate to high/low income areas and have significant disparity in quality of education, and I expect this is a strongly self-reinforcing trend towards elite private institutions.
Typically the accelerated/gifted and talented/special education system in public education is designed to prevent students from being variously bored or overwhelmed, leading to poorer outcomes in either direction. It isn’t designed as a competitive construct.
AP courses notwithstanding. AP courses were insanely competitive and speaking as someone had been all over the map in my K12 years (AP, accelerated courses, early foreign language, and a touch of remedial relative to grade level) the students in AP were mainly in competition with themselves. That however is just personal anecdote.
Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U?
(Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)
But the difference might not be between Harvard and a local community college. People don't come out of "slums" to Harvard and immediately join the upper class.
But you'll be exposed to different people and opportunities by going to a state school instead of a community college, or a better school out of state with a scholarship vs. a state college, etc. The small differences matter.
I literally got my first job because my roommate's dad knew of someone looking for a software developer job. Would I have met that person in community college? Maybe! Lots of people with good networks go to community colleges, too - but I'd bet fewer than more expensive schools.
The network is not (only) your graduating peers, it's primarily the alumni. If you see a job you want and the hiring manager also went to Harvard, they will have a more favorable opinion of you. You may ask how this is any different from any other college, but, due to prior network effects, the prior Harvard graduates themselves are more likely to be in higher positions of power. Prestige begets prestige, in a way that lower universities do not.
For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.
You're talking about the way the world should be. Reality is different.
For instance, having graduated from Harvard is going to get you a fairly good job _regardless_ of their GPA.
Similarly, there is no objective way to measure "merit" that isn't unfair to _someone_ and also scales to dozens/hundreds/thousands of students. So people use GPA.
When discussing percentile ranks of students and their admission to top schools the school needs some way of measuring the percentile according to some measurable metric. It’s not a vibe based process. GPA and test scores are heavily leaned upon.
I would note that students who depend on AIs to answer questions on homework will do poorly on tests. I am not really sure what all the fuss is about. Kids cheating on homework is nothing new and a machine doing it for your is little different than all the other ways kids cheat on homework. And cheating on homework doesn’t help you in your grades - it hurts you because you’re unprepared for exams, which typically dominate the weighting of a grade. Then once you take a standardized placement exam you’re totally screwed.
> When discussing percentile ranks of students and their admission to top schools the school needs some way of measuring the percentile according to some measurable metric. It’s not a vibe based process. GPA and test scores are heavily leaned upon.
How does this relate to the prior comment?
I’m clearly not an admissions officer at Harvard, nor likely are the other HN commentors here.
Yes but people actually think about 20th percentile Harvard vs 20th BU, and correctly deduces that Harvard would be better path.
Parents are worried about the worst case scenario, and going to Harvard raises that floor by ensuring they can get noticed straight out of graduation, even if they are bottom of the class.
Anecdotally, I failed out of undergrad 3 times. When I finally graduated, it had been 9 years and my final GPA was a 2.4. I also walked out that door with 6 interviews and an offer from each, all through the school job fair. Nobody ever asked about my GPA, they care about my degree and where I got it. For reference, I attended a respectable private school, but not one anywhere near the level of Harvard.
No. There are entire categories of employers (such as most of the prestigious financial firms for financial jobs) that only hire from the Ivy League. Twitter had its internal hiring policy leaked some time ago (before Elon) and Harvard was on the list (GPA 3.6) but BU was not at any GPA. School matters much more in the American class system than GPA (edit: or class rank) does. My understanding is that too high a GPA may in fact be disqualifying in some places; you might be uptight.
> I don't understand this sentiment, even though it is common among Americans. Why is education seen as a competition between students, even in the younger grades?
Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this, especially compared to more competitive educational systems like China. My kid is in second grade and hasn't gotten a real grade yet.
Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this
It's hard to generalize here, as Americans are a heterogeneous bunch. Demographic subsets exist where education is seen as a vigorous competitive sport, where the goal is to achieve admission to the "right" college. The parents are as involved as the kids, usually for better but sometimes for worse.
At the same time, among other groups of Americans, the goal is simply for kids to reach adulthood without too much interaction with the police. You can't draw sweeping conclusions that will cover the entire spectrum.
Entrance to elite colleges is dependent on your academic record. Only so many spots exist. So competition in high schools is common. Then elite high schools only have so many spots, so competition in middle school exists. And so on down to preschool.
Everything in America is a competition. I'm sorry, but I chuckled considering that this _very website_ is devoted entirely to ruthlessly choosing winners and losers in (what purports to be) a cutthroat field. It's Hunger Games over here, buddy.
It's not a competition. Teach her to use her brain, and hope school will end up being a net positive. You can't fix other parents and their children.
It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will gain you. If you do it right it won't matter whether she is allowed to use those tools or not, she'll use her own brain because that will allow her to get ahead by the time it really matters.
Suggest watching the movie gattaca to understand what happens to kids of parents who think like this in an extreme version. The problem is if you ignore the reality of the competition it’s basically setting your kid up to fail due to prisoner dilemma dynamics.
You have already failed your kid if you don't teach them to use their brain. Education is what let's people transcend the rat race of life, acquiring knowledge to use for the rat race isn't education in this sense.
Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.
If you want your kids to be subservient to the king then of course they should use ChatGPT, and you should want schools to allow it otherwise we will just have more Asian and Indian students "getting ahead"
Hear me out: we could also build a more equitable society, one where the two choices aren't "live like an impoverished monk" and "win the Hunger Games".
I did all of my education post elementary school in the United States, specifically in Texas. Class space was limited in advanced subjects, and there are only so many scholarships to go around. If I had not gotten one, I am not sure if my family would have been able to afford college - which, regardless of we may think of the utility of higher education, definitely set me up with connections that set me on a career path that's currently supporting my family.
This will be "better in the long run" for her, in one way.
I see such competition as hare vs tortoise races, where the students who get an early unfair advantage end up cheating themselves out of an education, in the sense that all they come to know is how to prompt an LLM, rather than break down and solve hard problems.
It's still heartbreaking to consider both the early discrimination she will likely encounter, and the later failures that will anticipate her classmates, and the society that they will come to inhabit as adults.
> 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.
What makes this different from competing with classmates that cheat in general? You also had parents that do most of the tasks for their kids since forever
What makes LLMs stands out of the pack of other forms of assistance (parents, older siblings, software, online solutions, etc.)
Cheating (at least when I was school age) was fairly rare and not terribly difficult to detect. My concern is that both of those might be false with LLMs, and that'd make the circumstances different.
