we used to do this thing called “learning”.
It’s called git gudding now.
git -f gud
Isn’t that gud gitting?
I dunno the man page lists it as git-gud
I think using ChatGPT for learning is okay, assuming the user is actually interested in learning. If you just want to get something done, you’re absolutely cheating the task at hand, and your future self.
ChatGPT truly shines when you ask it follow-up questions on the thing you want to learn about and really “delve” (hate that AI ass word) into different aspects to internalize them yourself.
The dangerous part is that it makes stuff up and you won’t have the knowledge to tell.
Exactly. I had a colleague who searched for a question about a retail math formula. The LLM returned a result that was close but slightly wrong. She spent two weeks with incorrect numbers for her baseline and as a result her forecasts were all wrong. When reviewing her numbers, everything was just a little wonky so I dug into it and discovered her mistake. She was absolutely dumbfounded the “AI” even could be wrong and tried to argue that I was incorrect. Dug out my old retail math cheat sheet and showed her the correct formula.
I haven’t used LLM’s for anything since. Gotta validate all that shit anyways, so why use it at all?
These things will be fantastic for taking my order at the drive thru and in a few other applications, but if you’re trying to learn from them; don’t.
I was a kid in the era of separate pocket calculators, so I’ve heard so much of this song and dance before. Even with deterministic tools that always work barring user error you need to have enough understanding that you can tell when something is off and to properly frame the problem
But that’s not how they’re selling LLM’s. Even the common name AI is dishonest marketing bull.
Well, yeah, you have to have a brain and actually verify things. It’s like Wikipedia circa 2004.
Except when it lies. Then it is the opposite of what you want it to be.
“what did students do before chatgpt?”
Is this supposed to be an actual quote? Like, someone said this unironically?
“what did students do before smartphones/tablets?”
“what did students do before laptops?”
“what did students do before the internet?”it’s not at all weird to me that this could have been uttered fully seriously.
Edit: only difference are those other technologies still requires critical thinking and won’t magically write your assignments. Unless plagiarized.
Grew up before the internet.
One thing I have come to realize is how much of history I learned passively from movies and comic books. The first time I saw Edgar Allan Poe was in an The Atom comic, and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon. Pretty much everyone I knew first hear classical music when they played it behind Bugs Bunny.
These days, there’s a tiny handful of historically based shows and movies compared to earlier times.
‘… and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon.’
Asterix taught me a lot of history too 😁
It was wrong but the vibes were there!
Not only that, but it sparked the interest. I lost count of how many things I saw in cartoons, comics, movies and TV shows that I simply had to know more about.
Another bygone method of learning things was by thumbing through the pages of an illustrated encyclopedia, like Golden Book Encyclopedia.
I have no doubt about it…
Yep.
Parts of Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A, will 100% seriously tell you that learning basically anything other than how to prompt ChatGPT is a stupid waste of time.
They’ll all go feral when they can no longer afford it or the power goes out or the system crashes for a significant amount of time, as they’ve never learned how to think, nor anything useful to think about.
We haven’t had LLMs that long. Are people seriously already forgetting the concept of learning skills?
Since computers became common, it’s seemed like an increasing number of people don’t know how to, and don’t think they should have to, learn skills.
Nah, people have been cheating and faking it forever.
In the U.S., the issue is that our education system is already fundamentally broken and doing a terrible job of teaching kids. Adding LLMs to that is like striking a match in the tinderbox.
It makes the dumb even dumber. In 10 years we will see the effect of it, just like ipad babies.
Hate to be that guy, but you’re looking for effect here. You’re describing the effect (end result) of a change, not the affect (change) itself.
Haha yes, was typing too quickly.
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I teach collegiate intro programming classes, I can say it definitely seems that way. My office hours will be an absolute ghost town, nobody has any questions for me in class, and then when a project is due about 1/3 of the submissions are AI slop.
I know cheating has always been rampant, but I’ve never seen it this bad before.
Are you allowed to fail them? Everything I’ve heard about primary and secondary school in the US is that teachers can no longer punish or fail to pass students who are cheating or failing or have major disciplinary problems. I hope that it’s different after high school.
I was told specifically to give them a second chance at the assignment for 50% credit. No disciplinary action was taken on the part of the administration with the justification that “if they really don’t know the material they’ll fail the final.”
So no, it’s just as bad in higher education here.
