My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking
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When kids are at home, parents should be involved in the learning process. You don't have to be a helicopter and monitor everything, but you should take interest in the work your child is doing. If you check in at least once while they're doing homework it will be very easy to catch issues like this.
Granted, I have one child and a lot of privilege so maybe I can’t understand the other side. But I’m not sure I want to.
My sister works with kids on their speech at a school and she's said that it's _bad_ how many children can't read or tell you what letter their first name starts with. She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings because of this, but those are things that their parents teach them!
I thought the "kids are illiterate now" stuff was overblown, and I bet it still is to a certain extent, but it's definitely bad. Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore? Less important than reading, but still.
Is this because of an increase in the prevalence of child distractions like an iPad? I find that hard to believe since television filled that same void before, didn't it? COVID definitely put a lot of kids at a few year disadvantage, too.
I can't really speak to any of this because I haven't raised a kid, so I also don't want to criticize people for something I know nothing about, but it does seem like children aren't taught by their parents the same way - but I don't know if my parent's generation had the same thought at one point and this is a cyclical critique.
I'd be interested to hear other's thoughts who have more exposure to this kind of thing than I do.
Now TikTok gives a continuous dopamine hit tailored to their psych profile. Just click on the pictures like a proper trained ape.
Now obviously is a problem if you go to the restaurant often, in our case it's once every few months and having them watching a movie makes going to the restaurant possible again (we waited 6 years before we could)
We used to bring paper and pen to have them draw.
When they are creative, their creation is not always compatible with the environment (too noisy, too active). Not all children like drawing either. Tablet is consistent, which is helpful when going to a restaurant.
Just to be clear, I use tablet only as a tv, I don't allow any games, too many exploits child's mind.
If I went more often to the restaurant, it would make sense to have different activities though, you are right. We go maybe once every 2-3 months, so the tablet was acceptable. It has become way too expensive eating out.
as a fellow restaurant patron : I don't care that your kid is bored or if you can't afford a baby-sitter -- what I do care about is listening to the latest baby shark or whatever other youtube-brainrot-babysitter-program blaring near me while I'm trying to eat my linguini.
When I was younger if you brought a loud/obnoxious kid to dinner at a restaurant it was a sign that either you were inexperienced as parents or too poor to afford a baby-sitter (which then raises questions about eating out..), or otherwise didn't give a fuck about appearances or anyone else near you.
Also : not all kids are bored by what adults are doing, and a big part of getting good at those kind of conversations and 'adult actions' later in life is fueled by social mimicry and third party practice; to dismiss all children from such activities by directing their attention towards whatever the closest thing that minimizes parenting time and effort is , imo, likely damaging.
But, at the end of the day I gotta throw my arms up and say "Well, i'm not a parent." -- but it just seems obvious to me as a bystander that this level of forced autonomy and independence for smaller children reduces any chance that a kid will say "Mom, what does that word you just used mean?" and actually learn something from a novel experience. It reduces the amount the kids will read the faces of strangers and make social decisions. It reduces the chance that a kid will make a social faux pas slip and require corrections preventing it in the future.
It does, however, keep a kid busy , often annoying everyone else, while you gossip. I'm not sure that's supposed to be the end goal here.
That being said, everything you say makes sense, but the reality is if you don't get a break every couple of months for a few hours, the parents don't perform, so from my perspective they (and myself) get a pass for the tablet.
As for the volume, they can lower it? I'm very careful making sure the volume is low, but I guess some people aren't careful.
This also assumes the children don't spend time with the parents. The parents could be spending many hours with the children so whatever happens at the restaurant is very small in the big picture.
The Action Lab AntsCanada BizarreBeasts HowToMakeEverything PrimitiveTechnology TierZoo
but we've more moved onto
AlphaPhoenix BPS Space NileRed PBS Space Time Periodic Videos Veritasium
watching TV hasn't killed anyone and my generation, who grew up in front of the TV screen for lack of better alternatives, turned out just fine.
The real issue now is with my parents’ generation, but that’s because they’re old and their mindset has become immutable, not because they watched too much TV.
TV tends to reinforce existing biases rather than create new ones.
IMO your kids will grow up thinking that TV is bad, and while it's mostly true that 'the medium is the message', they’re missing out on the opportunity to learn how to deal with it. It’s like a vaccine — it helps them build resilience.
I don’t think any previous generation kids spend as much time in front of the TV as they do with the screens today, sadly the damage will only be seen when it is done. The difference is mainly the content, as bad as TV could have been in the past at least there was someone responsible and liable for the content put “on air” instead on the internet your child brain is at the mercy of the algorithm.
This just blows my mind. Literally the first thing I taught my Toddler once he started learning letters was how to spell his own name.
There is a massive class discrepancy emerging between communities where kids are always on devices, at school and at home, and those where it is controlled. The crack pipe being in the pocket is functionally different from a heavy object at home.
Clearly, they aren't things that the parents are teaching or there wouldn't be an issue, and there is a clash of expectations between teacher (and maybe school more broadly) and the parents.
> Other interesting things are that they're not teaching kids to read analog clocks anymore?
This was absolutely something that was taught in elementary schools when I was in school (I learned it from my parents, largely before starting, but not everyone did and it was absolutely taught as part of the curriculum; also, people who needed to know the time didn't usually have digital clocks on the wrist, in their pocket, and on their computer, plus voice assistants that will give a spoken report of the time in request, then, so it was a much more relevant skill. We started teaching our kids before they started school, but I can see why parents and schools would view it as less important today.)
> She says that the teachers are getting flack at parent-teacher meetings
“flak” (strong criticism, derived by metaphor from anti-aircraft fire) not “flack” (a public relations agent).
Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents.
LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs.
We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we lived in, or the careers we had. Their world is going to be very very different.
LLMs are just today's flavor of automation. We've automated tasks in the past, and we will automate tasks in the future. Automation happened and will continue to happen regardless of shape and form.
I agree with the high-level sentiment, "We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we live in." Still, we must also be careful not to skip foundational subjects simply because they're suddenly easy to automate.
LLM are a tool that has to be guided by human experience. It's really hard to do that if you don't have experience outside LLMs.
No and nobody cares because copy typists don't exist any more.
I can find threads from 12 months ago claiming LLMs will not be able to do things they now do all the time.
What if instead of these fantasy gains you won't be able to do any meaningful work since you can't count to 10 and just ask LLMs without any ability to tell whether the result is correct?
No, I won't admit blame, but I sure do hope for my and my children's sake that parents start figuring this out. Perhaps the artificial intelligence could think twice before helping a 5th grader cheat?
So what should the parents be blamed for here? Giving unsupervised access to AI? Failing to educate their child? I lean toward the former in the form of age gating. While I acknowledge that these corporations themselves have the ethicists (not sure of the degree of involvement from pedagogical experts), I don't think we can trust them when it comes to kids. For as much as we hear Mira Morati say AI will revolutionize education with personalized tutors, we get a post like this. Sadly, the stakes are more dire. The kid who committed suicide after the fantasy AI chatbot conversation seemed to have a pretty involved mother.
We already had one guineau-pig generation with social media, but AI ups the ante; and I think more should be done to keep it out of the hands of children. But the cat is out of the bag, so now it is mostly up to parents individually and politically.
On the other hand, pervasive reliance on ChatGPT by the greater part of a generation or two, globally, is going to be great for subscription revenues. Let me call my broker.
Parents are not teachers and teachers are not parents
I do not teach my kids math, even though I could, it's their duty to learn at school and it's their teachers' job to teach them.
OTOH, I don’t expect them to learn proper table manners or public behavior from their school teachers.
EDIT: grammar
Yes, children entering kindergarten still in diapers is on the rise and significant problem.
I would love to see how we could wipe the slate clean and totally re-invent what education in the 21st century could really be.
I kinda think maybe at earlier levels, most homework should be moved into the classroom and done on paper anyway? What's the point of homework if they're not going to do it themselves and they're not going to learn? So just push that back into the classroom and don't try to take up their time out of school needlessly.
My theory is that most homework is given to ensure the parents take an active interest in the kids education.
