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The summer is over, schools are back, and the data is in: ChatGPT is mainly a tool for cheating on homework.

https://www.businessinsider.com/school-is-back-chatgpt-mainly-tool-cheating-homework-2023-9

ChatGPT traffic dropped when summer began and schools closed. Now students are back, and they're using the AI tool again more.

The summer is over, schools are back, and the data is in: ChatGPT is mainly a tool for cheating on homework.::ChatGPT traffic dropped when summer began and schools closed. Now students are back, and they're using the AI tool again more.

99 comments

FunderPants

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Terrible article, let me save you all the time. Students using ChatGPT = Cheating , there you go, that's the article.

Hackerman_uwu

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It isn’t cheating any more than Wikipedia is cheating and Wikipedia isn’t cheating any more than an encyclopaedia is cheating.

Just get out of then new world if you can’t lend a hand.

beetus

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So you are suggesting that a student looking up information on Wikipedia is the same level of academic dishonesty as someone turning in a paper written by chatgpt?

What the fuck?

oscar

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That's not what they, or the stats, said. You can use chatgpt without plagiarizing, just like how you can use wikipedia without copy-pasting the whole article.

sailingbythelee

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It's not about plagiarizing. It's about needing to know whether you, not ChatGPT, can actually write well. How are you going to write original research? ChatGPT can maybe sort of help write your introduction, but it can't write about something you've just discovered. You have to know how to write or else you'll never be able to write anything original. Imagine how depressing the world will be when everything you read is just AI-mass-genersted pablum imitating and simulating human experience, but not truly connected to an actual person with real emotions.

Gutless2615

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Homework is a tool for repetition and drudgery. Kids are in school all day. They shouldn’t need homework.

Someonelol

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I hate to say it but there are simply so many subjects to cover in a single day that it's hard to reinforce the lessons learned in class within the given amount of time in a school session. Maybe if schools were structured in a way in which fewer subjects were taught each day would the lessons stick better without the need of homework.

darth_helmet

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Homework should be reading, class should be demonstration and practice

PapstJL4U

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You don't just get better at playing the piano by reading about it. Your cardio doesn't increads by reading papers and 45min lecture is not enough for individual work in a 20 pupil glass.

JackFrostNCola

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I agree, if you can get a kid to read a book and actually trick them into discovering the world of fiction & non-fiction that they are interested in you have just invested in their future, there has to be no downsides to a kid wanting to read a book in bed at night rather than scroll tiktok.

Hackerman_uwu

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Homework is a way to get parents involved because there is literally no way to teach kids everything they need to learn at school.

It’s a pitifully failed way to try and get parents involved because in the end the vast majority literally don’t give a shit.

My sister is a teacher and she’s constantly on about how little time parents put into their kids education. Note that she teaches affluent kids, I’d assume this is ten times worse in homes where both parents work or single parent homes with few resources.

Gutless2615

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I don’t know why or where you get the idea that 8+ hours a day five days a week isn’t enough to teach kids” everything they need to know in school.” I am not anti education at all. Love school. Love university. But as someone that had to leave before the sun rose and didn’t get back until long after it set thanks to after school commitments +homework, I’ll be doing everything I can to avoid subjecting my child to that. Work life balance is important for adults, and I refuse to believe it’s not also crucial for growing minds.

soloner

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Fr. Just do the homework in school, proctored, if it matters so much to the teacher.

Ultimately the kids will get a test, and it should include an essay section, which they obviously have to write on the spot. I don't really think it matters how much homework they did or didn't do or what tools they used to "cheat", as long as they can perform come test day that's what matters.

gohixo9650

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do you think someone will be capable to write an essay if it is literally the first essay they ever write, since they were using AI all the previous times? This is like reading solved math equations and believing that in a test you'll be able to solve them on the spot, without having tried to solve any by yourself before.

soloner

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No! And they'll fail, retake the class, and learn from their mistakes (relying on AI completely instead of using AI for enablement). I see no problems.

This is something our whole generation will learn about and understand, like has already been done for email, social media, the internet, search engines, etc. Students are just the most concentrated because they are young, and this technology applies to solving homework problems.

sailingbythelee

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Failing a class or a year is highly disruptive all around. If a large number of students literally lose the ability to write original work come test day, is the school going to fail half the student body? No, that's crazy talk. It would be considered a disaster by the school, the parents, and the wider society if it was widespread. Schools put rules in place to ensure that your work is your own mainly to prevent children from doing stupid things that will make them fail on test day.

BlueBockser

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Repetition is how people learn to remember things and improve their skills. I fail to see how that's bad.

foo

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People learn through spaced, interleaved, varied, low stakes practice. Mass practice after a long day of work isn't helpful

PapstJL4U

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You just wrote bad homework is bad because it's bad. That is not an argument against HW.