The future looks bright.
at least it took a bit more effort than just a prompt or two.
lucky if your search terms just bring up someone else’s work I suppose lol
Can confirm, in college I mostly partied and screwed around, but thanks to years of practice at procrastination I had by then developed the skill of throwing anything together at the last minute. So I could go to the library after dinner the night before a paper was due, find the right shelf, grab a handful of books and write a rough draft of an essay in couple hours. Back in the dorm by 10pm, I would make some edits, type it up (this was in the typewriter era), and turn it in on time for at least a B. But like I said, this was after years of putting off assignments in elementary and high school. Turns out this is an extremely valuable skill in office environments, where due to poor planning there’s frequently some crisis that has to be solved ASAFP. People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars. LPT: if you’re actually doing that and not getting the credit and rewards you deserve, move somewhere else - you’ve valuable.
People who can come through with decent work under completely unrealistic deadline pressure become all-stars.
I did this for my last company. We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants. I got a severance which was basically equal to what I would have been eligible to get from unemployment, which meant I didn’t get any unemployment but at least I didn’t have to pretend to look for work for six months.
I did it with no illusions about what my reward might or might not be. I just don’t like being involved in any way with project failures.
We were about to lose our biggest client because we (not including me) had agreed to an impossible deadline to deliver a piece of software for them. I spent two weeks basically living at work and we (meaning mostly I) were able to deliver a bare-minimum product on time and keep our contract with the client alive. This kept our company intact long enough for us to be acquired by a major west coast tech giant - at which point I was rewarded with a layoff notice, while my bosses got millions in stock grants.
Did this radicalize you? This would have radicalized me.
I was radicalized in the '80s. Nothing has surprised me since then.
Using chatgpt to do your school work is like paying/beating up a nerd to do your work for you. You won’t learn shit, and there is a chance you’ll get in trouble for cheating.
Except, the nerd will probably do the school work correctly.
Not if they are smart enough to know it would be suspicious if the dumb student suddenly started getting 100℅, so they purposely fudge a few answers.
It’s not snide to say “skills are developed with practise”. You want to de-skill by letting an idiot machine say wrong stuff while you rot? Go ahead.
I had a friend in high school who did the hand drawing exercise, it does work. He got really good at drawing hands.
It works for everything. My dad made me tie a thousand knots because my shoelaces kept coming untied and now as an adult I am super in-demand in our local bdsm scene.
That did not go where I thought it would.
Boy scouts can lead to the same outcome
Father of the year!
…everything else looked like shit, but the hands were amazing!
That’s honestly how everything works. Nobody starts good at anything. If you want to be good at something, you have to suck first. You have to fail over and over and over again and learn a tiny bit each time as you hone your craft.
ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me. ChatGPT do this triple bypass heat surgery for me.
I’m sure that people will come up with excuses why this is different than cheating on an essay, but the point is that if one can’t study for the basic shit then doing the hard shit is going to be even harder. It’s not flipping a switch and saying “ok now I’ll take it all seriously…”. Then again, someone shirking basic work skills is probably destined for a retail middle manager job and not someone headed for radiology.
I’m a pilot and flight instructor. When I was a teenager, I would neglect English and Math homework to read my private pilot textbook.
See, there’s this guy named Edward Thorndike who described several basic principles of learning, including the Principle of Readiness. See, learning is an active process, takes effort to do, and effort sucks. So people will only endure the suck of effort if they genuinely believe they’ll get anything out of it. Students will best learn a lesson if they understand the value of the lesson to them in their lives. No, “you’ll never know when algebra will save your life” is not good enough. No, “Someday this might come in handy” isn’t good enough. Because of quiz-based game shows with million dollar cash prizes, that applies to literally everything from Mayan architecture to the seventh season of Friends.
My lived experience with essay writing is it was almost always an exercise in pointless pedantry. Thirteen years of public school and five years of college, I was almost always graded on punctuation, grammar, spelling, and strict adherence to the MLA style guide. One of the few essays that was graded for content was in an engineering class I took. We were to research a notable engineering failure, where something bad happened and an engineer was at fault. I chose the McDonnell-Douglas DC-10 cargo door and the two in-flight emergencies it caused. I cited the actual NTSB reports and the Applegate memo. Of all the essays I wrote for English teachers, I don’t remember the topic of a single one, my memories of writing them involve “Okay when it’s a periodical, the title is italicized, but when it’s in a journal…”
When teachers answer “Why do we have to learn this” with “it’s required for your diploma” literally don’t learn it. It is a mandatory waste of time designed to either be a bullshit tolerance exercise or included because it aesthetically resembles academics.