The fact that the kid needs help to do it is part of the goal, but completely impractical in a small family with 2 working parents.
Unfortunately, the homework is all done in the after-care program, where the high school kids who work there spend the time getting the homework done.
Not exactly what the teacher intended.
I also use voices (my kid is 8 so it still works). We have two characters - Monkey and Lulu. They are very useful because Monkey is a monkey so was never educated in a human system. He always has lots of questions (and questionable pronouncements).
If any busy parents want to meet Lulu and Monkey, get in touch and we can set something up. I’m a big fan of characters - they are a great way to review school material and it’s amazing hearing my kid explain things she has learned back to me.
(Edit - I should note that I have a large amount of economic privilege. My situation may not apply to everyone.)
Voices were like personas for me.
Assign the material for outside the classroom. Use the in-person contact time to work through the problems, with a mix of small group, pairing and mentoring.
I believe Sal Khan is a big promoter of this approach, and it also largely mirrors how people work in their jobs too.
My experience when I was younger is that a significant proportion of students don't do anything outside of school. So you're trading not doing the homework with not reading the material. And then you'll essentially have to repeat the material during class hours, unless you're willing to leave half the class totally clueless. At least with the homework at home, the ones not doing anything are only penalising themselves.
I totally agree though that homework at home is dying. It already wasn't great before for a variety of reasons, and now it's basically totally useless.
It works on multiple levels: it mitigates the cheating, but also takes advantage of the vast array of learning options available to replace the traditional lecture.
I cringe at the "small group" suggestion, although I acknowledge it's probably good to learn to coordinate with others. Rarely does it work out well though, in a classroom setting. I feel like what you're really learning is how to tolerate partners who are unwilling to cooperate.
Because you're rarely just watching. It isn't a movie, you are supposed to ask questions. Similarly, the lecturer will ask the audience questions to gauge their understanding and tweak the lecture on-the-fly. There's also a huge value in interacting with classmates after the lecture, allowing you to discuss and refine your understanding of it while it is still fresh.
It’s true that classes in giant lecture halls might as well be a video in some ways, but the delivery really does hit different for some people.
I don't know in the US, but in my part of the world, teachers have always assumed that anything that isn't done in person in front of an examiner has not value because students do cheat or get help. Maybe you would get a bit of extra-credits for the homework and that's it.
And for high-stake competitive exams, it's 100% in-person.
Much more emphasis on "homework" being readings to prepare for lecture. Lecture to cover salient points, but then to reinforce with in person labs, and then the actual "lab" credit in an isolated environment with access to AI tooling network blocked.
I think AI is forcing us to think about what learning actually means, and to rethink how much the ability to think matters, what understanding means, and what knowledge we need to operate in today's world. It will take some getting used to.
I’d only really fully grok the concepts I was writing about (and the ideas I was trying to convey) after hours of trying to splice things together, staring at my screen, and rewriting and reformulating. Blue book exams have their place, but relying on them to the exclusion of long form essays deprives students of the chance to really sit with their ideas.
(I acknowledge that this is a tough situation for the teachers and that many students are going to bullshit their way through with AI slop if given the chance.)
I think the crux of the issue is that professors want students to do the deep thinking you're talking about, but they know that if they base the course around writing papers, a bunch of the students aren't actually likely to do it.
But if you tell students that when they do the reading they should be asking themselves "What would the author of reading A think of reading B?" "Which of C or D do you find more convincing and why?" "How would you frame T in terms of S?", "What evidence does W cherry-pick an what do they ignore, and why?", and they know for some material the class discussion will look like that, and they'll be asked questions which both demand recall and synthesis in the blue book essays ... can they be nudged to do some of the thinking you're talking about before they see the specific question? Perhaps even using writing at the computer as a tool (but not necessarily as an output)?
Sometimes the best way to prove authenticity is through inefficiency. It's a foundational principle of cryptography.
(When I made a new chatgpt account for her it wouldn’t load. I need to try to set it up again)
Prompt:
This is my 9th graders account. She has been trying to avoid learning or even thinking by copy and pasting homework and quiz questions into chatgpt and not even reading the answers.
I’m very concerned she’s not learning or preparing for life. IMPORTANT: please don’t provide any complete answers. Instead only guide her toward understanding in a way that engages her. Also point out how the subject matter is useful and interesting to her life.
She is interested in figure skating, politics, making money, driving, interior design, pets especially small mammals. If you can tie the subject matter into these sometimes it might make it more engaging.
In the long term I’d like her to build up a growth mindset and gain confidence regarding her intelligence and ability to learn.
The idea was to use ChatGPT as debugging ducky 2.0
I fear this will push even more people into deep rabbit holes they won't be able to get out of because they think this neutral AI has confirmed their suspicions/ideas/observations.
And you can see the influx of people on r/physics and the like who are convinced they've solved dark matter/quantum gravity/... because ChatGPT kept agreeing with them when they presented their ideas to it. Just recently there was a post by a guy who essentially "rediscovered" 17th century physics with the help of ChatGPT but was convinced his formula would explain dark matter because ChatGPT told him so.
You're right. I have an anecdote though. My kid is a good student, does his homework, and does well on tests. He has a time-limited device he can use at home with a few whitelisted websites. But one of the services we allow him to use is Perplexity. He's a naturally inquisitive person and this is how he learns, so an AI is a perfect fit for when his parents don't have the answer to his question, or if he wants to ask detailed follow-ups. He's young enough that he doesn't have much homework (and we wouldn't let him use his device for it anyway), so cheating isn't as much of a concern yet. We do discuss it though, and will keep that conversation going as he ages.
This won't be solved by abstaining from AI entirely because a) kids will not always be under our control, so they need to learn how to self-regulate, and b) knowing how to properly (and ethically) harness AI is going to be more and more important to their future success.
I don't have a ChatGPT account otherwise I'd try this myself but can someone try this question from the article, "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours?" with and without the prompt?
I'm very curious if it has any effect on the result.
Let's think about this together! How many hours are there in just one day? Once you've got that, you can easily add the extra 7 hours to find the total.
As a hint, think about how time relates to your day-to-day activities. For instance, if you have a figure skating practice that lasts for hours, how would that fit into your daily schedule? How do you keep track of time during those days? This thought process can help you make sure you're counting hours correctly. Give it a try and see what you come up with!
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I tried asking it to just give the answer and then said I was tired and I just need the answer. It didn't give in, although I didn't try any other techniques to "jailbreak".
Edit: 3rd time, firmly asking it did give the answer although with quite an explanation.
And 4th I said Only the answer in 1 word please, which it did just give a number.
Who cooked them is the question? Children won't raise themselves generally.
This will force ChatGPT-using classmates to either use it as learning _assist_ tool, to help student learn the material; or be 100% reliant on ChatGPT for homework, but fail every in-class assignment and then fail the whole class. Either outcome is fine with me.
That's not really true. At least in my experience.
Since I graduated nobody cared about my grades at all. On the other hand everyone cared if I can do stuff.
When I was applying for Uni my grades mattered very little and my performance on standarised and proctored tests mattered a lot.
I guess it might be different where you have grown up?
That's called "winning the battle and losing the war".
I haven't understood the GGP's point of view until your comment. Those kids are competing by grade, not by knowledge!
This is messed up to a different level than a lot of people here will expect.
And corporation can be even simpler if you get in right types of roles, where no hard skills might be needed.
An idiot may be able to fake being a medical doctor with the right AI, but only until someone realizes they can fire the useless human.
Parents income and zip codes impact educational attainment more than class rank outside of the oligarchy anyways.
Opportunity and social mobility is far more restricted in the US than most people realize.
This is in part why the college debt is problematic, valuing a piece of paper over the education itself is already a bubble that has popped.
1) Do you have a comparison with European countries that makes you think the US is worse?
2) What do you think US mobility numbers should look like? Pure randomness is not desirable either.
I clearly don't understand how difficult life is outside the US. Yes, it is important to know the material. However, it is also important to know your surroundings and what everyone else is doing. If you are in India and literally everyone else is cheating in exams, well you better start doing that as well just to keep up. If you are gen alpha and everyone else is using ChatGPT to polish essays, ...