I honestly wouldn't worry about that aspect of it too much. Effective understanding and use of tools is important for this next generation (which is why we have restrictive but reasonable rules for tech use for our kids). However, unless ChatGPT and other such tools start being allowed in SATs and in the classroom and etc, there's no substitute for true education and understanding.
The essay my 8 year old can currently write in scribbly handwriting certainly won't compete with the essay a classmate "writes" using ChatGPT. But the facade is paper thin and ever so short lived. Seeing how much better my kids write now, vs 2 years ago, proves how much they're learning and the incredible power of practice. Someone relying on such a serious crutch will be left behind. I guarantee it.
Unless there's some dystopian future where every aspect and communication in our lives are managed and filtered by some kind of AI middle layer. I doubt it.
Tech advancements always lead to this struggle, but it's rarely as stark as you might think. My kids are still learning cursive in school, though I can't imagine when they'll ever use it.
Want to give them a leg up, get the 'What every first grader should know' books, and continue with the next one each year. There's way less friction in learning when your child experiences multiple exposures to the material being taught.
competing with what? your score doesnt vary based on others.
i came here to laugh at this thread.. no different than calculators and google both of which were misused in the same way. and then people who are "worried" about it and use that as an excuse to do it themselves. and now you know why the tech industry sucks
> competing with what? your score doesnt vary based on others.
Grading on a curve is very much a thing. Rarer in lower levels but not completely unheard of.
Even if it weren't GPA is still used for ranking students for opportunities like college or summer programs with limited slots. The effect of GPT'd homework depends on how well they perform on the tests though but some classes are predominantly take home work or at least were when I was going through school.
That will make her better than them, what with some personal resiliency, autonomy and, for lack of a better term, grit. I would not worry about (1) the details of what your 1-yr-old 's world will look like in 10+ years, (2) that making a kid struggle and work a bit will put them at a disadvantage.
I believe uploading neural weights in the form factor of a reaction speed game will become the norm.
Imagine the token weights etc to live an an N dimensional embedding.
Consider a random 2D isometric projection, now imagine plotting (a subset of) the tokens on screen at their respective locations, with the background having patterns conveying the orientation of the projection.
Imagine tokens appearing FIFO, and 95% or so of the tokens at their correct position, and 5% at incorrect positions.
The user is expected to identify misplaced tokens in the projection.
Each the frame the perspective slowly changes.
Since we guarantee ~95% of the tokens on screen are correctly placed this enables the human to absorb their correct high dimensional location subconsciously.
Imagine this game is made a bit addictive.
Imagine eventually the user gets high scores and thus knows most of the coordinates of the token embeddings in a coordinate free way (no axes had to be drawn)
At that point all the information the ANN required is undisputedly present in the humans brain, absent how those coefficients are used. This is where the fun starts.
The alcorithm can calculate the likelihood of observing 2 tokens in a certain order. It can generate more probable pairs, this will correlate with the information in the brain.
For example imagine the user knows some spanish, and that the language model was multilingual. Suddenly the brain starts picking up the correlation between close juxtapositions of certain tokens, and their positions learnt from the computer game.
While playing and getting better scores in the game, the user starts noticing its own grammar and vocabulary improve, because the brain has been helped in better estimating next tokens...
People will be able to learn math, languages, programmnig languages, tables of chemistry, etc... with substantially less effort.
Competing with what? Homework is usually the minority of grade weight in almost every course and college entrance is largely based on entrance exams. Using AI to cheat on homework only cheats the students ability to complete and exam, let alone an entrance exam.
People act as if cheating on homework is new with LLms. It’s not. The homework is there to guide you towards the exam, and exams are generally proctored to prevent cheating in ways homework is explicitly not. Generally teachers grade homework to create an incentive for students to practice rigorously for the in course and final exams. Any student who doesn’t avail themselves of that practice invariably flunks their exams. Your homework grade won’t help you then.
So who cares? Sooner or later the cheating student either learns why it doesn’t pay to cheat or suffers the life consequences of not learning in school. This isn’t new with LLMs.
What is new is you have a tool that you can get advice from on topics that are difficult or even get up front grading and advice on homework before turning it in that helps you master the material better. Students who use this will be able to master the material faster, even if their parents both work and can’t invest the time to tutor their children at night.
(N.b., The threads here imply every parent works at a cushy tech job and has plenty of time to be invested in their kids education and any parent who isn’t is negligent - while the truth is many are just struggling to make ends meet - as my parents did … I didn’t get the investment my daughter gets not because they didn’t care but because they were busy feeding me and keeping us from being homeless. I would have loved to have ChatGPT help me as a kid)
Funny, I'm worried about classmates not being good enough for my girls. I'm worried that other kids will normalize bad ideas/behaviors growing up, and some day they'll end up in a dating scene that looks like today's, alone, or with a loser. I'd love to have them grow up into a world of strong, competent, conscientious, and honest peers.
So this kind of development adds to my pile of worries about their future, but for exactly the opposite reason.
I'm not saying that presented scenario in that post is not real, but since it is popular post on Reddit, there is huge chance, that it is just rage-bait.
Recently at the restaurant I saw a family with three kids, all with their own individual smartphones. One was a toddler barely a few months old, too young to even be able to understand how to use it, his smartphone was on a stand on the table, playing some of those coma inducing toddler videos that exist on the nightmare-ish corners of youtube.
There is a legitimate problem at hand here with our relationship with tech and how children.. are left to their own device with that stuff. On purpose, for the most part: the parents seem all too happy with the ability of those devices to make their kids shut up and stay constantly distracted. Doomscrolling habits makes for more "well behaved" children in public settings.
chatGPT is but one of the many symptoms, the root problem is that children should really have no business having unsupervised internet access.
My five year old son was watching Lankybox, that stuff is mindnumbing. I tried to control what he's able to watch, but next thing I know he's watching it again. I ended up removing Youtube, relying on PBS Kids. He protested though, PBS Kids is long format shows, and that's not stimulating enough for him.
I hope you'll manage to turn that around. My five year old (nearly six) is allowed one episode of something suitable after school, and in the weekends after his swimming lessons something longer. I suspect we've lucked out with him in this regard though. He's currently rewatching Netflix' Hilda (which is really excellent, but typically for children maybe two years older), and he is simply engrossed. It's a struggle to find something new though (especially in a quality Dutch dubbing).
We did try YouTube when he was three/four though, but quickly reduced that to hand-picked videos and selected shows on Netflix. The amount of soul-sucking crap on YouTube… Even the 3D CGI Fireman Sam series is preferable.
There are some (Alfred J. Kwak, obviously, which he very much enjoyed), but it's too soon for foreign language productions without dubs, and what quality Dutch stuff does exist is often hard to find. Often you'll be relegated to watching these on YouTube, cut up in several parts, placed there by novice 'archivists'. There one day, gone another.
