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

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

  • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.worldEnglish
    25·
    1 year ago

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

    • June@lemm.eeEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

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

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

    • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.eeEnglish
      41·
      1 year ago

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

      • grabyourmotherskeys@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        1 year ago

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

        • Moobythegoldensock@lemm.eeEnglish
          41·
          1 year ago

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

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

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

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