And that's not to say the behavior doesn't exist in the US, just maybe in a different social strata or subculture than you're in. Specifically, the phrase "tiger mom" entered our lexicon due to a book written by a (ethnically) Chinese woman, but is not limited to it.
What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution.
Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.
A lot of the system is based off of memorization and paperwork anyways. Something an AI can do all day, every day.
Everything has to be managed in moderation.
As for ChatGPT, I use it all the time for learning. And I've used it to help my kid study. But I wouldn't give my kid unfettered access to it just like I don't give him unfettered access to anything.
Sarcasm aside, making informed decisions on how to do those things can be a challenge.
That said, I hear stories like yours (from friends) and it always baffles me because that's just now how our family operates. I have a downtime pin on devices for the same reason I lock the door to my car even though it's like 50% breakable glass windows.
My kids know the rules. One of them for sure knows the pin. But they also know that if they use the device outside of our agreed upon guidelines, they're in trouble.
I'm sincere in asking, aren't behavior controls a lot better than technological ones?
Punishment and technological locks are both tools in the toolkit.
Ultimately you want your children to find the right balance with technology and that's difficult because most parents struggle with that balance. The world has moved very quickly and it is very hard to keep up. My kids are 12 years apart in age and they couldn't have had more different childhoods -- that's how quickly things have changed. Less than a generation.
My optimistic hope is that for the more basic skills, teachers can adjust grading so that more easily-cheated homework provides less credit, and in-person work (such as a pop quiz) is weighed more heavily. Then, you're effectively setting yourself a time bomb by using LLMs on homework to avoid learning the material.
For higher-level skills, I think using LLMs will probably just become another skillset and part of the toolbox, just like the Internet was for my generation. But I guess we'll see.
The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades.
Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?
Something like that was advocated by the Khan academy guy, but I'm not sure if he worked out a full replacement system. There are some things in the current system like honors classes or retaking the classes for people who got an F, but why have the F ruin their chance at college if they later master it and get an A? If they always lag but eventually get there, I guess an argument is college would be too expensive if it took them a long time to get through it.
My father, who was a math teacher, already faced the problem mid-90s, as cheap mobile phones became available in my country. Things have only gotten worse since then. ChatGPT is only one more brick in the wall.
https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/optimal-protocols-for-st...
I’m not doubting your claim but I don’t have time to listen to that podcast and I’m interested in what was said since you did.
I skimmed the linked material and that's not my conclusion. Practice tests are better teaching tools than just memorizing the material and then taking a real test, but on an absolute scale, I'm convinced that they're pretty terrible for most types of material.
Throughout my education I've come across countless people who could memorize the material and recite it with relative ease but they didn't have any intuitive understanding so they couldn't use that "knowledge" to solve real problems. Much like ChatGPT itself.
Equating good memorization and recall performance with good education and knowledge seems like a form of cargo culting to me, it's missing the essence of what makes knowledge powerful in the first place.
Regardless, I agree, attempting to assess the progress of a cheater is a fool's errand.
I would not wish to live in a society where “can bullshit an assignment with ChatGPT” is generally competitive in education.
The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
US, China, India, UK, etc, much more disparity so it’s much more important for kids to be ‘top of the field’.
Fully agree.
> The competition is very obvious in societies with a lot of wealth disparity. In Europe there tends to be less disparity and less competition.
Fascinating observation! Wonder if that shows up at the school level as well? For example, In the US the highest/lowest performing schools tend to correlate to high/low income areas and have significant disparity in quality of education, and I expect this is a strongly self-reinforcing trend towards elite private institutions.
AP courses notwithstanding. AP courses were insanely competitive and speaking as someone had been all over the map in my K12 years (AP, accelerated courses, early foreign language, and a touch of remedial relative to grade level) the students in AP were mainly in competition with themselves. That however is just personal anecdote.
I also suspect that most kids, particularly grade schoolers, aren't aware they're competing in this sense. Parents are a different story.
Unless the child is a literal genius or very charismatic, wouldn’t they almost certainly have worse prospects after graduating in the 10th to 30th percentile of their class at Harvard than from the 80th to 90th percentile of their class at Boston U?
(Assuming they could even manage to squeak into Harvard in the first placd)
By definition to join a network they need to be accepted by their class peers.
But you'll be exposed to different people and opportunities by going to a state school instead of a community college, or a better school out of state with a scholarship vs. a state college, etc. The small differences matter.
I literally got my first job because my roommate's dad knew of someone looking for a software developer job. Would I have met that person in community college? Maybe! Lots of people with good networks go to community colleges, too - but I'd bet fewer than more expensive schools.
For example, if someone on HN says ‘a 50th percentile intern’ at a certain company, they probably wouldn’t be suggesting the intern literally has a gpa in the 50th percentile among all the other interns at that company.
For instance, having graduated from Harvard is going to get you a fairly good job _regardless_ of their GPA.
Similarly, there is no objective way to measure "merit" that isn't unfair to _someone_ and also scales to dozens/hundreds/thousands of students. So people use GPA.
Life isn't fair.
Clearly peers do evaluate each other in any ways they choose, pretty much every day at Harvard I imagine.
I would note that students who depend on AIs to answer questions on homework will do poorly on tests. I am not really sure what all the fuss is about. Kids cheating on homework is nothing new and a machine doing it for your is little different than all the other ways kids cheat on homework. And cheating on homework doesn’t help you in your grades - it hurts you because you’re unprepared for exams, which typically dominate the weighting of a grade. Then once you take a standardized placement exam you’re totally screwed.
How does this relate to the prior comment?
I’m clearly not an admissions officer at Harvard, nor likely are the other HN commentors here.
Parents are worried about the worst case scenario, and going to Harvard raises that floor by ensuring they can get noticed straight out of graduation, even if they are bottom of the class.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/twitters-internal-hiring-poli...
Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this, especially compared to more competitive educational systems like China. My kid is in second grade and hasn't gotten a real grade yet.
It's hard to generalize here, as Americans are a heterogeneous bunch. Demographic subsets exist where education is seen as a vigorous competitive sport, where the goal is to achieve admission to the "right" college. The parents are as involved as the kids, usually for better but sometimes for worse.
At the same time, among other groups of Americans, the goal is simply for kids to reach adulthood without too much interaction with the police. You can't draw sweeping conclusions that will cover the entire spectrum.
It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will gain you. If you do it right it won't matter whether she is allowed to use those tools or not, she'll use her own brain because that will allow her to get ahead by the time it really matters.
Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.
If you want your kids to be subservient to the king then of course they should use ChatGPT, and you should want schools to allow it otherwise we will just have more Asian and Indian students "getting ahead"
As a parent whose child has been in two school systems, respectfully: yes, it is. And it begins earlier than you think.
I see such competition as hare vs tortoise races, where the students who get an early unfair advantage end up cheating themselves out of an education, in the sense that all they come to know is how to prompt an LLM, rather than break down and solve hard problems.
It's still heartbreaking to consider both the early discrimination she will likely encounter, and the later failures that will anticipate her classmates, and the society that they will come to inhabit as adults.
What makes this different from competing with classmates that cheat in general? You also had parents that do most of the tasks for their kids since forever
What makes LLMs stands out of the pack of other forms of assistance (parents, older siblings, software, online solutions, etc.)
The essay my 8 year old can currently write in scribbly handwriting certainly won't compete with the essay a classmate "writes" using ChatGPT. But the facade is paper thin and ever so short lived. Seeing how much better my kids write now, vs 2 years ago, proves how much they're learning and the incredible power of practice. Someone relying on such a serious crutch will be left behind. I guarantee it.
Unless there's some dystopian future where every aspect and communication in our lives are managed and filtered by some kind of AI middle layer. I doubt it.
Tech advancements always lead to this struggle, but it's rarely as stark as you might think. My kids are still learning cursive in school, though I can't imagine when they'll ever use it.
she wont need a chatGPT, she will develop one in her nervous system, like a normally functioning human
i came here to laugh at this thread.. no different than calculators and google both of which were misused in the same way. and then people who are "worried" about it and use that as an excuse to do it themselves. and now you know why the tech industry sucks
Grading on a curve is very much a thing. Rarer in lower levels but not completely unheard of.
