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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> I think most people see where the puck is going

Overinflated hype about “where the puck is going” being wrong is…not a new phenomenon. And the non-tech media (traditional and social, and particularly a whole lot of the elite commentariat that spans both more than the “hard” news side of traditional media, though that is influenced too) perspective on this is driven quite disproportionately by the marketing message of the narrow set of people with the most financial stake in promoting the hype. Even the cautionary notes being sounded there are exactly the ones that are being used by the same people to promote narrow control.

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You know the shoeshine boy indicator story [1]? That's the vibe I've been getting with ChatGPT lately, I have multiple old high school teachers with 0 computational background who hardly ever spoke about ML before posting regularly on LinkedIn about ChatGPT the last couple months.

The part that gets me is they aren't just aimlessly making posts, they're getting involved with webinars targeted at educators in their respective topics, speaking at regional events about the future with ChatGPT, etc.

One of them was a really excellent teacher but like this dude absolutely does not have any qualifications to be speaking on ChatGPT, and I hope it hasn't actually changed his teaching style too much because I'm having trouble imagining how ChatGPT could've fit in well with the way he used to teach.

Don't get me wrong, hype often surrounds something legitimately good, but I think ChatGPT is being taken way out of context in both the ML achievement it is and in what things the tool is actually useful for. I guess it is easy for a layperson to make mistaken assumptions about where the puck is going when they see what ChatGPT can do.

[1] "The story took place in 1929: Joseph Patrick Kennedy Sr., JFK's father, claimed that he knew it was time to get out of the stock market when he got investment tips from a shoeshine boy."

I can see why educators are getting involved. They are seeing it change how their students do work in real time.

I grew up and using a pocket calculator was verboten. You just did not do it. You better learn and memorize all of that stuff. Spin on 10 years after me and all kids have them now. If you have the right app on your phone the thing will OCR the problem and auto solve it and show you the steps. ChatGPT and its ilk are here, now. How we learn and create things has dramatically changed in under a year. It is not clear how much though.

Teachers are trying to get ahold of what does it mean to teach if you can just ask some device to summarize something as complex as the interactions of the 6 major countries in WWII and what caused it. Then the thing thinks for 2 seconds and spits out a 1000 word essay on exactly that. Then depending on which one you use it will footnote it all and everything.

This style of learning is going to take some getting used to. This tool is in their classrooms right now. Right or wrong. It will be there. The teachers are going to have to figure out what this means to their class planning. Not 5 years from now, today.

Yeah there is a broader issue here for sure. I don't think that means within a few weeks of the launch of the pocket calculator there should have been dozens of random talks from people that have no understanding of what a pocket calculator does trying to pitch a curriculum based around it.

These posts ooze hype bullshit, not nuanced talk about pros and cons and how it will affect education. ChatGPT should be thought of as a writing tool and perhaps an information source on very surface level topics. Trying to teach an advanced research course at a top school with ChatGPT heavily involved is a terrible idea on the other hand.

I have tested asking it about a number of specific topics in biology research/asking questions about particular papers, and it gives horrible answers the majority of the time. If someone submitted that as a paper to me I'd give it a bad grade because it is dumb, I wouldn't need to know if it were ChatGPT or not. I would be alarmed if my kid's teacher went from organically teaching how to dissect a scientific paper to suggesting that a major part of the curriculum can be replaced with talking to GPT.

I've seen articles about teachers taking the other extreme against ChatGPT too, but I haven't personally seen anything that was a realistic take on what LLMs can do. Maybe it boils down again to disagreement on "where the puck is going" but to me most of the hype is making ridiculous assumptions about what is imminent meanwhile ignoring the things worth discussing now.

Which sounds a lot like bubbles. The dot com crash didn't mean the internet was a bad idea or that it wasn't worth discussing at that time.

The thing was when pocket calculators came out they were expensive to get ahold of. Like 500-1000 bucks for one (in 1970s terms that is a lot). This sort of NLM is effectively free. All you need is an account and the cell phone you already have. This is disrupting classrooms right now. Everyone I talk to that has a kid is saying their kids are using it for coursework. I get why teachers are 'oh no...' as of right now it is exploding on them. They have not had time to digest it. Unfortunately at this point chatgpt is like an reporter summing up information it has no idea what it is talking about and putting it into nice prose that looks good. So while in your area of expertise you can spot out the issues. But you flip the page and it is on a different subject it will be tough to spot out the errors. Simply because you do not know and attribute expertise they do not really have onto it. This NLM is that but turned up to 11.

"where the puck is going" is something to consider and we will 100% get that wrong, but right now this thing is creating waves and making issues now.

Teaching is going to be a career affected early by chatgpt because students will use it (are using it) to do assignments. A good teacher doesn't need to know much about machine learning to think about how that will affect his job, he just needs to know his students and have an idea how to work with them given the new tools they have.

> Teaching is going to be a career affected early by chatgpt because students will use it (are using it) to do assignments.

Already happening. A student in Russia submitted his thesis written with the help of GPT, it was accepted, then rejected, then accepted: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/02/02/russian-student-al...

Yes for generic 9th grade English or poorly taught science classes it is easy to just use ChatGPT. His class would've been pretty immune to GPT plagiarized assignments though, assuming a serious grader were evaluating them, which one used to at least. Yes GPT could've been used to assist in the writing itself, but that wouldn't disrupt the educational goals achieved by developing the content, which required synthesizing multiple modern scientific papers in a coherent way.

In any event, he isn't concerned at all about students using it for assignments, it's the degree to which he seems to think it can be integrated in his current curriculum that alarms me. I think he is misunderstanding the capabilities and therefore pitching something that doesn't actually make sense.

The other teacher I didn't follow as closely, I just got a kick out of seeing she was now advertising some sort of webinar about ChatGPT filled with buzzwords too.

Also if a teacher is really serious about wanting to plan around what GPT can and can't do to the point they want to be a teaching authority on it, they should be consulting with people in the relevant domain. When I want to use a new tool in the lab I talk with colleagues that have a great deal of relevant experience before I start working it into experiments. I can't imagine starting to give advice to others on the matter when I don't actually know the current nuances.

Soon, a lot of people will realize that the puck doesn't travel in a straight line. Eventually, it will veer to the right in a logarithmic fashion. When it does is up for debate, but - in my experience - it always happens very short of where the hype claims it was heading.

The puck can also hit you in the face and break your jaw.

Certainly a likelihood for everyone too lazy to write their own code.

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