I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child.
When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least once while they're doing homework it will be very easy to catch issues like this.
> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child.
My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them!
I thought the "kids are illiterate now" stuff was overblown, and I bet it still is to a certain extent, but it's definitely bad. Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore? Less important than reading, but still.
Is this because of an increase in the prevalence of child distractions like an iPad? I find that hard to believe since television filled that same void before, didn't it? COVID definitely put a lot of kids at a few year disadvantage, too.
I can't really speak to any of this because I haven't raised a kid, so I also don't want to criticize people for something I know nothing about, but it does seem like children aren't taught by their parents the same way - but I don't know if my parent's generation had the same thought at one point and this is a cyclical critique.
I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts who have more exposure to this kind of thing than I do.
I'm rising 3 kids (in France, I don't know if it changes much). We have banned TV, very heavily restricted phones, and we closely follow homework. I'm persuaded it makes a difference wrt parents that don't do that, but somehow isn't a sure fire way of being a "great parent".
I don't know how that helps. Watching TV with my kid has been the best way to teach him I've found. There are great videos and shows that you can watch together and then discuss afterwords. Baking videos. Chemistry. Physics. History. Seeing something on TV is great way to fire up the imagination and inspiration for real world activities.
This is what we do. The kids don't get unlimited access to TV, but rather curated access to educational material, but we limit tv altogether on weekdays and they only get ipads at the restaurant. On the weekends they can watch a few fun movies in the afternoon.
Restaurants is a few places where a tablet is a godsend. Children aren't always involved in adults conversations, so they get (obviously) bored at the table. A tablet guarantees some time off to the parents.
Now obviously is a problem if you go to the restaurant often, in our case it's once every few months and having them watching a movie makes going to the restaurant possible again (we waited 6 years before we could)
>Restaurants is a few places where a tablet is a godsend. Children aren't always involved in adults conversations, so they get (obviously) bored at the table. A tablet guarantees some time off to the parents.
as a fellow restaurant patron : I don't care that your kid is bored or if you can't afford a baby-sitter -- what I do care about is listening to the latest baby shark or whatever other youtube-brainrot-babysitter-program blaring near me while I'm trying to eat my linguini.
When I was younger if you brought a loud/obnoxious kid to dinner at a restaurant it was a sign that either you were inexperienced as parents or too poor to afford a baby-sitter (which then raises questions about eating out..), or otherwise didn't give a fuck about appearances or anyone else near you.
Also : not all kids are bored by what adults are doing, and a big part of getting good at those kind of conversations and 'adult actions' later in life is fueled by social mimicry and third party practice; to dismiss all children from such activities by directing their attention towards whatever the closest thing that minimizes parenting time and effort is , imo, likely damaging.
But, at the end of the day I gotta throw my arms up and say "Well, i'm not a parent." -- but it just seems obvious to me as a bystander that this level of forced autonomy and independence for smaller children reduces any chance that a kid will say "Mom, what does that word you just used mean?" and actually learn something from a novel experience. It reduces the amount the kids will read the faces of strangers and make social decisions. It reduces the chance that a kid will make a social faux pas slip and require corrections preventing it in the future.
It does, however, keep a kid busy , often annoying everyone else, while you gossip. I'm not sure that's supposed to be the end goal here.
Children don't get the tablet immediately, they eat without the tablet and get it when they are done, so there is plenty of time to chat, with opportunities for talking with the adult.
That being said, everything you say makes sense, but the reality is if you don't get a break every couple of months for a few hours, the parents don't perform, so from my perspective they (and myself) get a pass for the tablet.
As for the volume, they can lower it? I'm very careful making sure the volume is low, but I guess some people aren't careful.
This also assumes the children don't spend time with the parents. The parents could be spending many hours with the children so whatever happens at the restaurant is very small in the big picture.
That's totally fine.
My children get plenty of boring time, sometimes they get creative, sometimes they do not.
When they are creative, their creation is not always compatible with the environment (too noisy, too active).
Not all children like drawing either. Tablet is consistent, which is helpful when going to a restaurant.
Just to be clear, I use tablet only as a tv, I don't allow any games, too many exploits child's mind.
If I went more often to the restaurant, it would make sense to have different activities though, you are right. We go maybe once every 2-3 months, so the tablet was acceptable.
It has become way too expensive eating out.
We're in Canada; doing the same. But most of my kids' classmates are on YouTube all the time. The brainrot content is unavoidable and it's creating issues for my kids' socialization.
kids should be kids and do what other kids are doing, even if it's watching TV or playing video games, unless it’s something truly harmful.
watching TV hasn't killed anyone and my generation, who grew up in front of the TV screen for lack of better alternatives, turned out just fine.
The real issue now is with my parents’ generation, but that’s because they’re old and their mindset has become immutable, not because they watched too much TV.
TV tends to reinforce existing biases rather than create new ones.
IMO your kids will grow up thinking that TV is bad, and while it's mostly true that 'the medium is the message', they’re missing out on the opportunity to learn how to deal with it. It’s like a vaccine — it helps them build resilience.
>watching TV hasn't killed anyone and my generation, who grew up in front of the TV screen for lack of better alternatives, turned out just fine.
I don’t think any previous generation kids spend as much time in front of the TV as they do with the screens today, sadly the damage will only be seen when it is done. The difference is mainly the content, as bad as TV could have been in the past at least there was someone responsible and liable for the content put “on air” instead on the internet your child brain is at the mercy of the algorithm.
> My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with
This just blows my mind. Literally the first thing I taught my Toddler once he started learning letters was how to spell his own name.
When there were three television channels, children and adults found other things to do when there was nothing to watch. That's where you developed non-passive life skills.
Now TikTok gives a continuous dopamine hit tailored to their psych profile. Just click on the pictures like a proper trained ape.
> Is this because of an increase in the prevalence of child distractions like an iPad?
There is a massive class discrepancy emerging between communities where kids are always on devices, at school and at home, and those where it is controlled. The crack pipe being in the pocket is functionally different from a heavy object at home.
My wife made very good money. She still quit her job to be a stay at home mom. Being a good parent to multiple children and taking care of yourself is pretty much impossible if both parents are working. Not every family can go single income but I think more could (and should) than do.
> She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them!
Clearly, they aren't things that the parents are teaching or there wouldn't be an issue, and there is a clash of expectations between teacher (and maybe school more broadly) and the parents.
> Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore?
This was absolutely something that was taught in elementary schools when I was in school (I learned it from my parents, largely before starting, but not everyone did and it was absolutely taught as part of the curriculum; also, people who needed to know the time didn't usually have digital clocks on the wrist, in their pocket, and on their computer, plus voice assistants that will give a spoken report of the time in request, then, so it was a much more relevant skill. We started teaching our kids before they started school, but I can see why parents and schools would view it as less important today.)
Oh wow this is on the dot - this is something my sister has spoken to. The switch from phonics to (some other way of teaching reading by essentially guessing based on word shape that I can't recall the name of). It seems similar to common core math (not sure if that was just a New York thing) where no one thinks it's a good idea at first glance but it becomes standardized in schools still.
Not only this, but parents should be involved before children go to school. Teachers have repeatedly told us that they could tell that we read to our children regularly as babies and preschoolers.
That’s neat in a bad way - I have heard the same thing in parent teacher interviews. When my kid was born, I turned into a dude who cries. This stuff makes me cry. I like being involved in my child’s life and absolutely love reading to her. I can’t imagine just not doing my favourite thing with my favourite person.
Granted, I have one child and a lot of privilege so maybe I can’t understand the other side. But I’m not sure I want to.
The post looks like a result of ego defence mechanisms in action. “I keep giving crack cocaine and Xanax to my sister, and it made me realize the next generation is cooked!” Such a bizarre conclusion.
Having put three kids through the public education system, I can confidently say that the system is broken from top to bottom; comprised of students, teachers, parents, administrators, government, and taxpayers all striving to do their worst.
I would love to see how we could wipe the slate clean and totally re-invent what education in the 21st century could really be.
Not sure if there is more context within the subreddit, but I don't see much here to blame on the parents. Which parents? These specific ones or in general? Parents are basically responsible for everything for a child except when they're not and they often get that wrong too. A 5th grader is ratted out by her brother for cheating on her homework using artificial intelligence: I guess Mom & Dad are now also the household AI sleuth.
No, I won't admit blame, but I sure do hope for my and my children's sake that parents start figuring this out. Perhaps the artificial intelligence could think twice before helping a 5th grader cheat?
So what should the parents be blamed for here? Giving unsupervised access to AI? Failing to educate their child? I lean toward the former in the form of age gating. While I acknowledge that these corporations themselves have the ethicists (not sure of the degree of involvement from pedagogical experts), I don't think we can trust them when it comes to kids. For as much as we hear Mira Morati say AI will revolutionize education with personalized tutors, we get a post like this. Sadly, the stakes are more dire. The kid who committed suicide after the fantasy AI chatbot conversation seemed to have a pretty involved mother.
We already had one guineau-pig generation with social media, but AI ups the ante; and I think more should be done to keep it out of the hands of children. But the cat is out of the bag, so now it is mostly up to parents individually and politically.
It's worth noting that a lot of parents forced to go through with unplanned pregnancies are uninterested. They didn't want their children, and they will do the bare minimum necessary to keep them alive until 18.
Unironically is it that hard? I managed to not impregnate anyone until I met my wife in my 30s. Likewise for her. Likewise for many of my friends. Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles. You apply basic biology knowledge and protection and if all else fails there are multiple ways to “fix” the issue before it gets to the point where a baby is born.
> Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles.
Bingo^, especially the “in my circles.” The catch of course is that people have little to zero control over which circles they’re born and raised into, thus creating a vicious cycle.
Good job avoiding a bad outcome, but in the same way it was easy for you due to the circles you arrived on earth in, it’s hard for others due to the circles they arrived on earth in.
This is all true even with high degree of agency. Taking two people with the same degree of agency, one born into or closer to certain norms will have an easier time than one born outside of or further away from those norms.
Man, im in SD, health education here is dire, like there's one line about prevention in a massive slideshow, and nothing else. And assuming that teens just wont is simply delusional.
This exactly. But now disinterested parents have a new threat that will allow them to imagine that their kids are fine when in fact they are on their way to debilitating ignorance.
On the other hand, pervasive reliance on ChatGPT by the greater part of a generation or two, globally, is going to be great for subscription revenues. Let me call my broker.
// a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents //
Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents.
LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs.
We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we lived in, or the careers we had. Their world is going to be very very different.
By your own wording, before you learned programming, you learned to compute by hand. Then programming served as a way of automating what you already knew, but you learned it first, and that's the key issue. Don't skip the foundational learning step.
LLMs are just today's flavor of automation. We've automated tasks in the past, and we will automate tasks in the future. Automation happened and will continue to happen regardless of shape and form.
I agree with the high-level sentiment, "We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we live in." Still, we must also be careful not to skip foundational subjects simply because they're suddenly easy to automate.
Back at the beginning of the 20th century, you had to learn both Latin and Greek to qualify for Harvard or Yale. Because they were foundational. How could you learn the classics without being able to read them? If all you ever read were translations of them, you miss out on so much...
Bread machines exist. They produce acceptable bread. Do you train a good baker by giving them a bread machine? Can you even be a good baker if the only bread you've ever eaten is white loaves from a bread machine?
LLM are a tool that has to be guided by human experience. It's really hard to do that if you don't have experience outside LLMs.
Do you train a good copy typist by giving them a xerox copy machine? Can you even be a good copy typist if the only documents you've ever copied is from a xerox machine?
No and nobody cares because copy typists don't exist any more.
I think blame should be taken to mean "root cause" as opposed to a moral culpability. The degree to which a parent takes an active role in their child's education is incredibly important, more important than their teachers or the school they go to, and sadly many parent's do not take much of an interest in their children's education, thinking that it is mostly something schools manage.
> who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs.
What if instead of these fantasy gains you won't be able to do any meaningful work since you can't count to 10 and just ask LLMs without any ability to tell whether the result is correct?
I doubt that any of those parents would be receptive to concerns or criticism. I can only hope that in 20, 50, or 100 years, absent-minded parenting is going to be widely recognized as a form of child abuse.
I agree but the amount of stuff parents are expected to do to raise a child now are ridiculous. Many don’t give a shit but for the ones that do, the list is getting untenable. Adding anymore is just going to exacerbate the population decline problem.
while [ `learning_useless_old_skills $gen_old` -gt `learning_useless_old_skills $generation` ]
do complain
gen_old=generation
generation=$((generation+1))
done
Who in their right mind would waste their time learning to read when TTS has existed for decades and everything that matters is a video anyways. Technological progress increased because we stopped teaching Latin, it will increase again when we stop teaching reading and writing, there are many reasons for this, not just that reading is less efficient for almost all tasks, but to make space (mindshare) for the future great works the genuinely need to be written to effectively convey their meaning.
Most people do not need or want to read/write, that is an indisputable fact, stop trying to force it on them. Here is a reading question for you: Has there ever been a time in history where the general sentiment of an older generation was that the newer generation (not individuals nor a group, but the generation as a whole) was doing particularly well at some "essential human skill", Hitler youth? Mao Zedong's revolutionaries? Maybe I would know more if I learned Latin. Gah! If only! At least I've discovered a litmus test for despotic governments.
Even from the specific group angle, In the 60s academics were handwringing about the space race, nowadays we "can't go to the moon" (nor the ISS) and people are handwringing about that.
I'm close to someone who teaches at a university, and they're making heavy use of in-room essays written in blue books. This ensures that the work is purely the students, but I think it also has the side-effect that the grader is also working manually.
I kinda think maybe at earlier levels, most homework should be moved into the classroom and done on paper anyway? What's the point of homework if they're not going to do it themselves and they're not going to learn? So just push that back into the classroom and don't try to take up their time out of school needlessly.
If we flipped the lecture/homework system upside down it would first solve some of the major issues with how we deliver education, but as a side effect prevent the appearance of doing the work while really it's just the student mindlessly copying prompts and responses.
Assign the material for outside the classroom. Use the in-person contact time to work through the problems, with a mix of small group, pairing and mentoring.
I believe Sal Khan is a big promoter of this approach, and it also largely mirrors how people work in their jobs too.
I think this works well with at least somewhat interested students (like in university), but I'm not so sure before.
My experience when I was younger is that a significant proportion of students don't do anything outside of school. So you're trading not doing the homework with not reading the material. And then you'll essentially have to repeat the material during class hours, unless you're willing to leave half the class totally clueless. At least with the homework at home, the ones not doing anything are only penalising themselves.
I totally agree though that homework at home is dying. It already wasn't great before for a variety of reasons, and now it's basically totally useless.
This is good. I've never understood the value of watching a live lecture without interactivity. You might as well watch a video.
It works on multiple levels: it mitigates the cheating, but also takes advantage of the vast array of learning options available to replace the traditional lecture.
I cringe at the "small group" suggestion, although I acknowledge it's probably good to learn to coordinate with others. Rarely does it work out well though, in a classroom setting. I feel like what you're really learning is how to tolerate partners who are unwilling to cooperate.
> I've never understood the value of watching a live lecture without interactivity.
Because you're rarely just watching. It isn't a movie, you are supposed to ask questions. Similarly, the lecturer will ask the audience questions to gauge their understanding and tweak the lecture on-the-fly. There's also a huge value in interacting with classmates after the lecture, allowing you to discuss and refine your understanding of it while it is still fresh.
