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Comment by isaacfrond | Hacker News Reader

Well, I dunno. I have a 17 year old in his last year of high school. After the initial novelty wore off, I don't think ChatGpt is used much anymore, not by him at least.

- You can hardly use the writing in an essay, as it is replete with listicles. You'd have to completely rewrite the stuff anyway. Moreover, he know he'll be tested on this stuff, and yeah that does seem to have an impact.

- Even using ChatGpt for explaining stuff is hardly used. For sure, I use it much much more often than he does. Also here it seems that it is hardly worth it, as the ChatGpt answer will differ too much from what is expected on the test. He much prefers to study with last years' tests--and the accepted answers-- than to use ChatGpt.

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You can hardly use the writing in an essay

While it's not necessarily great for writing an essay from scratch, it is a pretty good editor of an essay. My daughter uses it to 'grade' all her essays before handing them in (With a prompt like "This is a 2 page essay about X for a 10th grade social studies class, what grade would it get") and then follows up with "what needs to be improved to get the essay from a B to an A". And based on what I've seen it does a pretty good job and gives quite reasonable recommendation that are appropriate for the grade and class in a question.

Using it to explain stuff. Don't we already have books written by professionals with hopefully years of experience? And these are given out to the students... And anything in them is taken as truth for the tests...

In context of school, I would think just reading the book is lot simpler than figuring right thing to ask.

Ofc, there is situations like literature where asking the ai to tell about book is probably easy cheat... But you also would have wikipedia and whatever...

Don't we already have books written by professionals with hopefully years of experience? And these are given out to the students...

Do you remember your school textbooks? At best you could say they were optimised for some sort of median student that prefers the 'standard' way of acquiring information. If that's not you, or you want to learn information outside the textbook you are out of luck. LLMs have the potential to be the infinitely patient teacher that will explain the things over and over in as many different ways as necessary for each student to fully understand the information.

Beyond that, from about 6th grade or so we were definitely expected to start going beyond our textbooks for some assignments. Going to the school library or taking my bike to the local library to work on assignments was not uncommon.

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