ChatGPT robs students of motivation to write and think for themselves | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT robs students of motivation to write and think for themselves

theconversation.com

53 pointsrntn45 comments

Students aren’t writing because they’re “motivated”, they are writing because they have to. It’s a grade.

Motivated people will still write (perhaps in conjunction with GPT) and think for themselves.

School papers and professional communication falls under the umbrella of “necessary writing”. This genre will be the first to be automated.

Critical and creative writing is safe from replacement, at least for now.

> Students aren’t writing because they’re “motivated”, they are writing because they have to. It’s a grade.

So what? That argument doesn't really make sense to me. An educated populace is generally considered to be a good thing and teenagers for instance aren't always sufficiently self-motivated to learn how to write and think. Exercising your thinking and writing muscle for the sake of getting a grade is not necessarily a bad thing.

I suppose your claim seems to be that mandatory homework and grades are generally useless. And perhaps you are okay with a future where - when most cognitively demanding jobs have been automated - much of of humanity as been reduced to mentally incompetent beings dependent on AI. Does not seem so desirable to me, however.

They comment made an observation about the underlying psychology(motivation)and didn’t make the claim you suggested.

The cognitive demand shift to other tasks, and probably increase, rather than disappearing.

I am one of the people vehemently defending the position that many of us will not be replaced by AI in the near future, as we will have other "better" things to do.

It isn't clear to me, though, that any of those things will be possible unless we have a solid background in logic and thought, which we humans improve on by doing symbol manipulation (writing, math, coding, etc.).

Which has the unfortunate effect that, even if we aren't forced to go away, the world could devolve quite quickly if we surrender it by simply deciding that kids doing stuff computers can already do is pointless, even as a training exercise.

FWIW, I want to also not be too concerned about this issue with essay writing, as we already have had this problem for a while now in math with first calculators and then stuff like Mathematica, and somehow we keep learning math?...

...Though, I'm honestly not quite so sure we have been learning math as well in the past 10 years or so, so maybe I'm wrong; and, since I also am unsure how you are right in my stead (I'd need an explanation of what children will do to prepare themselves for the future other than learn to write), maybe we're doomed :(.

What is the benefit of thinking and writing in school? Forcing the populace to do these tasks doesn't seem to have a beneficial effect. English degrees are out of jobs and my courses in English I'd call absolutely useless. I remember doing all the work for a group project because it was easier for everyone who would just copy and paste wikipedia to me.

I'd have to see the value of these essays if there are any. I have yet to see any evidence they do anything except occasionally put people's heads in the clouds.

> What is the benefit of thinking and writing in school?

Cogito ergo sum.

Practicing thinking makes you a better thinker. Thinking is what makes us… us.

(To be clear though I think LLMs / AI generally can be a tool for thought.)

Being "educated" doesn't require you to be able to write without the assistance of a person or tool.

Bad students have always been able to hire ghostwriters to do their homework for them. Suddenly the service just got a lot cheaper and accessible.

People who want to learn will still learn. People who are forced to learn were always bad students.

it's insanely patronizing to view kids this way, I'm glad I'll never have to spend time writing a business email ever again, promoting the AI effectively is a way more useful life skill for kids to learn than writing essays

we simply need to adapt the curriculum to reflect the tasks that aren't rendered effectively worthless by LLMs and let kids prompt to their hearts content, much like they will do in the real world

if your work can be done by chatgpt, do (or have the students do) more interesting work

and for the record, homework is the most fucking awful thing ever invented and I still hold a burning malice toward it to this day

> And perhaps you are okay with a future where - when most cognitively demanding jobs have been automated - much of of humanity as been reduced to mentally incompetent beings dependent on AI.

This is an understandable reading of my position. But I would probably phrase it differently.

I think we should make a delineation between work that we have to do and work that we want to do. AI will probably automate away much of the work we have to do, freeing us up to do more of the work we want to do.

We can optimize society such that every person should work towards some hypothetical motivated, curious, and educated ideal, or we can optimize society so that people are just happy in whatever way happiness can be defined for them.