The video lecturer might just as well ask some question and unlike the theater of the real one, get a response from every single viewer instead of getting a "gauge". And I don't know what mythical school most students spend the few minutes break getting huge value "discussing and refining" (which, by the way, could also be arranged with an alternative)
I went back to school as an adult and struggled with “flipped” classrooms, where we watched video lectures on our own time and worked through problems in class. I don’t process information well from video, and struggled to hold focus. In-person lectures worked much much better. I could read the text book for things I missed. Some of the flipped classes didn’t even have textbooks, so I resorted to finding other resources to try and learn the material.
It’s true that classes in giant lecture halls might as well be a video in some ways, but the delivery really does hit different for some people.
I went back to school about 7 years ago and took freshman physics. It was taught in this "flipped classroom" style. The practice is definitely catching on.
Assigning the material outside of class is a great idea, but it only works when caregivers are involved in education. Unfortunately, not all children have that advantage and they will just fall even more behind. It’s already amazing to me how much time teachers spend reviewing the prior year’s material to stop kids from getting lost in the system.
> This ensures that the work is purely the students
I don't know in the US, but in my part of the world, teachers have always assumed that anything that isn't done in person in front of an examiner has not value because students do cheat or get help. Maybe you would get a bit of extra-credits for the homework and that's it.
And for high-stake competitive exams, it's 100% in-person.
A strict system does not contradict making accomodations for those that need them. All countries do it differently but in several European countries you even have graduation certificates that may indicate if you followed a special curriculum or had some accomodations, if relevant for the final result/report.
That’s unfortunate. I got a BA, and while I often question its value, one thing I do think college taught me was how to distill complex ideas, integrate them, and then form my own complex ideas from what I’d learned.
I’d only really fully grok the concepts I was writing about (and the ideas I was trying to convey) after hours of trying to splice things together, staring at my screen, and rewriting and reformulating. Blue book exams have their place, but relying on them to the exclusion of long form essays deprives students of the chance to really sit with their ideas.
(I acknowledge that this is a tough situation for the teachers and that many students are going to bullshit their way through with AI slop if given the chance.)
> relying on them to the exclusion of long form essays deprives students of the chance to really sit with their ideas
I think the crux of the issue is that professors want students to do the deep thinking you're talking about, but they know that if they base the course around writing papers, a bunch of the students aren't actually likely to do it.
But if you tell students that when they do the reading they should be asking themselves "What would the author of reading A think of reading B?" "Which of C or D do you find more convincing and why?" "How would you frame T in terms of S?", "What evidence does W cherry-pick an what do they ignore, and why?", and they know for some material the class discussion will look like that, and they'll be asked questions which both demand recall and synthesis in the blue book essays ... can they be nudged to do some of the thinking you're talking about before they see the specific question? Perhaps even using writing at the computer as a tool (but not necessarily as an output)?
> I'm close to someone who teaches at a university, and they're making heavy use of in-room essays written in blue books. This ensures that the work is purely the students, but I think it also has the side-effect that the grader is also working manually.
Sometimes the best way to prove authenticity is through inefficiency. It's a foundational principle of cryptography.
In doing my masters, i've noticed a similar trend coming from TAs in technical programs.
Much more emphasis on "homework" being readings to prepare for lecture. Lecture to cover salient points, but then to reinforce with in person labs, and then the actual "lab" credit in an isolated environment with access to AI tooling network blocked.
I think AI is forcing us to think about what learning actually means, and to rethink how much the ability to think matters, what understanding means, and what knowledge we need to operate in today's world. It will take some getting used to.
I don’t have a partner and have 50% custody of my child. It’s difficult to do it on my own, but as long as I capture lost time it works. For example, we do math, reading and spelling while we are in the car.
I also use voices (my kid is 8 so it still works). We have two characters - Monkey and Lulu. They are very useful because Monkey is a monkey so was never educated in a human system. He always has lots of questions (and questionable pronouncements).
If any busy parents want to meet Lulu and Monkey, get in touch and we can set something up. I’m a big fan of characters - they are a great way to review school material and it’s amazing hearing my kid explain things she has learned back to me.
(Edit - I should note that I have a large amount of economic privilege. My situation may not apply to everyone.)
I have this problem too! I wrote up this system prompt I want to set on my daughters account. You’re welcome to try using it and let me know it goes.
(When I made a new chatgpt account for her it wouldn’t load. I need to try to set it up again)
Prompt:
This is my 9th graders account. She has been trying to avoid learning or even thinking by copy and pasting homework and quiz questions into chatgpt and not even reading the answers.
I’m very concerned she’s not learning or preparing for life. IMPORTANT: please don’t provide any complete answers. Instead only guide her toward understanding in a way that engages her. Also point out how the subject matter is useful and interesting to her life.
She is interested in figure skating, politics, making money, driving, interior design, pets especially small mammals. If you can tie the subject matter into these sometimes it might make it more engaging.
In the long term I’d like her to build up a growth mindset and gain confidence regarding her intelligence and ability to learn.
> What is stopping you from whitelisting websites she can visit?
You're right. I have an anecdote though. My kid is a good student, does his homework, and does well on tests. He has a time-limited device he can use at home with a few whitelisted websites. But one of the services we allow him to use is Perplexity. He's a naturally inquisitive person and this is how he learns, so an AI is a perfect fit for when his parents don't have the answer to his question, or if he wants to ask detailed follow-ups. He's young enough that he doesn't have much homework (and we wouldn't let him use his device for it anyway), so cheating isn't as much of a concern yet. We do discuss it though, and will keep that conversation going as he ages.
This won't be solved by abstaining from AI entirely because a) kids will not always be under our control, so they need to learn how to self-regulate, and b) knowing how to properly (and ethically) harness AI is going to be more and more important to their future success.
Hell, I’d argue a similar prompt could be useful for a lot of people. I use something similar for coding and ask it not to provide direct code and more a guide on coding principals with source links if possible.
one of the more important ones in my opinion would be a prompt to make ChatGPT much less agreeable.
Unless explicitly asked for, it never really challenges your observations and will just keep being supportive and telling you how well of an argument you're making.
I fear this will push even more people into deep rabbit holes they won't be able to get out of because they think this neutral AI has confirmed their suspicions/ideas/observations.
yeah that's actually what I was thinking about. I have a PhD in physics, so I easily notice when ChatGPT just keeps agreeing with me even though we're on very shaky ground. But I worry about the times it does this when we're talking about stuff I'm not as knowledgeable about.
And you can see the influx of people on r/physics and the like who are convinced they've solved dark matter/quantum gravity/... because ChatGPT kept agreeing with them when they presented their ideas to it. Just recently there was a post by a guy who essentially "rediscovered" 17th century physics with the help of ChatGPT but was convinced his formula would explain dark matter because ChatGPT told him so.
How well has that worked for you? Sometimes just hearing other ideas helps get to a solution even if none of the ideas heard were the actual solution. Sometimes, just being forced to get out of the rut you're in at the time by being "forced" to stop to think about something else is all that's needed.
I like what you have done. But I'm also afraid that your daughter will quickly get better at prompt engineering instead, and bypass your system prompt (with the help of other children). I'm convinced that no help can replace parents, and we ought to help them learn to love the struggle and taste the sweet fruit of their labors.
I don't have a ChatGPT account otherwise I'd try this myself but can someone try this question from the article, "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours?" with and without the prompt?
I'm very curious if it has any effect on the result.
Let's think about this together! How many hours are there in just one day? Once you've got that, you can easily add the extra 7 hours to find the total.
As a hint, think about how time relates to your day-to-day activities. For instance, if you have a figure skating practice that lasts for hours, how would that fit into your daily schedule? How do you keep track of time during those days? This thought process can help you make sure you're counting hours correctly. Give it a try and see what you come up with!
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I tried asking it to just give the answer and then said I was tired and I just need the answer. It didn't give in, although I didn't try any other techniques to "jailbreak".
Edit: 3rd time, firmly asking it did give the answer although with quite an explanation.
And 4th I said Only the answer in 1 word please, which it did just give a number.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
My 13 y/o was lamenting something the other day and it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper and it returned a "B+". She was using GPT to basically pre-check the quality of her paper before submitting it after having actually written it herself.
But it occurred to me that there are probably teachers out there who are taking the lazy route of using GPT to grade papers that students are submitting that have been written by GPT in the entirety.
There's some non-zero amount of GPT grading GPT in education.
Sounds highly unreliable to me. I would be very surprised if ChatGPT was ever confrontational enough to give out a lower grade like D or F. It also wouldn't surprise me if the grade-letter it chooses tends to be off by one or more grade-letters just due to natural variance/subjectivity of grading and hallucinations.
GPT is blunt, critical, and highly opinionated if you tell it to be.
That's what I don't get about people on this forum. GENERATIONS of STEM professionals who have it engraved in their head that a computer will only do what you tell it to - and nothing more, and they still don't think to simply just tell GPT what lens they want it to view content in, or give it accurate and necessary directives. They think it'll handle that for them. Why?
This should be the group getting the best outputs of this technology, bar-none. I've never encountered a more pragmatic group of people, haha! I don't get where the disconnect is.
> and they still don't think to simply just tell GPT what lens they want it to view content in, or give it accurate and necessary directives. They think it'll handle that for them. Why?
Projecting much? That doesn't describe me _at all_. I use ChatGPT and other LLM's frequently. I just legitimately don't think it would be good at the task of grading a paper with any sort of consistency. I don't even see why you would _need_ your paper graded for you to know it has flaws.
I agree. Sometimes I have some notes and thoughts I want to turn into a blog post, particularly pieces regarding philosophy or another such argumentation based field, and I'll ask an LLM to review and come up with counter examples. It does a very good job almost every time and really makes me think critically about the counter examples it gives me.
I use it this way for my own writing. I think this actually a good use. It allows for rapid feedback in away that doesn't require teacher time, and can help a writer grow. Of course LLM feedback should not be treated as gospel.
Props to your kid. Doing the work yourself and then asking for a critique (however flawed) is a way better approach than most kids at that age would take.
That’s an improvement on what lazy teachers do now, grade the students current assignment based on their previous work or reputation or how much they like the student.
Tip for students: do well on your first assignment. The better teachers will give you the benefit of the doubt for mistakes on your future work. The bad teachers will just give you the same grade.
Having older siblings and friends with older siblings and resubmitting their essay is eye opening.
Some 15 years ago I recall some schools in California bragging about their success in flipping the school schedule around. They had students watch lectures at home as videos. Then during class they did "homework".
Seems like this method is going to become a necessity if students can just prompt "Hey GPT. Do my homework for me. Thanks." at home every day.
I think it's a great idea that the delivery of the material is done by video, and then the engagement with it, the exercises etc., are done with a teacher.
Knowing that the vast majority of parents will not check or enforce school work at home, either because they don't care or can't (2 jobs etc) ...
You have to choose which one actually happens. That seems to me to be the lecture.
Additionally teachers are very opposed to doing extra work (this seems to be a Gen-Z thing: even with doctors you see this, there was an article about doctors refusing to do emergency rooms shifts during covid because they didn't want to pull more hours ...). So you'll need to get teachers that are willing to do a LOT of extra work (and compensated accordingly), and prevent people from sabotaging that system.
Either that or you could make schools pretty exclusive again. Which is what the default outcome will be if we don't act.
> there was an article about doctors refusing to do emergency rooms shifts during covid because they didn't want to pull more hours
This phenomenon did not involve Gen Z, it involved all generations, and was multifactorial in nature. It also gets complicated by health center where physicians and nurses can see inequities in how these +1 shifts and responsibilities emerge, get distributed, and get compensated.
What happens is it's usually done by a lazy teacher who has no idea what they're even teaching. Most kids won't be motivated to learn and watch from the videos.
I consider myself studious. When I was in that class, I watched all the video lessons and whatnot at home. Even then, I had a poor understanding of the material, and obviously the teacher was of no help.
Although not much better, a lecture is better of the two. Hands on learning in the best, but not necessarily possible with certain subjects.
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!
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.
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).
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."
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I guess this signals the end of focusing on testing to prove one's "rank" as a student and actually start focusing on educating students rather than evaluating them.
The whole problem with factory mass-education is the almost exclusive focus on evaluation. A little bit of education happens as a side-effect of the unrelenting soul-crushing evaluation so we've put up with it and called it education for 100 years.
ChatGPT will make it nearly impossible to cause any educating to happen as a side effect of constant re-evaluation.
That means we are going to have to focus on education directly. Probably just train ChatGPT to be a really good tutor and everybody gets a 19th century rich boy's education instead of the junk we've had in feed-lot-style schools for the last 100 years.
Note that Waldorf schools are kind of immune to this problem since the kids don't get to touch a computer until they are in 9th grade and heck, they don't even read until 2nd grade.
Cost is a huge factor. Asking a student to write what 7+8 is on a sheet of paper is a cheap substitute of high quality math education.
Not saying that this is the case in OP, it's very likely that the teacher will eventually catch up to the fact that a kid with A on their homework isn't quite a math genius. The same systems that would catch a child being aided by parents or cheating would catch this anomaly.
In France the extreme majority of your grades comes from in-class exams that are essay-based or at least long format rather than multi-choice like in the US. Homeworks are just exercises to learn and aren't graded.
This entirely solves ALL the problems introduced by LLMs.
The US just needs to adapt their evaluation system.
At my high school, teachers were given a lot of freedom to decide their own grading, but had the rule that the final could not be more than 20% of your grade. Typically, homework ended up being 50%.
I failed my Geometry class despite getting 110% on the final (She had some hard extra-credit questions that went beyond what we learned) because I didn't do a single homework assignment.
Meanwhile, this high school made all sorts of claims about preparing students for college, and my first math class in college, homework was only 3% of your grade.
This is probably because you can fail catastrophically with the college way of doing things. I remember many people who failed one test out of three for the semester and essentially failed the class (given they did average on the other 2). No high school wants to deal with a system like that, it would be too much for kids to handle.
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.
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....
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.
I mean, that's just shifting goal posts at this point; no one said anything about only using the free version. And anyway, Altman said they're losing money on the paid versions too, so I expect OpenAI to go under sometime in the next few years. They'll be like Xerox or Kodak, pioneering a novel innovation but ultimately failing to other bigger companies.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The most likely eventual outcome of ChatGPT (and similar software) will be the elimination of graded homework/coursework, and a renewed emphasis on traditional in-person tests and exams.
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.
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.
When I was in elementary school, my teachers told me it was very important to memorize multiplication tables because I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. We know how that turned out.
I asked an LLM the first example question (convert 3 minutes to seconds), and it provided not just the answer, but that there are 60 seconds per minutes, so that's 3 * 60 = 180. I don't think an 11 year old is harmed by that sort of assistance.
> When I was in elementary school, my teachers told me it was very important to memorize multiplication tables because I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. We know how that turned out.
I find knowing the multiplication tables to be essential. It consumes too much time and distraction to pull out a computing device for everything. I assume you don't use your phone for simple addition either.
> When I was in elementary school, my teachers told me it was very important to memorize multiplication tables because I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. We know how that turned out.
This is a bit sad and dangerous.
I also resisted learning the multiplication tables because I was too prideful in being able to calculate them on the spot, but at least I memoized the easy ones like 5x 10x, 9x.
The objective of multiplication tables is not to be able to do the calculations that you need, but to aid in wider calculations. You learn the table of multiplications not because most calculations are going to be 1 digit by 1 digit, but because most calculations of more digits can be decomposed into single digit calculations. And further most calculations are part of more complex non math Chains of Thought.
Your teacher was building up your cache and LUT so that you could solve these in nanoseconds, and move on to higher order processes in your head. You haven't beaten the system by calling a 200ms API, you have cooked your ALU.
There’s a difference between not knowing multiplication and just refusing any logical thinking at all. We already see this a lot in adults today. Many are just too lazy to turn on their brain, because it’s easier to call, ask on Reddit or whatever, even if it takes ten times longer than just doing the thinking yourself.