I'd pay for a service which simply allowed me to stream anything broadcast in the Netherlands, but no such thing exists. Old stuff is too hard to licence, so they don't bother. Some pirate stuff exists, but it's harder than it should be.
We slowly resorted to letting them watch almost whatever they want, but an extremely reduced volume. On most days there is no TV at all; on days where there is its usually one small block (30-90 minutes). We disallow ipad (etc) at the dinner table, while eating out, in the car, etc, outright. It definitely took some time, but by being extremely consistent eventually it panned out. I think yes not only more difficult for some kids than others, but also depends on your kid. Young rambunctious boys are an entirely different thing than relatively chill daughters, so I try not to judge.
Other kids around + outdoor play time is the only thing I see that consistently works well all around for everyone.
> Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.
Technology access is pretty ubiquitous, and genAI is pushed everywhere just like social media, so that big tech can make more $B. Very hard to escape it even as an 11 year old unless the parents are very vigilant and active in restricting it, which if both parents are working is hard to do plus they have to contend with a _lot_ of push back from the kids because "everyone is doing it".
"Who cooked them?", he pondered, on the HN post situated between "I built a robot waifu with ChatGPT" and "Here's why it's okay to kill the bottom 10% of the workforce".
> Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.
Society. Parents, schools, whatever technology kids are exposed to (so, all of it).
We've had 4 years of literally every form of media pushing AI as the solution to all life's problems. Is it really so surprising that our youth looks to AI for the solution to their problems?
I think it's extremely optimistic to expect this can be addressed by parents alone. My parents did a great job of teaching me the dangers of alcohol, but once my friends got into it I followed suit.
I think a better question is what we do about it, because (like alcohol) I'd assume that parents and teachers by themselves are entirely out of their depths here. I suspect it will take some type of sweeping societal change like we've started seeing with cell phone bans in schools.
Where are the parents? This is easily addressed with a discussion about the importance of learning for yourself, and some accountability. They’re only 11.
If you asked kids what the purpose of school is, they will overwhelmingly say that they are there to get a good grade. So for what they want from the process, it makes sense.
> She asks him to make it shorter and even when chatgpt makes the answer litterally 1 SENTENCE she still asks him to make it shorter making it a 1st grade 7 word sentence and copies it without understanding it or understanding the poem or even reading it.
Even children are figuring out that iterative prompt engineering is super effective. For maybe not the right reasons, but still.
Back 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 and will happily spout out perfectly written nonsense. At least encarta has effort put into making sure it is factually correct… it wasn’t compressed knowledge.
Granted it wasn’t when I was 11, but still. Not sure my point proves anything but it’s a point, damn it.
I remember people handing in work copy pasted from Encarta, complete with the blue hyperlinks (even back then pasting formatted text was a stupid default in Word).
How did I know my classmates did that? Because they managed to get that "work" pinned up on the "exemplary work" notice board!
My carefully hand-tuned word art titles meant nothing in comparison! Nothing!
I know that having parents who cared about my education (and were in a position to actively participate in it) was a privilege and not a given, but where are the parents in this situation? Do we just accept that an 11 year-old watches squid game, has unrestricted access to chatgpt and does all their school work without any oversight at all? Clearly this kid is not receiving the guidance it needs. Or any guidance really.
What kind of guidance does 11 year old need for homework? Me and my siblings were doing all of it independently pretty much from the start, parents were only involved if there was some tough nut that we needed help with.
My parents cared but they just weren't educated enough themselves to offer any good advice.
I would say I basically received no guidance my entire childhood on anything important. Not because my parents were delinquents but they simply had nothing to offer.
If was in middle school, there is no way my parents would be able to police the use of chatGPT. They wouldn't think it is good or bad, they would just not understand what is going on.
I have thought about that many times. It is unimaginable to have received good advice growing up and not have to figure out everything for myself, fixing all these mistakes. What an advantage.
Unrestricted access to the internet might occur much earlier than 11 in the life of a child, at age 2 many children are given tablets with youtube videos or videogames, it's all a slow transition from there.
The tablet doesn't work so you let them watch youtube on the PC
They find some games on the PC
They get bored of the games of the PC so they pirate some cool games
They get sophisticated in removing DRM so they install linux
They become programmers or influencers.
It's the pipeline that we know of, but there's probably a lot of pipelines into influencers, gamblers, onlyfans models, brainrot consumers, etc...
If you use these tools to get the homework done, but there's little retention of knowledge or skill, how are you going to pass a test where the resource is not available to you? Homework is ostensibly about practicing certain skills (math) or learning/memorizing facts.
Do we still ask children to pass tests? I have been wondering about this. Can you still be held back? Can you still be given low grades if parents are aggressive?
Not really. You'll just be given a minimum passing grade, socially promoted, and ultimately pushed out of the education system having "graduated". Functionally illiterate, scientifically ignorant, and innumerate.
I love this question. I was just thinking last night: do kids still carry around books? I have no clue what modern American primary education is like. I expect that I'll be surprised.
I find my self using LLMs for very simple things, to jog my memory instead of actually exercising it. Yesterday I asked Claude how to format a numeric string in Ruby. I could have figured it out in the REPL in a minute but instead got the answer from AI in 15 seconds.
This is the same kind of laziness as using it to multiply 60 * 3. If I take the slightly slower road of figuring out the string formatting next time I might go from a minute to 3 seconds.
It's like telling someone to always take the stairs for their health. It's pretty good advice, but it's sweaty and takes time so we mostly don't. Maybe we should lock kids out of elevators and escalators as well as LLMs. But what's good for the duckling is good for the duck.
When you go to gym class, you are expected to perform without aids - you cannot ride a e-bike around the track when teacher tells you to run.
Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you.
Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain.
The distinction seems pretty clear to me, I am not sure why people are having problems with it.
> When you go to gym class, you are expected to perform without aids - you cannot ride a e-bike around the track when teacher tells you to run.
If you are expected to perform without assistance, then the instructor is failing to meet the needs of the students and doing them a disservice. If the goal is to get the students to exercise, an e-bike may well be the best tool to allow a student to get from a lower point to a higher point. A student who cannot do an hour of sustained running but can do an hour of sustained assisted cycling can have those assistances removed over time, enabling longer endurance while still maintaining the hour of time will have made significant strides in health.
I doubt you could run a marathon today, unprompted. You would start by going shorter distances, working your way up.
This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work.
> Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you.
An instructor who forbids assistance is an instructor who deludes themself about their performance when they were a student. Not all learn to fish the same way, and being shown how in a different way can mean all the difference.
