Picture this: You're a seventh-grade student who struggles to solve the equations in math. But now you have an AI that solves it for you.
I bet that there will be more students of the later type than the former.
I don't think they should allow use of AI during tests because yeah, it'd just do all the work for them and they wouldn't learn anything, but I absolutely think there's value in being able to use it as a 24/7 instant tutor, particularly since ChatGPT can be coerced into explaining things in basically any style that you'd like.
Something I've found fun and bizarrely useful is having ChatGPT explain stuff in terms of scripts from King of the Hill. It's fun to hear Hank Hill compare ZF Set Theory to something as reliable and efficient as propane while Dale goes into tirades about how the government imposed the axiom of choice to distract away from System F.
For any test where there's an AI good enough to cheat with and cheap enough students can afford it, the test itself is no longer important — it is as pointless as testing how well students can use fountain pens when everyone uses a keyboard for actual work. Or how well they can play chess.
I'm not sure the exact shape of what each model can and can't do, but I am confident that this means they're never be an important "cheating" risk, not even when they're technically capable of it.
We didn't just stop teaching children how to read the second that text-to-speech stuff came about, and we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented, and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released.
There is value in learning the fundamentals of things. If you never actually learn algebra, then it becomes effectively impossible to do the more advanced stuff.
TTS from visual input isn't good enough to be an example of that yet. It's good, but not that good.
> we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released.
And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.
Even if TTS were absolutely perfect, then I'd still maintain my point.
> And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.
Doesn't that sort of prove my point? Calculators existed and were obviously useful, but they didn't just stop teaching you algebra, despite knowing you had a calculator.
Only if you missed mine about how it is no longer cheating to use one.
I think the disagreement I have is that I think part of the reason calculators are allowed on calculus tests is because they're actually not that useful for a lot of what they teach you in calculus. I had a graphing calculator in my math and physics classes in high school, but most of my work was still done with a pen and paper. The calculator was of course useful for the arithmetic stuff, and it could be useful to sanity-check your work (e.g. to see if the roots you calculated were correct), but I still had to do most of the actual calculus by hand.
Even when I got a calculator with a CAS built in (HP 50G), I would still have to do most of the algebra by hand, and honestly if my teachers had known that my calculator had a CAS I suspect they wouldn't have allowed me to use it to begin with.
That said the uselessness of education is the point. It's a signal that you're willing to do pointless work for future rewards. We may as well replace it with counting beans and it would be just as effective.
Well, unless I have another go at learning Arabic…
Once you hit a problem that an AI cannot solve, it's good to be at least aware of what's going on in the field. You don't necessarily have to remember every formula and every fact off the top of your head, but having an intuition on what facts and formulas there are and where they can be used is immensely helpful.
Imagine you're writing a program in an esoteric scripting language that Copilot doesn't understand, and you need to put a large array of events in order from oldest to newest. If you had to learn this sort of think before, you'll immediately have an intuition that this is called sorting, there are slow (n^2) sorting algorithms and faster (n log n) sorting algorithms and you want the latter, and that quicksort is probably a good candidate to start with. You don't necessarily have to be able to write quicksort by hand, you can look up an implementation online and port it to your weird proprietary language, but the intuition is important.
That sounds like a different thing than I'm saying, and I agree with what I think you're saying.
So, if an AI can answer "what's a fast sort function" with "quicksort, here's some pseudocode: …", that's a related but different question to "write quicksort in [this brand new language you've never encountered before]".
Is like how AI won't take our jobs, but it will take over for each individual task that our jobs are made from.
It is overwhelmingly likely that you are learning incorrect facts about mathematics from ChatGPT, especially with the distracting gimmick of using cartoon characters.
Second, I know what fuck I'm doing, and I'm sorry to "depress" you, but having a high level summary of something in terms of a cartoon is generally reasonably accurate, and generally any information I learn is also mechanically checked with Isabelle. I agree that it shouldn't be the be-all-end all of everything but if you're a student who's already frustrated with math, having a high-level description of stuff in terms of something you understand can be valuable.