This is just the perfection of that. And it’s suuuuper scary, because it trains you to be a brain dead monkey that literally believes anything ChatGPT tells you. And we know how that’ll work out.
I'm so sick of this trope. The point of numeracy is not in case you're suddenly caught without a calculator, although longhand arithmetic is definitely a good skill to possess.
LLM’s are notoriously bad at math. My company tried it and the results were laughable.
A calculator eliminates the arithmetic part, thus doing “all” of “2+2”.
Half the point if a word problem is learning how to set up the arithmetic. “Convert 3 minutes to seconds”. You are learning that there are 60 seconds in a minute, that you have to use multiplication, and that the result is in seconds, not something else you need to convert.
The LLM does ALL of this for you. You literally just have to copy / paste.
I also have young relatives who are using this technology (a bit older though, teenagers). One problematic thing I see is not knowing just how inaccurate these answers are. Somehow many people just assume complete correctness and accuracy because that's how they think of or have been primed to think of technology. Of course, the marketing and hype when it comes to AI doesn't help.
This may be a transitory period until teachers realize they can ask much harder questions. Students become teleological (goal-seeking) agents, and the bar is raised.
Computer science in middle school. Quantum physics in high school. Proofs in between, formal methods, and welcome the rising tide.
The larger trend of "making things more user friendly and easy" is part of this problem.
I cut my teeth on early Linux with really poor driver support and had to figure out so many things just to get X to start or to get audio to play. This made me intimately familiar with the system and I had the confidence to explore things myself.If were to start off with a modern Ubuntu, I wouldn't be aware of any of this. Wouldn't know where the logs are, how to look at them, what a certain error meant etc. "A system error has occured. Click here to submit a bug report to Canonical" is just not quite the same as digging through some obscure log file and trying to create a mental model of how the distribution works before the next attempt at fixing the problem.
Things which require tinkering to get working are invaluable during the learning journey. Problems which require effort to solve are one example of this and a powerful solution that eliminates the effort and directly provides the reward is surely going to cripple learners.
In this specific case, I think the parents have "outsourced" education to the school/teachers/tools which is why this has happened.
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.
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.
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.
Well... how about you don't let your little sister use chatgpt to do her homework? If you think it fries her little brain the responsible thing as a big brother is to buy her a little bit of lsd to microdose and counteract the damage you have already done, right?
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.
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.
Counterpoint: maybe, if anyone is even cooked, it is just this one student and not an entire generation.
Go back generations and it was always something else ruining the youth: not playing outside enough, Internet, videogames, hip hop, playing outside too much, TV, rock & roll, books, etc.
In my own studies and brief time as a tutor, you get students like this who just see school as an obstacle to something else. Even then, some people aren't good in a structured setting, like school, but can still be a productive member of society.
So is the stigma of mental illness. It is a good thing that people are more comfortable admitting that they are not OK, but I'm not sure the bearing of this on the current conversation.
My little son has a buddy who uses AI bots intensively. The friend is actually very smart and capable, but he pays too much attention to the things he likes (programming and games) and ignores all other aspects of basic education. And he slips, mindlessly copying what the bot tells him. If this is a widespread trend, it's obviously very worrying, especially for young students.
On the other hand, we have had many discussions with my son about the role of education, AI and what we need. Thankfully, my son understands that it's the struggle that we go through that helps us to understand and make the knowledge truly our own. Of course, I have to model my use of AI, pointing out its flaws and the dangers of mindlessly using bots.
At the end of the day, it's the internal motivation that drives us. If you're not interested in knowledge and learning, having a genie to cheat is too tempting to resist.
So, I have little ones too. And AI, to me, ends up being a tool. One that will very much help out.
However, the post brings up a good point: Education isn't cheap.
Looking through the history of pedagogy, 'teaching' has never been easy.
We managed to get around this, somewhat, in the developed world for about 150 years or so. Mostly to keep the factories working cheaply, but we also found out that an educated populace was a heck of a jolt for national security too. Not a bad run at all!
But industrial education still is expensive, about 30% or so of the budget for a US state (very rough % there).
Now, we've got AIs, and the methods we found in industrial education to make it a bit cheaper, well, they don't really work anymore.
There's gonna be this little gap period here with AIs where we have the old methods and new tech, and it's not going to go well. Education of the youth, yeah, that's still going to be a huge thing. But it's going to be a bit more expensive and messy for a while.
Fortunately, we do have AIs to help out with that and run through the processes faster, get to a 'good-ish' state of things again. But things like homework, essays, 500 person freshmen lectures, those little cheats short-cuts, those things aren't going to work anymore (and let's be honest, never really did anyway).
What will work? I don't know yet. But I think it will be even cheaper overall, and will decidedly not look like what we have today. No more prom kings, no more homecomings, no more lectures, no more homework. Things like A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, sure, that's a given. But Starfleet Academy isn't going to be big on sitting down. I think it'll be more like away missions mixed in with some St. John's/Oxbridge approaches. A lot more teachers with a lot more training/AI help, that's for sure. And that's not cheap either.
Using ChatGPT like this is most likely a symptom, not the problem. An 11 year old is naturally a curious creature and if she's turned her brain off to the point of mindlessly solving her homework like this, there's something very wrong with her environment.
"Here's 5 bullet points, go home and use ChatGPT to generate an essay, then bring that essay to class, and then we'll discuss why it's shit. and then we'll work on corrections during class. Bonus points if I can't tell if you used ChatGPT or not."
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. :)
If you'd told people 50 years ago that "literacy" would decline to the level of the reddit poster's style of writing, with poor sentence structure and words in ALL CAPS, they'd be pretty shocked. Now it's just normal communication.
Older people are shocked that young people can't do long division, or easily add a column of numbers mentally.
I'm not saying LLMs won't negatively influence the next generation, but the next generation has always been the first to use and abuse new technology and we are all still alive and (most) bridges and airplanes stay up and maybe we will even put people on the moon again some day.
7:05 shows the lever for a Brother typewriter in this video and a bit before that shows a different lever for heavyness (although I don't know if that would do bold): https://youtube.com/watch?v=d_dTu6T87Cg&t=6m50s
And AFAIR you could somewhat do bold by overtyping a few times (backspace, retype, repeat) or by hitting keys harder.
Plus many early home computers only had UPPERCASE (e.g. initial Apple ][) and were monochrome (so inverse was often a highlight thing instead of using colour).
Yes, agreed. Actually the very existence of the problem described in the original post is an indication that the work being assigned is ultimately useless. If the teacher can't reliably distinguish between a student's answer and an AI answer then what's the point of giving that assignment? Kids with street smarts or a hacker mentality are always going to figure out the easiest path from A to B, and it's arguable if we should even be discouraging that—it's quite an important skill in real life.
We're at a major transition point and I don't envy teachers who need to figure out ways to adjust to it, but giving the same exact assignments clearly isn't going to cut it. They should instead try to come up with assignments where an AI may be a helpful assistant but isn't able to complete 100% of the task to a high standard. Then evaluate the result regardless of how the student got there. Presentations, discussion-based evaluation, and projects with a physical component are all examples.
I remember when I was a kid, some teachers would assign research papers and then tell us we weren't allowed to use the internet; we needed to go to the school library and use physical books instead. This holy war of teachers vs. chatgpt is likely going to seem similar in hindsight.
>If you'd told people 50 years ago that "literacy" would decline to the level of the reddit poster's style of writing, with poor sentence structure and words in ALL CAPS, they'd be pretty shocked. Now it's just normal communication.
I would argue that the people who would have written like 50 years ago just never had the opportunity or audience that people do today. Except maybe in a Letter to the Editor of a newspaper or something.
So many more people are expressing themselves in public than ever were able to 50 years ago so I think it just seems that people have become less literate than they were. So many YouTube comments and Facebook posts that never would have occurred 50 years ago.
It's a democratization of the broadcasting of expression more than literacy decline.
I believe the PISA comparison in this context is flawed. To compare any statistics, we must control for other variables, otherwise any conclusion about causal effects and relationships could be deeply wrong. In the education context, the most important variables are the economic background of the households, the active involvement of the parents in the education of the children, the amount of time spending on the subjects (both in class and at home), the curriculum and methods of teaching.
Finland has only 5 millions population and a relatively high median income, the teacher:students ratio is much higher and the percentage of intact families are higher. Therefore, if we want to compare, we have to select better districts in the US, where the teacher:students ratio is similar high then see what the PISA scores will say. Only then, and looking deeper into the curriculum and teaching method, we can say whether homework is beneficent or not.
You shift blame to the social issues, but that doesn't make any of that better. I mean, if the US has social problems that pull down the PISA scores, wouldn't the low score be justified then?
The problem isn't the kids using these tools to solve problems, the real problem is the energy cost we have to provide the kind of simple answers that previous “dumb” systems could provide at lesser cost.
The kid doesn't care at all about the problems she's asked to solve. I considered that normal until recently. Now I'm increasingly surprised that no one bats an eye that we're forcing kids to learn. Naturally that has little success.
I heard someone say "adapt the lesson to the student's excitement, not the excitement to the lesson". I think that's a foundation for something wholesome, though, admittedly, I struggle imagining how I would do that if I had a kid.
At some point, you need to learn how to do things that are hard, or unpleasant, or just downright boring. Not everything can be a MrBeast video, that just isn't how life works. We're raising kids who can't just sit with their own thoughts; they need constant stimulation. But guess what? Long division isn't stimulating. Taxes aren't stimulating. Cleaning the kitchen isn't stimulating. But you need to do those things anyway.
I find it hard to believe that it's mere coincidence that everything fell apart right after we invented these perfect little surveillance Skinner boxes, and then put overpriced Markov chains in them and unleashed them on children.
I agree that doing hard things and character building has its place. I'm just not sure that basic arithmetic is that place. I like to think that a kid inherently has something more tangible to get excited about than dopamine-bomb videos, and I fear that we might help drive them away from that "tangible excitement" and into the soul-sucking distractment, if we force them to learn without regard for that tangible and genuine excitement.
Many children have always hated homework and sought ways to avoid it or cut corners. This tool is disturbing in that you actually do finish the homework, yet in a way where you learn nothing at all.
I personally believe children should have no homework or far less of it. Typical education lasts 12-21 years. An insane amount of time. Use the lesson time more effectively and give kids some breathing room.
Disturbing detail of the post is this young girl watching Squid Games. This is a show where a few dozen people get executed each episode. Some are shot and kept alive so that their organs are fresh for harvesting.
How on earth do you let a 11 y/o girl watch that?
All of this seems like total neglect, but frankly I understand it (somewhat). The modern couples I know are dual income. By the time they're done with work, dinner and cleaning up, it's 8PM. Now we expect them to dig into the homework of their children and micro manage every media they consume? They don't have the time and energy and often don't even understand half of it.
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.
It's worth noting people probably reacted to this like they did with calculators, and perhaps, encyclopedias.
I see this use a bit differently: as a teacher that scales (and is probably more accurate that a human, hallucinations and other concerns notwithstanding).
I see my kids using it in a similar manner as described in this post, but I also see their curiosity piqued and them asking all kinds of theoretical and curious questions.
I don't have kids. But I do have interns occasionally. Which are about the same age as my kids could have been if I had kids. Anyway, as their employer and mentor, I want them to use LLMs to deliver faster and better and I actively challenge them to do use that to the max and thus free up more time to do more important things. I mentored four over the summer and they did a nice job.
I think the reality for teachers and students is that both should be using LLMs to their advantage at this point and openly so. Not mindlessly and hopefully in some supervised way. But it's only cheating if the teacher doesn't up their game and raises the ambition level. Which they would be negligent not to do at this point.
I used to hate homework. All this mindless drudgery that you had to do at home and then submit to some poor overworked teacher that then had to manually verify all that stuff. Just not necessary anymore. A lot of the verification can be automated. And a lot of curiosity can be satisfied without teacher involvement. The teacher's role then becomes nudging that process along and making sure the student is challenged enough.
Teachers should be tailoring exercises to individual students in a way that challenges them on their own level and then focus their efforts on verifying whether the student is actually at that level. That used to be hard because it didn't scale if they use the right tools. But now it can scale. They could be challenging individual students at their own level, whatever that is. But that requires using available tools more effectively.
The student is growing up in a world of technology. How can the homework be designed leveraging LLMs? Can some curriculums be accelerated assuming LLMs provide a new base? What is the goal of teaching? Memorizing formulas or learning to think? Do students gain any value writing a book report or is there more value writing an essay about how a book relates to a students personal story?
Anything that is formulaic in nature will likely end up automated. We should be teaching people to both leverage that fact and think creatively, even at 11 years old.
It seems to me that the fundamental tenants of "education" are being disrupted here. I have always found learning in order to do things far less intuitive and interesting than doing things in order to learn. The incentive structures of our education systems are wonky (reflected in this post). Maybe they could use a good shakeup.
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.
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.
i found the same thing with programming... you start using AI and then all of a sudden, you find yourself not writing code you could've written yourself (probably with better organization too...)
Does anyone have strategies for actually thinking while using AI?
Interesting anecdote, but doesn't really tell much on gen alpha and impact of ChatGPT. There always have been disinterested kids who put zero effort in their homework. But there are also smart and curious kids who will use these tools to learn faster.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Students do the work via ChatGPT. Teachers create assignments and grade them with ChatGPT. It's a giant self licking ice cream cone that doesn't educate anybody and fritters away a lot of wealth while using several nuclear plants worth of energy.
It does in the short term solve the problem that kids hate doing schoolwork and teachers hate doing their jobs.
Scare tactics designed to confirm what I already fear. The fact that the comments are full of the same Idiocracy "jokes" that people have been making since that movie started airing constantly on Comedy Central means the belief that the younger generation is stupider does not rely on the existence of ChatGPT to be held.
However, the inability to consider possible societal impacts of technology before rolling it out into the world free of regulation was the story of the 20th Century and I guess it's going to be the story of the 21st. Underneath the fear-mongering about AI is an honest belief that maybe we're not considering where this is all going. I'm not afraid of a super smart Gen AI that controls humanity, I'm afraid that people are going to outsource all decision-making to extremely stupid LLMs because we're seemingly evolutionarily wired to cut corners until we accidentally cut our fingers off.
I find "homework" more disturbing than kids figuring out ways to subvert the system they're forced into. Offloading state mandated education on parents without compensating for it is quite the policy, and likely accepted because most parents are afraid their kids will end up in misery if they refuse to or can't obey.
Is this a ChatGPT problem or a family system problem? My child is eight years old and writes significantly better than the writer. Her mom and I value education, reading and writing so we work with her throughout the school year.
If an older sibling writes that poorly, I feel there are other things going on than overreliance on technology. I hope she makes it through this because the world is becoming increasingly hostile to people with poor literacy.
I'm transitioning to teaching math after a 30-year career as an engineer. I am really conflicted about the use of LLMs for homework.
One thing we *for sure* know that employers are going to want is that one employee does the work of 10 using llms. A
I'm wondering, why don't we give the employers what they want? Why not teach the kids to be super-effective with alms, and then We just give the kids 10x the amount of homework and tell them to get it done anyway they want to?
Sounds rough, but that's the reality which almost every creative writing professional is facing right now. And as soon as the technology makes it feasible, that's the reality that every software engineer is going to be facing. All this talk about 10x engineers...employers are going to expect all of us to be 10x engineers.
I mean, imagine a gym class which teaches kids how to run down an antelope. Because for 200,000 years running down an antelope was a core survival skill, and just because we had supermarkets doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to live off the land.
From John Henry vs. the Steam Hammer, to accountants using spreadsheets in the 80s, the whole story of technology is making 1 person able to do the work of 10. There's no use trying to pretend LLMs didn't happen. They happened, and they are not going away.
