ChatGPT in Academic Writing
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One thing that it seems most of the profs find annoying is... they're aware that GPT can invent convincing sounding sources, so they're doing a lot more work verifying sources.
Commented this ^^ the other day on the UK students being able to use LLMs post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35028224
... The false positives won't be pretty. Especially for ESL students whose grasp of the language might make them sound a little too artificial.
> it's hard to know how much was written by GPT and how much was edited by the student
The smartest students won't even be suspected of using an AI model. They'll use the AI to do directed work, proofread and re-write as needed. Not really different than going through three revisions with different mentors for their college entrance essay...
If that’s what they’re using it for I propose that they’re meeting the learning objectives just as much as someone who did those things in a study group with their friends. Of course how acceptable that is depends on the context of the work.
I’d be interested if anyone has tried this and what their experiences were.
- is this text convincing? How can it be improved?
- rewrite the following passage for clarity. Target an audience of X level.
It’s like a more efficient version of grammarly, I don’t have any qualms with this use. Saves hours debating phrasing, and acts as a TA for getting initial feedback on whether you are missing the mark.
Do you honestly think you'll get into a philosophical debate so incredibly challenging that you'd need to fall back upon ChatGPT to argue on your behalf in the middle of say, the Australian bush??
And even if you did, RV Starlink is there to save the day.
ChatGPT doesn't "do work for you". ChatGPT is like having a subject matter expert by your side to guide you. And like every single person who has access to a subject matter expert, you're going to take away whatever you want, and leave whatever you don't. Lazy shitbags will be lazy shitbags with or without ChatGPT. But inquisitive people who want to soar with the eagles have an impossibly powerful tool at their disposal.
I'm either a fool who's able to get by with modern technology - or we're freeing up mental capacity to work on new ideas. ChatGPT is yet another tool, one which is demonstrating productivity improvements comparable to the launch of the internet IMO.
My mom (Rhonda, 64) is the shop steward at a deli counter and had this conversation with her fellow employee Janice (25y):
Janice: "Hey Rhonda, they want 2/3 of a pound of cheese. How much is that on the scale?"
Rhonda (mom): "Janice, that's .66 on the scale."
Janice: "Yea but why is it .66 on the scale if they want two thirds?"
Rhonda: "Janice, you don't have to worry about that, just know that two thirds is .66."
Janice: "Yeah, but HOW do you know that?"
Rhonda: "..."
I'm sure someone will say "Your mom is wrong because she should teach her fractions! What a huge jerk!" Note that this person has gone through high school, and children do this math regularly. What I am saying is, being numerate is useful at all levels of life, not just academic exercise.
The model is very easy to break down, all to learn something ONCE.
Here's the difference: You know fractions everywhere and you don't have to think about it more than 2s without your phone because you are math literate. OR Every time someone asks you something, you take 5s to pull out your phone type the numbers (hopefully correctly), and you get your decimal answer that you can hopefully interpret.
Which do you think is a better employee overall?
I have a particular axe to grind on this one, as the response "well I'll just look it up!" is so glib it throws the entire house out with the bathwater and the baby inside :).
For day to day math, needing a calculator to do the basics is like walking instead of flying. Mastery of the basics really pays off, especially for young students.
I have never used a calculator app on a phone, ever, at least I don't remember the last time I did. The only times where I need to add up a large set of numbers, I get in front of a computer and use a python repl or a spreadsheet, but even then I "pre-stage" the calculation by doing approximations in my head, so I'm sort of ready.
Not letting your tools think for you is how you distinguish a professional from someone who can just push buttons. Don't disservice yourself by allowing yourself to never really learn to the limit of your abilities.
This is a hilariously bad take. I'm sorry how long does it take to "punch in numbers"? Is it possible to fail touch typing class on a phone?
The value in understanding mathematics is not the ability to be able to recite the quadratic formula or to be able to perform long division in your head, it's knowing when to use the formulas and understanding their applications in your daily life and work.
>The value in understanding mathematics is not the ability to be able to recite the quadratic formula or to be able to perform long division in your head, it's knowing when to use the formulas and understanding their applications in your daily life and work.
You can do both, really. You should be able to recite the mathematics you use in your daily work without having to look it up. I've never met a good scientist who wasn't able to.
EDIT: okay, may be one exception is for example something like tedious calculations from QFT or something, but you should be able to gesture at general parts of it, you should be able recite certain simple equations or particular approximations. If you have to refamiliarize yourself with your work every time you look at it, I do not know how you can advance in your research.
Even though I find ChatGPT impressive, it still doesn't write what I want to it write in the way I want it written.
The same way Dall-E, Mindjourney doesn't really draw what I want it to draw. It draws something , but I can just accept it's "good enough", but it's a different experience to creating something yourself.