I maintain that one of the very best teachers I ever had was my 9th grade biology teacher, purely because she understood absolutely nothing about biology and appeared to just be making shit up. You could argue that in a vacuum this might be benign, but part of the issue is that she would use tests provided by the textbook, written by competent biologists. As a result of this, I had to learn to ignore most of what my teacher said, and sometimes argue back with her, and I feel like ironically I learned biology better than most people in that class; if nothing else I did get an A on all the "real" tests from the textbooks.
I think that arguing is actually a really underrated tool in education. Looking for and correcting bullshit is something that extraordinarily enlightening, at least for me, and I think AIs even in their current state can be useful for that.
The future generations do not have the same background as we do. For them it is very difficult to teach what is "misinformation", or have a thinking model like that, unless we make them read proper books and compare the content for the output of the AI.
But if the AI is soon correct enough, they don't get it, and they don't feel it important, and they just take the output from AI as fact.
I think that just like human teachers, it'll be impossible to completely solve the misinformation problem, but I do think it'll get asymptotically close to being solved.
What I think is valuable is trying to figure out stuff where ChatGPT contradicts the "established" stuff, and having students figure it out.
A clever guy he was.
While I do obviously hope that ChatGPT is able to curve against the misinformation problem, I actually do think there's been a lot of value for me personally in trying to figure out where it's getting things subtly wrong. Since I'm taking everything it says with huge grain of salt, the I am kind of forced to dissect every sentence a bit more thoroughly than I might with a textbook where I know everything is gonna be correct.
When I was a lecturer I would use ChatGPT to generate Java homework assignment. It would do "ok" with that, but it usually required three or four iterations to get something that actually made sense, and usually it would require a bit of editing on my end to get results I was happy with. It still saved me a boatload of time though, particularly since it was even able to give me the assignment in pandoc-compatible markdown.
In my case, that's why I usually try and figure out something to do in Isabelle. Trying to prove some kind of property based on something I learned from ChatGPT. I also will occasionally grab exercises from "real" textbooks once I know the keywords to search in Kagi.
I was a college dropout for quite awhile but was still working as a software engineer, and while that's definitely not something I would recommend to anyone (it makes stuff way harder), it did have the advantage of making me pretty decent at teaching myself stuff, simply because my career depended on me being able to play with the "big boys" on an intellectual level.
For software it's comparatively easier though, because you can just have a project to do X, and if it's complicated enough you'll likely touch on a lot of CS concepts, even some you didn't directly self-select. Math (particularly more abstract math) is harder simply because it's much harder to practice; there aren't a ton of tangible "math projects" that you can hack on.
The closest way I've been able to practice it is by using Isabelle. I didn't use ChatGPT to learn that initially, since I learned how to use it before ChatGPT was released; I read through the "Concrete Semantics" free book and did those examples, so I guess that of proves your point more than mine.
and then the AI explains how it was solved, step by step. You can repeatedly ask it to clarify, and it has endless patience and won't get bored or sick of you.
Eventually, you understand how the equation is solved. No human teacher would be able to achieve this.
It's just a matter of priorities for the company designing the models.
> Maybe have the network which generates the answer be moderated by another network that assesses the truthiness of it.
Like a GAN? Sometimes you can do that, but it seems not always.
If this was simple and obvious, they'd have done it as soon as the first one was interesting-but-wrong.
You can say, ELI5 (like the Explain Like I'm 5 years old Subreddit), or explain it like a child, or explain it in very simple English (which is like Simple English wikipedia).
It is actually going to be the greatest learning tool, but only for people that genuinely want to learn.
Certainly as my parent's generation must have been with the internet and computers for me.
I'm not sure what to do with this envy. Though, it has made me want to have a child even more, just to see first hand how they could develop so much faster and smarter than me.