BetaDoggo_

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Clearly an article written to fit a headline rather than the other way around. They talk about use in education settings as a sign that the use cases are limited, despite accounting for only a 12% increase.

In other news, pencil use is up 100% in the last month, signaling that pencils have limited use cases and are only good for cheating on homework.

muntedcrocodile

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Bro the capability of a pencil is a far better medium to expresses concepts. One could argue that a pencils ability to express shades of grey exceeds the capability of the pen. In some ways the pen has an effect of finality.

AdmiralShat

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There shouldn't be homework to begin with. Kids go to school FULL TIME, not including commute.

foo

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My senior secondary board believes that students. should spend 6 hours a week per subject on top of the hours they are physicians in class. It is insane

Tikiporch

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Whoa, they make those kids see patients during class?

phillaholic

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what is a senior secondary board? This is more or less the average amount of time I spent on work outside of class in College.

possiblylinux127

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I agree with you for most things except math. For math and math based courses you need to practice a ton to get it.

stufkes

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Reading and writing are no exception. You also need practice to learn foreign languages. It's not just math

funkless_eck

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as is the arts as well. there's a reason humans excel at different things in different ways

tacosplease

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We should send them somewhere to practice those things 7 hours a day 5 days a week

Sludgeyy

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Disagree.

You can get all the practice you need during school hours.

Maybe we should stop learning about the Ming dynasty and memorizing the Canterbury tales if we needed more time for math practice.

VictorPrincipum

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“You can use AI such as ChatGPT or Copilot on your senior projects, just make sure the code works, you understand it enough to document it, and your sponsor is ok with external code use” - paraphrased from my Software Engineering department head about our senior capstone projects.

“I have the kids ask ChatGPT for an essay and then have the (8th grade) kids treat it like a rough draft so they have practice editing it” - my English teacher Father

The best way to handle it is to embrace and use it to augment your skills, much like calculators in math classes.

grabyourmotherskeys

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Both of these methods require the student to understand the work. My old man brain insists they should have to code assembly from scratch and walk through snow storms to a library for their essay research, but in reality this is likely how this technology will be used. It's a practical approach. The 8th grade version should probably include fact checking.

June

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I’m thinking of LLMs like calculators when I was in school.

It’s good to have a fundamental understanding of how it all works, but let the tool be the workhorse and just learn to validate.

gohixo9650

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you can understand how subtraction or multiplication works, but if you don't do them repeatedly in your head and on paper you will end up needing a calculator for the most ridiculous things. Like getting change or splitting a bill with a friend, or whatever.

Zeoic

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To be fair, I dont think the people growing up with calculators in class and using chat gpt will be using cash at all. Not sure the last time I have even held physical currency, honestly. While your splitting a bill part might remain, we dont really need to worry about calculating change anymore.

gohixo9650

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this is strawman argument. Being able to do basic mathematic operations in your head has nothing to do with using cash or not. By your logic we can stop thinking at all. Calculator for mathematic operations, AI for thinking and talking. We can stop thinking at all since hey,AI is easier

radix

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I can confirm I literally never calculate change anymore. The only thing I do in my head is calculate a 20% tip.

(Obligatory screw tip culture.)

Moobythegoldensock

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Really it needs to start a little younger: in 5th or 6th grade they should be writing short essays in class, by hand, and then move onto outlining for larger essays, and then they can start using AI to do the drafts at home.

grabyourmotherskeys

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I was definitely outlining and writing essays in early grades but was on an accelerated track. My friends from the neighborhood who went to a different junior high entered high school without ever have done this. That blew my mind at the time and still does today decades later.

Moobythegoldensock

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It blows mine, too. I remember having to do the outlines and hating it, but it really helps you understand the structure of an essay even if you never write that way again.

I think outlining will actually become an important tool with generative AI. For example, I used it to generate a letter of recommendation last week. So to do that, I had to:

Write a prompt with enough background for the AI to work with, and include all my talking points
Generate the output
Read over everything to make sure what it generated was relevant and accurate
Edit the draft to reflect my voice, add a sentence or two to emphasize things I wanted to stand out, remove some of the fluff, etc.

It still turned what was probably an hour’s worth of work into 15 minutes, but at least currently you need to understand what you’re doing to use it this way. Specifically, knowing how to outline made it easy to write a concise yet detailed prompt so I could generate what I wanted on the first try.

Solumbran

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A calculator calculates. An AI bullshits.

The only thing ChatGPT can actually do might be marketing speeches, since they are nonsensical to start with and made by things pretending to be humans.

foo

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It's arguable that most of what we generate is mostly vague partially inaccurate bullshit.

Solumbran

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Unless you are a rock, your brain processes information to extract meaning from it. AIs don't.

