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Comment by plutoh28 | Hacker News Reader

This is the dagger that will make online schooling unviable.

ChatGPT already made it so that you could easily copy & paste any full-text questions and receive an answer with 90% accuracy. The only flaw was that problems that also used diagrams or figures would be out of the domain of ChatGPT.

With image support, students could just take screenshots or document scans and have ChatGPT give them a valid answer. From what I’ve seen, more students than not will gladly abuse this functionality. The counter would be to either leave the grading system behind, or to force in-person schooling with no homework, only supervised schoolwork.

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Another option is that this doesn't replace the student's work, but the teacher's. The single greatest use I have found for ChatGPT is in educating myself on various topics, hosting a socratic seminar where I am questioning ChatGPT in order to learn about X. Of course this could radically change a student's ability to generate homework etc, but this could also radically change how the student learns in the first place. To me, online school could become much more than they are now through AI-assisted tutoring. I can also see a future where "schooling" becomes much more decentralized than it is now and where students are self-selecting curriculum, methods, etc to give students ownership and a sense of control over their work so that they don't just look at it as "busywork".

I agree, but typical GPT use is actually the opposite of the traditional Socratic mode in which the teacher uses questions to guide the student to understanding. But I wonder how it would do if it was prompted to use the Socratic method.

Duolingo is experimenting with a GPT-4 fine tune/wrapper which makes it act as a Socratic method teacher.

I tried to teach it the Socratic method. It took some long prompt engineering, but finally it worked. BUT what I realized was that it was always lacking the bigger picture, an agenda of what it wants to teach me.

That's the only sane option. The other options suggested in previous comments are not really options but rather trying to use a band-aid to hold together a dam that has already been breached.

Absolutely ChatGPT is a great learning tool if in the right hands. The issue is that students with a genuine interest in learning are a minority. The majority would rather use ChatGPT to cheat through their class work and get an easy A rather then exhaust the effort to chat and learn for their own sake.

>The majority would rather use ChatGPT to cheat through their class work and get an easy A rather then exhaust the effort to chat and learn for their own sake.

Just have 100% of the mark come from in-person exams, as many subjects already do. Students can cheat all they want on assignments, but the only thing it's hurting is their exam score.

It's true.

I mean what is the point of doing schoolwork when some of the greatest minds of our time have decided the best way for the species to progress is to be replaced by machines?

Imagine you're 16 years old right now, you know about ChatGPT, you know about OpenAI and their plans, and you're being told you need to study hard to get a good career..., but you're also reading up on what the future looks like according to the technocracy.

You'd be pretty fucking confused right now wouldn't you?

It must be really hard at the moment to want to study and not cheat....

I'm in my mid 30s and even I have some amount of apathy for the remainder of my career. I feel pretty confident my software and product experience is going to be not-so-useful in 15 years as it is today.

Same, I'm already pivoting into other areas.

Your username checks out!

That said, is it that much different from the past twenty years, when everyone was being told to follow their passion and get a useless $200,000 communication or literature degree to then go work at Starbucks? At least kids growing up with AI will have a chance to make its use second nature like many of us did with computers 20-30 years ago.

The kids with poor parental/counselor guidance will walk into reality face first, the ones with helicopter parents will overcorrect when free, the studious ones will mostly figure life out, the smart ones will get disillusioned fast, and the kids with trust funds just kept doing their thing. I don't think much will change.

I do think it is much different from the past twenty years. Twenty years ago we didn't have ChatGPT. There are things we could compare it to, but there also isn't anything like it.

My biggest fear is just a lack of jobs.

When people need experience to work, and the work you give to people to give them experience is replaced by ChatGPT - then what do we do?

Of course there will still be companies hiring people, but when leadership is telling people to save money - it seems much cheaper to use ChatGPT that it is to train someone.

Why hire a kid that has been using AI, when the AI can just do the work? Or if a kid that has been using AI can do the work of 20 people, what happens to the 19 people that can't find work? Will we be in a place where we need 20 people doing the work of 20 people each? Is that need actually there?

I do very much appreciate your view. I feel like I waffle back and forth between what I'm saying here and your comment.

I apologize for coming across doomer-ish. It is sometimes hard for me to imagine a future for kids growing up with ChatGPT.

The only way there will be no jobs is if every conceivable human need is met by robots. In which case there will also be no need to work.

I understand that. The fear I'm describing isn't no jobs, but less jobs than there are people.

There's multiple ways to address this, but it's difficult for me to imagine a future with our current economic system (in the US) that allows that to happen (like UBI).

What people are missing is the teacher will soon be an LLM with a camera looking at the student. Why would you watch a video of a human during an online class? Why would you ask the student to produce something in a black room? We will not evaluate students based on their homework, an AI assistant will evaluate the student based on the conversations they had together. You can automate teaching, but not learning. There is this gap in time where teaching hasn't catch-up, it's going to be quickly addressed since teaching is expensive. Parents should really encourage their kids to practice their learning as before, eventually using ChatGPT like they use Wikipedia. One generation will suffer during the change.

When we talk about people abusing ChatGPT in a school context, it’s always for kids in high school or greater education levels. These are individuals that know right from wrong and also have the motor skills and access to use such a tool. These are individuals who are problem-solving for their specific need, which is to get this homework or essay out of the way so that they can do XYZ. Presumably XYZ does not leverage chatgpt. So make that what they spend their time on. At some point they’ll have to back-solve for skills they need to learn and need educational guidance and structure.

This is obviously not easy or going to happen without time and resources, but that is how adaptation goes.

I've taken certification exams where an app is run on my machine verifying I have nothing else open and my camera had to be enabled, with me and my hands in view for the entirety of the test. There are ways to ensure cheating is more difficult than it's worth, however I see this tech as greatly changing what we want to learn and how we might learn it. It is transformative and not slowing down.

> I've taken certification exams where an app is run on my machine verifying I have nothing else open and my camera had to be enabled, with me and my hands in view for the entirety of the test. There are ways to ensure cheating is more difficult than it's worth

Yes sure it makes cheating inconvenient. It also makes exam taking inconvenient.

If I can at all help it, I will not be a subject to this sort of abuse and neither will my kid.

Well, I think the kid will already be logged into ChatGPT using a AI Teacher ChatGPT plugin which is doing interactive instruction.

They can still log in on their phone to cheat though. I wonder if OpenAI will add linked accounts and parental controls at some point. Instance 2 of ChatGPT might "tell" on the kid for cheating by informing Instance 1 running the AI Teacher plugin.

Will be kind of stupid to cut kids off from ChatGPT and pretend to them that they should go off to school, meanwhile Silicon Valley is doing it's best to make every job possible obsolete? Kind of invalidates the whole exercise of the current approach to schooling right?

What are you going to school for, to learn how to write essays? Well, we have an app for that ?

It sounds like the future of work will be prompting, and if and when that is obsolete...who knows what...

Use online for training, real life for testing/grading. That way cheating at home will only hurt yourself.

The problem here is that homework is designed to provide the structure kids need to apply themselves and actually learn. If you don't provide structure for this, they will simply never study and accept failure. They frequently don't have the self-discipline and mindfulness and long-term vision to study "because it's the right thing to do". I know my entire education, even with college, was "why do i need to know this?" and being wildly bored with it all as a result.

It would be sufficient to do exams in person and no longer grade homework.

Good point. Though I imagine fully online institutions would require testing facilities. Maybe local libraries become testing hosts?

I studied at a distance university and they use lecture halls of local universities for the exams.

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