This immediately reminds me of the scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor is reflecting on how the terminator, reprogrammed to aid John Connor, is the best father figure he’s ever had.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tksN5Jaan9E
“It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him. Never shout at him or get drunk and hit him or say he was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there, and it would die to protect him.”
Amazing. what a beautiful scene, words, everything. And it's objectively true.
One of the things I have hugely enjoyed about LLMs is asking the same question again and again until I finally get why it is the way it is.
No human could deal with "I don't get it, try explaining it another way..." after the 10th time.
Not all teachers are able to see the POV of the student. In fact, i would argue that only exceptionally good teachers are able to.
Whether AI can achieve this level of understanding is still yet to be seen, but i would hope it is possible.
For example, unless the instructor has some kind of Jedi master level self control they may begin to show frustration at being asked the same question repeatedly or with minor variations.
If they choose to use an AI to "cheat" and not learn, then it is no different than them using any other methods to not learn (such as truancy).
Not true, but only available at great expense.
They would, but only if you were rich enough to afford a personal tutor. There's plenty of scientific evidence that students who have one learn a lot faster than those stuck in a classroom. With AI, you can probably get most of the benefits of a personal tutor for a fraction of the price.
The issue is that AI is not at least yet accurate enough for that. You need think on your own and be expert to spot all the inaccuracies. But then again, we are talking about how students can learn based on that...
There is little point in writing essays any more. We’ll need to find other ways of testing knowledge acquisition.
But also, we’ll need other menus of skills/knowledge to acquire. It seems to me that rote memorization of facts is even less useful than it was 5 years ago. However being able to synthesize facts and ideas, this is where the human edge will be concentrated.
With AI to do the grunt work, maybe we can have our kids actually building meaningful things much earlier than they would otherwise be capable of.
I don't think we need Generative AI for 7th grade. College, perhaps, but how much advanced math is there in 7th grade these days?
It didn’t keep me from learning the material - a lot of those assignments and problem sets were simply busy work — but did improve ho much free time I had to read and surf the net and learn new tech things.
But idea behind these AI tutors are to help and guide you through the process of asking questions until you understands.
Will it be perfect? hell no! Just another tool for teachers to either enhance and/or give extra help with almost no extra resources.
Hopefully this will pan out for the better then the worse
While I'm sure this is a typo, I also expect this is exactly how it will play out. For the better initially, then, for the worse a short time later.
The most of the students will not use it for improving their own text or iteration process, unless the penalties for cheating are very high. They instead copy-paste the instructions, add some adjustments, and then copy-paste the output. This will give them results in the shortest amount of time, if there are assignments where something needs to be returned. But how to detect cheaters?
Too many students do tasks as in "completion" oriented way, not in learning oriented way. I am mostly talking from college/university perspective.
(Source: a very smart science teacher I know and won't name. Keep in mind most high school science teachers have weak scientific backgrounds. This technology is poison.)
(Plus every one of them who gets out makes life better for the rest at least by reducing downward pressure on wages, and hopefully also by creating new business opportunities that raise wages further by increasing supply. Rigorous education is almost always a win-win: https://matiane.wordpress.com/2021/09/15/democratic-educatio... )
Sample size of one, and obviously there's a million confounding variables here, but I think that my love of math stems from the fact that both my parents, and especially my dad, really loved math (and physics), and so whenever I had any questions about any aspect of math (at least up to calculus and differential equations), I could ask one of them for help pretty much whenever I wanted, and they would enthusiastically help me immediately, and eventually I grew to love it myself.
Eventually I did well enough in math to where they gave me a test in school and I was able to skip two grades in it (going from 7th grade to 9th grade level). I ended up getting much more into discrete math and surpassed my parents in the more "pure" math. Even if my genetics were completely unaltered, I am quite convinced that if my parents weren't there to provide constant help then that wouldn't have happened.
I think AI has the possibility of providing a comparable experience to what I had. It can patiently explain every aspect of math that any middle or high school student is likely to come across, and I think it has power to "de-frustrate" them as a result.
So yes, I'd personally say we should expect people to "keep up in math".