This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work.
> Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain.
I don't know what work you do but that would be seen as lazy at my workplace and frowned upon.
There is a difference between seeking assistance ("Explain this in shorter terms") vs. absolve oneself of the burden of work ("take these points and turn them into paragraphs"). If OP's sister was asking questions ("Explain this poem") and then working from that to something that was her own work, that would be one thing. The fact that she is simply copying verbatim from the machine, thoughtless and without considering the meaning -- that's what is upsetting here.
I am not sure I've got your point, nor if you are agreeing or disagreeing with me?
anyway, I don't think your "run a marathon" or "hour of sustained running" analogies are appropriate... OP mentions "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours", that's closer to "run a 100 meters at any pace", something that any student should do.
And even if teacher is giving unreasonable assignments, the right answer is not to cheat (by asking parent, or ChatGPT or something) - but rather do what you can, so hopefully teacher will see low performance and adjust assignments/expectations.
I do the same thing. Maybe I shouldn't take the GenAI shortcuts but there's only so much I can remember. And everyone wants things done faster, all the time. So, by not using generative AI and figuring everything out for yourself because it's good for your metal exercise, is that fair to your employer who wants more, faster? And what will your output look like compared to your peers who hop straight to a chat prompt for everything?
> is that fair to your employer who wants more, faster?
I think it's ~dangerous to center this question because "more, faster" (and cheaper...) is something employers will always covet to some degree (even at the expense of life and limb).
Any arrangement between employers and employees that doesn't center win-win outcomes is an unsustainable race to somewhere we've already been and decided we didn't like.
Learning numbers in primary school and math is not looking up syntax of some very special programming language, not comparable, not at all. Not to mention that it is more laborous using an AI for this than spit out 180 in a fraction of a second....
As a senior college student who's seen ChatGPT take over much of higher education in real-time, I'm still curious (and unsure, really) how institutions will ever change their system of education if they struggle to address even smaller things than ChatGPT.
My view as a student, personally, has always been that people rampantly cheat, everyone looks like they're doing good on paper, the institution's happy.
My assumption was that such "infrastructural" education systems are hard to change (hence why few try to in the first place) and, if they work well enough, no one's going to attempt to touch it, let alone change it to better serve students who seem to be doing what they're expected to.
Happy to hear some thoughts, from a student worried about his peers. :)
The teachers' subreddit (/r/teachers) is full of anectodal but collectively terrifying stories about how smartphones and now AI are affecting young students, particularly in the areas of attention, initiative, and basic literacy. We're in the middle of a big, uncontrolled experiment on an entire generation.
I think her parents are not doing what they should be doing. And I also think, that it is partially their parents fault but much more the fault of the education and social system the parents has been brought up and currently working and existing, because they are missing the resources (time and knowledge, etc) to attend to their child needs in this regards. And I'm also 100% sure they are not missing those resource because they are not doing their best to get what they need to meet with their child's needs.
It would be really easy for me to blame her for choosing the easiest things to do, her teacher to not giving homework which cannot be solved with chatgpt, her brother for letting her using his account, her parents for not being there and overseeing how she does her homework, but I very much think that each and every person is in this story is exhausted by just simply trying to exists in systems which are not setup for this 11 years old to meet what she needs with her homework and every person either still fighting the systems or just gave up because they run out of steam and they are doing their best to keep their head above the water.
And that of course is a reason to repost this wonderful exchange in "A Clash of Kings":
> In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?
> "The king, the priest, the rich man — who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.
> "And yet he is no one," Varys said. "He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel."
> "That piece of steel is the power of life and death."
> "Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?"
> "Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords."
> "Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they? Whence came their swords? Why do they obey?" Varys smiled.
EDIT: Seeing no reactions yet, I just wanted to explain that the way I see this coming battle on controlling the AI that controls the world is that we have the governments, the billionaires and the ethicists saying what should be done, and us software professionals as the sellswords with our fingers on the literal trigger.
> 3. That software engineers actually control/own enough of everything to pull that "trigger" unilaterally.
Either you misunderstand the quote, or you haven't read the book or watched the series.
George Martin's central motif of what power really is doesn't have a definite answer, several characters propose different theories, in this case Varys poses more of a question than an answer.
You might say that the AI holds the power, you might say the Engineers hold the power, you might say the congressmen that regulate it hold the power, you might say the citizens who vote the congressmen have the power, you might say the president by control of the military holds the power, the users, god, chance, the smart, the capitalists, the shareholders, etc...
I slogged through the ~4,000+ pages of the 5 books--not that I consider myself a fan at this late date--and the subtext of my post was: "I don't think that thought-experiment maps usefully to anything around us right now, it barely did for the characters in a medieval fantasy."
All models are wrong, some are useful, I don't think this one is that useful, unless some researcher has a Technological Singularity in a Bottle somewhere.
" unless some researcher has a Technological Singularity in a Bottle somewhere."
But the model is that no one person holds all of the power? That power is many things at once and held by many people? Both in the book and in reality, matches to me.
Is this any different than the previous tech booms (or any industrial revolution for that matter). The US developed and exported almost all of the consumer (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) and infrastructural software (IP, Verisign, Linux).
The US domination through software is so normalized that the limit of these imports by highly sovereign countries are seen as dangerous or in violation of human rights in the 'western' internet.(China,Russia)
Hard to see how AI will be massively different than the history of Software in general in terms of geopolitical power.
this kind of thing feeds perfectly into our fears. However, we have to place trust in individuals and the choices they make - that's the only thing that matters at the end of the day.
Kids know that they should be learning things. They know that chatgpt can get in the way of that. Will they choose to do it the right way eventually aside from a few bumps in the road? I think so.
Am I the only one who found it interesting and perhaps a little alarming that the poster, while ostensibly aghast at their little sister's use of ChatGPT, decided midway through the screed to not only personify ChatGPT but also assign it a gender?
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 385 ms ] threadI would love to see this tried at a larger scale and studied to see if it actually works any better.
I used to watch Veritasium [1] videos (way back) that vividly illustrated that even when told the correct information, people would not change their world view but instead give answers consistent with their pre-teaching naive views.
Learning is complex. If all that a "teacher" is doing is lecturing, then a video might be a reasonable replacement.
Even when the content is straightforward, my observation is that engagement with videos are awful. Heck, engagement in a lecture is awful, but at least the (human) teacher in the room can reasonably be expected to do things to engage the audience and probe their understanding. Some of that might be possible in a video format, for 5x the effort; follow up with examples if you know good ones. I know in the MIT OCW I have seen recordings of discussion sections (very effective), and that should be the bottom of the barrel as far as engagement when "honestly trying to engage learners".