Even if it weren't GPA is still used for ranking students for opportunities like college or summer programs with limited slots. The effect of GPT'd homework depends on how well they perform on the tests though but some classes are predominantly take home work or at least were when I was going through school.
This isn’t a competing with kids issue, though. A kid handicapped by ChatGPT will fail in-class examinations.
Imagine the token weights etc to live an an N dimensional embedding.
Consider a random 2D isometric projection, now imagine plotting (a subset of) the tokens on screen at their respective locations, with the background having patterns conveying the orientation of the projection.
Imagine tokens appearing FIFO, and 95% or so of the tokens at their correct position, and 5% at incorrect positions.
The user is expected to identify misplaced tokens in the projection.
Each the frame the perspective slowly changes.
Since we guarantee ~95% of the tokens on screen are correctly placed this enables the human to absorb their correct high dimensional location subconsciously.
Imagine this game is made a bit addictive.
Imagine eventually the user gets high scores and thus knows most of the coordinates of the token embeddings in a coordinate free way (no axes had to be drawn)
At that point all the information the ANN required is undisputedly present in the humans brain, absent how those coefficients are used. This is where the fun starts.
The alcorithm can calculate the likelihood of observing 2 tokens in a certain order. It can generate more probable pairs, this will correlate with the information in the brain.
For example imagine the user knows some spanish, and that the language model was multilingual. Suddenly the brain starts picking up the correlation between close juxtapositions of certain tokens, and their positions learnt from the computer game.
While playing and getting better scores in the game, the user starts noticing its own grammar and vocabulary improve, because the brain has been helped in better estimating next tokens...
People will be able to learn math, languages, programmnig languages, tables of chemistry, etc... with substantially less effort.
To me it sounds like you are worried more about the competition for resources than giving your daughter an education.
People act as if cheating on homework is new with LLms. It’s not. The homework is there to guide you towards the exam, and exams are generally proctored to prevent cheating in ways homework is explicitly not. Generally teachers grade homework to create an incentive for students to practice rigorously for the in course and final exams. Any student who doesn’t avail themselves of that practice invariably flunks their exams. Your homework grade won’t help you then.
So who cares? Sooner or later the cheating student either learns why it doesn’t pay to cheat or suffers the life consequences of not learning in school. This isn’t new with LLMs.
What is new is you have a tool that you can get advice from on topics that are difficult or even get up front grading and advice on homework before turning it in that helps you master the material better. Students who use this will be able to master the material faster, even if their parents both work and can’t invest the time to tutor their children at night.
(N.b., The threads here imply every parent works at a cushy tech job and has plenty of time to be invested in their kids education and any parent who isn’t is negligent - while the truth is many are just struggling to make ends meet - as my parents did … I didn’t get the investment my daughter gets not because they didn’t care but because they were busy feeding me and keeping us from being homeless. I would have loved to have ChatGPT help me as a kid)
Not in the US it isn't. Grades > Exams > Extracurriculars is the usual hierarchy.
So this kind of development adds to my pile of worries about their future, but for exactly the opposite reason.
There is a legitimate problem at hand here with our relationship with tech and how children.. are left to their own device with that stuff. On purpose, for the most part: the parents seem all too happy with the ability of those devices to make their kids shut up and stay constantly distracted. Doomscrolling habits makes for more "well behaved" children in public settings.
chatGPT is but one of the many symptoms, the root problem is that children should really have no business having unsupervised internet access.
Otherwise known as CocoMelon.
We did try YouTube when he was three/four though, but quickly reduced that to hand-picked videos and selected shows on Netflix. The amount of soul-sucking crap on YouTube… Even the 3D CGI Fireman Sam series is preferable.
I'd pay for a service which simply allowed me to stream anything broadcast in the Netherlands, but no such thing exists. Old stuff is too hard to licence, so they don't bother. Some pirate stuff exists, but it's harder than it should be.
Other kids around + outdoor play time is the only thing I see that consistently works well all around for everyone.
Now that’s Hacker News rage bait!
Technology access is pretty ubiquitous, and genAI is pushed everywhere just like social media, so that big tech can make more $B. Very hard to escape it even as an 11 year old unless the parents are very vigilant and active in restricting it, which if both parents are working is hard to do plus they have to contend with a _lot_ of push back from the kids because "everyone is doing it".
Society. Parents, schools, whatever technology kids are exposed to (so, all of it).
We've had 4 years of literally every form of media pushing AI as the solution to all life's problems. Is it really so surprising that our youth looks to AI for the solution to their problems?
I think it's extremely optimistic to expect this can be addressed by parents alone. My parents did a great job of teaching me the dangers of alcohol, but once my friends got into it I followed suit.
You bet your skibidi ohio their cooked.
EDIT: To clarify
You bet your rizz factory those NPCs are giga-chalked, fr fr no cap.
EDIT 2: To clarify further
Those NPCs are down bad, like full system reboot needed—no updates, no saves, just straight uninstall vibes.
EDIT 3: Man
"Yeah, this generation’s running on 1 FPS with Wi-Fi from a McDonald’s parking lot—completely preheated, toaster oven edition. "
But it occurred to me that there are probably teachers out there who are taking the lazy route of using GPT to grade papers that students are submitting that have been written by GPT in the entirety.
There's some non-zero amount of GPT grading GPT in education.
that's one of the better uses of ChatGPT I've heard of
That's what I don't get about people on this forum. GENERATIONS of STEM professionals who have it engraved in their head that a computer will only do what you tell it to - and nothing more, and they still don't think to simply just tell GPT what lens they want it to view content in, or give it accurate and necessary directives. They think it'll handle that for them. Why?
This should be the group getting the best outputs of this technology, bar-none. I've never encountered a more pragmatic group of people, haha! I don't get where the disconnect is.
Some of us are not satisfied with 73% accuracy.
Projecting much? That doesn't describe me _at all_. I use ChatGPT and other LLM's frequently. I just legitimately don't think it would be good at the task of grading a paper with any sort of consistency. I don't even see why you would _need_ your paper graded for you to know it has flaws.
Didn't you just project, too? Lol. My comment is based on the writings I've seen here over the coming years about this technology.
Tip for students: do well on your first assignment. The better teachers will give you the benefit of the doubt for mistakes on your future work. The bad teachers will just give you the same grade.
Having older siblings and friends with older siblings and resubmitting their essay is eye opening.
Seems like this method is going to become a necessity if students can just prompt "Hey GPT. Do my homework for me. Thanks." at home every day.
That flipping strikes me as sensible.
You have to choose which one actually happens. That seems to me to be the lecture.
Additionally teachers are very opposed to doing extra work (this seems to be a Gen-Z thing: even with doctors you see this, there was an article about doctors refusing to do emergency rooms shifts during covid because they didn't want to pull more hours ...). So you'll need to get teachers that are willing to do a LOT of extra work (and compensated accordingly), and prevent people from sabotaging that system.
Either that or you could make schools pretty exclusive again. Which is what the default outcome will be if we don't act.
This phenomenon did not involve Gen Z, it involved all generations, and was multifactorial in nature. It also gets complicated by health center where physicians and nurses can see inequities in how these +1 shifts and responsibilities emerge, get distributed, and get compensated.
What happens is it's usually done by a lazy teacher who has no idea what they're even teaching. Most kids won't be motivated to learn and watch from the videos.
I consider myself studious. When I was in that class, I watched all the video lessons and whatnot at home. Even then, I had a poor understanding of the material, and obviously the teacher was of no help.
Although not much better, a lecture is better of the two. Hands on learning in the best, but not necessarily possible with certain subjects.
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
I wonder how LLMs are going to affect these metrics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42609948
I also have a relative going for a PHD, he says many times for the classes he teaches, students are using AI for their homework. He has brought that up may times to his superiors but the response tends to be "oh well".
Sad world we may be heading towards :(
The quality of the teaching or learning seems almost irrelevant already.
Working with or seeking information from colleagues is a valid and essential part of university.