ChatGPT writes something, but it's not me. While it might save me time, it's not as fun.
I think learning to enjoy the process important because honestly, that is all there is to life.
It's one thing to automate dry responses (email bots have been doing it for decades now) but automating writing in your career work leaves little left of your career, and further, it dilutes what you add in value to everyone else you work with.
I used to be an ESL instructor in another life and as I've always said to my students, "it doesn't matter how many languages you know if you've got nothing to say."
But what happens if generated poor content like this becomes a high percentage of what people are reading?
Will people start unconsciously mimicking the styles in their own writing? (This might be at least a temporary effect, as a technical writer mentioned they'd seen in their own work during a period they were reading Hunter S. Thompson heavily. Getting a bit punchy for tech doc.)
And will people's cognitive and expression abilities outright decline? (Perhaps because they're exposed to lots of generated examples of argument and other communication, or because they leaned on an AI-method tool, rather than go through the thinking and perhaps learning exercise themselves?)
Maybe these effects will begin, and even be noticed, but rather than try to fix it, society will just lower its standards, and then others will try to profit on the problem existing and continuing to exist? (Look at journalism and political discourse. Or at software development.)
Most people I know, smart people included, really struggle with writing. People struggle to clearly communicate ideas, express themselves, form sentences and more.
I'd say the majority of people I work with are actually poor communicators, especially via text (email, sms etc). Writing is a skill and no one is "perfect" at it, including me. It's only going to get worse without practice. I know this because I'm learning another language and if I take even a few weeks off, I lose it pretty quickly for being at an intermediate level.
There was a period in my life where I picked up a pen to write something and I realized that it had been so long since I used one I was actually intimated and struggled. I was too used to keyboards. I don't see outsourcing writing itself to ChatGPT being much different.
I cringe a little when I read all these messages like, "Oh, I just use ChatGPT to respond to everything now and write all my code etc". Well that's good it's saving you time, but you're also not exercising your ability to think anymore, and that will be detrimental. Many of those people probably didn't have a yardstick to measure there own writing ability by in the first place and now just assume they're better off outsourcing to ChatGPT. It's a questionable position to take.
There might be a time in 10 years where people are told they should write because it's good for their brain, like how we have to tell people who don't do physical labor they need to exercise...funny stuff.
Lastly, there must be truly something to be said for the fact that ChatGPT, at least currently (maybe it will train against itself soon) is trained off human inputs. If that trend continues and everything is ChatGPT, well where does that leave us? With a stagnant, flat way of communicating with stale ideas?
I feel like everything is becoming a little dystopian lately, ha!
We're discussing approaching OpenAI about enterprise pricing so everyone can have the Plus version.
I'm able to take time doing the bullshit grunt work of my job and essentially outsource it to ChatGPT. Then I go in and fix everything it fucks up - not just code, but poor wording, incoherent / incongruent sentences, etc.
University professors, high school teachers, middle school teachers - everyone - are all in for a rude awakening. You're going to have to get to know your students. You're going to have to scale down class sizes, because you have to now invest time in learning someone's writing style to know what's ChatGPT and what's their own voice. You're going to have to actually test for understanding, not just rote memorization. Our species is moving past that, thank God.
And more importantly, we're going to see college scaled back like it should have already been. Most people are not only not college material, they don't need to be college material. The vast, vast majority of jobs in the world can be easily done without a four-year degree and with a few weeks to a few months on on-the-job training.
We're long overdue to pass the buck back to companies to pay for training their workers, not dumping a $25,000 to $250,000 responsibility on would-be workers in the hopes they can stand out. ChatGPT will hopefully be a huge catalyst for this, and I think paired with crippling student loans, we will start to see a massive paradigm shift soon.
I can mostly figure out how to improve my work with modern ML, and I'm fairly tech literate... I think it's just a painful time for them. It's easy to say they're in for a rude awakening because it's obvious to us they are. However, she's a history professor who can hardly use a computer. Between dealing with bureaucracy of an inherently protectionist work environment, reading a zillion books, research, teaching, conferences, publishing, etc, etc, plus never really focusing on becoming technology literate, this is a lot to process.
My wife is still young relatively to her colleagues so I think she can deal with the shift, but it doesn't negate the fact that she's (a junior) member of a team, and this conversation is happening in all departments, from architecture to philosophy to math. It's going to be interesting to see what happens.
> However, she's a history professor who can hardly use a computer. Between dealing with bureaucracy of an inherently protectionist work environment, reading a zillion books, research, teaching, conferences, publishing, etc, etc, plus never really focusing on becoming technology literate, this is a lot to process.
This is no longer an option for our species.
We've managed to dumb down computers to a level that people can't even figure out what operating system they're using (Windows 10/11 or macOS).