You would be better off just trying to do the work, then looking up the information needed. That kind of works, and I bet that's what happens in the flipped classroom model. (Maybe 20% of the class watched the video? Stats welcome.)
I'm really just trying to point out that learning is complex. There's supposed to be a national What Works Clearinghouse [2], but I had a hard time finding useful information there.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium [2]: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
I wonder how LLMs are going to affect these metrics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609948
I also have a relative going for a PHD, he says many times for the classes he teaches, students are using AI for their homework. He has brought that up may times to his superiors but the response tends to be "oh well".
Sad world we may be heading towards :(
The quality of the teaching or learning seems almost irrelevant already.
Working with or seeking information from colleagues is a valid and essential part of university.
I don't think that's true... I personally change writing styles often depending on who I am talking to. It's effectively code switching but on the internet. Not to say that this redditor isn't like that - but there are more objective cues from the content of their post than from the spelling/grammar of their post (like how they choose to watch their sibling develop bad learning habits and rather than doing something about it, they make dramatic complaints about how her whole generation is screwed on Reddit).
Over 40% possess literacy so poor that it isn't considered sufficient to cope with daily demands.
It natural for humans to use tools to make tasks as easy as possible. Doesn’t mean the users are dumb or uneducated just lazy.
An adult wanting to find "how many hours are in 3.228 years?" when some task is looking for the answer aligns a bit with what you're saying. In this kind of scenario it has nothing with the adult not understanding how to do the conversion and everything to do with what the most accurate way to quickly complete the conversion itself is. I.e. the task is "produce an answer so we can use it". Whether that be done via calculator, spreadsheet, timespan conversion tool, or LLM (though the latter can be a bit of a poor choice for this type of task to be honest) the use of the tool is about best achieving the original goal accurately and quickly, not about sidestepping it.
A student wanting to find "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours" on their homework aligns very differently in my opinion. In this kind of scenario the goal was that the student become more educated on time conversions by practicing them. The actual answer provided is just a way to be able to provide feedback on how accurately that learning process went. Learning these kinds of basic things through experience allows them to tackle learning ever more complex things as they advance through their education. Faking gaining that education by using a tool to get an answer to write down isn't just the lazier way to do the conversion, it does leave them without the education the task was actually about.
Not only that, learning to do such basic timespan conversions is going to be the lazy way for such tasks over anything but the briefest timespan anyways!
If LLMs were being used as part of the learning process instead of a replacement of the learning process I'd hold different opinions of the post. I think tools (be it calculators or LLMs) can be extremely powerful learning aids... but extremely weak ones when used as learning replacements.
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/2/calculator-for-words/
Change 'check' to 'do' and we'll have a discussion.
now mention Socrates and his dislike of writing, or maybe how people were worried about television, video games...
meanwhile, a 12 years old somewhere is mechanically copying and pasting her math homework while understanding and learning absolutely nothing
no, wait, it's not just one 12 years old, it's probably all of them
Nope. It tried 5 times and failed.
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.
The thought experiment argues the exact opposite. The idea is you can have perfect Chinese but not understand a single word of what you are saying. The argument is that syntax (procedure based operation) and semantics (understanding) are distinct and separable.
As you extend the scope of the Chinese room from a single task (e.g. Chinese conversation) to human behavior in general, it converges with the question of if philosophical zombies can exist.
In terms of the Chinese room, the distinction IS the difference.
There is the role of the human within the metaphor, and the argument/position of the metaphor as a whole. I don't think it makes much sense to talk about the "point/argument/position of a single component of the metaphor. At least, that wasn't how it was originally structured.
In other words: it's an argument that would work perfectly fine to defend the idea that humans have no consciousness.
Ergo it can only really prove that either humans have no consciousness/soul/... (whatever you name the magical human property) or that it doesn't exist at all.
It's odd to me to present an argument on human vs. machine intelligence and completely skip over what human intelligence is — exactly what it is about human intelligence that is so distant from this "trained" (educated?) book.
(I think I am also speaking for Karl Pilkington when I say that I have no way to know that the little man in my head that is busy flipping through the Calhoun Book has a clue as to what I am on about either.)
But I mostly agree. It's not a hopeful situation. If AI takes over it won't take over because it fought it war with humans and won. AI will take over because people want it to take over.
I have a friend who's a teacher that is pioneering methods to include (modified / preprompted) LLMs as a part of their lessons. He calls it Modern PBL: Project-Based Learning. He wrote a book on it if you are interested: https://a.co/d/7MFQ5wa
That's because a calculator is designed to give the right answer. An LLM is not. It's only designed to produce text that seems plausible based on the prompt. "Plausible" is not the same as "trustworthy".
A graphing calculator in which you can put (9+3x2) before pressing enter is different than a adding calculator in which you can only do sequential binary operations (9+3, enter, x2, enter).
The calculator is programmed exactly to do as it was. Both calculators are correct in their programming. It's you who mistyped what you intended.
The real difference is that calculation isn’t the important part of math above a certain level.
An LLM is not a reliable tool, and that is a huge difference. It's not just that the students are asking "someone else" to do their homework for them. It's that they're being lied to by the proponents of LLMs, who are telling them the answers the LLM gives them are reliable, when they're not. Nobody made claims about what calculators can do that weren't justified by their actual design.
X may in fact be like Y. But make the argument - don't just sarcastically imply it.
Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.
This will force ChatGPT-using classmates to either use it as learning _assist_ tool, to help student learn the material; or be 100% reliant on ChatGPT for homework, but fail every in-class assignment and then fail the whole class. Either outcome is fine with me.
That's not really true. At least in my experience.
Since I graduated nobody cared about my grades at all. On the other hand everyone cared if I can do stuff.
When I was applying for Uni my grades mattered very little and my performance on standarised and proctored tests mattered a lot.
I guess it might be different where you have grown up?
That's called "winning the battle and losing the war".
I haven't understood the GGP's point of view until your comment. Those kids are competing by grade, not by knowledge!
This is messed up to a different level than a lot of people here will expect.
And corporation can be even simpler if you get in right types of roles, where no hard skills might be needed.
An idiot may be able to fake being a medical doctor with the right AI, but only until someone realizes they can fire the useless human.
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.
https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/opportunity-atla...
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022_FM...
1) Do you have a comparison with European countries that makes you think the US is worse?
2) What do you think US mobility numbers should look like? Pure randomness is not desirable either.
I clearly don't understand how difficult life is outside the US. Yes, it is important to know the material. However, it is also important to know your surroundings and what everyone else is doing. If you are in India and literally everyone else is cheating in exams, well you better start doing that as well just to keep up. If you are gen alpha and everyone else is using ChatGPT to polish essays, ...