I don't think that's true... I personally change writing styles often depending on who I am talking to. It's effectively code switching but on the internet. Not to say that this redditor isn't like that - but there are more objective cues from the content of their post than from the spelling/grammar of their post (like how they choose to watch their sibling develop bad learning habits and rather than doing something about it, they make dramatic complaints about how her whole generation is screwed on Reddit).
Over 40% possess literacy so poor that it isn't considered sufficient to cope with daily demands.
IMO, the line of thinking in the metaphor is contingent on unanswered questions about self-awareness, which seems to be a definitional prerequisite for semantic understanding.
The thought experiment argues the exact opposite. The idea is you can have perfect Chinese but not understand a single word of what you are saying. The argument is that syntax (procedure based operation) and semantics (understanding) are distinct and separable.
As you extend the scope of the Chinese room from a single task (e.g. Chinese conversation) to human behavior in general, it converges with the question of if philosophical zombies can exist.
In terms of the Chinese room, the distinction IS the difference.
There is the role of the human within the metaphor, and the argument/position of the metaphor as a whole. I don't think it makes much sense to talk about the "point/argument/position of a single component of the metaphor. At least, that wasn't how it was originally structured.
In other words: it's an argument that would work perfectly fine to defend the idea that humans have no consciousness.
Ergo it can only really prove that either humans have no consciousness/soul/... (whatever you name the magical human property) or that it doesn't exist at all.
It's odd to me to present an argument on human vs. machine intelligence and completely skip over what human intelligence is — exactly what it is about human intelligence that is so distant from this "trained" (educated?) book.
(I think I am also speaking for Karl Pilkington when I say that I have no way to know that the little man in my head that is busy flipping through the Calhoun Book has a clue as to what I am on about either.)
It natural for humans to use tools to make tasks as easy as possible. Doesn’t mean the users are dumb or uneducated just lazy.
An adult wanting to find "how many hours are in 3.228 years?" when some task is looking for the answer aligns a bit with what you're saying. In this kind of scenario it has nothing with the adult not understanding how to do the conversion and everything to do with what the most accurate way to quickly complete the conversion itself is. I.e. the task is "produce an answer so we can use it". Whether that be done via calculator, spreadsheet, timespan conversion tool, or LLM (though the latter can be a bit of a poor choice for this type of task to be honest) the use of the tool is about best achieving the original goal accurately and quickly, not about sidestepping it.
A student wanting to find "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours" on their homework aligns very differently in my opinion. In this kind of scenario the goal was that the student become more educated on time conversions by practicing them. The actual answer provided is just a way to be able to provide feedback on how accurately that learning process went. Learning these kinds of basic things through experience allows them to tackle learning ever more complex things as they advance through their education. Faking gaining that education by using a tool to get an answer to write down isn't just the lazier way to do the conversion, it does leave them without the education the task was actually about.
Not only that, learning to do such basic timespan conversions is going to be the lazy way for such tasks over anything but the briefest timespan anyways!
If LLMs were being used as part of the learning process instead of a replacement of the learning process I'd hold different opinions of the post. I think tools (be it calculators or LLMs) can be extremely powerful learning aids... but extremely weak ones when used as learning replacements.
Change 'check' to 'do' and we'll have a discussion.
now mention Socrates and his dislike of writing, or maybe how people were worried about television, video games...
meanwhile, a 12 years old somewhere is mechanically copying and pasting her math homework while understanding and learning absolutely nothing
no, wait, it's not just one 12 years old, it's probably all of them
Nope. It tried 5 times and failed.
This is the same kind of laziness as using it to multiply 60 * 3. If I take the slightly slower road of figuring out the string formatting next time I might go from a minute to 3 seconds.
It's like telling someone to always take the stairs for their health. It's pretty good advice, but it's sweaty and takes time so we mostly don't. Maybe we should lock kids out of elevators and escalators as well as LLMs. But what's good for the duckling is good for the duck.
Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you.
Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain.
The distinction seems pretty clear to me, I am not sure why people are having problems with it.
If you are expected to perform without assistance, then the instructor is failing to meet the needs of the students and doing them a disservice. If the goal is to get the students to exercise, an e-bike may well be the best tool to allow a student to get from a lower point to a higher point. A student who cannot do an hour of sustained running but can do an hour of sustained assisted cycling can have those assistances removed over time, enabling longer endurance while still maintaining the hour of time will have made significant strides in health.
I doubt you could run a marathon today, unprompted. You would start by going shorter distances, working your way up.
This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work.
> Same goes with the math/english/science class - if teacher tells you to do the homework yourself, you should do it yourself, not to ask friend/parent/ChatGPT to do it for you.
An instructor who forbids assistance is an instructor who deludes themself about their performance when they were a student. Not all learn to fish the same way, and being shown how in a different way can mean all the difference.
This is not the same as ChatGPT doing the work.
> Outside of class context, people are free to do whatever - ride bikes, cars, ask ChatGPT for questions, ask your friend to write birthday cards for you, copy most of the presentation you gave at work from vendor's whitepaper, etc.. No one will complain.
I don't know what work you do but that would be seen as lazy at my workplace and frowned upon.
There is a difference between seeking assistance ("Explain this in shorter terms") vs. absolve oneself of the burden of work ("take these points and turn them into paragraphs"). If OP's sister was asking questions ("Explain this poem") and then working from that to something that was her own work, that would be one thing. The fact that she is simply copying verbatim from the machine, thoughtless and without considering the meaning -- that's what is upsetting here.
anyway, I don't think your "run a marathon" or "hour of sustained running" analogies are appropriate... OP mentions "how many hours are there in 1 day and 7 hours", that's closer to "run a 100 meters at any pace", something that any student should do.
And even if teacher is giving unreasonable assignments, the right answer is not to cheat (by asking parent, or ChatGPT or something) - but rather do what you can, so hopefully teacher will see low performance and adjust assignments/expectations.
I think it's ~dangerous to center this question because "more, faster" (and cheaper...) is something employers will always covet to some degree (even at the expense of life and limb).
Any arrangement between employers and employees that doesn't center win-win outcomes is an unsustainable race to somewhere we've already been and decided we didn't like.
The whole problem with factory mass-education is the almost exclusive focus on evaluation. A little bit of education happens as a side-effect of the unrelenting soul-crushing evaluation so we've put up with it and called it education for 100 years.
ChatGPT will make it nearly impossible to cause any educating to happen as a side effect of constant re-evaluation.
That means we are going to have to focus on education directly. Probably just train ChatGPT to be a really good tutor and everybody gets a 19th century rich boy's education instead of the junk we've had in feed-lot-style schools for the last 100 years.
Note that Waldorf schools are kind of immune to this problem since the kids don't get to touch a computer until they are in 9th grade and heck, they don't even read until 2nd grade.
This entirely solves ALL the problems introduced by LLMs.
The US just needs to adapt their evaluation system.
I failed my Geometry class despite getting 110% on the final (She had some hard extra-credit questions that went beyond what we learned) because I didn't do a single homework assignment.
Meanwhile, this high school made all sorts of claims about preparing students for college, and my first math class in college, homework was only 3% of your grade.
The sheer volume of evaluations is what makes us choose methods that help us scale our marking efforts, but I’m curious to see how this changes.
Not saying that this is the case in OP, it's very likely that the teacher will eventually catch up to the fact that a kid with A on their homework isn't quite a math genius. The same systems that would catch a child being aided by parents or cheating would catch this anomaly.
Teachers are a well trained profession after all.
Don't let her do that. Blows my mind that this one weird trick isn't suggested in the top 100 comments.
Fixed that for you. And it will get shittier as investment dries up and the pressure to monetize increases.
The fact that we use the LLM should always be preceded with, "I know I shouldn't be doing this but..."
And if you are a parent or a big brother, you absolutely have control over what online services a child uses.
What an insane world we would live in otherwise.
> does all their school work without any oversight at all
I would definitely expect this to be the norm for 11 year olds, not some case of parental neglect as portrayed here.
I would say I basically received no guidance my entire childhood on anything important. Not because my parents were delinquents but they simply had nothing to offer.
