Technology

Traditional instruction gave the same result as a bleeding edge ChatGPT tutorial bot. Imagine what would happen if a tiny fraction of the billions spent to develop this technology went into funding improved traditional instruction.

Better paid teachers, better resources, studies geared at optimizing traditional instruction, etc.

Move fast and break things was always a stupid goal. Turbocharging it with all this money is killing the tried and true options that actually produce results, while straining the power grid and worsening global warming.

I don't even know of this is ChatGPT's fault. This would be the same outcome if someone just gave them the answers to a study packet. Yes, they'll have the answers because someone (or something) gave it to them, but won't know how to get that answer without teaching them. Surprise: For kids to learn, they need to be taught. Shocker.

Kids who take shortcuts and don't learn suck at recalling knowledge they never had..

At work we give a 16/17 year old, work experience over the summer. He was using chatgpt and not understanding the code that was outputing.

I his last week he asked why he doing print statement something like

print (f"message {thing} ")

no shit

Yea, this highlights a fundamental tension I think: sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, the point of doing something is the doing itself, not the result.

Tech is hyper focused on removing the "doing" and reproducing the result. Now that it's trying to put itself into the "thinking" part of human work, this tension is making itself unavoidable.

I think we can all take it as a given that we don't want to hand total control to machines, simply because of accountability issues. Which means we want a human "in the loop" to ensure things stay sensible. But the ability of that human to keep things sensible requires skills, experience and insight. And all of the focus our education system now has on grades and certificates has lead us astray into thinking that the practice and experience doesn't mean that much. In a way the labour market and employers are relevant here in their insistence on experience (to the point of absurdity sometimes).

Bottom line is that we humans are doing machines, and we learn through practice and experience, in ways I suspect much closer to building intuitions. Being stuck on a problem, being confused and getting things wrong are all part of this experience. Making it easier to get the right answer is not making education better. LLMs likely have no good role to play in education and I wouldn't be surprised if banning them outright in what may become a harshly fought battle isn't too far away.

All that being said, I also think LLMs raise questions about what it is we're doing with our education and tests and whether the simple response to their existence is to conclude that anything an LLM can easily do well isn't worth assessing. Of course, as I've said above, that's likely manifestly rubbish ... building up an intelligent and capable human likely requires getting them to do things an LLM could easily do. But the question still stands I think about whether we need to also find a way to focus more on the less mechanical parts of human intelligence and education.

Kids using an AI system trained on edgelord Reddit posts aren’t doing well on tests?

Ya don’t say.

Like any tool, it depends how you use it. I have been learning a lot of math recently and have been chatting with AI to increase my understanding of the concepts. There are times when the textbook shows some steps that I don't understand why they're happening and I've questioned AI about it. Sometimes it takes a few tries of asking until you figure out the right question to ask to get the right answer you need, but that process of thinking helps you along the way anyways by crystallizing in your brain what exactly it is that you don't understand.

I have found it to be a very helpful tool in my educational path. However I am learning things because I want to understand them, not because I have to pass a test and that determination in me to want to understand is a big difference. Just getting hints to help you solve the problem might not really help in the long run, but it you're actually curious about what you're learning and focus on getting a deeper understanding of why and how something works rather than just getting the right answer, it can be a very useful tool.

Of all the students in the world, they pick ones from a "Turkish high school". Any clear indication why there of all places when conducted by a US university?

TLDR: ChatGPT is terrible at math and most students just ask it the answer. Giving students the ability to ask something that doesn't know math the answer makes them less capable. An enhanced chatBOT which was pre-fed with questions and correct answers didn't screw up the learning process in the same fashion but also didn't help them perform any better on the test because again they just asked it to spoon feed them the answer.

I'm not entirely sold on the argument I lay out here, but this is where I would start were I to defend using chatGPT in school as they laid out in their experiment.

It's a tool. Just like a calculator. If a kid learns and does all their homework with a calculator, then suddenly it's taken away for a test, of course they will do poorly. Contrary to what we were warned about as kids though, each of us does carry a calculator around in our pocket at nearly all times.

We're not far off from having an AI assistant with us 24/7 is feasible. Why not teach kids to use the tools they will have in their pocket for the rest of their lives?

Something I've noticed with institutional education is that they're not looking for the factually correct answer, they're looking for the answer that matches whatever you were told in class. Those two things should not be different, but in my experience, they're not always the same thing.

I have no idea if this is a factor here, but it's something I've noticed. I have actually answered questions with a factually wrong answer, because that's what was taught, just to get the marks.

There are a part here that sounds interesting

The students who used it did spectacularly better on the practice problems, solving 127 percent more of them correctly compared with students who did their practice work without any high-tech aids. But on a test afterwards, these AI-tutored students did no better.

Do you think that these students that used ChatGPT can do the exercises "the old fashioned way"? For me it was a nightmare try to resolve a calculus problem just with the trash books that doesn't explain a damn fuck, I have to go to different resources, wolphram, youtube, but what happened when there was a problem that wasnt well explained in any resource?. I hate openAI, I want to punch Altman in the face. But this doesn't mean we have to bait this hard in the title.

Taking too many shortcuts doesn't help anyone learn anything.

This isn't a new issue. Wolfram alpha has been around for 15 years and can easily handle high school level math problems.

ChatGPT lies which is kind of an issue in education.

As far as seeing the answer, I learned a significant amount of math by looking at the answer for a type of question and working backwards. That's not the issue as long as you're honestly trying to understand the process.

I've found AI helpful in asking for it to explain stuff. Why is the problem solved like this, why did you use this and not that, could you put it in simpler terms and so on. Much like you might ask a teacher.