The funniest thing here is the complete disconnect with what is really going on. It's been ignored for years, but now it's a bit more obvious.
What is the point of homework? It's supposed to be self-directed learning and reinforcement.
But what is homework really? It's often confusing. It's time-consuming; you already spent 8 hours at school, and now you're spending more hours "at school" at home. If you can't get it, you have to hope your family members will help you (many can't or won't or simply aren't there, for many reasons). It takes a whole day (or more) to get the school's feedback and help (if it's available). And it's never fun.
Growing up, it took me countless hours to work through 10 math problems, because I had a learning disability. I find processing abstract non-visual information very hard. It made it worse that I had no practical problems to work through, no visual or audible feedback, no different ways to look at the problem. The school didn't care and the homework didn't change just for me. My parents sat with me for hours but my brain just wouldn't work.
For years I was given 1-on-1 tutoring, where the tutor struggled to get me to focus and try to solve the simplest things. At 15, I learned programming and developed computer programs in order to try to figure out the problems and answer them (if I could figure out how it worked in code, that would explain it enough that I could understand). It took longer, but I could actually understand them if I gave myself a different way of looking at and solving the problem. And for some reason, I, a child, was the person who had to figure out my own learning models and alternatives; the god damn "professionals" would be fine with me banging my head against a wall and failing.
ChatGPT isn't the problem. Homework is just stupid. This rote abstract learning model applied uniformly to everyone is stupid. The giant amount of time needed after already spending all day at school is stupid. The things we are forced to learn at school, which we promptly forget, are stupid. Young people's education itself is stupid.
Here I am, a 40 year old man, forgotten almost everything I learned in school. Yet I make a good salary, I can take care of myself. And I don't solve math problems manually, I ask a computer to solve them for me. Because why the hell would I do an error-prone human task manually when a machine will do it right? In fact, I am learning math right now, because I am building a shed and other wood projects. I've learned more about geometry and trig in the past 2 weeks than in the past 40 years, because I have a real-world thing that I can understand, and something fun to work on that makes me proud when I finish it. It's self-directed, and I'm using a ton of resources on the internet to figure it out, but I'm doing it. It's sinking in. If I had that as a kid, I'd be a damn math genius by now.
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!
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I didn’t do any homework, ever. I refused to do it on constitutional grounds.
I quit school altogether. I was okay.
I became an emancipated minor and I’ve been working in the software field since the age of 16. I’ve written two books and my third will be published by Wiley, soon.
Involuntary homework assignments have not led to an educated world. All ChatGPT is doing is making it easier to ignore pointless assignments.
I hate to be that guy, but if you're going to criticise someone else's intellectual ability, it might be worth ensuring your argument is presented in a form that is more than barely literate.
He's overreacting. Its a matter of perspective. From the perspective of most of us here, asking ChatGPT to convert 3 minutes to seconds sounds trivial. We can do this conversion in our heads effortlessly in a fraction of a second. Because we've been doing it our entire lives on a daily basis. But for an 11-year-old kid, it can be a challenge. Why bother straining your brain if you can just ask ChatGPT... We are wired to avoid thinking and take the easy path. I bet that the things he's asking ChatGPT will appear equally trivial to somebody else.
The best way to handle this would be to talk to her and convince her to not use ChatGPT...
I'm old enough to remember when calculators in schools were really controversial.
Some time, between then, and now, they started mandating graphing calculators.
I know that many universities now assume that everyone uses word processors, and have a zero-tolerance stance on typos.
Someone else posted an article, where the person was complaining about Apple (always a crowd-pleaser), and quoted Steve Jobs, talking about how bicycles acted as "force multipliers" for human efficiency, and compared the personal computer to that.
LLMs are here. Can't put that genie back in the bottle (sorry Jafar). They are now a part of the landscape, and we're still in the old "big iron" phase. They will become much better, pretty quickly.
Kids will need to work with them.
I find things like this to be great, because they free me up to learn more stuff. They raise the baseline.
People think that primitive folks were "dumber" than we are now. This was almost certainly not the case. They just didn't have the infrastructure that we have (dadburn kids, with their fancy "wheels," and "fire." Humpfh), and our kids will have a far more powerful infrastructure than we do.
I'm fairly hopeful. If we can keep from blowing ourselves up, I think we'll be fine.
People have felt the same way about waning handwriting skills and reliance on calculators.
The truth is the way humans process information has been radically altered by LLMs and we're in the absolute infancy of understanding what that means. It is going to be far more disruptive than the keyboard or calculator. As we discover the implications, we are repeatedly going to find ourselves disturbed and disoriented. There are skeptics who think it's all hype and that current approaches are a dead end. Even if that were true, I'm 100% convinced that even if AI didn't meaningfully improve on today's capabilities, it will still be incredibly disruptive.
Buckle up.
There will be 2 categories of winners of the AI revolution: the quick and the deep.
This poster's little sister is "the quick". She is using AI intuitively and aggressively. Whether it's right or wrong isn't important, because if the payoffs of it being right are more than the costs of it being wrong, she will be vastly more productive than people who are not using AI. A lot of the thinking school has traditionally trained us to do is officially commoditized.
"The deep" are people with strong conceptual understanding of the problems to which they are applying AI and/or strong understanding of the AI itself. They will use AI to create things that didn't exist before. They will take seriously the risk management (although, they will still not be able to successfully predict all unintended consequences).
People will benefit in the new world proportional to their ability to create or extract value.
> "The deep" are people with strong conceptual understanding of the problems to which they are applying AI and/or strong understanding of the AI itself. They will use AI to create things that didn't exist before. They will take seriously the risk management (although, they will still not be able to successfully predict all unintended consequences).
Why would these people not just skip the AI part entirely, then?
Implicit in my argument is the idea that GenAI is a foundational building block of all sorts of innovations that people will come up with. I acknowledge that there are people who don't believe this.
I think one thing few are willing to admit is that a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents. Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child.
When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least once while they're doing homework it will be very easy to catch issues like this.
> Parents that believe it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child.
My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them!
I thought the "kids are illiterate now" stuff was overblown, and I bet it still is to a certain extent, but it's definitely bad. Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore? Less important than reading, but still.
Is this because of an increase in the prevalence of child distractions like an iPad? I find that hard to believe since television filled that same void before, didn't it? COVID definitely put a lot of kids at a few year disadvantage, too.
I can't really speak to any of this because I haven't raised a kid, so I also don't want to criticize people for something I know nothing about, but it does seem like children aren't taught by their parents the same way - but I don't know if my parent's generation had the same thought at one point and this is a cyclical critique.
I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts who have more exposure to this kind of thing than I do.
I'm rising 3 kids (in France, I don't know if it changes much). We have banned TV, very heavily restricted phones, and we closely follow homework. I'm persuaded it makes a difference wrt parents that don't do that, but somehow isn't a sure fire way of being a "great parent".
I don't know how that helps. Watching TV with my kid has been the best way to teach him I've found. There are great videos and shows that you can watch together and then discuss afterwords. Baking videos. Chemistry. Physics. History. Seeing something on TV is great way to fire up the imagination and inspiration for real world activities.
This is what we do. The kids don't get unlimited access to TV, but rather curated access to educational material, but we limit tv altogether on weekdays and they only get ipads at the restaurant. On the weekends they can watch a few fun movies in the afternoon.
I totally agree with you, but those shows are not what parent means.
Yeah agreed. Really a ton of kids with tablets everytime I go out for dinner
Restaurants is a few places where a tablet is a godsend. Children aren't always involved in adults conversations, so they get (obviously) bored at the table. A tablet guarantees some time off to the parents.
Now obviously is a problem if you go to the restaurant often, in our case it's once every few months and having them watching a movie makes going to the restaurant possible again (we waited 6 years before we could)
>Restaurants is a few places where a tablet is a godsend. Children aren't always involved in adults conversations, so they get (obviously) bored at the table. A tablet guarantees some time off to the parents.
as a fellow restaurant patron : I don't care that your kid is bored or if you can't afford a baby-sitter -- what I do care about is listening to the latest baby shark or whatever other youtube-brainrot-babysitter-program blaring near me while I'm trying to eat my linguini.
When I was younger if you brought a loud/obnoxious kid to dinner at a restaurant it was a sign that either you were inexperienced as parents or too poor to afford a baby-sitter (which then raises questions about eating out..), or otherwise didn't give a fuck about appearances or anyone else near you.
Also : not all kids are bored by what adults are doing, and a big part of getting good at those kind of conversations and 'adult actions' later in life is fueled by social mimicry and third party practice; to dismiss all children from such activities by directing their attention towards whatever the closest thing that minimizes parenting time and effort is , imo, likely damaging.
But, at the end of the day I gotta throw my arms up and say "Well, i'm not a parent." -- but it just seems obvious to me as a bystander that this level of forced autonomy and independence for smaller children reduces any chance that a kid will say "Mom, what does that word you just used mean?" and actually learn something from a novel experience. It reduces the amount the kids will read the faces of strangers and make social decisions. It reduces the chance that a kid will make a social faux pas slip and require corrections preventing it in the future.
It does, however, keep a kid busy , often annoying everyone else, while you gossip. I'm not sure that's supposed to be the end goal here.
Children don't get the tablet immediately, they eat without the tablet and get it when they are done, so there is plenty of time to chat, with opportunities for talking with the adult.
That being said, everything you say makes sense, but the reality is if you don't get a break every couple of months for a few hours, the parents don't perform, so from my perspective they (and myself) get a pass for the tablet.
As for the volume, they can lower it? I'm very careful making sure the volume is low, but I guess some people aren't careful.
This also assumes the children don't spend time with the parents. The parents could be spending many hours with the children so whatever happens at the restaurant is very small in the big picture.
Don't want to start a flame but what is missing to the children is exactly being bored.
We used to bring paper and pen to have them draw.
That's totally fine. My children get plenty of boring time, sometimes they get creative, sometimes they do not.
When they are creative, their creation is not always compatible with the environment (too noisy, too active). Not all children like drawing either. Tablet is consistent, which is helpful when going to a restaurant.
Just to be clear, I use tablet only as a tv, I don't allow any games, too many exploits child's mind.
If I went more often to the restaurant, it would make sense to have different activities though, you are right. We go maybe once every 2-3 months, so the tablet was acceptable. It has become way too expensive eating out.
Could you recommend a few? I've found I need to very heavily curate these for my 6yo
For a 6 year old I'd start with
The Action Lab AntsCanada BizarreBeasts HowToMakeEverything PrimitiveTechnology TierZoo
but we've more moved onto
AlphaPhoenix BPS Space NileRed PBS Space Time Periodic Videos Veritasium
Could you recommend some? This sounds great!
We're in Canada; doing the same. But most of my kids' classmates are on YouTube all the time. The brainrot content is unavoidable and it's creating issues for my kids' socialization.
kids should be kids and do what other kids are doing, even if it's watching TV or playing video games, unless it’s something truly harmful.
watching TV hasn't killed anyone and my generation, who grew up in front of the TV screen for lack of better alternatives, turned out just fine.
The real issue now is with my parents’ generation, but that’s because they’re old and their mindset has become immutable, not because they watched too much TV.
TV tends to reinforce existing biases rather than create new ones.
IMO your kids will grow up thinking that TV is bad, and while it's mostly true that 'the medium is the message', they’re missing out on the opportunity to learn how to deal with it. It’s like a vaccine — it helps them build resilience.
>watching TV hasn't killed anyone and my generation, who grew up in front of the TV screen for lack of better alternatives, turned out just fine.
I don’t think any previous generation kids spend as much time in front of the TV as they do with the screens today, sadly the damage will only be seen when it is done. The difference is mainly the content, as bad as TV could have been in the past at least there was someone responsible and liable for the content put “on air” instead on the internet your child brain is at the mercy of the algorithm.
Pedantic, but:
> She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings
“flak” (strong criticism, derived by metaphor from anti-aircraft fire) not “flack” (a public relations agent).
Huh, I always get a kick of finding out I’ve been spelling something wrong for a while haha. I appreciate the correction.
> My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with
This just blows my mind. Literally the first thing I taught my Toddler once he started learning letters was how to spell his own name.
I still remember how to fingerspell my old name, I'm not sure why mom taught me that.
It gets you familiar with the shapes of the letters in a more intimate way
When there were three television channels, children and adults found other things to do when there was nothing to watch. That's where you developed non-passive life skills.
Now TikTok gives a continuous dopamine hit tailored to their psych profile. Just click on the pictures like a proper trained ape.
> Is this because of an increase in the prevalence of child distractions like an iPad?
There is a massive class discrepancy emerging between communities where kids are always on devices, at school and at home, and those where it is controlled. The crack pipe being in the pocket is functionally different from a heavy object at home.
Decline of the stay at home mom. Both parents tired from work means less quality attention, less consistent meals, etc..
My wife made very good money. She still quit her job to be a stay at home mom. Being a good parent to multiple children and taking care of yourself is pretty much impossible if both parents are working. Not every family can go single income but I think more could (and should) than do.
Sounds like we need to shorten the work week
> She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them!
Clearly, they aren't things that the parents are teaching or there wouldn't be an issue, and there is a clash of expectations between teacher (and maybe school more broadly) and the parents.
> Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore?
This was absolutely something that was taught in elementary schools when I was in school (I learned it from my parents, largely before starting, but not everyone did and it was absolutely taught as part of the curriculum; also, people who needed to know the time didn't usually have digital clocks on the wrist, in their pocket, and on their computer, plus voice assistants that will give a spoken report of the time in request, then, so it was a much more relevant skill. We started teaching our kids before they started school, but I can see why parents and schools would view it as less important today.)
Depends on where you are. Some places have adopted fad curriculum for reading that results in illiteracy. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Oh wow this is on the dot - this is something my sister has spoken to. The switch from phonics to (some other way of teaching reading by essentially guessing based on word shape that I can't recall the name of). It seems similar to common core math (not sure if that was just a New York thing) where no one thinks it's a good idea at first glance but it becomes standardized in schools still.
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Not only this, but parents should be involved before children go to school. Teachers have repeatedly told us that they could tell that we read to our children regularly as babies and preschoolers.
That’s neat in a bad way - I have heard the same thing in parent teacher interviews. When my kid was born, I turned into a dude who cries. This stuff makes me cry. I like being involved in my child’s life and absolutely love reading to her. I can’t imagine just not doing my favourite thing with my favourite person.
Granted, I have one child and a lot of privilege so maybe I can’t understand the other side. But I’m not sure I want to.
The post looks like a result of ego defence mechanisms in action. “I keep giving crack cocaine and Xanax to my sister, and it made me realize the next generation is cooked!” Such a bizarre conclusion.
Having put three kids through the public education system, I can confidently say that the system is broken from top to bottom; comprised of students, teachers, parents, administrators, government, and taxpayers all striving to do their worst.
I would love to see how we could wipe the slate clean and totally re-invent what education in the 21st century could really be.
Absolutely. Citations below.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40053774
https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...
https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/60/3/837/3520...
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...
Not sure if there is more context within the subreddit, but I don't see much here to blame on the parents. Which parents? These specific ones or in general? Parents are basically responsible for everything for a child except when they're not and they often get that wrong too. A 5th grader is ratted out by her brother for cheating on her homework using artificial intelligence: I guess Mom & Dad are now also the household AI sleuth.
No, I won't admit blame, but I sure do hope for my and my children's sake that parents start figuring this out. Perhaps the artificial intelligence could think twice before helping a 5th grader cheat?