Water1053

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p03locke

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This video only takes up the entire screen. Why can't it be bigger?

p03locke

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The data is in: Business Insider is mainly a tool.

shasta

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Your mom is a tool!

nosurprises

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Permanently Deleted

FunderPants

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That's me, yup. Barely touched it over the summer, but I use it all the time to help lesson plan, invent fake case studies, and more.

mob

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Also, not necessarily cheating even if used for school. I have a college professor that words homework so weird, I run it through ChatGPT to "translate"

float

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In many countries, schools only care about grades. I was pretty good at getting good grades by understanding what will be tested and minimizing the effort to get there. I would've totally used ChatGPT to do my homework.

bob_wiley

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Permanently Deleted

pc_admin

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Homework shouldn't even exist anymore, it's antiquated and gives kids no work/life balance. (It might actually be a conspiracy to condition them to being worked to death.)

Moobythegoldensock

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However, if usage is only recovering because students are back, that may be a bad sign because it suggests there's a limited range of use cases for ChatGPT and other AI-powered chatbots.

Or maybe kids have always been the early adopters for computer tech?

Water1053

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At work when I write certain emails or code snippets I'll paste them into ChatGPT and ask it to make the email sound "more professional" or "optimize this code." ChatGPT also talks to me like SHODAN from System Shock 😆

BlueBockser

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I hope you know what you're doing. That's a good way to share company secrets with outsiders, also it's uncertain whether you're even legally allowed to use the resulting code.

Water1053

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I appreciate your concern, but no worries. The company code is structured text as I program B&R PLCs and ChatGPT is pretty useless (so far) for that kind of code. The python code I paste in is more for personal hobbies.

jadedwench

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In a similar industry. Friend used it to write Wireshark dissectors for their interface between the PLC and software system. I haven't used ChatGTP yet, but for certain boiler plate tasks it might be useful. I used to dump tag lists and generate ladder logic with some regex and python to fix the rung numbering within Notepad++. Dumb stuff nobody wants to do by hand.

Melco

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Permanently Deleted

aleq

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Prompt better. I use it extensively and the code I get is usually a good start. But it can't do anything.

Maven

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I use it quite a lot, and its code is usually either functional, or within a stone's throw, and debugging its code is usually faster than writing something myself.

possiblylinux127

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And how do your propose to stop it? The cats out of the bag, you need to design better homework.

IcecreamMelts

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Right?!

Don't tell students to write a book report, have them present one. Ask them live questions about their knowledge. It's also a great skill to have, knowing how to present.

It's so simple.

bob_wiley

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Permanently Deleted

Oxnvat

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Based teacher tbh

Afghaniscran

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I don't understand why anyone wants to stop it. I'm a teacher and since ChatGPT came out, my job got so much easier. I will say, ahead of my examples, that I proofread everything it creates and make sure all the facts are straight before submitting anything, but it's still a lot quicker.

I can use it to provide feedback on students work, I use it to write up lesson plans and schemes of work, I use it to draft emails, I use it to give me ideas for activities etc.

99.9% of the time there are parts I need to edit or delete due to irrelevance but it's done the bulk of the work. This is the same for students work, if they don't proofread it they will most likely hand in incorrect work.

specterspectre

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Handwritten assignments are going to make a comeback. It's hard to cheat through an essay you have to write on the spot.

stevedidWHAT

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Yeah I mean just make homework worthless and the cams everything.

Pretty simple. College professors have been doing this forever

nymwit

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discussion in here looking like old r/teenagers with predictable takes

Voyager

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We all were once young.

ChronosWing

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It's a godsend honestly. I just went back to school at damn near 40 and with a full time job. ChatGPT has made getting through my school work so much easier and faster. I would have never had the patience or time to do college work without it.

private_account

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Same tbh. I'm using bing search as it gives me relevant sources as well - to fact check the output. As a bonus, it leads me to websites that aren't seo spam. Google search is officially worse than Bing in my books.

Good on us for keeping up with the times, I say.

ChronosWing

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You can get chatGPT to write something with sources listed as well, just depends on how you prompt it. I do always proofread and edit its output though. Really is a super useful tool.

private_account

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Doesn't it just hallucinate a bunch of URLs?

ChronosWing

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Couple times I've used it the sources were right.

CaptObvious

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Trends don’t confirm hypotheses like this one. And they don’t appear to have the data for a proper causal analysis. At best, they have an interesting data point.

SchizoDenji

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Only if you don't have the patience to use Chatgpt properly.

pec

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So the homework is encouraging kids to explore a real life tool and the teacher can look at the result and corrects any issue with the result thus guiding the students towards a appropriate usage.

It's a good thing.

shasta

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This would be a good take if it was actually a reliable tool. But the answers it gives are often incorrect or entirely made up, and it is not always reproducible because it's always "learning" more and changing its output. Learning to rely on an unreliable tool is asking for trouble.