If was in middle school, there is no way my parents would be able to police the use of chatGPT. They wouldn't think it is good or bad, they would just not understand what is going on.
I have thought about that many times. It is unimaginable to have received good advice growing up and not have to figure out everything for myself, fixing all these mistakes. What an advantage.
The tablet doesn't work so you let them watch youtube on the PC They find some games on the PC They get bored of the games of the PC so they pirate some cool games They get sophisticated in removing DRM so they install linux They become programmers or influencers.
It's the pipeline that we know of, but there's probably a lot of pipelines into influencers, gamblers, onlyfans models, brainrot consumers, etc...
But I mostly agree. It's not a hopeful situation. If AI takes over it won't take over because it fought it war with humans and won. AI will take over because people want it to take over.
I asked an LLM the first example question (convert 3 minutes to seconds), and it provided not just the answer, but that there are 60 seconds per minutes, so that's 3 * 60 = 180. I don't think an 11 year old is harmed by that sort of assistance.
This is just the perfection of that. And it’s suuuuper scary, because it trains you to be a brain dead monkey that literally believes anything ChatGPT tells you. And we know how that’ll work out.
With or without AI, we have always thought we are of wildly above average intelligence and that “all the other people are brain dead zombies.”
This is just a classic human bias since we don’t ever experience what goes on inside anyones head but ours.
Everything is going to be just fine.
A calculator eliminates the arithmetic part, thus doing “all” of “2+2”.
Half the point if a word problem is learning how to set up the arithmetic. “Convert 3 minutes to seconds”. You are learning that there are 60 seconds in a minute, that you have to use multiplication, and that the result is in seconds, not something else you need to convert.
The LLM does ALL of this for you. You literally just have to copy / paste.
Zero learning
I find knowing the multiplication tables to be essential. It consumes too much time and distraction to pull out a computing device for everything. I assume you don't use your phone for simple addition either.
"I told Mrs. C fractions were useless and I never needed them, in your face Mrs. C"
The thing about knowledge is that you only know when it was useful if you know it, you will never know when you miss it.
Yeah... good and useful.
for example instead of multiplying 47*30 one can multiply 50*30 and subtract 3*30
the real benefit is the mathematical muscle gained while doing the memorization and identifying patterns.
same reason people are running treadmill not to get to the destination point, and despite having cars which are faster than running
This is a bit sad and dangerous.
I also resisted learning the multiplication tables because I was too prideful in being able to calculate them on the spot, but at least I memoized the easy ones like 5x 10x, 9x.
The objective of multiplication tables is not to be able to do the calculations that you need, but to aid in wider calculations. You learn the table of multiplications not because most calculations are going to be 1 digit by 1 digit, but because most calculations of more digits can be decomposed into single digit calculations. And further most calculations are part of more complex non math Chains of Thought.
Your teacher was building up your cache and LUT so that you could solve these in nanoseconds, and move on to higher order processes in your head. You haven't beaten the system by calling a 200ms API, you have cooked your ALU.
It does in the short term solve the problem that kids hate doing schoolwork and teachers hate doing their jobs.
If you use these tools to get the homework done, but there's little retention of knowledge or skill, how are you going to pass a test where the resource is not available to you? Homework is ostensibly about practicing certain skills (math) or learning/memorizing facts.
Computer science in middle school. Quantum physics in high school. Proofs in between, formal methods, and welcome the rising tide.
I would love to see this tried at a larger scale and studied to see if it actually works any better.
I used to watch Veritasium [1] videos (way back) that vividly illustrated that even when told the correct information, people would not change their world view but instead give answers consistent with their pre-teaching naive views.
Learning is complex. If all that a "teacher" is doing is lecturing, then a video might be a reasonable replacement.
Even when the content is straightforward, my observation is that engagement with videos are awful. Heck, engagement in a lecture is awful, but at least the (human) teacher in the room can reasonably be expected to do things to engage the audience and probe their understanding. Some of that might be possible in a video format, for 5x the effort; follow up with examples if you know good ones. I know in the MIT OCW I have seen recordings of discussion sections (very effective), and that should be the bottom of the barrel as far as engagement when "honestly trying to engage learners".
You would be better off just trying to do the work, then looking up the information needed. That kind of works, and I bet that's what happens in the flipped classroom model. (Maybe 20% of the class watched the video? Stats welcome.)
I'm really just trying to point out that learning is complex. There's supposed to be a national What Works Clearinghouse [2], but I had a hard time finding useful information there.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium [2]: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/
Level 0: this is bad.
Level -1: The teaching methods need to change.
Level -2: It's a glimpse into all of our future, not just children.
Level -3: Who controls the AI controls the world.
> In a room sit three great men, a king, a priest, and a rich man with his gold. Between them stands a sellsword, a little man of common birth and no great mind. Each of the great ones bids him slay the other two. ‘Do it,’ says the king, ‘for I am your lawful ruler.’ ‘Do it,’ says the priest, ‘for I command you in the names of the gods.’ ‘Do it,’ says the rich man, ‘and all this gold shall be yours.’ So tell me—who lives and who dies?
> "The king, the priest, the rich man — who lives and who dies? Who will the swordsman obey? It's a riddle without an answer, or rather, too many answers. All depends on the man with the sword.
> "And yet he is no one," Varys said. "He has neither crown nor gold nor favor of the gods, only a piece of pointed steel."
> "That piece of steel is the power of life and death."
> "Just so … yet if it is the swordsmen who rule us in truth, why do we pretend our kings hold the power? Why should a strong man with a sword ever obey a child king like Joffrey, or a wine-sodden oaf like his father?"
> "Because these child kings and drunken oafs can call other strong men, with other swords."
> "Then these other swordsmen have the true power. Or do they? Whence came their swords? Why do they obey?" Varys smiled.
EDIT: Seeing no reactions yet, I just wanted to explain that the way I see this coming battle on controlling the AI that controls the world is that we have the governments, the billionaires and the ethicists saying what should be done, and us software professionals as the sellswords with our fingers on the literal trigger.
1. That the "AI" being bandied about (read: LLMs) really is able to "kill" the other blocs.
2. That such an action will be safe from retaliation.
3. That software engineers actually control/own enough of everything to pull that "trigger" unilaterally.
Either you misunderstand the quote, or you haven't read the book or watched the series.
George Martin's central motif of what power really is doesn't have a definite answer, several characters propose different theories, in this case Varys poses more of a question than an answer.
You might say that the AI holds the power, you might say the Engineers hold the power, you might say the congressmen that regulate it hold the power, you might say the citizens who vote the congressmen have the power, you might say the president by control of the military holds the power, the users, god, chance, the smart, the capitalists, the shareholders, etc...
All models are wrong, some are useful, I don't think this one is that useful, unless some researcher has a Technological Singularity in a Bottle somewhere.
But the model is that no one person holds all of the power? That power is many things at once and held by many people? Both in the book and in reality, matches to me.
Is this any different than the previous tech booms (or any industrial revolution for that matter). The US developed and exported almost all of the consumer (Google, Microsoft, Facebook) and infrastructural software (IP, Verisign, Linux).
The US domination through software is so normalized that the limit of these imports by highly sovereign countries are seen as dangerous or in violation of human rights in the 'western' internet.(China,Russia)
Hard to see how AI will be massively different than the history of Software in general in terms of geopolitical power.
Linus Moved to the US in 2004 and became a citizen with his family later.
The linux foundation is a california nfp.
Go back generations and it was always something else ruining the youth: not playing outside enough, Internet, videogames, hip hop, playing outside too much, TV, rock & roll, books, etc.
In my own studies and brief time as a tutor, you get students like this who just see school as an obstacle to something else. Even then, some people aren't good in a structured setting, like school, but can still be a productive member of society.
I cut my teeth on early Linux with really poor driver support and had to figure out so many things just to get X to start or to get audio to play. This made me intimately familiar with the system and I had the confidence to explore things myself.If were to start off with a modern Ubuntu, I wouldn't be aware of any of this. Wouldn't know where the logs are, how to look at them, what a certain error meant etc. "A system error has occured. Click here to submit a bug report to Canonical" is just not quite the same as digging through some obscure log file and trying to create a mental model of how the distribution works before the next attempt at fixing the problem.