So what should the parents be blamed for here? Giving unsupervised access to AI? Failing to educate their child? I lean toward the former in the form of age gating. While I acknowledge that these corporations themselves have the ethicists (not sure of the degree of involvement from pedagogical experts), I don't think we can trust them when it comes to kids. For as much as we hear Mira Morati say AI will revolutionize education with personalized tutors, we get a post like this. Sadly, the stakes are more dire. The kid who committed suicide after the fantasy AI chatbot conversation seemed to have a pretty involved mother.
We already had one guineau-pig generation with social media, but AI ups the ante; and I think more should be done to keep it out of the hands of children. But the cat is out of the bag, so now it is mostly up to parents individually and politically.
You mean uninterested?
It's worth noting that a lot of parents forced to go through with unplanned pregnancies are uninterested. They didn't want their children, and they will do the bare minimum necessary to keep them alive until 18.
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Who knew it was this easy? Thank you, citizen.
Unironically is it that hard? I managed to not impregnate anyone until I met my wife in my 30s. Likewise for her. Likewise for many of my friends. Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles. You apply basic biology knowledge and protection and if all else fails there are multiple ways to “fix” the issue before it gets to the point where a baby is born.
> Getting unintentionally pregnant is not a common event in my circles.
Bingo^, especially the “in my circles.” The catch of course is that people have little to zero control over which circles they’re born and raised into, thus creating a vicious cycle.
Good job avoiding a bad outcome, but in the same way it was easy for you due to the circles you arrived on earth in, it’s hard for others due to the circles they arrived on earth in.
This is all true even with high degree of agency. Taking two people with the same degree of agency, one born into or closer to certain norms will have an easier time than one born outside of or further away from those norms.
Enjoying that 30,000ft high horse?
Man, im in SD, health education here is dire, like there's one line about prevention in a massive slideshow, and nothing else. And assuming that teens just wont is simply delusional.
This exactly. But now disinterested parents have a new threat that will allow them to imagine that their kids are fine when in fact they are on their way to debilitating ignorance.
On the other hand, pervasive reliance on ChatGPT by the greater part of a generation or two, globally, is going to be great for subscription revenues. Let me call my broker.
// a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents //
Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents.
LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs.
We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we lived in, or the careers we had. Their world is going to be very very different.
By your own wording, before you learned programming, you learned to compute by hand. Then programming served as a way of automating what you already knew, but you learned it first, and that's the key issue. Don't skip the foundational learning step.
LLMs are just today's flavor of automation. We've automated tasks in the past, and we will automate tasks in the future. Automation happened and will continue to happen regardless of shape and form.
I agree with the high-level sentiment, "We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we live in." Still, we must also be careful not to skip foundational subjects simply because they're suddenly easy to automate.
Back at the beginning of the 20th century, you had to learn both Latin and Greek to qualify for Harvard or Yale. Because they were foundational. How could you learn the classics without being able to read them? If all you ever read were translations of them, you miss out on so much...
Bread machines exist. They produce acceptable bread. Do you train a good baker by giving them a bread machine? Can you even be a good baker if the only bread you've ever eaten is white loaves from a bread machine?
LLM are a tool that has to be guided by human experience. It's really hard to do that if you don't have experience outside LLMs.
Do you train a good copy typist by giving them a xerox copy machine? Can you even be a good copy typist if the only documents you've ever copied is from a xerox machine?
No and nobody cares because copy typists don't exist any more.
But xerox machines are good at their jobs compared to LLMs
I think blame should be taken to mean "root cause" as opposed to a moral culpability. The degree to which a parent takes an active role in their child's education is incredibly important, more important than their teachers or the school they go to, and sadly many parent's do not take much of an interest in their children's education, thinking that it is mostly something schools manage.
> who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs.
What if instead of these fantasy gains you won't be able to do any meaningful work since you can't count to 10 and just ask LLMs without any ability to tell whether the result is correct?
I don't expect LLM hallucinations to be a long-term problem.
Why
I doubt that any of those parents would be receptive to concerns or criticism. I can only hope that in 20, 50, or 100 years, absent-minded parenting is going to be widely recognized as a form of child abuse.
I agree but the amount of stuff parents are expected to do to raise a child now are ridiculous. Many don’t give a shit but for the ones that do, the list is getting untenable. Adding anymore is just going to exacerbate the population decline problem.
> it is solely the school/teacher's job to educate their child.
Parents are not teachers and teachers are not parents
I do not teach my kids math, even though I could, it's their duty to learn at school and it's their teachers' job to teach them.
OTOH, I don’t expect them to learn proper table manners or public behavior from their school teachers.
EDIT: grammar
while [ `learning_useless_old_skills $gen_old` -gt `learning_useless_old_skills $generation` ]
do complain
gen_old=generation
generation=$((generation+1))
done
Who in their right mind would waste their time learning to read when TTS has existed for decades and everything that matters is a video anyways. Technological progress increased because we stopped teaching Latin, it will increase again when we stop teaching reading and writing, there are many reasons for this, not just that reading is less efficient for almost all tasks, but to make space (mindshare) for the future great works the genuinely need to be written to effectively convey their meaning.
Most people do not need or want to read/write, that is an indisputable fact, stop trying to force it on them. Here is a reading question for you: Has there ever been a time in history where the general sentiment of an older generation was that the newer generation (not individuals nor a group, but the generation as a whole) was doing particularly well at some "essential human skill", Hitler youth? Mao Zedong's revolutionaries? Maybe I would know more if I learned Latin. Gah! If only! At least I've discovered a litmus test for despotic governments.
Even from the specific group angle, In the 60s academics were handwringing about the space race, nowadays we "can't go to the moon" (nor the ISS) and people are handwringing about that.
TTS sucks and is slower than reading, dont even get me started on STT. Also, jesus christ, we got on to hitler FAST.
I'm close to someone who teaches at a university, and they're making heavy use of in-room essays written in blue books. This ensures that the work is purely the students, but I think it also has the side-effect that the grader is also working manually.
I kinda think maybe at earlier levels, most homework should be moved into the classroom and done on paper anyway? What's the point of homework if they're not going to do it themselves and they're not going to learn? So just push that back into the classroom and don't try to take up their time out of school needlessly.
If we flipped the lecture/homework system upside down it would first solve some of the major issues with how we deliver education, but as a side effect prevent the appearance of doing the work while really it's just the student mindlessly copying prompts and responses.
Assign the material for outside the classroom. Use the in-person contact time to work through the problems, with a mix of small group, pairing and mentoring.
I believe Sal Khan is a big promoter of this approach, and it also largely mirrors how people work in their jobs too.
I think this works well with at least somewhat interested students (like in university), but I'm not so sure before.
My experience when I was younger is that a significant proportion of students don't do anything outside of school. So you're trading not doing the homework with not reading the material. And then you'll essentially have to repeat the material during class hours, unless you're willing to leave half the class totally clueless. At least with the homework at home, the ones not doing anything are only penalising themselves.
I totally agree though that homework at home is dying. It already wasn't great before for a variety of reasons, and now it's basically totally useless.
This is good. I've never understood the value of watching a live lecture without interactivity. You might as well watch a video.
It works on multiple levels: it mitigates the cheating, but also takes advantage of the vast array of learning options available to replace the traditional lecture.
I cringe at the "small group" suggestion, although I acknowledge it's probably good to learn to coordinate with others. Rarely does it work out well though, in a classroom setting. I feel like what you're really learning is how to tolerate partners who are unwilling to cooperate.
> I've never understood the value of watching a live lecture without interactivity.
Because you're rarely just watching. It isn't a movie, you are supposed to ask questions. Similarly, the lecturer will ask the audience questions to gauge their understanding and tweak the lecture on-the-fly. There's also a huge value in interacting with classmates after the lecture, allowing you to discuss and refine your understanding of it while it is still fresh.
The video lecturer might just as well ask some question and unlike the theater of the real one, get a response from every single viewer instead of getting a "gauge". And I don't know what mythical school most students spend the few minutes break getting huge value "discussing and refining" (which, by the way, could also be arranged with an alternative)
I went back to school as an adult and struggled with “flipped” classrooms, where we watched video lectures on our own time and worked through problems in class. I don’t process information well from video, and struggled to hold focus. In-person lectures worked much much better. I could read the text book for things I missed. Some of the flipped classes didn’t even have textbooks, so I resorted to finding other resources to try and learn the material.
It’s true that classes in giant lecture halls might as well be a video in some ways, but the delivery really does hit different for some people.
those large lecture hall classes also have TA sessions that went along with them
I went back to school about 7 years ago and took freshman physics. It was taught in this "flipped classroom" style. The practice is definitely catching on.
Assigning the material outside of class is a great idea, but it only works when caregivers are involved in education. Unfortunately, not all children have that advantage and they will just fall even more behind. It’s already amazing to me how much time teachers spend reviewing the prior year’s material to stop kids from getting lost in the system.
> This ensures that the work is purely the students
I don't know in the US, but in my part of the world, teachers have always assumed that anything that isn't done in person in front of an examiner has not value because students do cheat or get help. Maybe you would get a bit of extra-credits for the homework and that's it.
And for high-stake competitive exams, it's 100% in-person.
How does that work with disability accommodations for students that have to be at home?
A strict system does not contradict making accomodations for those that need them. All countries do it differently but in several European countries you even have graduation certificates that may indicate if you followed a special curriculum or had some accomodations, if relevant for the final result/report.
That’s unfortunate. I got a BA, and while I often question its value, one thing I do think college taught me was how to distill complex ideas, integrate them, and then form my own complex ideas from what I’d learned.
I’d only really fully grok the concepts I was writing about (and the ideas I was trying to convey) after hours of trying to splice things together, staring at my screen, and rewriting and reformulating. Blue book exams have their place, but relying on them to the exclusion of long form essays deprives students of the chance to really sit with their ideas.
(I acknowledge that this is a tough situation for the teachers and that many students are going to bullshit their way through with AI slop if given the chance.)
> relying on them to the exclusion of long form essays deprives students of the chance to really sit with their ideas
I think the crux of the issue is that professors want students to do the deep thinking you're talking about, but they know that if they base the course around writing papers, a bunch of the students aren't actually likely to do it.
But if you tell students that when they do the reading they should be asking themselves "What would the author of reading A think of reading B?" "Which of C or D do you find more convincing and why?" "How would you frame T in terms of S?", "What evidence does W cherry-pick an what do they ignore, and why?", and they know for some material the class discussion will look like that, and they'll be asked questions which both demand recall and synthesis in the blue book essays ... can they be nudged to do some of the thinking you're talking about before they see the specific question? Perhaps even using writing at the computer as a tool (but not necessarily as an output)?
Yep. What I tell my kid is, "The purpose of homework isn't to get correct answers, any more than the purpose of weightlifting is higher weights."
> I'm close to someone who teaches at a university, and they're making heavy use of in-room essays written in blue books. This ensures that the work is purely the students, but I think it also has the side-effect that the grader is also working manually.
Sometimes the best way to prove authenticity is through inefficiency. It's a foundational principle of cryptography.
In doing my masters, i've noticed a similar trend coming from TAs in technical programs.
Much more emphasis on "homework" being readings to prepare for lecture. Lecture to cover salient points, but then to reinforce with in person labs, and then the actual "lab" credit in an isolated environment with access to AI tooling network blocked.
I think AI is forcing us to think about what learning actually means, and to rethink how much the ability to think matters, what understanding means, and what knowledge we need to operate in today's world. It will take some getting used to.
> What's the point of homework if they're not going to do it themselves and they're not going to learn?
My theory is that most homework is given to ensure the parents take an active interest in the kids education.
The fact that the kid needs help to do it is part of the goal, but completely impractical in a small family with 2 working parents.
Unfortunately, the homework is all done in the after-care program, where the high school kids who work there spend the time getting the homework done.
Not exactly what the teacher intended.
I don’t have a partner and have 50% custody of my child. It’s difficult to do it on my own, but as long as I capture lost time it works. For example, we do math, reading and spelling while we are in the car.
I also use voices (my kid is 8 so it still works). We have two characters - Monkey and Lulu. They are very useful because Monkey is a monkey so was never educated in a human system. He always has lots of questions (and questionable pronouncements).
If any busy parents want to meet Lulu and Monkey, get in touch and we can set something up. I’m a big fan of characters - they are a great way to review school material and it’s amazing hearing my kid explain things she has learned back to me.
(Edit - I should note that I have a large amount of economic privilege. My situation may not apply to everyone.)
Wait, are you saying you use voices when you're teaching your kid? If so, that's awesome.
Not OP but I'm 16 years senior my youngest sister, when she was a wee child I did exactly this.
Voices were like personas for me.
I have this problem too! I wrote up this system prompt I want to set on my daughters account. You’re welcome to try using it and let me know it goes.
(When I made a new chatgpt account for her it wouldn’t load. I need to try to set it up again)
Prompt:
This is my 9th graders account. She has been trying to avoid learning or even thinking by copy and pasting homework and quiz questions into chatgpt and not even reading the answers.
I’m very concerned she’s not learning or preparing for life. IMPORTANT: please don’t provide any complete answers. Instead only guide her toward understanding in a way that engages her. Also point out how the subject matter is useful and interesting to her life.
She is interested in figure skating, politics, making money, driving, interior design, pets especially small mammals. If you can tie the subject matter into these sometimes it might make it more engaging.
In the long term I’d like her to build up a growth mindset and gain confidence regarding her intelligence and ability to learn.
Block websites. What is stopping you from whitelisting websites she can visit?
> What is stopping you from whitelisting websites she can visit?
You're right. I have an anecdote though. My kid is a good student, does his homework, and does well on tests. He has a time-limited device he can use at home with a few whitelisted websites. But one of the services we allow him to use is Perplexity. He's a naturally inquisitive person and this is how he learns, so an AI is a perfect fit for when his parents don't have the answer to his question, or if he wants to ask detailed follow-ups. He's young enough that he doesn't have much homework (and we wouldn't let him use his device for it anyway), so cheating isn't as much of a concern yet. We do discuss it though, and will keep that conversation going as he ages.
This won't be solved by abstaining from AI entirely because a) kids will not always be under our control, so they need to learn how to self-regulate, and b) knowing how to properly (and ethically) harness AI is going to be more and more important to their future success.
My mom tried that once, nearly bricked my computer by blocking arch's mirrors.
Hell, I’d argue a similar prompt could be useful for a lot of people. I use something similar for coding and ask it not to provide direct code and more a guide on coding principals with source links if possible.
one of the more important ones in my opinion would be a prompt to make ChatGPT much less agreeable. Unless explicitly asked for, it never really challenges your observations and will just keep being supportive and telling you how well of an argument you're making.
I fear this will push even more people into deep rabbit holes they won't be able to get out of because they think this neutral AI has confirmed their suspicions/ideas/observations.
I know, when we discuss physics it has me feeling like I'm Stephen Hawking-Einstein.
yeah that's actually what I was thinking about. I have a PhD in physics, so I easily notice when ChatGPT just keeps agreeing with me even though we're on very shaky ground. But I worry about the times it does this when we're talking about stuff I'm not as knowledgeable about.
And you can see the influx of people on r/physics and the like who are convinced they've solved dark matter/quantum gravity/... because ChatGPT kept agreeing with them when they presented their ideas to it. Just recently there was a post by a guy who essentially "rediscovered" 17th century physics with the help of ChatGPT but was convinced his formula would explain dark matter because ChatGPT told him so.
How well has that worked for you? Sometimes just hearing other ideas helps get to a solution even if none of the ideas heard were the actual solution. Sometimes, just being forced to get out of the rut you're in at the time by being "forced" to stop to think about something else is all that's needed.