That's a problem. I don't care what anyone says. They're all objectively wrong. You *need* to have some idea of how the technology that shapes your life works. Just like you don't need to be able to tear down a car, you don't need to be able to explain how ChatGPT works, but just like you understand that using the accelerator makes your car go and the brake makes your car stop, you need some base idea of what's happening with your computer and the software you use.
We see this in just about every aspect of our lives. I wouldn't be able to file taxes for a multi-million dollar business with 300 employees, but I can file taxes for myself with a little bit of effort and reading (in fact, even trained professionals struggle with filing taxes, so maybe this wasn't the best example...).
I think you should have your wife make an account on OpenAI, and subscribe to ChatGPT, and try it out. Sometimes I literally just talk to it when I want to learn things.
I've never had to use Microsoft Outlook, ever, until I started working at my current job. I didn't know what an OST file was, or why they get fucked up so often, so instead of Googling and reading a bunch of shit, I just asked ChatGPT, "What is an Outlook OST file?" and it told me. And I went down an Outlook rabbit hole from there.
And the 4.0 and 5.0 version are just going to be that much more spectacular. I think it's better for her to embrace this right now and get on the other side of this train than be caught in the tracks when it arrives at her station.
Wow, I'm happy for you.
You realize though that the kinds of questions academic research tries to answer are a bit more nuanced than that, right? And not only that -- almost by definition -- when doing this kind of research, you don't just want to copy-pasta whatever turns up on the top of any automated search you do (whether it be through a search engine, or a chatbot).
Right?
For the actual rigorous fields that require some work and effort, ChatGPT wasn't designed to replace those researchers. It wasn't designed to make sense of the data that that kind of academic research produces. It's designed to help you take the bullshit work out of the sense you've already made out of this research.
It's an assistant. That's all it is... right now.
It will eventually, and probably sooner than later, be much, much more.
I’m pretty sure this is not a rude awakening. Everyone would like to work more closely with fewer students. The ones in for the rude awakening are the ones who will be paying for more instructors.
That's not going to happen. Too many free alternatives that can get the job done, and people are waking up to that.
*Administrators* might have to go find a way to be productive for once... but people are fed up with the insanely high costs of higher education. Especially given what it's producing.
And your line of work is?
That's literally all it takes... but oh no, it's too expensive, must figure out how to automate testing... while fighting against the automation of answering.
One I really liked a lot: >And if you don't trust the AI to output correct content, teach your students critical thinking by using Assisted Teaching to write history essays and let your students find mistakes in it.
Another way (if you want to go the more traditional way), is the Flipped Classroom [2] method, in which students self-teach at home and do the "homework" in the classroom.
I agree with others here that there is no way to ban these technologies; there are just better and worse ways to deal with it.
[1]: https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/the-age-of-assiste... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom
It seems more troubling if people can cheat their way all the way through college. There are a number of skills that really benefit from kind of boring/non-creative work. In intro classes, part of it is just spending enough time learn “reflexes” that will help later. I’m sure it is easy to find tools that will do this work for you.
But at some point, I mean, junior and senior (Err, I guess this is US lingo maybe, last couple years of college) should be doing actually interesting work, to the point where if they can “cheat” their way through the material with new tools, then… they’ve found an interesting new way to solve real problems. And if they aren’t doing anything interesting at all, then there are much, much deeper problems at the school.
True enough. I inadvertently learned trig so thoroughly that I could "see" many steps ahead as one. I say inadvertently because since every class was a math class, full of incidental trig work, this winds up happening to everyone.
Because not all students pick up things at the same speed, and some are naturally gifted and don't need to through the same amount of homework to get to the same skill level.
Having done the research and gotten the results, asking it to turn draft paragraphs into properly written text.
Low stakes should probably be fine but to anyone using it for something important at least do the old rewrite-to-not-be-plagiarism trick.
I have to imagine there's going to be a lot of people regretting using GPT shortcuts soon. It'll be the equivalent of copy pasting Wikipedia by the end of the year I bet.
The next big Google search ranking update should be fun too with all the AI content mills popping up right now. If you see your rival using AI for their blog posts, start writing real content in preparation :D
[1] https://openai.com/blog/new-ai-classifier-for-indicating-ai-...
It is trivial to get around even the best of these techniques. This is a cat and mouse game with a fat, lazy cat and really motivated, olympic tier mice.
None of this existed at all 5 years ago. Let it cook.
It's always been a to and fro between spam and ham. Always will be.
Unless you're releasing updates to your paper each time a new AI model comes out you're at risk of being caught out if anyone decides to do a "We found 80% of xyz to be AI generated" blog post.
