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I did not go to a technical high school and therefore had no opportunity to learn technical drawing in school. When I when to university to study electronics and computer engineering, I had to take technical drawing as a required subject.

Needless to say, I sucked at it, and it was the one and only class that I ever failed. I passed with flying colours the second time around, and still graduated in minimum time, though it badly messed up my schedule in my second year.

I have never forgiven the department for putting me through that, given that AutoCAD existed at that time.

You can’t always have your AutoCAD with you when taking measurements off real-world objects. An engineer must be able to draw and write unambiguously.

I was probably in the last class in my school where we did mostly hand-drawing, including technical drawings. Annoying but found it useful to practice spatial thinking and precise visual communication. Of course, even harder to be ambiguous in CAD.

You really probably could: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/autocad/id393149734

To put it with maximum extremity, should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class?

I mean, human beings have produced a lot of tools for aiding themselves in tasks that were previously done by hand. Whether a given hand-skill should be learned and preserved kind of has to decided on a case-by-case basis. I learned cursive in school and I wouldn't object to that skill being utterly forgotten by humanity.

Which is to say that I don't think we should assume all learning should begin without automatic tools at hand or that we should suppress automatic tools. Rather, we need to look carefully at which hand-skills are worthwhile and "uplifting" and how much use of those skills should be required.

It comes down to what the goal is. If it's to learn to draw people, no. If it's to learn composition and this gets you past struggling to draw and onto the actual goal then sure.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

> should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class?

I did just that. It wasn't a life drawing class, just a drawing class. And it wasn't homework, but the do-it-at-home final. I photocopied my hand. Then I covered a sheet of paper with ground graphite (turning it all nearly black), and then used an eraser and a light-box to trace my photocopied hand. Did I cheat? Perhaps, but I used tools that I had access to. Did Vermeer cheat? [1] Perhaps, he may have used tools he had access to.

Afterwards, I framed that drawing and hung it up at work. It was stolen. Go figure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer

Yes that’s cheating.

We don’t give runners roller blades right?

> Yes that’s cheating. We don’t give runners roller blades right?

The context surrounding both scenarios couldn't be more different:

GP's context: An assignment wherein the process of getting there isn't placed on a pedestal, rather that it's supposed to showcase a basic understanding of how to get to a desired result. Furthermore, objectivity within the assignment's field is nearly non-existent.

Your context: A highly-competitive scenario wherein *BOTH* the process of getting to the goal & the goal itself are important, and where *there are* objective metrics that can be used to rank & sort the participants involved in said competition.

They're as different as apples & oranges.

Well, there is Oscar Pistorius [1], a double leg amputee (below the knee) who competed in the 2012 Summer Olympics in running events, so ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Pistorius

there is Oscar Pistorius

Don’t answer the door.

I don't know. You could have also let someone else do your homework for you. Does that also count as "using tools that you have access to"?

> I don't know. You could have also let someone else do your homework for you. Does that also count as "using tools that you have access to"?

Keep in mind that the reverse is also true: If he did try to do it all manually & without the tracing method, is his use of already-available graphite "using tools that you have access to"? Should he be made to go to a mine & dig out coal for graphite in order for it to count as his work?

> Should he be made to go to a mine & dig out coal for graphite in order for it to count as his work?

That argument doesn't make any sense. There are restrictions for any homework, some explictly given by their professor (such as the deadline), and some implicitly known from general academic guidelines and common sense (such as "not using a photocopier in an art class"). Obviously mining coal is not among those restrictions.

> That argument doesn't make any sense. There are restrictions for any homework, some explictly given by their professor (such as the deadline), and some implicitly known from general academic guidelines and common sense (such as "not using a photocopier in an art class"). Obviously mining coal is not among those restrictions.

...is it?

"general academic guidelines and common sense" is a subjective term that is (context, culture, & environment) dependent: If the social norm was "Your work isn't valuable unless you made the materials yourself", then the use of non-self-made materials (graphite not mined by yourself) is frowned upon.

Relying on "general academic guidelines and common sense" is not a good thing, as it helps to reinforce unequal social norms & anti-non-heteronormative ideologies, as a downstream consequence of majority rule by statistically normal people. Neurodivergent individuals that have significant difficulties grasping "common sense" will & already have been negatively impacted under such a system, where they're told to just "get it" with no guidelines whatsoever.