Things which require tinkering to get working are invaluable during the learning journey. Problems which require effort to solve are one example of this and a powerful solution that eliminates the effort and directly provides the reward is surely going to cripple learners.
In this specific case, I think the parents have "outsourced" education to the school/teachers/tools which is why this has happened.
11-year-old watching Squid Games?
Seems to indicate some lack of interested parenting.
On the other hand, we have had many discussions with my son about the role of education, AI and what we need. Thankfully, my son understands that it's the struggle that we go through that helps us to understand and make the knowledge truly our own. Of course, I have to model my use of AI, pointing out its flaws and the dangers of mindlessly using bots.
At the end of the day, it's the internal motivation that drives us. If you're not interested in knowledge and learning, having a genie to cheat is too tempting to resist.
However, the post brings up a good point: Education isn't cheap.
Looking through the history of pedagogy, 'teaching' has never been easy.
We managed to get around this, somewhat, in the developed world for about 150 years or so. Mostly to keep the factories working cheaply, but we also found out that an educated populace was a heck of a jolt for national security too. Not a bad run at all!
But industrial education still is expensive, about 30% or so of the budget for a US state (very rough % there).
Now, we've got AIs, and the methods we found in industrial education to make it a bit cheaper, well, they don't really work anymore.
There's gonna be this little gap period here with AIs where we have the old methods and new tech, and it's not going to go well. Education of the youth, yeah, that's still going to be a huge thing. But it's going to be a bit more expensive and messy for a while.
Fortunately, we do have AIs to help out with that and run through the processes faster, get to a 'good-ish' state of things again. But things like homework, essays, 500 person freshmen lectures, those little cheats short-cuts, those things aren't going to work anymore (and let's be honest, never really did anyway).
What will work? I don't know yet. But I think it will be even cheaper overall, and will decidedly not look like what we have today. No more prom kings, no more homecomings, no more lectures, no more homework. Things like A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, sure, that's a given. But Starfleet Academy isn't going to be big on sitting down. I think it'll be more like away missions mixed in with some St. John's/Oxbridge approaches. A lot more teachers with a lot more training/AI help, that's for sure. And that's not cheap either.
My view as a student, personally, has always been that people rampantly cheat, everyone looks like they're doing good on paper, the institution's happy. My assumption was that such "infrastructural" education systems are hard to change (hence why few try to in the first place) and, if they work well enough, no one's going to attempt to touch it, let alone change it to better serve students who seem to be doing what they're expected to.
Happy to hear some thoughts, from a student worried about his peers. :)
That's not the problem here. Actual homework will not last in the age of LLMs.
Yup, and that's the environment I speak of. Modern elementary school is not a place for curious people.
Older people are shocked that young people can't do long division, or easily add a column of numbers mentally.
I'm not saying LLMs won't negatively influence the next generation, but the next generation has always been the first to use and abuse new technology and we are all still alive and (most) bridges and airplanes stay up and maybe we will even put people on the moon again some day.
Typewriters weren't able to do much else. At least, not the ones you could easily get.
Aired 1993, February 25:
Three ways: many could also type in red: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B009KXXSOI (showing a red/black ribbon).
7:05 shows the lever for a Brother typewriter in this video and a bit before that shows a different lever for heavyness (although I don't know if that would do bold): https://youtube.com/watch?v=d_dTu6T87Cg&t=6m50s
And AFAIR you could somewhat do bold by overtyping a few times (backspace, retype, repeat) or by hitting keys harder.
Plus many early home computers only had UPPERCASE (e.g. initial Apple ][) and were monochrome (so inverse was often a highlight thing instead of using colour).
(It would have been the late 80s in the UK, I have no idea how representative my experiences were).
We're at a major transition point and I don't envy teachers who need to figure out ways to adjust to it, but giving the same exact assignments clearly isn't going to cut it. They should instead try to come up with assignments where an AI may be a helpful assistant but isn't able to complete 100% of the task to a high standard. Then evaluate the result regardless of how the student got there. Presentations, discussion-based evaluation, and projects with a physical component are all examples.
I remember when I was a kid, some teachers would assign research papers and then tell us we weren't allowed to use the internet; we needed to go to the school library and use physical books instead. This holy war of teachers vs. chatgpt is likely going to seem similar in hindsight.
I would argue that the people who would have written like 50 years ago just never had the opportunity or audience that people do today. Except maybe in a Letter to the Editor of a newspaper or something.
So many more people are expressing themselves in public than ever were able to 50 years ago so I think it just seems that people have become less literate than they were. So many YouTube comments and Facebook posts that never would have occurred 50 years ago.
It's a democratization of the broadcasting of expression more than literacy decline.
I heard someone say "adapt the lesson to the student's excitement, not the excitement to the lesson". I think that's a foundation for something wholesome, though, admittedly, I struggle imagining how I would do that if I had a kid.
I find it hard to believe that it's mere coincidence that everything fell apart right after we invented these perfect little surveillance Skinner boxes, and then put overpriced Markov chains in them and unleashed them on children.
It sure will be interesting to see how this mass social experiment plays out
I have a friend who's a teacher that is pioneering methods to include (modified / preprompted) LLMs as a part of their lessons. He calls it Modern PBL: Project-Based Learning. He wrote a book on it if you are interested: https://a.co/d/7MFQ5wa
The process described sounds like it is a lot more work than just answering the questions using knowledge.
If an older sibling writes that poorly, I feel there are other things going on than overreliance on technology. I hope she makes it through this because the world is becoming increasingly hostile to people with poor literacy.
I see this use a bit differently: as a teacher that scales (and is probably more accurate that a human, hallucinations and other concerns notwithstanding).
I see my kids using it in a similar manner as described in this post, but I also see their curiosity piqued and them asking all kinds of theoretical and curious questions.
Anything that is formulaic in nature will likely end up automated. We should be teaching people to both leverage that fact and think creatively, even at 11 years old.
I’m still grappling with what this means now that LLMs have large enough context windows to ingest books.
I think the reality for teachers and students is that both should be using LLMs to their advantage at this point and openly so. Not mindlessly and hopefully in some supervised way. But it's only cheating if the teacher doesn't up their game and raises the ambition level. Which they would be negligent not to do at this point.
I used to hate homework. All this mindless drudgery that you had to do at home and then submit to some poor overworked teacher that then had to manually verify all that stuff. Just not necessary anymore. A lot of the verification can be automated. And a lot of curiosity can be satisfied without teacher involvement. The teacher's role then becomes nudging that process along and making sure the student is challenged enough.
Teachers should be tailoring exercises to individual students in a way that challenges them on their own level and then focus their efforts on verifying whether the student is actually at that level. That used to be hard because it didn't scale if they use the right tools. But now it can scale. They could be challenging individual students at their own level, whatever that is. But that requires using available tools more effectively.
I personally believe children should have no homework or far less of it. Typical education lasts 12-21 years. An insane amount of time. Use the lesson time more effectively and give kids some breathing room.
Disturbing detail of the post is this young girl watching Squid Games. This is a show where a few dozen people get executed each episode. Some are shot and kept alive so that their organs are fresh for harvesting.
How on earth do you let a 11 y/o girl watch that?
All of this seems like total neglect, but frankly I understand it (somewhat). The modern couples I know are dual income. By the time they're done with work, dinner and cleaning up, it's 8PM. Now we expect them to dig into the homework of their children and micro manage every media they consume? They don't have the time and energy and often don't even understand half of it.
Dual income society is a societal disaster.
Finland has only 5 millions population and a relatively high median income, the teacher:students ratio is much higher and the percentage of intact families are higher. Therefore, if we want to compare, we have to select better districts in the US, where the teacher:students ratio is similar high then see what the PISA scores will say. Only then, and looking deeper into the curriculum and teaching method, we can say whether homework is beneficent or not.
You shift blame to the social issues, but that doesn't make any of that better. I mean, if the US has social problems that pull down the PISA scores, wouldn't the low score be justified then?
So I see it as a mixed bag.