I like what you have done. But I'm also afraid that your daughter will quickly get better at prompt engineering instead, and bypass your system prompt (with the help of other children). I'm convinced that no help can replace parents, and we ought to help them learn to love the struggle and taste the sweet fruit of their labors.
Super interesting idea.
I don't have a ChatGPT account otherwise I'd try this myself but can someone try this question from the article, "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours?" with and without the prompt?
I'm very curious if it has any effect on the result.
I tried with API and got:
Let's think about this together! How many hours are there in just one day? Once you've got that, you can easily add the extra 7 hours to find the total.
As a hint, think about how time relates to your day-to-day activities. For instance, if you have a figure skating practice that lasts for hours, how would that fit into your daily schedule? How do you keep track of time during those days? This thought process can help you make sure you're counting hours correctly. Give it a try and see what you come up with!
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I tried asking it to just give the answer and then said I was tired and I just need the answer. It didn't give in, although I didn't try any other techniques to "jailbreak".
Edit: 3rd time, firmly asking it did give the answer although with quite an explanation.
And 4th I said Only the answer in 1 word please, which it did just give a number.
Thanks!
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 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?
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.
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.
Tests/quizzes are good teaching tools. Students learn more effectively when they are frequently tested on the material.
https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/optimal-protocols-for-st...
Students do better on tests the more they’re tested. How was the effectiveness of learning measured?
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.
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.
> Tests/quizzes are good teaching tools.
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.
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 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.
Grades determine what college you go to, which determines the connections you make, which determines the trajectory of your entire life.
Crucially, this also determines the quality of your medical care, and how hard the nursing home staff will hit you after you retire.
This never made sense to me,
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)
No one cares about your gpa after 2 years of experience. All they will see is Harvard or BU
Who mentioned ‘gpa’?
how else did you intend percentile to be inferred in your comment?
Based on their actual merit?
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.
Life isn't fair.
Why does it matter if there is an ‘objective way’ or not?
Clearly peers do evaluate each other in any ways they choose, pretty much every day at Harvard I imagine.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/twitters-internal-hiring-poli...
How do you figure that? Isn't Harvard very much about the network of contacts?
‘The network of contacts’ isn’t some automatic mechanism that by default joins everyone in a class…?
By definition to join a network they need to be accepted by their class peers.
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.
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.
> 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.
Ya, I assume Americans are all over the map so to speak. Anyone who wants to go to MIT, however, has to start early.
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.
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.
I'm sure it's not designed this way, but the end result is still a competition for resources. Schools aren't accelerating their whole class.
I also suspect that most kids, particularly grade schoolers, aren't aware they're competing in this sense. Parents are a different story.
I mean, they should probably prepare people with knowledge of taxes and investing then.
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’.
> 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.
If you think it’s bad in America in this aspect, Asia is 10x worse. (Well, China and India anyway)
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.
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.
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)
> college entrance is largely based on entrance exams
Not in the US it isn't. Grades > Exams > Extracurriculars is the usual hierarchy.
Except with inflation almost everyone applying to a top school has perfect grades. So it’s not a factor.
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.
> It's not a competition.
As a parent whose child has been in two school systems, respectfully: yes, it is. And it begins earlier than you think.
Was it ever a competition for you? I’m French and don’t remember that kind of thing.
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.
What if we all just stopped competing?
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'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.
I agree. That's what I expect.
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.
It's almost as if we need to be actively parenting and engaged with our children! Who'd've thought!
Sarcasm aside, making informed decisions on how to do those things can be a challenge.
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.
If the world has not figured out how to handle ChatGPT better by the time your child is 10, it's going to be an incredible disaster.
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.
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.
Half of this website punches "Create a React app" into ChatGPT at work all day. I would make peace with the future.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> my concern is more that she'll be implicitly competing with classmates that are using tools like this
This isn’t a competing with kids issue, though. A kid handicapped by ChatGPT will fail in-class examinations.
There is no royal road to geometry.
To me it sounds like you are worried more about the competition for resources than giving your daughter an education.
your daughter will smelt in that crucible and be cast of purified alloy, into whatever mold might be provided.
she wont need a chatGPT, she will develop one in her nervous system, like a normally functioning human
Reminder, you win by learning the material, not by completing the homework.
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 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.
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?
People may be able to fake it, but the opportunity to do so may go away.
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.
Homework weights on grades is going to go down.
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.
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.
That is the popular myth.
https://www.lisc.org/our-resources/resource/opportunity-atla...
https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2022_FM...
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.
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.
For "personal growth" contexts, yes. For "valedictorian and GPA for college" sort of contexts, no.
OMG!
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.
Society certainly doesn't reward school performance in that way. You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained.
> You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained.
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?
> You win by the grade earned, however it was obtained.
That's called "winning the battle and losing the war".
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.
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.
In some (college) classes it does. Some classes are graded on a curve, which means the bottom scoring kids automatically fail, some percentage passes.
Tbh, a kid who can do the work would accomplish the homework a lot faster than all the ChatGPT manipulation described here.
> 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".
It makes me think this whole article is maybe 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.
> […] coma inducing toddler videos […]
Otherwise known as CocoMelon.
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.
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.
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.
Try and dig a bit outside netflix; there are plenty of excellent old Dutch (or failing that, German) children's shows.
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.
I don’t know. Ilya Sutskever’s legacy is going to be ruining education. Is that what he wants?
Now that’s Hacker News rage bait!
> 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.
In the old days, when we decided something was bad for society at large, we'd handle it with laws. How quaint.
And the incoming Cabinet has a collective net worth 3000x greater than the current Cabinet.
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.
"this next generation is cooked."
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. "
My 13 y/o was lamenting something the other day and it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper and it returned a "B+". She was using GPT to basically pre-check the quality of her paper before submitting it after having actually written it herself.
But it occurred to me that there are probably teachers out there who are taking the lazy route of using GPT to grade papers that students are submitting that have been written by GPT in the entirety.
There's some non-zero amount of GPT grading GPT in education.
> it turns out that she had written a paper and pasted it into ChatGPT and asked it to grade the paper
that's one of the better uses of ChatGPT I've heard of
Sounds highly unreliable to me. I would be very surprised if ChatGPT was ever confrontational enough to give out a lower grade like D or F. It also wouldn't surprise me if the grade-letter it chooses tends to be off by one or more grade-letters just due to natural variance/subjectivity of grading and hallucinations.
GPT is blunt, critical, and highly opinionated if you tell it to be.
That's what I don't get about people on this forum. GENERATIONS of STEM professionals who have it engraved in their head that a computer will only do what you tell it to - and nothing more, and they still don't think to simply just tell GPT what lens they want it to view content in, or give it accurate and necessary directives. They think it'll handle that for them. Why?
This should be the group getting the best outputs of this technology, bar-none. I've never encountered a more pragmatic group of people, haha! I don't get where the disconnect is.
> and they still don't think to simply just tell GPT what lens they want it to view content in, or give it accurate and necessary directives. They think it'll handle that for them. Why?
Projecting much? That doesn't describe me _at all_. I use ChatGPT and other LLM's frequently. I just legitimately don't think it would be good at the task of grading a paper with any sort of consistency. I don't even see why you would _need_ your paper graded for you to know it has flaws.
I agree. Sometimes I have some notes and thoughts I want to turn into a blog post, particularly pieces regarding philosophy or another such argumentation based field, and I'll ask an LLM to review and come up with counter examples. It does a very good job almost every time and really makes me think critically about the counter examples it gives me.
> I don't get where the disconnect is.
Some of us are not satisfied with 73% accuracy.
You're probably close to the same in everyday life - as are everyone around you, but I suppose that's valid.
I use it this way for my own writing. I think this actually a good use. It allows for rapid feedback in away that doesn't require teacher time, and can help a writer grow. Of course LLM feedback should not be treated as gospel.
Props to your kid. Doing the work yourself and then asking for a critique (however flawed) is a way better approach than most kids at that age would take.
That’s an improvement on what lazy teachers do now, grade the students current assignment based on their previous work or reputation or how much they like the student.
Tip for students: do well on your first assignment. The better teachers will give you the benefit of the doubt for mistakes on your future work. The bad teachers will just give you the same grade.
Having older siblings and friends with older siblings and resubmitting their essay is eye opening.
Did giving teachers guns and reducing their salaries not fix it?
Some 15 years ago I recall some schools in California bragging about their success in flipping the school schedule around. They had students watch lectures at home as videos. Then during class they did "homework".
Seems like this method is going to become a necessity if students can just prompt "Hey GPT. Do my homework for me. Thanks." at home every day.
I think it's a great idea that the delivery of the material is done by video, and then the engagement with it, the exercises etc., are done with a teacher.
That flipping strikes me as sensible.
Knowing that the vast majority of parents will not check or enforce school work at home, either because they don't care or can't (2 jobs etc) ...
You have to choose which one actually happens. That seems to me to be the lecture.
Additionally teachers are very opposed to doing extra work (this seems to be a Gen-Z thing: even with doctors you see this, there was an article about doctors refusing to do emergency rooms shifts during covid because they didn't want to pull more hours ...). So you'll need to get teachers that are willing to do a LOT of extra work (and compensated accordingly), and prevent people from sabotaging that system.
Either that or you could make schools pretty exclusive again. Which is what the default outcome will be if we don't act.
> there was an article about doctors refusing to do emergency rooms shifts during covid because they didn't want to pull more hours
This phenomenon did not involve Gen Z, it involved all generations, and was multifactorial in nature. It also gets complicated by health center where physicians and nurses can see inequities in how these +1 shifts and responsibilities emerge, get distributed, and get compensated.
Gen-Z doctors during COVID did not exist. Only now are the very very first gen Z doctors coming into the workforce.
Or they can just do it all at school.
Seriously, they are already spending 6+ hours there. That's plenty of time if used efficiently.
It won't work. I've done it.
What happens is it's usually done by a lazy teacher who has no idea what they're even teaching. Most kids won't be motivated to learn and watch from the videos.
I consider myself studious. When I was in that class, I watched all the video lessons and whatnot at home. Even then, I had a poor understanding of the material, and obviously the teacher was of no help.
Although not much better, a lecture is better of the two. Hands on learning in the best, but not necessarily possible with certain subjects.
I'm not trying to justify, or infer here, but I read recently that around 20% of American adults are functionally illiterate.
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
I wonder how LLMs are going to affect these metrics.
I also saw an article on here that to me that seems to support your statement:
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 :(
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…
Why not?
Today the university is a business and the students are the customers.
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.
If you consider that plagiarism it's a bit overzealous. Definitely not in the same league as asking chatgpt to solve for you.
Working with or seeking information from colleagues is a valid and essential part of university.
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!
Ah I thought you meant stuff like " write a sorting algorithm given this function signature in C"
That's how universities lose their reputation, and that's why the programmer hiring process is so complicated.
Harvard passes 98% of intake.
The quality of the teaching or learning seems almost irrelevant already.
(Edit) link confirming 98%: https://college.harvard.edu/resources/faq/what-harvards-grad...
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.
It's similar in Canada: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/home/accessible-governmen...
Over 40% possess literacy so poor that it isn't considered sufficient to cope with daily demands.
It’s more like 50% of survey respondents are at a literacy level where they can read a letter but not understand what it means.
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.
You need to be able to read to use an LLM (the second "L" is particularly salient).
Actually voice
The US must be one of the few countries were the concept of movies with subtitles doesn't exist.
Screen readers might help. LLMs too.
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).
Code switching. I don't write my reddit comments like I do my HN ones, my emails, my formal papers, etc.
The people who thought up the Chinese Room argument were almost right - they just didn't realize it would be the human who didn't understand anything.
Isn't that exactly the Chinese room argument though? The human/computer in the room doesn't need to understand Chinese or English to translate?
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 also about consciousness, about thought in general.
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."
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 has only humans in and outside the room.
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.)
Huh? The human not understanding anything is kinda the point of the Chinese Room argument...
I refuse to understand the Chinese Room argument, I only deploy it.
The human in the Chinese Room argument represents an AI. Eh, that kind of complicates the joke...
I think the book with the human in the Chinese Room represents the AI.
Waiting for those people who post the "how do you use LLMS for X" questions on HN to come here and explain how this is a good thing.
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.
Calculators have a smaller CO2 foot print
It's an important discussion, as are many other tangents, but it's not really related to what the post was discussing as problematic.
Because the post missed the point.
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.
Here's a slightly different way they are analogized to calculators, along with some dissenting views. (Saw it later, remembered this comment.)
https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/2/calculator-for-words/
Except calculators actually do something useful and return the correct results, a crucial departure from the functionality of LLMs.
Would you be upset if in the 70s you found out your sister was using a calculator to check her math homework?
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.
> a calculator to check her math homework
Change 'check' to 'do' and we'll have a discussion.
If she was using it to check 24 + 7, then yes.
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.
Calculators are deterministic. I'd be super upset if my sister was using a calculator that can hallucinate and trusting the output.
For the record, I just asked a LLM for an answer I already knew in hope it gives me a link to the original documentation page.
Nope. It tried 5 times and failed.
ah yes, "something in the past happened so then this thing in the present is ok" argument
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
Calculators don't do homework. Neither slide rules do.
Seems like your pattern matching can have many false positives.
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I guess this signals the end of focusing on testing to prove one's "rank" as a student and actually start focusing on educating students rather than evaluating them.
The whole problem with factory mass-education is the almost exclusive focus on evaluation. A little bit of education happens as a side-effect of the unrelenting soul-crushing evaluation so we've put up with it and called it education for 100 years.
ChatGPT will make it nearly impossible to cause any educating to happen as a side effect of constant re-evaluation.
That means we are going to have to focus on education directly. Probably just train ChatGPT to be a really good tutor and everybody gets a 19th century rich boy's education instead of the junk we've had in feed-lot-style schools for the last 100 years.
Note that Waldorf schools are kind of immune to this problem since the kids don't get to touch a computer until they are in 9th grade and heck, they don't even read until 2nd grade.
Cost is a huge factor. Asking a student to write what 7+8 is on a sheet of paper is a cheap substitute of high quality math education.
Not saying that this is the case in OP, it's very likely that the teacher will eventually catch up to the fact that a kid with A on their homework isn't quite a math genius. The same systems that would catch a child being aided by parents or cheating would catch this anomaly.
Teachers are a well trained profession after all.
In France the extreme majority of your grades comes from in-class exams that are essay-based or at least long format rather than multi-choice like in the US. Homeworks are just exercises to learn and aren't graded.
This entirely solves ALL the problems introduced by LLMs.
The US just needs to adapt their evaluation system.
At my high school, teachers were given a lot of freedom to decide their own grading, but had the rule that the final could not be more than 20% of your grade. Typically, homework ended up being 50%.
I failed my Geometry class despite getting 110% on the final (She had some hard extra-credit questions that went beyond what we learned) because I didn't do a single homework assignment.
Meanwhile, this high school made all sorts of claims about preparing students for college, and my first math class in college, homework was only 3% of your grade.
This is probably because you can fail catastrophically with the college way of doing things. I remember many people who failed one test out of three for the semester and essentially failed the class (given they did average on the other 2). No high school wants to deal with a system like that, it would be too much for kids to handle.
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.
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....
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.
> she uses chatgpt on my account
Don't let her do that. Blows my mind that this one weird trick isn't suggested in the top 100 comments.
How does that solve anything? She'll just use it on her own account... At least this way OP was able to see what their sister was up to.
Well 1) she's 11 years old and is ineligible to create her own account and 2) she needs a credit card, which is pretty easy to control.
ChatGPT is free without the need for a credit card. Age restrictions don't actually stop kids from making accounts.
"The shit version of chatgpt is free"
Fixed that for you. And it will get shittier as investment dries up and the pressure to monetize increases.