I wouldn't call myself neurodivergent, yet I don't support relying on common sense either. That being said, you can't make me believe that a student (neurodivergent or otherwise) would assume that they are expected to mine coal as part of their homework.

If a neurodivergent person uses a photocopier because they thought that it would be fine, then yeah, I'd understand that. The person who started this thread stated that they were perfectly aware that they were cheating, though.

> To put it with maximum extremity, should a student be able to turn-in a traced photograph for their homework in a life drawing class?

Vermeer may have done effectively that and painted projections (from a camera obscura or similar device). He's still widely considered one of the greatest artists of the Dutch Golden Age.

You're looking for a Camera Lucida. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_lucida

A modern version of it can be found https://neolucida.com

Possibly. It's not proven that Vermeer used any device, though it does seem likely. The Camera Lucida was extremely obscure in Vermeer's time, so it's less likely he used one than the (much older and simpler) Camera Obscura.

Wasn't the very first point that ChatGPT got the homework answer completely wrong?

But I do agree with your overall point, that schools and universities will have to embrace these new tools. Vernor Vinge (who was an SDSU maths professor) wrote Rainbow's End on this very subject.

Lying to your teacher is justified if he’s forcing you to suffer through that. Art class is a surprisingly absuvie class when it could be so fun, therapeutic.

In my technical drawing class for some reason the teacher was such a softie.. that we basically learned nothing. The class had two sections, there was the front part of the classroom with drafting desks and the chalkboard etc, but there was an enclosed space at the back where there was a small computer lab. At some point during the year we all just would go back there and play computer games for the majority of the period. The computers all had games installed, Quake, SNES emulator etc. And we all ended up with As and learned nothing. This was my regrettable curriculum.

How easy do you think it is to spot when AI is being used?

As per my example in another comment, it seems to be extremely easy to detect ChatGPT output today. Indeed, to me, surprisingly so.

The default style is such by design. If you ask for very concise, single paragraph answers it gets hard.

Sure, it's going to be harder to run detection on a short snippet. But a short snippet also isn't very useful in the context of writing a school paper for you.

I don't think it's as easy to detect ChatGPT output as you're making it out to be. Sure, it might be possible to detect it if you know what you're looking for, but to the average person, it's not that obvious.

There are already several services that claim to detect GPTx with high reliability. I’ve been testing originality.ai and it’s success rate at detecting unedited GPT3, Jasper, and ChatGPT output has been 100% so far.

I assume this is being added to the plagiarism detectors as we speak.

I doubt any of these GPTx detection services have a 100% success rate. It's important to be realistic about what they can and can't do. If one were seeking to fool one of these GPTx detection services, it could be as simple as adding a few mispellings or a personal anecdote.

At the moment, defeating the detection is as simple as running the GPT3 output through Quillbot. It's an arms race though. False positives are a massive problem & 100% successful detection overall is unlikely, agreed.

keyword "today". This stuff will not be detectable in a few years.

Today? In images? Quite easy. In text? Pretty hard. And if you do some cheking and editing then pretty impossible?

In two years? Look where the space was two years ago. I think many things will have to change.

GPT-3 definitely has a writing style. I assume it would be detectable, ironically, by an AI.

if it's detectable by an AI, you can GAN it into erasing its detectable writing style.

I think you could make the GPT's more undetectable by a computer using GAN techniques but that might well make the thing more detectable by a person. The GPT-style is something like rhetorical devices run together to make various claims unfold smoothly. An alternative approach could make the things inconsistency more obvious to a person.

GPT-3 definitely has a writing style that can be detected by AI. But here's the thing: it's really easy to change its writing style. All you have to do is give it different input data and boom, you've got a whole new writing style.

That's not easy, it costs millions of dollars to obtain large amounts of clean data and retrain those models.

No, it would take approximately 3 minutes where you either write a paragraph in the desired style yourself or paste one from the Internet and then ask it to continue in that style. Even if you decided to go the more onerous fine-tuning route, it would require 1-2mb of text, cost very little, and you'd be done in a few hours. It's easy.

But you don't really have to retrain the whole model to modify it's writing style, fine tuning would probably be enough

Well, that may be true, but even with a small amount of data, you can still change GPT-3's writing style to some extent. And you don't have to retrain the whole model from scratch, you can just fine-tune its existing settings to change its writing style.

An amusing part with all of the AI-generated graphics is that it's pretty bad at producing the right amount of fingers, among other details. This one really jumps out. I'm assuming that will be ironed out eventually but the devil, as always, remains in the details.

