chapotraphouse

Yeah cheating was rampant when I was in school. I remember in my physics class there was a group who had access to each midterm and final exam and would cheat. They wouldn't share with anyone else and sure as shit weren't going to say how they got ahold of the tests. Most of us were irritated because A) we actually did the work of learning the material; B) everything was graded on curve.

Professor was trying to figure out who they were, but you can't just accuse people of something that could get them expelled just because they got a 91% on a test.

They still get diploma and connect, they would be just the most boring cogs imaginable

My son is in 6th grade. He reads a lot and have kept him from device over use. He's no unsupervised time on the Internet, appropriate for a not yet 12 year old. His teachers love me. I love them.

Doesnt mean shit though, when some other boy sneaks in a burner phone to look up porn in the bathroom and show his peers. Any kid who has unrestricted access to the internet is going to be exposed to degeneracy, and I don't just mean the porn. My son understands screen addiction. Something I'm really proud of, but also sad about because he sees it in his peers.

The whole point is that A) the goal of school assignments isn't to get the right answer it's to learn to understand the surrounding concepts and how to get the right answer in a more generalizable way and B) the students aren't learning anything if its copy pasted from an AI. And C) frankly the LLM doesn't usually "solve" it. Its outputs are often easily distinguishable, poor answers, that just look good enough at first glance to hit submit.

What about an LLM producing plausible output (the one thing it's built to do) in response to a prompt (the question/assignment) actually means the coursework is poorly designed?

I genuinely want to know your thought process here. Is it just that teachers should be expected to outpace cheating technology or that you genuinely think anything that can convincingly be done by an LLM isn't worth having a human do it?

Writing an essay on a topic is not just a way of assessing your knowledge of the topic, it's great practice for communicating your ideas in a coherent polished form in general. Just because an LLM can write something that sometimes passes for a human-written essay doesn't mean that essays are useless now...

i haven't done long division by hand in years but it was still important to learn how math works even though we all carry a calculator around.

the basics are basic, extremely well understood, and covered in great detail, of course a stochastic parrot can regurgitate them.

It's not actually being solved, an imitation of a solution is being presented. Kids using AI sludge is the same as if their parents did all their work for them. Changing the coursework to ensure their parents or machine sludge aren't doing it for them is going to turn schoolwork more and more into multiple choice exams with linear thinking.

I have a very good friend who totally ghostwrote the master's thesis of a Russian oligarch's failson when we were all in grad school. My friend and I were doing PhDs in topics pretty closely related to the failson's master's (my friend's dissertation topic was pretty much bang-on). The guy paid my friend a low four figures amount for him to do it; the topic was an obscure technical field, and the guy was clearly just getting the credential to pad his CV. This kind of thing has always been around--ChatGPT has just sort of democratized it.

I'm honestly more worried about the increasing number of people who are using ChatGPT as a substitute for friends or soft skills. The people who are using it to do their essays probably wouldn't have written particularly scintillating essays even if they didn't have it (or would have found some other way to cheat). Lots and lots of ordinary people are using it as a socialization outlet, though, and we don't know what effect that's having.