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.
What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution.
Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.
A lot of the system is based off of memorization and paperwork anyways. Something an AI can do all day, every day.
Everything has to be managed in moderation.
As for ChatGPT, I use it all the time for learning. And I've used it to help my kid study. But I wouldn't give my kid unfettered access to it just like I don't give him unfettered access to anything.
Sarcasm aside, making informed decisions on how to do those things can be a challenge.
That said, I hear stories like yours (from friends) and it always baffles me because that's just now how our family operates. I have a downtime pin on devices for the same reason I lock the door to my car even though it's like 50% breakable glass windows.
My kids know the rules. One of them for sure knows the pin. But they also know that if they use the device outside of our agreed upon guidelines, they're in trouble.
I'm sincere in asking, aren't behavior controls a lot better than technological ones?
Punishment and technological locks are both tools in the toolkit.
Ultimately you want your children to find the right balance with technology and that's difficult because most parents struggle with that balance. The world has moved very quickly and it is very hard to keep up. My kids are 12 years apart in age and they couldn't have had more different childhoods -- that's how quickly things have changed. Less than a generation.
My optimistic hope is that for the more basic skills, teachers can adjust grading so that more easily-cheated homework provides less credit, and in-person work (such as a pop quiz) is weighed more heavily. Then, you're effectively setting yourself a time bomb by using LLMs on homework to avoid learning the material.
For higher-level skills, I think using LLMs will probably just become another skillset and part of the toolbox, just like the Internet was for my generation. But I guess we'll see.
The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades.
Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?
Something like that was advocated by the Khan academy guy, but I'm not sure if he worked out a full replacement system. There are some things in the current system like honors classes or retaking the classes for people who got an F, but why have the F ruin their chance at college if they later master it and get an A? If they always lag but eventually get there, I guess an argument is college would be too expensive if it took them a long time to get through it.
My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.
https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/optimal-protocols-for-st...
I’m not doubting your claim but I don’t have time to listen to that podcast and I’m interested in what was said since you did.
I skimmed the linked material and that's not my conclusion. Practice tests are better teaching tools than just memorizing the material and then taking a real test, but on an absolute scale, I'm convinced that they're pretty terrible for most types of material.
Throughout my education I've come across countless people who could memorize the material and recite it with relative ease but they didn't have any intuitive understanding so they couldn't use that "knowledge" to solve real problems. Much like ChatGPT itself.
Equating good memorization and recall performance with good education and knowledge seems like a form of cargo culting to me, it's missing the essence of what makes knowledge powerful in the first place.
Regardless, I agree, attempting to assess the progress of a cheater is a fool's errand.
I would not wish to live in a society where “can bullshit an assignment with ChatGPT” is generally competitive in education.
The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
US, China, India, UK, etc, much more disparity so it’s much more important for kids to be ‘top of the field’.
Fully agree.
> The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
Fascinating observation! Wonder if that shows up at the school level as well? For example, In the US the highest/lowest performing schools tend to correlate to high/low income areas and have significant disparity in quality of education, and I expect this is a strongly self-reinforcing trend towards elite private institutions.
AP courses notwithstanding. AP courses were insanely competitive and speaking as someone had been all over the map in my K12 years (AP, accelerated courses, early foreign language, and a touch of remedial relative to grade level) the students in AP were mainly in competition with themselves. That however is just personal anecdote.
I also suspect that most kids, particularly grade schoolers, aren't aware they're competing in this sense. Parents are a different story.
Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U?
(Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)
By definition to join a network they need to be accepted by their class peers.
But you'll be exposed to different people and opportunities by going to a state school instead of a community college, or a better school out of state with a scholarship vs. a state college, etc. The small differences matter.
I literally got my first job because my roommate's dad knew of someone looking for a software developer job. Would I have met that person in community college? Maybe! Lots of people with good networks go to community colleges, too - but I'd bet fewer than more expensive schools.
For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.
For instance, having graduated from Harvard is going to get you a fairly good job _regardless_ of their GPA.
Similarly, there is no objective way to measure "merit" that isn't unfair to _someone_ and also scales to dozens/hundreds/thousands of students. So people use GPA.
Life isn't fair.
Clearly peers do evaluate each other in any ways they choose, pretty much every day at Harvard I imagine.
I would note that students who depend on AIs to answer questions on homework will do poorly on tests. I am not really sure what all the fuss is about. Kids cheating on homework is nothing new and a machine doing it for your is little different than all the other ways kids cheat on homework. And cheating on homework doesn’t help you in your grades - it hurts you because you’re unprepared for exams, which typically dominate the weighting of a grade. Then once you take a standardized placement exam you’re totally screwed.
How does this relate to the prior comment?
I’m clearly not an admissions officer at Harvard, nor likely are the other HN commentors here.
Parents are worried about the worst case scenario, and going to Harvard raises that floor by ensuring they can get noticed straight out of graduation, even if they are bottom of the class.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/twitters-internal-hiring-poli...
Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this, especially compared to more competitive educational systems like China. My kid is in second grade and hasn't gotten a real grade yet.
It's hard to generalize here, as Americans are a heterogeneous bunch. Demographic subsets exist where education is seen as a vigorous competitive sport, where the goal is to achieve admission to the "right" college. The parents are as involved as the kids, usually for better but sometimes for worse.
At the same time, among other groups of Americans, the goal is simply for kids to reach adulthood without too much interaction with the police. You can't draw sweeping conclusions that will cover the entire spectrum.
It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will gain you. If you do it right it won't matter whether she is allowed to use those tools or not, she'll use her own brain because that will allow her to get ahead by the time it really matters.
Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.
If you want your kids to be subservient to the king then of course they should use ChatGPT, and you should want schools to allow it otherwise we will just have more Asian and Indian students "getting ahead"
As a parent whose child has been in two school systems, respectfully: yes, it is. And it begins earlier than you think.
I see such competition as hare vs tortoise races, where the students who get an early unfair advantage end up cheating themselves out of an education, in the sense that all they come to know is how to prompt an LLM, rather than break down and solve hard problems.
It's still heartbreaking to consider both the early discrimination she will likely encounter, and the later failures that will anticipate her classmates, and the society that they will come to inhabit as adults.
What makes this different from competing with classmates that cheat in general? You also had parents that do most of the tasks for their kids since forever
What makes LLMs stands out of the pack of other forms of assistance (parents, older siblings, software, online solutions, etc.)
The essay my 8 year old can currently write in scribbly handwriting certainly won't compete with the essay a classmate "writes" using ChatGPT. But the facade is paper thin and ever so short lived. Seeing how much better my kids write now, vs 2 years ago, proves how much they're learning and the incredible power of practice. Someone relying on such a serious crutch will be left behind. I guarantee it.