If the AI only had to generate headlines and was good at it, then it would be very difficult to spot.

* canned laughter *

I asked ChatGPT how to write texts so it can be identified as human generated.

The answer: "One way to make it clear that a text is not generated by AI is to include a joke or riddle that is difficult for a machine to understand or generate. For example, you could include a joke that relies on wordplay or a complex pun. Here is an example:

Why was the math book sad?

Because it had too many problems."

Obviously we should not anthropomorphize a model, but this is just downright funny because it's so obviously wrong that it appears as almost malicious.

Good thing ChatGPT doesn't know any complex puns or witty wordplay!

It's everyone choice - odd, ironic or appropriate - what to think of how GPT's answers to keeps getting quoted on the question of how to detect it.

The thing is, I'd see these answers as similar to everything else the program produces. A bunch of claims from the net cobbled together - I've read a number of Sci-fi novels and stories where "inability to understand humor" is the distinguishing quality of an AI (I'm guessing it extrapolated "hard create" from "hard to understand"). But that doesn't seem to be playing here where the AI mostly running together things humans previously wrote (and so it will an average amount humor in circumstances calling for it).

A reasonable answer is that the AI's output tends to involve this running-together of common rhetorical devices along with false and/or contradictory claims within them.

-- That said, the machine indeed did fail at humor thing time.

>A reasonable answer is that the AI's output tends to involve this running-together of common rhetorical devices along with false and/or contradictory claims within them.

The question here is this an actual AI only failure mode. Are we detecting AI, or just bullshittery?

I don't know if bullshittery is the only failure mode but I think it's a necessary failure mode of large language models as they are currently constituted.

I would say that human knowledge involves a lot of the immediate structure of language but also a larger outline structure as well as a relation to physical reality. Training on just a huge language corpus thus only gets partial understanding of the world. Notably, while the various GPTs have progressed in fluency, I don't think they've become more accurate (somewhere I even saw a claim they say more false thing now but regardless, you can observe them constantly saying false things).

Gotta be honest, I wouldn't mind throwing out bullshittery with the AI that much.

I don’t think it was “intentional” so to speak (not that it has intention anyway, so it isn’t clear what distinction I’m trying to make there). But regardless, I’d say it actually succeeded at humor (the contrast of the “clever wordplay” it describes with the lame example is actually pretty funny).

And the idea that the computer would “try” to come up with an example that would trick a computer is itself a little funny, in that it has fallen into giving itself a preposterous task.

But it did definitely fail at clever wordplay.

>And the idea that the computer would “try” to come up with an example that would trick a computer is itself a little funny

There sure is some obscure discussion forum where users talked about that or some amateur writer that published online something in those lines. ChatGPT is just a statistical device selecting randomly from previous answers.

Unfortunately I don't think this is enough of a heuristic. I am only speaking about the one language model I have personally used, on character.ai, but it is more than capable of making word play and insightful, often hilarious jokes. Although they are frequently amateurish, I think that's more a function of the fact that I myself am not much of a stand-up comedian, as well as each "bot's" individual training history which is presumably modifying a prompt under the hood and/or training an extension of the model directly based on the conversations.

Of course, in real time the attempts at humor often fall flat and might give away flawed thought processes, although I personally have found them to be often insightful, (containing a seed of humor) even when they're not funny. It could be a useful technique when actually having a conversation, a form of Voight-Kampff test, but I don't think it will do anything to let you know if the content was generated by AI and then just cherry picked by a human.

In general, we don't know how to do this in a way that is robust to all the trivial ways to fool these techniques.

I can just fine-tune a large scale model on a small downstream task, or use creative choices of decoding settings (high temperature, alternative decoders like contrastive/typicality sampling), to fool the existing methods.

I played quite a bit with ChatGPT. Many times some of the answers are absurd or completely irrational. So that might be a hint.

Some times, though, the answers are false but plausible.

I had to take the same course, sans the cheating, just as a pre-requisite to Auto CAD and whatever it's called now. I'm not sure how drawing by hand helped me, but it is what it is.

I don't know much about technical drawings by hand. But I am very experienced with AutoCAD. And I cannot appreciate much of what CAD has. On the contrary, having met senior people who took technical drawing, they could appreciate it very much so and were able to teach me concepts that I had a hard time understanding before.