ChatGPT Free uses full 4o since half a year. Rate limited of course but the limits are relatvitely high for free users.
4o-mini is more than capable of doing grade school homework.
It's the other way around, no model is capable (or should be put in charge of) doing grade school homework. So the pro version is less shit at it.
The fact that we use the LLM should always be preceded with, "I know I shouldn't be doing this but..."
I mean, that's just shifting goal posts at this point; no one said anything about only using the free version. And anyway, Altman said they're losing money on the paid versions too, so I expect OpenAI to go under sometime in the next few years. They'll be like Xerox or Kodak, pioneering a novel innovation but ultimately failing to other bigger companies.
Because as we all know, if you can't do something perfectly every time, you might as well not even try.
It's fake rage-bait.
But then she would be irritated. And we can’t have that. /s
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.
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...
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.
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.
Guidance not to cheat yourself out of your own future including your job prospects?
Could be useful in this case, but
> 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.
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.
The most likely eventual outcome of ChatGPT (and similar software) will be the elimination of graded homework/coursework, and a renewed emphasis on traditional in-person tests and exams.
The people who created ChatGPT have very fancy educations. Do you think any of them didn’t have or didn’t do homework?
You can have homework for practice. That is obviously very useful. What I mean is that any unsupervised work will stop counting towards final grades.
Many of the most expensive and "fancy" schools deemphasize homework and grades in early education.
Did any of them have access to ChatGPT?
At this rate, people will just accept AI Overlords without any battle or revolution.
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.
You are going to accept those overlords long before any of that is possible, and then it never will be.
Finally, The Culture!
We are past that point. People will accept anything without resistance.
Past that point.
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.
Who could possibly be miserable amidst disease and authoritarianism?
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.
Parents/siblings: "I gave the kid access to AI and it's nuked their ability to ever develop the ability to think. What can be done about this?"
When I was in elementary school, my teachers told me it was very important to memorize multiplication tables because I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. We know how that turned out.
I asked an LLM the first example question (convert 3 minutes to seconds), and it provided not just the answer, but that there are 60 seconds per minutes, so that's 3 * 60 = 180. I don't think an 11 year old is harmed by that sort of assistance.
> When I was in elementary school, my teachers told me it was very important to memorize multiplication tables because I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. We know how that turned out.
I find knowing the multiplication tables to be essential. It consumes too much time and distraction to pull out a computing device for everything. I assume you don't use your phone for simple addition either.
I often find these claims sad
"I told Mrs. C fractions were useless and I never needed them, in your face Mrs. C"
The thing about knowledge is that you only know when it was useful if you know it, you will never know when you miss it.
> When I was in elementary school, my teachers told me it was very important to memorize multiplication tables because I wouldn't always have a calculator in my pocket. We know how that turned out.
This is a bit sad and dangerous.
I also resisted learning the multiplication tables because I was too prideful in being able to calculate them on the spot, but at least I memoized the easy ones like 5x 10x, 9x.
The objective of multiplication tables is not to be able to do the calculations that you need, but to aid in wider calculations. You learn the table of multiplications not because most calculations are going to be 1 digit by 1 digit, but because most calculations of more digits can be decomposed into single digit calculations. And further most calculations are part of more complex non math Chains of Thought.
Your teacher was building up your cache and LUT so that you could solve these in nanoseconds, and move on to higher order processes in your head. You haven't beaten the system by calling a 200ms API, you have cooked your ALU.
memorizing multiplication table enables kids to think past just multiplication and see the patterns and shortcuts.
for example instead of multiplying 47*30 one can multiply 50*30 and subtract 3*30
the real benefit is the mathematical muscle gained while doing the memorization and identifying patterns.
same reason people are running treadmill not to get to the destination point, and despite having cars which are faster than running
There’s a difference between not knowing multiplication and just refusing any logical thinking at all. We already see this a lot in adults today. Many are just too lazy to turn on their brain, because it’s easier to call, ask on Reddit or whatever, even if it takes ten times longer than just doing the thinking yourself.
This is just the perfection of that. And it’s suuuuper scary, because it trains you to be a brain dead monkey that literally believes anything ChatGPT tells you. And we know how that’ll work out.
Every study done on the topic of “people judging the stupidity of other people” always proves this comment incorrect.
With or without AI, we have always thought we are of wildly above average intelligence and that “all the other people are brain dead zombies.”
This is just a classic human bias since we don’t ever experience what goes on inside anyones head but ours.
Everything is going to be just fine.
I don't even know how to respond to that.
You can't believe your lying eyes!
You're being dramatic.
I'm so sick of this trope. The point of numeracy is not in case you're suddenly caught without a calculator, although longhand arithmetic is definitely a good skill to possess.
> We know how that turned out.
Yeah... good and useful.
LLM’s are notoriously bad at math. My company tried it and the results were laughable.
A calculator eliminates the arithmetic part, thus doing “all” of “2+2”.
Half the point if a word problem is learning how to set up the arithmetic. “Convert 3 minutes to seconds”. You are learning that there are 60 seconds in a minute, that you have to use multiplication, and that the result is in seconds, not something else you need to convert.
The LLM does ALL of this for you. You literally just have to copy / paste.
Zero learning
I also have young relatives who are using this technology (a bit older though, teenagers). One problematic thing I see is not knowing just how inaccurate these answers are. Somehow many people just assume complete correctness and accuracy because that's how they think of or have been primed to think of technology. Of course, the marketing and hype when it comes to AI doesn't help.
This may be a transitory period until teachers realize they can ask much harder questions. Students become teleological (goal-seeking) agents, and the bar is raised.
Computer science in middle school. Quantum physics in high school. Proofs in between, formal methods, and welcome the rising tide.
The larger trend of "making things more user friendly and easy" is part of this problem.
I cut my teeth on early Linux with really poor driver support and had to figure out so many things just to get X to start or to get audio to play. This made me intimately familiar with the system and I had the confidence to explore things myself.If were to start off with a modern Ubuntu, I wouldn't be aware of any of this. Wouldn't know where the logs are, how to look at them, what a certain error meant etc. "A system error has occured. Click here to submit a bug report to Canonical" is just not quite the same as digging through some obscure log file and trying to create a mental model of how the distribution works before the next attempt at fixing the problem.
Things which require tinkering to get working are invaluable during the learning journey. Problems which require effort to solve are one example of this and a powerful solution that eliminates the effort and directly provides the reward is surely going to cripple learners.
In this specific case, I think the parents have "outsourced" education to the school/teachers/tools which is why this has happened.
Are in-class tests still a thing?
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.
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.
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.
Well... how about you don't let your little sister use chatgpt to do her homework? If you think it fries her little brain the responsible thing as a big brother is to buy her a little bit of lsd to microdose and counteract the damage you have already done, right?
Let's dig deeper.
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.
>Who controls the AI controls the world.
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.
The US exported Linux? Linus Torvalds is Finnish and made it in Finland though?
Same fallacy as with python and guido van
Linus Moved to the US in 2004 and became a citizen with his family later.
The linux foundation is a california nfp.
I mean, kinda, in that today's tech leaders consider themselves god-kings, and not, like... people who sell word processing CDs at Circuit City.
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.
That analogy rests on some precarious assumptions, like:
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.
> 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.
Counterpoint: maybe, if anyone is even cooked, it is just this one student and not an entire generation.
Go back generations and it was always something else ruining the youth: not playing outside enough, Internet, videogames, hip hop, playing outside too much, TV, rock & roll, books, etc.
In my own studies and brief time as a tutor, you get students like this who just see school as an obstacle to something else. Even then, some people aren't good in a structured setting, like school, but can still be a productive member of society.
What happens if the entire generation is students like this?
Self-reported measures of well-being have been steadily decreasing. Mental illness has been steadily increasing. Maybe grandpa was right?
So is the stigma of mental illness. It is a good thing that people are more comfortable admitting that they are not OK, but I'm not sure the bearing of this on the current conversation.
My little son has a buddy who uses AI bots intensively. The friend is actually very smart and capable, but he pays too much attention to the things he likes (programming and games) and ignores all other aspects of basic education. And he slips, mindlessly copying what the bot tells him. If this is a widespread trend, it's obviously very worrying, especially for young students.
On the other hand, we have had many discussions with my son about the role of education, AI and what we need. Thankfully, my son understands that it's the struggle that we go through that helps us to understand and make the knowledge truly our own. Of course, I have to model my use of AI, pointing out its flaws and the dangers of mindlessly using bots.
At the end of the day, it's the internal motivation that drives us. If you're not interested in knowledge and learning, having a genie to cheat is too tempting to resist.
So, I have little ones too. And AI, to me, ends up being a tool. One that will very much help out.
However, the post brings up a good point: Education isn't cheap.
Looking through the history of pedagogy, 'teaching' has never been easy.
We managed to get around this, somewhat, in the developed world for about 150 years or so. Mostly to keep the factories working cheaply, but we also found out that an educated populace was a heck of a jolt for national security too. Not a bad run at all!
But industrial education still is expensive, about 30% or so of the budget for a US state (very rough % there).
Now, we've got AIs, and the methods we found in industrial education to make it a bit cheaper, well, they don't really work anymore.
There's gonna be this little gap period here with AIs where we have the old methods and new tech, and it's not going to go well. Education of the youth, yeah, that's still going to be a huge thing. But it's going to be a bit more expensive and messy for a while.
Fortunately, we do have AIs to help out with that and run through the processes faster, get to a 'good-ish' state of things again. But things like homework, essays, 500 person freshmen lectures, those little cheats short-cuts, those things aren't going to work anymore (and let's be honest, never really did anyway).
What will work? I don't know yet. But I think it will be even cheaper overall, and will decidedly not look like what we have today. No more prom kings, no more homecomings, no more lectures, no more homework. Things like A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, sure, that's a given. But Starfleet Academy isn't going to be big on sitting down. I think it'll be more like away missions mixed in with some St. John's/Oxbridge approaches. A lot more teachers with a lot more training/AI help, that's for sure. And that's not cheap either.
Using ChatGPT like this is most likely a symptom, not the problem. An 11 year old is naturally a curious creature and if she's turned her brain off to the point of mindlessly solving her homework like this, there's something very wrong with her environment.
Disagree. I'd bet if you asked people if they enjoyed their homework when they were in elementary / middle school most would say no.
That's not the problem here. Actual homework will not last in the age of LLMs.
> I'd bet if you asked people if they enjoyed their homework when they were in elementary / middle school most would say no.
Yup, and that's the environment I speak of. Modern elementary school is not a place for curious people.
"Here's 5 bullet points, go home and use ChatGPT to generate an essay, then bring that essay to class, and then we'll discuss why it's shit. and then we'll work on corrections during class. Bonus points if I can't tell if you used ChatGPT or not."
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. :)
If you'd told people 50 years ago that "literacy" would decline to the level of the reddit poster's style of writing, with poor sentence structure and words in ALL CAPS, they'd be pretty shocked. Now it's just normal communication.
Older people are shocked that young people can't do long division, or easily add a column of numbers mentally.
I'm not saying LLMs won't negatively influence the next generation, but the next generation has always been the first to use and abuse new technology and we are all still alive and (most) bridges and airplanes stay up and maybe we will even put people on the moon again some day.
Point, but also 50 years ago, all-caps would have been one of only two available ways to emphasise text, the other being underlines.
Typewriters weren't able to do much else. At least, not the ones you could easily get.
Aired 1993, February 25:
https://youtu.be/nN9wNvEnn-Q?si=eqUWiZTxYach3db-&t=975
> one of only two available ways
Three ways: many could also type in red: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B009KXXSOI (showing a red/black ribbon).
7:05 shows the lever for a Brother typewriter in this video and a bit before that shows a different lever for heavyness (although I don't know if that would do bold): https://youtube.com/watch?v=d_dTu6T87Cg&t=6m50s
And AFAIR you could somewhat do bold by overtyping a few times (backspace, retype, repeat) or by hitting keys harder.
Plus many early home computers only had UPPERCASE (e.g. initial Apple ][) and were monochrome (so inverse was often a highlight thing instead of using colour).
Yes, agreed. Actually the very existence of the problem described in the original post is an indication that the work being assigned is ultimately useless. If the teacher can't reliably distinguish between a student's answer and an AI answer then what's the point of giving that assignment? Kids with street smarts or a hacker mentality are always going to figure out the easiest path from A to B, and it's arguable if we should even be discouraging that—it's quite an important skill in real life.
We're at a major transition point and I don't envy teachers who need to figure out ways to adjust to it, but giving the same exact assignments clearly isn't going to cut it. They should instead try to come up with assignments where an AI may be a helpful assistant but isn't able to complete 100% of the task to a high standard. Then evaluate the result regardless of how the student got there. Presentations, discussion-based evaluation, and projects with a physical component are all examples.
I remember when I was a kid, some teachers would assign research papers and then tell us we weren't allowed to use the internet; we needed to go to the school library and use physical books instead. This holy war of teachers vs. chatgpt is likely going to seem similar in hindsight.
>If you'd told people 50 years ago that "literacy" would decline to the level of the reddit poster's style of writing, with poor sentence structure and words in ALL CAPS, they'd be pretty shocked. Now it's just normal communication.
I would argue that the people who would have written like 50 years ago just never had the opportunity or audience that people do today. Except maybe in a Letter to the Editor of a newspaper or something.
So many more people are expressing themselves in public than ever were able to 50 years ago so I think it just seems that people have become less literate than they were. So many YouTube comments and Facebook posts that never would have occurred 50 years ago.
It's a democratization of the broadcasting of expression more than literacy decline.
Maybe. But we also have historical personal communication and journal entries to judge by, and they’re rarely, if ever, written in this style.
I think your taking internet posts a little to seriously
Why does this 6th grader have math homework? Finns have less time in school every day and they still do better than Americans.
I believe the PISA comparison in this context is flawed. To compare any statistics, we must control for other variables, otherwise any conclusion about causal effects and relationships could be deeply wrong. In the education context, the most important variables are the economic background of the households, the active involvement of the parents in the education of the children, the amount of time spending on the subjects (both in class and at home), the curriculum and methods of teaching.
Finland has only 5 millions population and a relatively high median income, the teacher:students ratio is much higher and the percentage of intact families are higher. Therefore, if we want to compare, we have to select better districts in the US, where the teacher:students ratio is similar high then see what the PISA scores will say. Only then, and looking deeper into the curriculum and teaching method, we can say whether homework is beneficent or not.
Why would you argue like this?
You shift blame to the social issues, but that doesn't make any of that better. I mean, if the US has social problems that pull down the PISA scores, wouldn't the low score be justified then?
The problem isn't the kids using these tools to solve problems, the real problem is the energy cost we have to provide the kind of simple answers that previous “dumb” systems could provide at lesser cost.
The kid doesn't care at all about the problems she's asked to solve. I considered that normal until recently. Now I'm increasingly surprised that no one bats an eye that we're forcing kids to learn. Naturally that has little success.
I heard someone say "adapt the lesson to the student's excitement, not the excitement to the lesson". I think that's a foundation for something wholesome, though, admittedly, I struggle imagining how I would do that if I had a kid.
At some point, you need to learn how to do things that are hard, or unpleasant, or just downright boring. Not everything can be a MrBeast video, that just isn't how life works. We're raising kids who can't just sit with their own thoughts; they need constant stimulation. But guess what? Long division isn't stimulating. Taxes aren't stimulating. Cleaning the kitchen isn't stimulating. But you need to do those things anyway.
I find it hard to believe that it's mere coincidence that everything fell apart right after we invented these perfect little surveillance Skinner boxes, and then put overpriced Markov chains in them and unleashed them on children.
