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Comment by stinkbutt | Hacker News Reader

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.

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