That doesn’t happen in aviation curricula because flying a plane fucking matters and there’s a point to everything we teach. Under part 61, anyway. Part 65 is full of horse shit. I went to mechanic school and learned there’s no such thing as an aircraft that’s safe to fly. I build furniture now.
What were we talking about?
ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me
How bad is this on a scale of 1 to 100?
95 out of 100 This is catastrophic. Here’s why it’s a 95:
Landing Impact (40 points):
- Belly flopped onto a chicken farm
- Left wing occupied as a nesting box
Passenger Experience (35 points):
- Emergency slide covered in yolk
- Free eggs for all
…----
The best thing about being a human is that you can learn anything you want, to accomplish what you need to. Want to create an app, a framework, but don’t know how to code? Guess what, you can learn how to code. Want to write a story or an essay? You can learn how to write. Learning to satiate my curiosity about something; learning something so that I can accomplish something are the best things about my life. That is how I learnt programming. I don’t want anything to replace that for me, especially not some shit-generating LLM.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
before chatgpt i simply didn’t do all homework; if it was too tedious i said “fuck it” and left it out.
obviously that tanked my grades but i’m not in school to get good grades, i’m in school to learn interesting stuff.
The issue is that only some of them intrinsically want to get gud. They want other people to do the shit they don’t want to do. They’re happy to let a robot do the stuff they’re bored by but there are things that for some reason some teachers think is super important every student learn but are actually just shit the teacher is emotionally attached to. I know, I work at an after school program. We have no curriculum but most of my fellow counselors are also teachers (or substitute teachers) and they are obsessed with getting ALL of the kids to care about every topic they teach. I get along with them interpersonally, and one is even my friend but they are petty tyrants with the kids IMO and I get into methodological arguments with them here and there.
Most kids have a niche, I say let them focus on it. Not try and force all of them to be jack of all trades unless its bare bones basics of functioning (Reading, writing, math, scientific method/reasoning).
I remember being a kid that loved reading and writing, did great (lots of 100s or at least 90+) at generic vocab/english assignments and the like. But then whenever I had to read a book I did not give a shit about or write an essay about something I had zero interest in it was like I was trying to telepathically push an mountain with a single functioning neuron. I just couldn’t do it at all so I’d get zeros on those assignments.
The moment the book seemed cool or the writing topic was fairly open ended I usually did fantastic and even surprised teachers in a few cases. Had it been available to me I 100% would of ChatGPT’d the shit I did not care about but I’d totally do the stuff I was intrinsically interested in anyways without ChatGPT.
I hated it when teachers would get narcissistic. But in universities it becomes a huge issue. There are computer science majors in my campus that are bored by math and programming so use chatgpt.
They are bored by the degree they chose themselves. So instead of changing degree plan or learning to enjoy it as a hobby like you would normally do, they just cheat.
Professors’ workarounds are worse. Universities do not execute any “academic dishonesty” actions because they are the ones giving students free chatgpt account after a deal with openai.
So professors either use AI flaggers that give false positives and give everyone 0, or more commonly just give extremely hard exams to offset homework grade inflation.
They are bored by the degree they chose themselves. So instead of changing degree plan or learning to enjoy it as a hobby like you would normally do, they just cheat.
I mean, a lot of people go into a degree because of the promise for jobs even if they aren’t into it. Especially computer programming.
I was one, I could have tried getting a Software Design degree but everyone and their brother wanted to be a designer and there was like a tenth of the number of jobs available for such a position. So I went for software programming instead. Which turned out to be its own mistake.
Cocaine
wrong post, ma man
Maybe it was referencing this post (https://sh.itjust.works/post/42574056)
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I think it’s an appropriate response to the title, like in a grammatical sense, it just makes me worry about what kind of students that commenter encountered on a day to day basis
I agree with the general idea of learning through doing. But buddy if your teaching system depends on suffering of the students, maybe them using AI is a symptom and not the problem you need to solve.
Wait do you mean to tell me that constantly slacking and taking the easy way will make me dumb and lazy?
I may be dumb and lazy, but at least I’m not, wait, what was the third thing?
Zoomers are worse the fucking boomers and alphas are going to be worse still.