If people aren’t interested in learning more about themselves and about the world around them, so be it. It certainly wouldn’t effect my motivation.

Think of it like working out. Nobody needs to exercise, but people do it because they want to. Either because it’s fun, or it makes them feel better about themselves, or for the skill acquisition aspect, or even the community aspect.

You know, I think we have to decide whether we're going to be curious and educated people who think and analyze or do we want to devolve to forever teenagery. Automation + AI may afford us to forgo the rigors and the work of learning -but at what cost to self? One could ask, what is the cost of a dog or a monkey not attaining human intelligence --to them it means nothing. To a human not being leaned but instead a base individual, basically illiterate and innumerate but full or emotions not understood seems to be a wrong turn.

Ah yes, a linguist playing at being a psychologist while making a "won't anyone think of the children" argument relating to the subject matter they are themselves concerned over.

Every single one of these I see infuriates me, as I know full well that we are heading towards a skill-based divide where people exposed to using these new tools TODAY will grow alongside them to be well adapted to the accelerating future, but those kept from them are going to be as generationally lost as when people missed the Internet boat and were left confused and discriminated against professionally for their ineptitude with what was an increasing necessity.

Everyone needs to get off their high minded horse about what new thing is going to corrupt the youth (a trend which over the years included chess and ballroom dancing), and recognize the world has already changed and irrespective of how they feel about it, holding others back from adapting to it is only going to cause harm.

Every educator should immediately be trying to adapt lesson plans to incorporate the tech rather than trying to ban it from the classroom. Get kids who don't have access at home access in school. Because "knowing how to talk to AI" is going to be as necessary a skill as "knowing how to search" has been, if not more. And pouting at the inevitable march of time simply isn't helpful to anything other than the pouter's ego.

ChatGPT further robs unmotivated students of any motivation to write and think for themselves when unmotivated students never wanted to write and think for themselves in the first place. Motivated students, on the other hand, use ChatGPT to greatly increase their learning depth, breadth and pace

I think my headline is more accurate

I don’t remember directions; I use Google Maps. I don’t remember facts; I have Google Search. Now I don’t even remember how to think or convey my thoughts. Why do I exist?

Books rob students of the motivation to memorize and recite for themselves.

You can recite that, as others have, but if there were more books than anyone could ever read, wouldn't the change in volume represent a change in kind, and a value change for recitation itself as transfer of memory?

This was platos and the Greeks unironic take. It's telling that we now realize how dumb it is. Just as our children will laugh at how dumb it is to try to ban this AI technology.

Useless commenters rob lesser useless commenters of their time.

Now do the calculator and arithmetic.

And the Internet! I remember a teacher of mine getting all bent out of shape I was using Wikipedia for research instead of books in the library.

Mental math can be surprisingly good for your brain.

The calculator has ruined kid's ability to do arithmetic, and, because of it, they never develop any numeracy or sense of how numbers work. Which means when they hit algebra, they hit a brick wall once the abstraction starts to come in.

Yeah, ChatGPT is so powerful that it managed to rob motivation of students from 30 years ago.

It surely has nothing to do with conservative, uninteresting teachers who criticize every attempt to have an original thought different to their well travelled path.

I am not a student or chatGPT user, and it is removing most of my motivation to do much of anything...

I'm not sure how much longer I'll have a a career if AI keeps up. I already don't even make 5 figures most years, and almost all my reason to get up in the morning was just career ambition...

Maybe it'll rob us. Why write a fledgling blog just to have OpenAI copy (likely steal, I assume they don't abide by everything) it for training data.

This is a symptom. Root cause is students there for the degree or the grade rather than the education.

Things that can be automated should be - if something is simple enough to automate with GPT then we should be evaluating a deeper level of understanding through oral examinations. If I understand the topic but can use GPT to complete 80% of the essay where I tweak and expand arguments, and can orally argue my point, I think that should be acceptable. If you increase the grading so you need an almost factually perfect paper to get a passing grade then people will be editing and need to understand to check for mistakes.

There was google before chatgpt, and google always did just as good a job at finding things to cut and paste. Sure, it was a few more clicks, but for a motivated student that's no barrier.