What would happen if they ever decide to crank up the paid model for ChatGPT and suddenly most people can't afford it, only corporations, and the last 10-20 years of people coming up through the school system now don't know how to do anything or find answers to their questions.

Maggoty

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By that time it's going to be an app on our neural implant.

Just like when we were growing up the teachers said we wouldn't always have a calculator. They need to learn to use the tool responsibly, just like Wikipedia.

adrian783

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you can't be serious

sknowmads

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I bet calculator usage also goes up during the school year

plz1

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I'm from the "show your work, you won't carry a calculator around when you're in the real world" generation. This hits home hard.

Zeoic

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While im from the early "Not much in life needs manual calculation, and if it does we already have a calculator on us at all times" generation haha.

Honestly, I could work harder on practicing mental calculations even now, but I see vastly more value in continuing my learning of technology to improve my career and hobbies.

plz1

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This is the way

foo

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At the end of the day generative AI not only exists but is likely right at the start of a logistics curve. In ten years time this tech is going to be pervasive

pec

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Would you rather have them only use it outside of school work where no one will point out that it can be wrong? Teachers could also ask questions on the studied subject in class to teach student that by copy pasting the output they are not learning much.

ChatGPT exist, kid will use it. Should adults guide them?

datavoid

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Future generations learning how to utilize powerful new technologies is a bad thing now?

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

ChatGPT was supposed to be the fastest-growing tech product in history, so this reversal got the technosphere theorizing as to why the chatbot wasn't so hot anymore.

Then there's the amusing comparison with interest in Minecraft, a popular video game that kids love to play when they're not using ChatGPT to cheat on their homework.

However, if usage is only recovering because students are back, that may be a bad sign because it suggests there's a limited range of use cases for ChatGPT and other AI-powered chatbots.

Mark Shmulik, a top internet analyst at Bernstein, made this point at the start of the summer, when usage fell.

In other words, if a big part of ChatGPT growth is driven by cheating students, this means the technology, or at least the chatbot format, may not be the dominant computing platform of the future.

OpenAI did release this guide for teachers at the end of August, which suggests ways to use ChatGPT in the classroom, including prompts and lesson plans.

The original article contains 470 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 64%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

ShittyRedditWasBetter

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Egh Moody adults are ignorant to how it works, how to prompt well, and are scared of using it at work.

Kids are going to gobble that shit up. It's being used for cheating until the kids get into the workforce.

Solumbran

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If anything, people who like chatGPT are the ones ignorant of how it works (spoiler: it doesn't).

And kids with their understanding of technology being limited to youtube and tiktok have no clue about what an AI is. They see it, like most people, as a magic black box that is incredibly smart. Apart from being a black box, none of that is true.

ShittyRedditWasBetter

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Literally unusable.

astronaut_sloth

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It works well if you know how to prompt well. LLMs are able to do so much, but a user just needs to know how to use it correctly. The technology is still in its infancy, so it's a bit difficult to use well.

Solumbran

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It does not work. At most it looks like it works.

A human brain is able to understand and process information. An AI simply calculates a mathematical function. There is no reasoning and no understanding of anything, all that ChatGPT does is try to look like a human. And by "try to look like a human", I mean "generate sentences that can be believable, on shape, to be written by a human".

If you ask it to calculate 2+2, and then tell it that it is equal to 5, it won't see any problem because it doesn't understand any of it. But it will give you answers that are, grammatically speaking, reasonably human.

If I ask a rock how much is 2+2 and I throw it, and it bounces 4 times, it does not mean that this rock knows how to count. ChatGPT and similar are just better illusions, but they're nothing more.

SmoothIsFast

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It does not work. At most it looks like it works.

No it does work, it's just most people don't understand its just a very complex lookup table essentially using a predictive model. It doesn't think, nor feel, nor imagine, it runs a function to choose the next fitting word based on previous inputs and it's training set. In that regard it is damn good.

Solumbran

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Yes but that's not what people think. They use it as a search engine, a programmer and a teacher. This is my problem, they use it as something it absolutely isn't and base their opinions, knowledge and work on that.

SmoothIsFast

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The only issue with it is needing to teach people to fact check back with 1st party sources. Teachers are not always absolute, documentation is not always absolute, and search engines are certainly not always absolute especially with SEO. Fact checking is always a necessity whether using generative AI solutions or not. You need to take a step back, this improves efficiency when used correctly and you won't teach proper use cases if not brought up early with students in school. You are arguing against yourself here.

naught

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Yeah, shitty article. AI is the same as calculators. So what! Kids don't have to waste mental cycles with your tedious and borderline sadistic amounts of homework. Go fly a kite.

edit: clarification

ShittyRedditWasBetter

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I never said anything to the contrary. Using ti86 was cheating when I was in school, now it's taught in 6th grade.

naught

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I was agreeing and speaking more at the article. Sorry for the confusion :)