Comment by janeway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by janeway | Hacker News Reader

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I am delighted to hear that children are already adopting the new tech. Sure there will be kinks for a while where no one bothers with the reading or writing assignments. But shortly that will smooth out as everyone gets on even ground.

Writing those essays will become trivial and irrelevant and be replaced with more interesting tasks with the assistance of AI.

I always think of Star Trek; instead of long-division math questions they will learn skills like “computer, if the trajectory of this rouge planet is reversed and we assume that is was ejected after some massive explosion, calculate the possible causes based on previously observed similar events and report the top candidate cause and confidence interval”.

An example from my academic field: instead of biased, unreproducible research papers we could publish: [1] raw data, [2] hypothesis context, [3] model, [4] seed. The output result can be read based on your own AI chatbot preferences but the conclusion is consistent and reproducible.

But surely the point of essay writing is to learn how to structure your thoughts into a coherent argument? If students aren't doing this, how will they learn this skill?

Or just learning how to write - most people simply can't write well. It's great that people are learning how to carefully craft a Google search query to give them the results they want, but they'll never be able to write a vulnerable love letter to their wife.

The point then is that they won't have to anymore.

However, I also think that you learn by imitation. If you have a text assignment, and that you make a sloppy job, and get a bad grade, what did you learn? But if you do the same text assignment, and improve it by iterating several prompts, then at least you learn something.

Also, learning requires motivation. It's futile to compare learning methods if there is no motivation (e.g; we assume students want to cheat). If instead we assume motivation, and we lower the bar required for learning, then these students will learn more with AI than without.

The only point I'm worried about is about imagination. For instance, it's easy to ask AI for example of names, stories, etc. But there is also benefit in spending time searching these things yourself. Not sure what the tradeoff will be there.

People won't be required to write anymore? Are you high?

The problem with essays is that what they're asking people to do aren't actually what we want people to be able to do. Sure, you can get a chat bot to write out some arguments about why a character in a story might be female. But you can't get it to, say, write your own experiences, or write your own novel thoughts about something, or basically anything which the AI isn't already familiar with.

AI as a spell checker and maybe filler generator works. AI as an essay generator works. AI as a replacement for the stuff you'll actually want to use your writing skills for past school doesn't work.

Good point; the post even reinforces how the students couldn't use AI to do the whole assignment because in addition to writing the essay with ChatGPT, they also had to "write a reflection at the end on how the AI did". The AI has no meaningful idea of how it did, or how to reflect on a student's subjective experience using it.

> The point then is that they won't have to anymore.

They'll certainly still need to use rhetoric and argumentation throughout their lives. That's the point about writing essays as a pedagogical tool; it's not about learning how to write a 3x5 essay, but rather how to construct the arguments that go into that essay.

A decade from now, what happens when one of these students who coasted through school using AI-generated essays is asked to argue on-the-fly, like in a work meeting? What if it's for something high stakes, that could impact their employment or future job trajectory at theory company? You need to be able to develop an argument with logical, supporting evidence, and articulate the complete argument in a compelling, persuasive manner -- oftentimes, on-the-fly, out-loud.

It sounds pastiche to argue with a student that "you won't always have an AI to help you" but in contrast the with a calculator, there are truly scenarios where you definitely _will not_ be able to take the time to reach for an AI crutch to build your argument for you.

> If you have a text assignment...and get a bad grade, what did you learn?

Ideally you learned what mistakes you made and how to avoid them in the future. The reliability of this process will depend a lot on the teacher, but I don't see how putting AI in the mix really changes this. You will surely need to learn /something/ about writing before you could even begin to evaluate the quality of a ChatGPT essay.

>The point then is that they won't have to anymore.

One should not ever feel obligated to write a love letter, my dude.

In debate class. I’m not convinced that essay writing has ever been a good way of learning how to structure thoughts into a coherent argument. I think essays (especially the terrible 5-paragraph essay) exist mostly because they are easy to grade.

Essays are so static. I think a debate format where you are immediately challenged on your arguments or asked to elaborate would give a much better idea of how well the student has mastered the material.

I know it's easy to get caught up in a few sustained decades of peace and progress (for those that have had it) and imagine that we can always rely on the tools that make our lives easy today, but it's actually quite important that people have foundational skills.

I suspect that of we have a disaster big enough to lose these computer-based tools, good writing will be the least of our worries.

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