That is... not impressive. I'm honestly surprised that OpenAI was willing to release the tool in this state, it's probably the least reponsible thing they have done since calling themselves "OpenAI". Some kids are going to get expelled for no reason.
I'd be ok with it being a first line thing that causes a more fine tuned manual check and maybe a manual pop quiz on what the person 'wrote', though. Manual being the key word after AI does its bit.
This doesn't advance us as a species. ChatGPT does. The point of writing is to communicate ideas, thoughts, and feelings. It shouldn't matter if an AI took your ideas, thoughts, feelings, data, experiments, and then amalgamated it into a coherent work from which others can draw meaning.
The question and answer session would be done through a video session and recorded.
Seems fairly simple. Answer the question. 10.... 9.... 8.... 7...
Students who wrote their own assignments would be able to answer the questions and those who didn't, couldn't.
Many academics are really smart but not very good at explaining things, especially when using a non-native language. Many papers don't get great ideas don't get those ideas the reach they deserve simply because they are too dense to understand, not just in the content itself, but in the overly-verbose and convoluted writing.
If ChatGPT helps academics write better papers it would be amazing. And presumably these papers' logic is actually checked by people (even if they don't go through peer-review) so potential BS is not a problem.
I use ChatGPT to riff off ideas and make sure I haven't missed anything; often ChatGPT reminds me that "oh right I'm missing aspect X Y and Z which would make my project or writing more complete.
With that said, I haven't written anything published in a journal yet, and maybe I'll use ChatGPT to assist (probably in the same way as I mentioned, as a way to riff off and brainstorm ideas, rather than as a content generator; its output is way too boring and verbose for my linking)
Personally I couldn't be more tickled shitless at this creation. It's cheap ($20 a month!!), it's fast, it's already learned my writing and coding style, and it is probably saving me 30-40% time every week. The amount of projects I've been able to start working on, that I had on the back burner, is just incredible.
I really could not be more excited about where GPT 4.0 and 5.0 will go.
Have you tried adjusting your prompts? Even just a single instruction to 'be concise' will make a difference. For some applications, you might be able to give examples fo the writing style you are looking for.
Give away the poison, sell the antidote.
Perhaps you would prefer to include the generated text source as an author.
It would however be nice to have a mode where any output that matches some existing text in the training set could be highlighted, to help one avoid unintentional plagiarism.
If so, we could pattern match historically, and discover the base rate of plagiarism.
Nature's neural networks (also called humans) have been willing to provide cheating services for far cheaper than it costs OpenAI to run ChatGPT. So the question is, what were you doing then?
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I'll share a personal anecdote on cheating and the futility of it. I am taking a course on SQL at Coursera, and at the end of the course there is a peer-reviewed project you have to do (you submit your project for others to mark, and you have to mark the project of four other students to pass).
The thing is, you can already find the entire project online, a few people have posted their project for people to see, probably to help build their profile (just google "yelp coursera").
And obviously what most students did was just copy paste the damn thing, I immediately recognized that when I was marking the other candidates' projects, they didn't even bother attempting to hide it.
The thing is, I am not doing this course because I am being forced to by work or anything, but because I wanted to learn. Therefore, copying pasting the project would have not achieved the goals.
See, I wouldn't even have needed google to cheat, my BiL is a computer scientist, I could have easily used him to cheat if that was the goal.
But I wanted to learn, so I did it on my own, as did many other students whose project I did end up agreeing to mark (I refused to mark the cheater's projects and just refreshed the tab)
And since I am on HN and in tune with the tech on goings, I already had applied for the new BingGPT Chat, so I used to that to help with my project.
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I didn't just paste my project questions, but I used it like I would have used my BiL to help; I asked it questions when my code didn't run like it should have.
In other words, I would, say, google (and yes google, regular bing search is still bad) for questions like normal, but the answer from StackOverflow would be for, say, MySQL, so I would ask the BingGPT Chat to give me an example of doing the same thing in SQLite, which is what the course used.
It would then recognize that I couldn't use CTE, for example (limitation of the Coursera web portal, not SQLite, in this instance), and give me an alternate way to do the same thing, and now I could use the concept to answer my own question.
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In other words, ChatGPT is now acting as that education sibling/relative you can ask questions of to do homework... just people always have been before the existence of computers.
The only benefit is that now EVERYONE has access to that educated "relative", not just the lucky ones. Now everyone can get a customized answer, and that's wonderful, imho. More importantly, is that you can now ask it follow up questions.
Don't blame ChatGPT for cheating, people who wanted to cheat always could.
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The problem with citing ChatGPT is, has anybody ever cited their relative who helped with the project? or do you cite google the search string you used?
I understand what the author is getting at, but it's still strange. ChatGPT isn't the authoritative source, so why cite the prompt?