This is really interesting. We're talking about relenquish critical thinking, pursue of knowledge, etc... to LLMs.

We know that students look for easiest way to do homework, etc...

This won't accelerate learning, this will hinder it.

Why spend 15 years studying medicine, law, becoming a PhD, if "AI" is going to replace me?

This is a dangerous slope and the issue here is we can't just "hope for the best" and let innovation run amok. We could destroy a whole generation if we don't think this through.

We will destroy a whole generation, in more ways than one. Chatbots will replace what vestiges are left of real in-person socialisation, and then all human connection will be gone. All while a certain few make amazing profits off of it, which they'll then use to insulate themselves from the negative societal repercussions of what they've created.

The challenge isn't laziness. It's creating better designed assignments with the time you have with students in person.

Grade school students are already in school for 8 whole hours (or close to). You're not igniting the wandering philosopher in them (if it is to be ignited) that ponders about academic subjects after school until college or late high school.

Setting up the internet as an adversary will always be a losing battle.

It's crazy to me...you already have 8 hours of what is essentially full control! Use that effectively instead of complaining students aren't doing what you want with the other 16 hours of their life. We're finally at a point where we can abandon the systems of old approach to learning. Maximize that, don't cling to the past.

Whether or not anyone thinks it's a good idea, the toothpaste is now out of the tube. The only viable approach is to figure out how to adjust to the new status quo, rather than complaining that the status quo had changed.

GPT4 scored a 2 our of 5 on AP English language composition. That exam is about thinking, analysis, and writing. That is language understanding and what we teach students so GPT4 has a long way to go.

https://apstudents.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-english-langu...

No it just lets you be the editor instead of the writer

I've been experiencing this with posting online tbh, once I figured out the right prompt, people on 4chan don't even realise you're just pasting the output of a machine. It really makes me wonder what the point of posting is anymore.

I think there's a valid and necessary question emerging as this domain evolves:

    What should we teach and why?

Simple example:

One can get any circuit design formula from an AI running on a pocket computer. What, then, is the value-add of a human and how should we teach it?

At some point we will have to admit there are lots of things nobody should ever again memorize. It's kind of pointless. A waste of time and effort. Like being able to rank sorting algorithms from memory. Truly. Who cares? At a minimum there are dozens of books with that information. And then there's Google. And now even better tools.

Motivation ≠ Discouragement. I hope it does not discourage students from trying to become journalists for example.

Supermarkets rob citizens of the motivation to hunt and forage for themselves

Bad example. If someone went to hunting school, and to get their certificate of completion they had to kill and butcher a cow, you would definitely wonder if there really should be a butcher shop next door to the school tempting the students to just cheat. With chatgpt in their bedrooms, students are very tempted to just take the easy way out instead of learning.

> If someone went to hunting school, and to get their certificate of completion they had to kill and butcher a cow

I know it’s not the point, but I’m stifling laughter at the image of a hunting-school-adjacent farmer wondering where all his moo-cows are going.

I'm 99% with the author. I'm watching my nephew actively playing with ChatGPT and saying "why would I want to write my program? I'll ask AI to do it". It's depressing. It's contrary to the concept of knowing how things are working. It's like people are voluntarily depriving themselves of knowledge. It happened before (yes, web-devs, I'm looking at you!), AI made a huge leap in this direction. But the thing is: AI is based on human knowledge, it is finite. Human progress is based on knowledge, re-thinking, observing, inventing stuff. If there's no prior knowledge, inventions and overall progress is impossible. When people throw away know-hows, they stop developing.

tl;dr It's like "Why whould I cook? My mom cooks for me".

PS: I hope AI doesn't read my posts.

Apparently it is a-okay to allow entities and corporations to capitalize off of machine learning to increase business productivity and minimize error, but it's not okay for a person to do the same and be better and get ahead of others.

Let that one absorb.

Horseless carriages rob farriers of careers.

Public transit robs citizens of motivation to walk for health benefit or robs them of potential capitalist-nationalistic pride of stimulating the economy by owning an expensive vehicle.

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