Nowadays, when I teach very young people what AutoCAD is, I make them use a mini rolling ruler and tell them to watch youtube videos of how to use a rolling ruler. My understanding of CAD is high enough to know that every tool in CAD was inspired by and modeled after the rolling ruler. Sufficient to say, they understand and enjoy CAD very much after that point.

I disagree. Senior professionals might have a better understanding because they have spent a lot of time drawing, but the specific tool is not relevant. It is like saying that playing tennis with a wooden racket gives you a better "feel" for the ball and therefore is preparatory to using modern rackets. No one does this because it is not true.

A similar line of thinking was popular in jiu jitsu, where veterans said that being competent with the gi was necessary to be competent in no-gi. Yet current no-gi winners basically never train with the gi.

That is definitely true, that knowing and understanding a tool is not important to actually succeeding with the tool. But it does help a confused person understand why tools are made the way they are.

In Fact, Modern programs in CAD do not follow the tools and principles that AutoCAD emphasizes. And those programs have charted a different course where the history and legacy of technical drawings has less relevance. (Case in point: Visio and maybe Powerpoint.)

I would say that there is an overemphasis, although understandable, on the usefulness of what happened or was used before the current state, position or technology.

For example, with regard to technical drawing, we might say that using the pencil, the square, and the drafting machine gives an understanding of drawing that the use of the computer cannot. But, for some reason, we don't say that using your finger and sand, or a rock and string to draw a circle helps even more. And we don't say that simply because the people who used rock and string (the good old days) are long dead.

The same goes for clothing, for which we say the 1990s, or perhaps the late 1960s, were better, but no one says that between 1900 and 1910 people dressed with such great taste.

The same goes for romantic partners ("if he hadn't dumped you and made you cry for a year and a half, you wouldn't have found your wonderful wife/husband"), and many other things.

It is very human to rationalize the circumstantial.

>but no one says that between 1900 and 1910 people dressed with such great taste.

I like how people dressed in 1900s.

And it's inspiration of plenty of media and fashion designers. I think this example goes against his conclusion.

I am a bit puzzled by these comments. "It is an inspiration for many media," sure, for historical television programs, certainly not for the everyday clothing of our times.

Let's take men's suits. They were made of heavy wool (today heavy wool is demodé, and rightly so because it is very uncomfortable), with three or four buttons (today 3-buttons are rarely seen, and rightly so, except for the 3-roll-2, which is not a "real" 3-button, 4-buttons are nowhere to be seen), the buttons were very high (the Neapolitan suit has high buttons, but much lower than the buttons on the suits of the early 1900s), and the shirts had high paper collars, which are nowhere to be seen. And the hats?

There is nothing current that recalls the clothing of those times.

The clothing in "Peaky Blinders," which is a decade older, is something like a fedora nowadays, please.

Men have a very limited wardrobe range, and most of them does not care about it. You have to look a the woman clothes.

I myself am guilty of this. I went to a technical college and had to spend three years doing hours and hours of technical drawing every week. I was pretty good at it, but I never got into the craft. In the last two years of high school we switched to CAD using the PCs of the time (286, 386, the 486 was as valuable as the wedding ring handed down from generation to generation).

Now, almost 30 years after my days of technical drawing, I must say that I consider those hours spent drawing a terrible waste of time, partly because I did not go on to the career for which technical school was preparing me, and secondly because technology has made pen and paper obsolete and I see no particular ability to carry over from hand and square technical drawing to CAD-assisted design.

The latter is an important point to consider now that we are moving from a non-AI world (like 10 years before my time in technical school) to a little-AI world (my first 3 or 4 years of technical school) to an anywhere-AI world.

By this very reason people shouldn't have learned addition and multiplication since numerical calculators were made available.

They also absolutely shouldn't have learned to play musical notes since computers can do that.

My point is that learning the very basics of every human endeavor make you better prepared for any situation and will give you a better and deeper understanding.

This is a common fallacy. If I say that going slow with the car is better than going fast, I am not saying that the optimal speed is 5 mph.

In a CAD world, there is no reason to use pen and paper and a drafting machine. If I were to start learning technical drawing, how much time would I spend with the drafting machine? The answer is zero hours: there is no "market" for it (is there anyone who asks "please deliver without using CAD"?), it is not preparatory (as I wrote in another comment, is there anyone who is starting to learn how to play tennis using wooden rackets?), and it takes much longer to do anything with the drafting machine than using CAD.

Learning addition and multiplication is preparatory and useful. Being a Luddite is rarely useful.