Unless there's some dystopian future where every aspect and communication in our lives are managed and filtered by some kind of AI middle layer. I doubt it.
Tech advancements always lead to this struggle, but it's rarely as stark as you might think. My kids are still learning cursive in school, though I can't imagine when they'll ever use it.
she wont need a chatGPT, she will develop one in her nervous system, like a normally functioning human
i came here to laugh at this thread.. no different than calculators and google both of which were misused in the same way. and then people who are "worried" about it and use that as an excuse to do it themselves. and now you know why the tech industry sucks
Grading on a curve is very much a thing. Rarer in lower levels but not completely unheard of.
Even if it weren't GPA is still used for ranking students for opportunities like college or summer programs with limited slots. The effect of GPT'd homework depends on how well they perform on the tests though but some classes are predominantly take home work or at least were when I was going through school.
This isn’t a competing with kids issue, though. A kid handicapped by ChatGPT will fail in-class examinations.
Imagine the token weights etc to live an an N dimensional embedding.
Consider a random 2D isometric projection, now imagine plotting (a subset of) the tokens on screen at their respective locations, with the background having patterns conveying the orientation of the projection.
Imagine tokens appearing FIFO, and 95% or so of the tokens at their correct position, and 5% at incorrect positions.
The user is expected to identify misplaced tokens in the projection.
Each the frame the perspective slowly changes.
Since we guarantee ~95% of the tokens on screen are correctly placed this enables the human to absorb their correct high dimensional location subconsciously.
Imagine this game is made a bit addictive.
Imagine eventually the user gets high scores and thus knows most of the coordinates of the token embeddings in a coordinate free way (no axes had to be drawn)
At that point all the information the ANN required is undisputedly present in the humans brain, absent how those coefficients are used. This is where the fun starts.
The alcorithm can calculate the likelihood of observing 2 tokens in a certain order. It can generate more probable pairs, this will correlate with the information in the brain.
For example imagine the user knows some spanish, and that the language model was multilingual. Suddenly the brain starts picking up the correlation between close juxtapositions of certain tokens, and their positions learnt from the computer game.
While playing and getting better scores in the game, the user starts noticing its own grammar and vocabulary improve, because the brain has been helped in better estimating next tokens...
People will be able to learn math, languages, programmnig languages, tables of chemistry, etc... with substantially less effort.
To me it sounds like you are worried more about the competition for resources than giving your daughter an education.
People act as if cheating on homework is new with LLms. It’s not. The homework is there to guide you towards the exam, and exams are generally proctored to prevent cheating in ways homework is explicitly not. Generally teachers grade homework to create an incentive for students to practice rigorously for the in course and final exams. Any student who doesn’t avail themselves of that practice invariably flunks their exams. Your homework grade won’t help you then.
So who cares? Sooner or later the cheating student either learns why it doesn’t pay to cheat or suffers the life consequences of not learning in school. This isn’t new with LLMs.
What is new is you have a tool that you can get advice from on topics that are difficult or even get up front grading and advice on homework before turning it in that helps you master the material better. Students who use this will be able to master the material faster, even if their parents both work and can’t invest the time to tutor their children at night.
(N.b., The threads here imply every parent works at a cushy tech job and has plenty of time to be invested in their kids education and any parent who isn’t is negligent - while the truth is many are just struggling to make ends meet - as my parents did … I didn’t get the investment my daughter gets not because they didn’t care but because they were busy feeding me and keeping us from being homeless. I would have loved to have ChatGPT help me as a kid)
Not in the US it isn't. Grades > Exams > Extracurriculars is the usual hierarchy.
So this kind of development adds to my pile of worries about their future, but for exactly the opposite reason.
There is a legitimate problem at hand here with our relationship with tech and how children.. are left to their own device with that stuff. On purpose, for the most part: the parents seem all too happy with the ability of those devices to make their kids shut up and stay constantly distracted. Doomscrolling habits makes for more "well behaved" children in public settings.
chatGPT is but one of the many symptoms, the root problem is that children should really have no business having unsupervised internet access.
Otherwise known as CocoMelon.
We did try YouTube when he was three/four though, but quickly reduced that to hand-picked videos and selected shows on Netflix. The amount of soul-sucking crap on YouTube… Even the 3D CGI Fireman Sam series is preferable.
I'd pay for a service which simply allowed me to stream anything broadcast in the Netherlands, but no such thing exists. Old stuff is too hard to licence, so they don't bother. Some pirate stuff exists, but it's harder than it should be.
Other kids around + outdoor play time is the only thing I see that consistently works well all around for everyone.
Now that’s Hacker News rage bait!
Technology access is pretty ubiquitous, and genAI is pushed everywhere just like social media, so that big tech can make more $B. Very hard to escape it even as an 11 year old unless the parents are very vigilant and active in restricting it, which if both parents are working is hard to do plus they have to contend with a _lot_ of push back from the kids because "everyone is doing it".
Society. Parents, schools, whatever technology kids are exposed to (so, all of it).
We've had 4 years of literally every form of media pushing AI as the solution to all life's problems. Is it really so surprising that our youth looks to AI for the solution to their problems?
I think it's extremely optimistic to expect this can be addressed by parents alone. My parents did a great job of teaching me the dangers of alcohol, but once my friends got into it I followed suit.
You bet your skibidi ohio their cooked.
EDIT: To clarify
You bet your rizz factory those NPCs are giga-chalked, fr fr no cap.
EDIT 2: To clarify further
Those NPCs are down bad, like full system reboot needed—no updates, no saves, just straight uninstall vibes.
EDIT 3: Man
"Yeah, this generation’s running on 1 FPS with Wi-Fi from a McDonald’s parking lot—completely preheated, toaster oven edition. "
It sure will be interesting to see how this mass social experiment plays out
Even children are figuring out that iterative prompt engineering is super effective. For maybe not the right reasons, but still.
Super effective at doing what is asked, but I guarantee that 7-word sentence is wrong for the 150-word poem. This is such a bad effect that it has...
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 and will happily spout out perfectly written nonsense. At least encarta has effort put into making sure it is factually correct… it wasn’t compressed knowledge.
Granted it wasn’t when I was 11, but still. Not sure my point proves anything but it’s a point, damn it.
How did I know my classmates did that? Because they managed to get that "work" pinned up on the "exemplary work" notice board!
My carefully hand-tuned word art titles meant nothing in comparison! Nothing!
> does all their school work without any oversight at all
I would definitely expect this to be the norm for 11 year olds, not some case of parental neglect as portrayed here.
