Hacker News Reader

Comment by staticman2 | Hacker News Reader

So if you're teaching, I dunno, Introduction to Physics, your claim is you'd rather assign students GPT 4 than a physics textbook if you could only assign them one educational tool? Because it's the best tool?

If you were teaching fourth grade math, instead of assigning a workbook of math problems you'd prefer to tell the kids "Ask GPT to make up math problems" because it's the best tool, so if you could only pick one tool you'd go with that?

If you were teaching history and had the choice of sending kids to the university library to write research papers of having them ask GPT 4 about history, you'd have them just ask GPT 4 about history, because it's the best educational tool?

Bold claim.

View on HN

A physics textbook is a great start, but it has one major drawback: it's linear, and can't adapt to the reader. Maybe I already understand half of the textbook, but I can't figure out this one section. I'm out of luck, because the textbook won't expand on the part I struggle with.

One major value of the teacher in the classroom is to be able to sense when students are getting lost, and have ways to slow down, re-explain concepts that they missed.

A basic AI sounds like it could soon do a great job of providing the content of a physics textbook, with the adaptability of a one on one teacher.

Sans neuralink or equivalent tech, I’m skeptical that an AI will soon develop the input mechanisms to make those judgements on par with an experienced human tutor. Students often (inadvertently) mischaracterize what is blocking their progress - and blockers are often nonacademic. What I would like to see, and work on, is augmenting the human instruction rather than replace it.

A physics textbook? For intro to physics? Instead of Khan academy? I wouldn't be surprised is a double digit percentage of students never even open their 30 year old decaying textbook in their high school physics class.

no one made the claim that gpt4 is the only tool that should be used

The claim was GPT4 was the best education tool. I think that's absurd.

Forcing an educator to choose it or a book demonstrates the book is in fact the best education tool unless the educator is going to double down and say they'd teach from a chatbot over a textbook.

I'm curious how many students would agree that textbooks are useful at all. My memories of college include actively finding ways to avoid having to buy textbooks and never opening a textbook if lectures were recorded. The best classes by far were seminar classes where the entire text basis for the class would be reading publications in the field - cell signaling and microbiology and others didn't have any recommended books at all. I don't remember ever using a textbook in a CS class either. I'm pretty sure GPT-4 would be infinitely more useful than a textbook in those classes considering we didn't use textbooks

its not absurd at all. if i want to learn what an atom is, why on earth would i open a book when i can just have a hour long conversation with an AI that can explain the concepts to me at any level and answer my questions? as a learning tool, why is a book better?

If I wanted to know what an atom is I wouldn't sign up for a college course.

But if I did sign up for a college course i would expect a more systematic presentation of the material than "whatever random thing I thought to ask an AI."

Not to mention just the other day I asked Chatgpt 4 accounting questions and it gave the wrong answer, and only interrogating it prompted it to correct itself.

you seem to think "gpt4 is the best learning tool" means "gpt4 is the only tool that should be used in education". i literally said in my original reply that it should be used with other learning tools. your example is the perfect use case. the course is a great tool for providing an outline of what to learn. if i follow that outline with gpt4 im going to learn the concepts much faster than i would with a book, and since i'm learning them faster i will have more time (and motivation) to learn more concepts.

I'm saying GPT 4 isn't the best learning tool, books are, and GPT 4 can be useful without exaggerating it's usefulness and declaring it "the best tool".

That's debatable.

The hardest thing about learning a new concept/idea is to get started. GPT lowers the barrier of entry, and you can use the knowledge you got to tackle other learning tools and fix the parts GPT got wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com