Yes yet there is indeed a deeper point. If the AI is to be used as a teaching tool it still has to give genuinely useful advice. No good sounding advice that might actually still be wrong. LLMs can feed wrong final answers but they can also make poor suggestions on the process itself too. So there are both problematic, how the tool is used but also its intrinsic limitations.

No worries. Somehow I use it quite often nowadays

GPTs are designed with translation in mind, so I could see it being extremely useful in providing me instruction on a topic in a non-English native language.

But they haven’t been around long enough for the novelty factor to wear off.

It’s like computers in the 1980s… people played Oregon Trail on them, but they didn’t really help much with general education.

Fast forward to today, and computers are the core of many facets of education, allowing students to learn knowledge and skills that they’d otherwise have no access to.

GPTs will eventually go the same way.

Ah thanks, that does appear to be the case.

When you automate these processes you lose the experience. I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t parse information as well as you can now, if you had access to chat GPT.

It’s had to get better at solving your problems if something else does it for you.

Also the reliability of these systems is poor, and they’re specifically trained to produce output that appears correct. Not actually is correct.

I remember teachers telling us not to trust the calculators. What if we hit the wrong key? Lol

Some things never change.

This is true for the whole internet, not only AI Chatbots. Kids need to get teached that there is BS around. In fact kids had to learn that even pre-internet. Every human has to learn that you can not blindly trust anything, that one has to think critically. This is nothing new. AI chatbots just show how flawed human education is these days.

Yeah it’s like if you had a calculator and 10% of the time it gave you the wrong answer. Would that be a good tool for learning? We should be careful when using these tools and understand their limitations. Gen AI may give you an answer that happens to be correct some of the time (maybe even most of the time!) but they do not have the ability to actually reason. This is why they give back answers that we understand intuitively are incorrect (like putting glue on pizza), but sometimes the mistakes can be less intuitive or subtle which is worse in my opinion.

Ask your calculator what 1-(1-1e-99) is and see if it never halucinates (confidently gives an incorrect answer) still.

are all just a tool
just a tool
it’s just a tool
a tool is a tool
all are just tools
it’s no more than a tool
it’s just a tool
it’s a tool we can use
one of our many tools
it’s only a tool
these are just tools
a tool for thee, a tool for me

guns don’t kill people, people kill people
the solution is simple:
teach drunk people not to shoot their guns so much
unless they want to
that is the American way

tanks don’t kill people, people kill people
the solution is simple:
teach drunk people not to shoot their tanks so much
the barista who offered them soy milk
wasn’t implying anything about their T levels
that is the American way

Thanks for reminding me that AI is just tools, friend.
My memory is not so good.
I often can’t
remember

It’s the other way round: Education makes for less gullible people and for workers that demand more rights more freely and easily - and then those are coming for their yachts…

The point of assignments is to help study for your test.

Homework is forced study. If you’re just handed the answers, you will do shit on the test.

I would like to see it compared with human tutors too. This could be a more affordable alternative for students who need help outside of the classroom but can’t afford paid tutoring.

The researchers believe the problem is that students are using the chatbot as a “crutch.” When they analyzed the questions that students typed into ChatGPT, students often simply asked for the answer. Students were not building the skills that come from solving the problems themselves.

I did? What are you trying to say?

Can I blame the tech for using massive amounts of electricity, making e.g. Ireland use more fossil fuels again?

The study is still valuable, this is a math class not a technology class, so understanding it’s impact is important.

Yea I know, which is why I said it may become a harsh battle. Not being in education, it really seems like a difficult situation. My broader point about the harsh battle was that if it becomes well known that LLMs are bad for a child’s development, then there’ll be a good amount of anxiety from parents etc.

As someone who has taught math to students in a classroom, unless you have at least a basic understanding of HOW the numbers are supposed to work, the tool - a calculator - is useless. While getting the correct answer is important, I was more concerned with HOW you got that answer. Because if you know how you got that answer, then your ability to get the correct answer skyrockets.

Because doing it your way leads to blindly relying on AI and believing those answers are always right. Because it’s just a tool right?

The point of learning isn’t just access to that information later. That basic understanding gets built on all the way up through the end of your education, and is the base to all sorts of real world application.

There’s no overlap at all between people who can’t pass a test without an LLM and people who understand the material.

The main goal of learning is learning how to learn, or learning how to figure new things out. If “a tool can do it better, so there is no point in not allowing it” was the metric, we would be doing a disservice because no one would understand why things work the way they do, and thus be less equipped to further our knowledge.

This is why I think common core, at least for math, is such a good thing because it teaches you methods that help you intuitively figure out how to get to the answer, rather than some mindless set of steps that gets you to the answer.

This is ridiculous. The world doesn’t have to bend the knee to LLMs, they’re supposed to be useful tools to solve problems.

And I don’t see why asking them to help with math problems would be unreasonable.

And even if the formulation of the test was not done the right way, your argument is still invalid. LLMs were being used as an aid. The test wasn’t given to the LLM directly. But students failed to use the tool to their advantage.

This is yet another hint that the grift doesn’t actually serve people.

Another thing these bullshit machines can’t do! The list is getting pretty long.

About the calculator argument… Well, the calculator is still used in class, because it makes sense in certain contexts. But nobody ever sold calculators saying they would teach you math and would be a do-everything machine.

It all depends on how and what you ask it, plus an element of randomness. Remember that it’s essentially a massive text predictor. The same question asked in different ways can lead it into predicting text based on different conversations it trained on. There’s a ton of people talking about python, some know it well, others not as well. And the LLM can end up giving some kind of hybrid of multiple other answers.

It doesn’t understand anything, it’s just built a massive network of correlations such that if you type “Python”, it will “want” to “talk” about scripting or snakes (just tried it, it preferred the scripting language, even when I said “snake”, it asked me if I wanted help implementing the snake game in Python 😂).

So it is very possible for it to give accurate responses sometimes and wildly different responses in other times. Like with the African countries that start with “K” question, I’ve seen reasonable responses and meme ones. It’s even said there are none while also acknowledging Kenya in the same response.

Students first need to learn to:

1. Break down the line of code, then
2. Ask the right questions

The student in question probably didn’t develop the mental faculties required to think, “Hmm… what the ‘f’?”

A similar thingy happened to me having to teach a BTech grad with 2 years of prior exp. At first, I found it hard to believe how someone couldn’t ask such questions from themselves, by themselves. I am repeatedly dumbfounded at how someone manages to be so ignorant of something they are typing and recently realising (after interaction with multiple such people) that this is actually the norm^[1].

There is nothing wrong with it. He just didn’t know what it meant after using it for a little over a month.