I would say I basically received no guidance my entire childhood on anything important. Not because my parents were delinquents but they simply had nothing to offer.
If was in middle school, there is no way my parents would be able to police the use of chatGPT. They wouldn't think it is good or bad, they would just not understand what is going on.
I have thought about that many times. It is unimaginable to have received good advice growing up and not have to figure out everything for myself, fixing all these mistakes. What an advantage.
The tablet doesn't work so you let them watch youtube on the PC They find some games on the PC They get bored of the games of the PC so they pirate some cool games They get sophisticated in removing DRM so they install linux They become programmers or influencers.
It's the pipeline that we know of, but there's probably a lot of pipelines into influencers, gamblers, onlyfans models, brainrot consumers, etc...
Welcome to Costco, I love you
If you use these tools to get the homework done, but there's little retention of knowledge or skill, how are you going to pass a test where the resource is not available to you? Homework is ostensibly about practicing certain skills (math) or learning/memorizing facts.
This is the same kind of laziness as using it to multiply 60 * 3. If I take the slightly slower road of figuring out the string formatting next time I might go from a minute to 3 seconds.
It's like telling someone to always take the stairs for their health. It's pretty good advice, but it's sweaty and takes time so we mostly don't. Maybe we should lock kids out of elevators and escalators as well as LLMs. But what's good for the duckling is good for the duck.
Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you.
Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain.
The distinction seems pretty clear to me, I am not sure why people are having problems with it.
If you are expected to perform without assistance, then the instructor is failing to meet the needs of the students and doing them a disservice. If the goal is to get the students to exercise, an e-bike may well be the best tool to allow a student to get from a lower point to a higher point. A student who cannot do an hour of sustained running but can do an hour of sustained assisted cycling can have those assistances removed over time, enabling longer endurance while still maintaining the hour of time will have made significant strides in health.
I doubt you could run a marathon today, unprompted. You would start by going shorter distances, working your way up.
This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work.
> Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you.
An instructor who forbids assistance is an instructor who deludes themself about their performance when they were a student. Not all learn to fish the same way, and being shown how in a different way can mean all the difference.
This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work.
> Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain.
I don't know what work you do but that would be seen as lazy at my workplace and frowned upon.
There is a difference between seeking assistance ("Explain this in shorter terms") vs. absolve oneself of the burden of work ("take these points and turn them into paragraphs"). If OP's sister was asking questions ("Explain this poem") and then working from that to something that was her own work, that would be one thing. The fact that she is simply copying verbatim from the machine, thoughtless and without considering the meaning -- that's what is upsetting here.
anyway, I don't think your "run a marathon" or "hour of sustained running" analogies are appropriate... OP mentions "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours", that's closer to "run a 100 meters at any pace", something that any student should do.
And even if teacher is giving unreasonable assignments, the right answer is not to cheat (by asking parent, or ChatGPT or something) - but rather do what you can, so hopefully teacher will see low performance and adjust assignments/expectations.
I think it's ~dangerous to center this question because "more, faster" (and cheaper...) is something employers will always covet to some degree (even at the expense of life and limb).
Any arrangement between employers and employees that doesn't center win-win outcomes is an unsustainable race to somewhere we've already been and decided we didn't like.
My view as a student, personally, has always been that people rampantly cheat, everyone looks like they're doing good on paper, the institution's happy. My assumption was that such "infrastructural" education systems are hard to change (hence why few try to in the first place) and, if they work well enough, no one's going to attempt to touch it, let alone change it to better serve students who seem to be doing what they're expected to.
Happy to hear some thoughts, from a student worried about his peers. :)
Had it been my little brother doing this I'd have whooped his ass, cut internet access, and ratted him out to my parents ;-)
I joke, but honestly the sister's situation is completely the fault of her shit upbringing, not ChatGPT.
It would be really easy for me to blame her for choosing the easiest things to do, her teacher to not giving homework which cannot be solved with chatgpt, her brother for letting her using his account, her parents for not being there and overseeing how she does her homework, but I very much think that each and every person is in this story is exhausted by just simply trying to exists in systems which are not setup for this 11 years old to meet what she needs with her homework and every person either still fighting the systems or just gave up because they run out of steam and they are doing their best to keep their head above the water.
Level 0: this is bad.
Level -1: The teaching methods need to change.
Level -2: It's a glimpse into all of our future, not just children.
Level -3: Who controls the AI controls the world.
> In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?
> "The king, the priest, the rich man — who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.
> "And yet he is no one," Varys said. "He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel."
> "That piece of steel is the power of life and death."
> "Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?"
> "Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords."
> "Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they? Whence came their swords? Why do they obey?" Varys smiled.
EDIT: Seeing no reactions yet, I just wanted to explain that the way I see this coming battle on controlling the AI that controls the world is that we have the governments, the billionaires and the ethicists saying what should be done, and us software professionals as the sellswords with our fingers on the literal trigger.
1. That the "AI" being bandied about (read: LLMs) really is able to "kill" the other blocs.
2. That such an action will be safe from retaliation.
3. That software engineers actually control/own enough of everything to pull that "trigger" unilaterally.
Either you misunderstand the quote, or you haven't read the book or watched the series.
George Martin's central motif of what power really is doesn't have a definite answer, several characters propose different theories, in this case Varys poses more of a question than an answer.
You might say that the AI holds the power, you might say the Engineers hold the power, you might say the congressmen that regulate it hold the power, you might say the citizens who vote the congressmen have the power, you might say the president by control of the military holds the power, the users, god, chance, the smart, the capitalists, the shareholders, etc...
All models are wrong, some are useful, I don't think this one is that useful, unless some researcher has a Technological Singularity in a Bottle somewhere.
But the model is that no one person holds all of the power? That power is many things at once and held by many people? Both in the book and in reality, matches to me.
Is this any different than the previous tech booms (or any industrial revolution for that matter). The US developed and exported almost all of the consumer (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) and infrastructural software (IP, Verisign, Linux).
The US domination through software is so normalized that the limit of these imports by highly sovereign countries are seen as dangerous or in violation of human rights in the 'western' internet.(China,Russia)
Hard to see how AI will be massively different than the history of Software in general in terms of geopolitical power.
Linus Moved to the US in 2004 and became a citizen with his family later.
The linux foundation is a california nfp.
Kids know that they should be learning things. They know that chatgpt can get in the way of that. Will they choose to do it the right way eventually aside from a few bumps in the road? I think so.
Am I the only one who found it interesting and perhaps a little alarming that the poster, while ostensibly aghast at their little sister's use of ChatGPT, decided midway through the screed to not only personify ChatGPT but also assign it a gender?