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.
“You can use AI such as ChatGPT or Copilot on your senior projects, just make sure the code works, you understand it enough to document it, and your sponsor is ok with external code use” - paraphrased from my Software Engineering department head about our senior capstone projects.
“I have the kids ask ChatGPT for an essay and then have the (8th grade) kids treat it like a rough draft so they have practice editing it” - my English teacher Father
The best way to handle it is to embrace and use it to augment your skills, much like calculators in math classes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A calculator calculates. An AI bullshits.
The only thing ChatGPT can actually do might be marketing speeches, since they are nonsensical to start with and made by things pretending to be humans.
This video only takes up the entire screen. Why can’t it be bigger?
Clearly an article written to fit a headline rather than the other way around. They talk about use in education settings as a sign that the use cases are limited, despite accounting for only a 12% increase.
In other news, pencil use is up 100% in the last month, signaling that pencils have limited use cases and are only good for cheating on homework.
Bro the capability of a pencil is a far better medium to expresses concepts. One could argue that a pencils ability to express shades of grey exceeds the capability of the pen. In some ways the pen has an effect of finality.
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Also, not necessarily cheating even if used for school. I have a college professor that words homework so weird, I run it through ChatGPT to “translate”
The data is in: Business Insider is mainly a tool.
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However, if usage is only recovering because students are back, that may be a bad sign because it suggests there’s a limited range of use cases for ChatGPT and other AI-powered chatbots.
Or maybe kids have always been the early adopters for computer tech?
At work when I write certain emails or code snippets I’ll paste them into ChatGPT and ask it to make the email sound “more professional” or “optimize this code.” ChatGPT also talks to me like SHODAN from System Shock 😆
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Prompt better. I use it extensively and the code I get is usually a good start. But it can’t do anything.
Handwritten assignments are going to make a comeback. It’s hard to cheat through an essay you have to write on the spot.
Yeah I mean just make homework worthless and the cams everything.
Pretty simple. College professors have been doing this forever
discussion in here looking like old r/teenagers with predictable takes
So the homework is encouraging kids to explore a real life tool and the teacher can look at the result and corrects any issue with the result thus guiding the students towards a appropriate usage.
It’s a good thing.
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By that time it’s going to be an app on our neural implant.
Just like when we were growing up the teachers said we wouldn’t always have a calculator. They need to learn to use the tool responsibly, just like Wikipedia.
you can’t be serious
Would you rather have them only use it outside of school work where no one will point out that it can be wrong? Teachers could also ask questions on the studied subject in class to teach student that by copy pasting the output they are not learning much.
ChatGPT exist, kid will use it. Should adults guide them?
Future generations learning how to utilize powerful new technologies is a bad thing now?
Only if you don’t have the patience to use Chatgpt properly.
Egh Moody adults are ignorant to how it works, how to prompt well, and are scared of using it at work.
Kids are going to gobble that shit up. It’s being used for cheating until the kids get into the workforce.
If anything, people who like chatGPT are the ones ignorant of how it works (spoiler: it doesn’t).
And kids with their understanding of technology being limited to youtube and tiktok have no clue about what an AI is. They see it, like most people, as a magic black box that is incredibly smart. Apart from being a black box, none of that is true.
Literally unusable.
Yeah, shitty article. AI is the same as calculators. So what! Kids don’t have to waste mental cycles with your tedious and borderline sadistic amounts of homework. Go fly a kite.
edit: clarification
I never said anything to the contrary. Using ti86 was cheating when I was in school, now it’s taught in 6th grade.
I was agreeing and speaking more at the article. Sorry for the confusion :)
I feel this is a political issue on the understanding of ai. It is a powerful tool and all powerful tools garner a certain amount of fear. Ultimately the protests against ai will fail and if history has taught us anything that protesting efficiency will be futile.
I’m not sure whether or not to call my daughter lucky that she couldn’t get away with this on her school-issued Chromebook, but it’s probably for the best.