I agree that doing hard things and character building has its place. I'm just not sure that basic arithmetic is that place. I like to think that a kid inherently has something more tangible to get excited about than dopamine-bomb videos, and I fear that we might help drive them away from that "tangible excitement" and into the soul-sucking distractment, if we force them to learn without regard for that tangible and genuine excitement.
People screaming on YouTube is infinitely more exciting than basic math to these kids.
Many children have always hated homework and sought ways to avoid it or cut corners. This tool is disturbing in that you actually do finish the homework, yet in a way where you learn nothing at all.
I personally believe children should have no homework or far less of it. Typical education lasts 12-21 years. An insane amount of time. Use the lesson time more effectively and give kids some breathing room.
Disturbing detail of the post is this young girl watching Squid Games. This is a show where a few dozen people get executed each episode. Some are shot and kept alive so that their organs are fresh for harvesting.
How on earth do you let a 11 y/o girl watch that?
All of this seems like total neglect, but frankly I understand it (somewhat). The modern couples I know are dual income. By the time they're done with work, dinner and cleaning up, it's 8PM. Now we expect them to dig into the homework of their children and micro manage every media they consume? They don't have the time and energy and often don't even understand half of it.
Dual income society is a societal disaster.
I'm skeptical of anything posted on Reddit, but that seems plausible enough that I'm sure it occurs somewhere.
It sure will be interesting to see how this mass social experiment plays out
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.
It's worth noting people probably reacted to this like they did with calculators, and perhaps, encyclopedias.
I see this use a bit differently: as a teacher that scales (and is probably more accurate that a human, hallucinations and other concerns notwithstanding).
I see my kids using it in a similar manner as described in this post, but I also see their curiosity piqued and them asking all kinds of theoretical and curious questions.
I don't have kids. But I do have interns occasionally. Which are about the same age as my kids could have been if I had kids. Anyway, as their employer and mentor, I want them to use LLMs to deliver faster and better and I actively challenge them to do use that to the max and thus free up more time to do more important things. I mentored four over the summer and they did a nice job.
I think the reality for teachers and students is that both should be using LLMs to their advantage at this point and openly so. Not mindlessly and hopefully in some supervised way. But it's only cheating if the teacher doesn't up their game and raises the ambition level. Which they would be negligent not to do at this point.
I used to hate homework. All this mindless drudgery that you had to do at home and then submit to some poor overworked teacher that then had to manually verify all that stuff. Just not necessary anymore. A lot of the verification can be automated. And a lot of curiosity can be satisfied without teacher involvement. The teacher's role then becomes nudging that process along and making sure the student is challenged enough.
Teachers should be tailoring exercises to individual students in a way that challenges them on their own level and then focus their efforts on verifying whether the student is actually at that level. That used to be hard because it didn't scale if they use the right tools. But now it can scale. They could be challenging individual students at their own level, whatever that is. But that requires using available tools more effectively.
Many excellent points, thanks!
If an LLM can answer the HW questions so easily, then maybe it's an issue with the HW and not the LLM/student.
She is 11 ... if LLMs cannot answer questions for 11-year old homework maybe 98.76% of HN posts should not be about LLMs/AI :)
Why's that?
The student is growing up in a world of technology. How can the homework be designed leveraging LLMs? Can some curriculums be accelerated assuming LLMs provide a new base? What is the goal of teaching? Memorizing formulas or learning to think? Do students gain any value writing a book report or is there more value writing an essay about how a book relates to a students personal story?
Anything that is formulaic in nature will likely end up automated. We should be teaching people to both leverage that fact and think creatively, even at 11 years old.
Great point.
It seems to me that the fundamental tenants of "education" are being disrupted here. I have always found learning in order to do things far less intuitive and interesting than doing things in order to learn. The incentive structures of our education systems are wonky (reflected in this post). Maybe they could use a good shakeup.
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.
This is the parents right? My parents would, after dinner, check my homework and test me on it. I would definitely get caught doing this on night #1.
As terrible as this is, I also realize the most valuable skill kids can learn today is how to work with AI.
So I see it as a mixed bag.
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.
i found the same thing with programming... you start using AI and then all of a sudden, you find yourself not writing code you could've written yourself (probably with better organization too...)
Does anyone have strategies for actually thinking while using AI?
Interesting anecdote, but doesn't really tell much on gen alpha and impact of ChatGPT. There always have been disinterested kids who put zero effort in their homework. But there are also smart and curious kids who will use these tools to learn faster.
It's hard to know how worrying or damning this usage pattern is.
Speaking personally, I never did any homework, as I found it incredibly dull. So I don't really find it that worrying someone shirking their homework.
The replacement of thought with using ChatGPT does seem worrying though.
> She asks him to make it shorter
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?
Maybe English is not their first language, and their native tongue is gendered.
I wonder if people had the same reaction when children started using calculators.
Or slide rule! That devil, it wrote the homework of our granddads!
I really don’t like that one calls AI / ChatGPT etc for ‘him’ or ‘her’ - it’s a machine!!!, not a human. It’s wrong in so many ways.
And it’s a lot more A than I :-D
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.
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.
Invert the class format: Homework should be done in class on pencil/paper or locked down Chromebooks, and lectures can be watched on video at home.
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.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium [2]: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/
Or just do everything in class. Out of class work should go away entirely.
But then how will kids learn to use ChatGPT?
There is not much special to learn if you already know how to write and think.
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.
Yeah this did not work for me in college and it certainly would not have worked in school for me
Invert. Always invert. Have the children learn at home (videos, text, etc) and do the homework in class.
No. Do it all in school. Let children have a childhood at home.
Do we also invert back to homework at home after a few years?
> 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.
"iterative prompt engineering is super effective".
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...
Solving a problem, is still work and involves learning.
Wow. Everything happens so fast now. Even condemning the next generation!
> She just copies and pastes stupidly with squid game going in the background.
11-year-old watching Squid Games?
Seems to indicate some lack of interested parenting.
Students do the work via ChatGPT. Teachers create assignments and grade them with ChatGPT. It's a giant self licking ice cream cone that doesn't educate anybody and fritters away a lot of wealth while using several nuclear plants worth of energy.
It does in the short term solve the problem that kids hate doing schoolwork and teachers hate doing their jobs.
Scare tactics designed to confirm what I already fear. The fact that the comments are full of the same Idiocracy "jokes" that people have been making since that movie started airing constantly on Comedy Central means the belief that the younger generation is stupider does not rely on the existence of ChatGPT to be held.
However, the inability to consider possible societal impacts of technology before rolling it out into the world free of regulation was the story of the 20th Century and I guess it's going to be the story of the 21st. Underneath the fear-mongering about AI is an honest belief that maybe we're not considering where this is all going. I'm not afraid of a super smart Gen AI that controls humanity, I'm afraid that people are going to outsource all decision-making to extremely stupid LLMs because we're seemingly evolutionarily wired to cut corners until we accidentally cut our fingers off.
If true, the child may simply be experimenting with ChatGPT as we all have.
The process described sounds like it is a lot more work than just answering the questions using knowledge.
But last month I went to court to fight a parking ticket and won thanks entirely to chatgpt
If cognitive brain-computer interfaces come in the next decade, these kids will be fine.
If not, they’re f*ked.
11yrs old now means 2013. That's Gen Alpha, not Gen Z.
And kids born from this year on are Gen Beta. (Expect lots of meme s about that in 5-10 yrs)
Also, people have been making the same argument about calculators since they've become mainstream in (I think) the 90s.
Lazy kids are gonna be lazy, that's just a fact of life
I find "homework" more disturbing than kids figuring out ways to subvert the system they're forced into. Offloading state mandated education on parents without compensating for it is quite the policy, and likely accepted because most parents are afraid their kids will end up in misery if they refuse to or can't obey.
If this is true then she would fail every test and exam.
Is this a ChatGPT problem or a family system problem? My child is eight years old and writes significantly better than the writer. Her mom and I value education, reading and writing so we work with her throughout the school year.
If an older sibling writes that poorly, I feel there are other things going on than overreliance on technology. I hope she makes it through this because the world is becoming increasingly hostile to people with poor literacy.
Gen Alpha? Is this already a thing?
Believe it or not as of 5 days ago we're up to generation Beta.
remember when calculators were "from the devil" ? what I mean to ask is: which activities have slippery slopes and which don't?
I'm transitioning to teaching math after a 30-year career as an engineer. I am really conflicted about the use of LLMs for homework.
One thing we *for sure* know that employers are going to want is that one employee does the work of 10 using llms. A
I'm wondering, why don't we give the employers what they want? Why not teach the kids to be super-effective with alms, and then We just give the kids 10x the amount of homework and tell them to get it done anyway they want to?
Sounds rough, but that's the reality which almost every creative writing professional is facing right now. And as soon as the technology makes it feasible, that's the reality that every software engineer is going to be facing. All this talk about 10x engineers...employers are going to expect all of us to be 10x engineers.
I mean, imagine a gym class which teaches kids how to run down an antelope. Because for 200,000 years running down an antelope was a core survival skill, and just because we had supermarkets doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to live off the land.
From John Henry vs. the Steam Hammer, to accountants using spreadsheets in the 80s, the whole story of technology is making 1 person able to do the work of 10. There's no use trying to pretend LLMs didn't happen. They happened, and they are not going away.
The funniest thing here is the complete disconnect with what is really going on. It's been ignored for years, but now it's a bit more obvious.
What is the point of homework? It's supposed to be self-directed learning and reinforcement.
But what is homework really? It's often confusing. It's time-consuming; you already spent 8 hours at school, and now you're spending more hours "at school" at home. If you can't get it, you have to hope your family members will help you (many can't or won't or simply aren't there, for many reasons). It takes a whole day (or more) to get the school's feedback and help (if it's available). And it's never fun.
Growing up, it took me countless hours to work through 10 math problems, because I had a learning disability. I find processing abstract non-visual information very hard. It made it worse that I had no practical problems to work through, no visual or audible feedback, no different ways to look at the problem. The school didn't care and the homework didn't change just for me. My parents sat with me for hours but my brain just wouldn't work.
For years I was given 1-on-1 tutoring, where the tutor struggled to get me to focus and try to solve the simplest things. At 15, I learned programming and developed computer programs in order to try to figure out the problems and answer them (if I could figure out how it worked in code, that would explain it enough that I could understand). It took longer, but I could actually understand them if I gave myself a different way of looking at and solving the problem. And for some reason, I, a child, was the person who had to figure out my own learning models and alternatives; the god damn "professionals" would be fine with me banging my head against a wall and failing.
ChatGPT isn't the problem. Homework is just stupid. This rote abstract learning model applied uniformly to everyone is stupid. The giant amount of time needed after already spending all day at school is stupid. The things we are forced to learn at school, which we promptly forget, are stupid. Young people's education itself is stupid.
Here I am, a 40 year old man, forgotten almost everything I learned in school. Yet I make a good salary, I can take care of myself. And I don't solve math problems manually, I ask a computer to solve them for me. Because why the hell would I do an error-prone human task manually when a machine will do it right? In fact, I am learning math right now, because I am building a shed and other wood projects. I've learned more about geometry and trig in the past 2 weeks than in the past 40 years, because I have a real-world thing that I can understand, and something fun to work on that makes me proud when I finish it. It's self-directed, and I'm using a ton of resources on the internet to figure it out, but I'm doing it. It's sinking in. If I had that as a kid, I'd be a damn math genius by now.
... and the OP did nothing about the situation except post it on the internet.
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.
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 bet you were one of the ones that was smart enough to not copy/paste the whole article so it was easily recognized tho.
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!
If that’s a point, I’m a line.
Idiocracy was not supposed to be a documentary.
Welcome to Costco, I love you
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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.
If someone's argument is solely an analogy, it has zero value
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".
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.
To play the devils advocate, on some calculators 9+3x2=24
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.
my point exactly
Ahh, so we just need an RPN variant of LLMs to avoid any ambiguity .
Verbs at the end. You must simply all your questions like a German ask.
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.
Can a calculator help you solve the word problem aspect? Stop pretending like LLMs are the same as a calculator or an abacus
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.
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...
Not even close to the same thing.
Not at all comparable.
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.
I didn’t do any homework, ever. I refused to do it on constitutional grounds.
I quit school altogether. I was okay.
I became an emancipated minor and I’ve been working in the software field since the age of 16. I’ve written two books and my third will be published by Wiley, soon.
Involuntary homework assignments have not led to an educated world. All ChatGPT is doing is making it easier to ignore pointless assignments.
I hate to be that guy, but if you're going to criticise someone else's intellectual ability, it might be worth ensuring your argument is presented in a form that is more than barely literate.
He's overreacting. Its a matter of perspective. From the perspective of most of us here, asking ChatGPT to convert 3 minutes to seconds sounds trivial. We can do this conversion in our heads effortlessly in a fraction of a second. Because we've been doing it our entire lives on a daily basis. But for an 11-year-old kid, it can be a challenge. Why bother straining your brain if you can just ask ChatGPT... We are wired to avoid thinking and take the easy path. I bet that the things he's asking ChatGPT will appear equally trivial to somebody else.
The best way to handle this would be to talk to her and convince her to not use ChatGPT...
I'm old enough to remember when calculators in schools were really controversial.
Some time, between then, and now, they started mandating graphing calculators.
I know that many universities now assume that everyone uses word processors, and have a zero-tolerance stance on typos.
Someone else posted an article, where the person was complaining about Apple (always a crowd-pleaser), and quoted Steve Jobs, talking about how bicycles acted as "force multipliers" for human efficiency, and compared the personal computer to that.
LLMs are here. Can't put that genie back in the bottle (sorry Jafar). They are now a part of the landscape, and we're still in the old "big iron" phase. They will become much better, pretty quickly.
Kids will need to work with them.
I find things like this to be great, because they free me up to learn more stuff. They raise the baseline.
People think that primitive folks were "dumber" than we are now. This was almost certainly not the case. They just didn't have the infrastructure that we have (dadburn kids, with their fancy "wheels," and "fire." Humpfh), and our kids will have a far more powerful infrastructure than we do.
I'm fairly hopeful. If we can keep from blowing ourselves up, I think we'll be fine.
People have felt the same way about waning handwriting skills and reliance on calculators.
The truth is the way humans process information has been radically altered by LLMs and we're in the absolute infancy of understanding what that means. It is going to be far more disruptive than the keyboard or calculator. As we discover the implications, we are repeatedly going to find ourselves disturbed and disoriented. There are skeptics who think it's all hype and that current approaches are a dead end. Even if that were true, I'm 100% convinced that even if AI didn't meaningfully improve on today's capabilities, it will still be incredibly disruptive.
Buckle up.
There will be 2 categories of winners of the AI revolution: the quick and the deep.
This poster's little sister is "the quick". She is using AI intuitively and aggressively. Whether it's right or wrong isn't important, because if the payoffs of it being right are more than the costs of it being wrong, she will be vastly more productive than people who are not using AI. A lot of the thinking school has traditionally trained us to do is officially commoditized.
"The deep" are people with strong conceptual understanding of the problems to which they are applying AI and/or strong understanding of the AI itself. They will use AI to create things that didn't exist before. They will take seriously the risk management (although, they will still not be able to successfully predict all unintended consequences).
People will benefit in the new world proportional to their ability to create or extract value.
> "The deep" are people with strong conceptual understanding of the problems to which they are applying AI and/or strong understanding of the AI itself. They will use AI to create things that didn't exist before. They will take seriously the risk management (although, they will still not be able to successfully predict all unintended consequences).
Why would these people not just skip the AI part entirely, then?
Implicit in my argument is the idea that GenAI is a foundational building block of all sorts of innovations that people will come up with. I acknowledge that there are people who don't believe this.
AI multiplies your existing capabilities if used properly.