It would be really easy for me to blame her for choosing the easiest things to do, her teacher to not giving homework which cannot be solved with chatgpt, her brother for letting her using his account, her parents for not being there and overseeing how she does her homework, but I very much think that each and every person is in this story is exhausted by just simply trying to exists in systems which are not setup for this 11 years old to meet what she needs with her homework and every person either still fighting the systems or just gave up because they run out of steam and they are doing their best to keep their head above the water.
Am I the only one who found it interesting and perhaps a little alarming that the poster, while ostensibly aghast at their little sister's use of ChatGPT, decided midway through the screed to not only personify ChatGPT but also assign it a gender?
Speaking personally, I never did any homework, as I found it incredibly dull. So I don't really find it that worrying someone shirking their homework.
The replacement of thought with using ChatGPT does seem worrying though.
Does anyone have strategies for actually thinking while using AI?
And it’s a lot more A than I :-D
Kids know that they should be learning things. They know that chatgpt can get in the way of that. Will they choose to do it the right way eventually aside from a few bumps in the road? I think so.
Even children are figuring out that iterative prompt engineering is super effective. For maybe not the right reasons, but still.
Super effective at doing what is asked, but I guarantee that 7-word sentence is wrong for the 150-word poem. This is such a bad effect that it has...
If not, they’re f*ked.
One thing we *for sure* know that employers are going to want is that one employee does the work of 10 using llms. A
I'm wondering, why don't we give the employers what they want? Why not teach the kids to be super-effective with alms, and then We just give the kids 10x the amount of homework and tell them to get it done anyway they want to?
Sounds rough, but that's the reality which almost every creative writing professional is facing right now. And as soon as the technology makes it feasible, that's the reality that every software engineer is going to be facing. All this talk about 10x engineers...employers are going to expect all of us to be 10x engineers.
I mean, imagine a gym class which teaches kids how to run down an antelope. Because for 200,000 years running down an antelope was a core survival skill, and just because we had supermarkets doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to live off the land.
From John Henry vs. the Steam Hammer, to accountants using spreadsheets in the 80s, the whole story of technology is making 1 person able to do the work of 10. There's no use trying to pretend LLMs didn't happen. They happened, and they are not going away.
However, the inability to consider possible societal impacts of technology before rolling it out into the world free of regulation was the story of the 20th Century and I guess it's going to be the story of the 21st. Underneath the fear-mongering about AI is an honest belief that maybe we're not considering where this is all going. I'm not afraid of a super smart Gen AI that controls humanity, I'm afraid that people are going to outsource all decision-making to extremely stupid LLMs because we're seemingly evolutionarily wired to cut corners until we accidentally cut our fingers off.
The only real thing that would bug me is LLM’s are professional bullshitters. They are a super compressed store of knowledge that doesn’t know its own boundaries and will happily spout out perfectly written nonsense. At least encarta has effort put into making sure it is factually correct… it wasn’t compressed knowledge.
Granted it wasn’t when I was 11, but still. Not sure my point proves anything but it’s a point, damn it.
How did I know my classmates did that? Because they managed to get that "work" pinned up on the "exemplary work" notice board!
My carefully hand-tuned word art titles meant nothing in comparison! Nothing!
And kids born from this year on are Gen Beta. (Expect lots of meme s about that in 5-10 yrs)
Also, people have been making the same argument about calculators since they've become mainstream in (I think) the 90s.
Lazy kids are gonna be lazy, that's just a fact of life
Had it been my little brother doing this I'd have whooped his ass, cut internet access, and ratted him out to my parents ;-)
I joke, but honestly the sister's situation is completely the fault of her shit upbringing, not ChatGPT.
Welcome to Costco, I love you
What is the point of homework? It's supposed to be self-directed learning and reinforcement.
But what is homework really? It's often confusing. It's time-consuming; you already spent 8 hours at school, and now you're spending more hours "at school" at home. If you can't get it, you have to hope your family members will help you (many can't or won't or simply aren't there, for many reasons). It takes a whole day (or more) to get the school's feedback and help (if it's available). And it's never fun.
Growing up, it took me countless hours to work through 10 math problems, because I had a learning disability. I find processing abstract non-visual information very hard. It made it worse that I had no practical problems to work through, no visual or audible feedback, no different ways to look at the problem. The school didn't care and the homework didn't change just for me. My parents sat with me for hours but my brain just wouldn't work.
For years I was given 1-on-1 tutoring, where the tutor struggled to get me to focus and try to solve the simplest things. At 15, I learned programming and developed computer programs in order to try to figure out the problems and answer them (if I could figure out how it worked in code, that would explain it enough that I could understand). It took longer, but I could actually understand them if I gave myself a different way of looking at and solving the problem. And for some reason, I, a child, was the person who had to figure out my own learning models and alternatives; the god damn "professionals" would be fine with me banging my head against a wall and failing.
ChatGPT isn't the problem. Homework is just stupid. This rote abstract learning model applied uniformly to everyone is stupid. The giant amount of time needed after already spending all day at school is stupid. The things we are forced to learn at school, which we promptly forget, are stupid. Young people's education itself is stupid.
Here I am, a 40 year old man, forgotten almost everything I learned in school. Yet I make a good salary, I can take care of myself. And I don't solve math problems manually, I ask a computer to solve them for me. Because why the hell would I do an error-prone human task manually when a machine will do it right? In fact, I am learning math right now, because I am building a shed and other wood projects. I've learned more about geometry and trig in the past 2 weeks than in the past 40 years, because I have a real-world thing that I can understand, and something fun to work on that makes me proud when I finish it. It's self-directed, and I'm using a ton of resources on the internet to figure it out, but I'm doing it. It's sinking in. If I had that as a kid, I'd be a damn math genius by now.
I quit school altogether. I was okay.
I became an emancipated minor and I’ve been working in the software field since the age of 16. I’ve written two books and my third will be published by Wiley, soon.
Involuntary homework assignments have not led to an educated world. All ChatGPT is doing is making it easier to ignore pointless assignments.
The best way to handle this would be to talk to her and convince her to not use ChatGPT...
Some time, between then, and now, they started mandating graphing calculators.
I know that many universities now assume that everyone uses word processors, and have a zero-tolerance stance on typos.
Someone else posted an article, where the person was complaining about Apple (always a crowd-pleaser), and quoted Steve Jobs, talking about how bicycles acted as "force multipliers" for human efficiency, and compared the personal computer to that.
LLMs are here. Can't put that genie back in the bottle (sorry Jafar). They are now a part of the landscape, and we're still in the old "big iron" phase. They will become much better, pretty quickly.
Kids will need to work with them.
I find things like this to be great, because they free me up to learn more stuff. They raise the baseline.
People think that primitive folks were "dumber" than we are now. This was almost certainly not the case. They just didn't have the infrastructure that we have (dadburn kids, with their fancy "wheels," and "fire." Humpfh), and our kids will have a far more powerful infrastructure than we do.
I'm fairly hopeful. If we can keep from blowing ourselves up, I think we'll be fine.
The truth is the way humans process information has been radically altered by LLMs and we're in the absolute infancy of understanding what that means. It is going to be far more disruptive than the keyboard or calculator. As we discover the implications, we are repeatedly going to find ourselves disturbed and disoriented. There are skeptics who think it's all hype and that current approaches are a dead end. Even if that were true, I'm 100% convinced that even if AI didn't meaningfully improve on today's capabilities, it will still be incredibly disruptive.
Buckle up.
There will be 2 categories of winners of the AI revolution: the quick and the deep.
This poster's little sister is "the quick". She is using AI intuitively and aggressively. Whether it's right or wrong isn't important, because if the payoffs of it being right are more than the costs of it being wrong, she will be vastly more productive than people who are not using AI. A lot of the thinking school has traditionally trained us to do is officially commoditized.
"The deep" are people with strong conceptual understanding of the problems to which they are applying AI and/or strong understanding of the AI itself. They will use AI to create things that didn't exist before. They will take seriously the risk management (although, they will still not be able to successfully predict all unintended consequences).
People will benefit in the new world proportional to their ability to create or extract value.
Why would these people not just skip the AI part entirely, then?