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Comment by hatthew | Hacker News Reader

Okay, sure. The difference between option 1 and option 2 is completely irrelevant to this discussion and I gave what I thought would be an uncontroversial take on it because I thought it didn't matter. The point is at least one of option 1 or 2 is almost always better than option 3. Option 3 is what I and others are arguing against.

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Irrelevant? How so? And why did you present two different options if you thought it was irrelevant? I thought you were trying to make a point about human interaction. From my POV, your options 2 and 3 are much closer together than 1 & 2, so if you’re not suggesting that human interaction is preferable to LLM interaction, then what’s your justification for claiming any option is better than any other? I still completely disagree with your clarified point, and suspect many many other people do too, and are demonstrating that preference by using chatGPT for their classes instead of using either the teacher or Google. It’s a simple fact that interacting with an LLM can be preferable to interacting with some teachers some of the time, and LLMs currently often make interacting with the internet more pleasant and more efficient. Your ‘almost always’ still sounds to me like one person’s opinion that is not shared by all.

We're not talking about humans vs LLMs in general, we're talking about humans copy-pasting LLM output as if they wrote it themselves. It's less "LLMs are bad" and more "if you want to communicate something specific to me, LLMs are a bad substitute for your own writing".

Oh I see I’ve misunderstood. Your analogy is restricting the scenario to no interaction with LLMs. In that case, there are still some reasons LLM writing might be prefereable for students: for non-native speakers, and for math teachers new to match developing a new curriculum (sucks, I guess, but it certainly happens), just to name a couple.

One question to ask is why is your contrived LLM scenario any different than a math teacher using a textbook, or district/state worksheets? Math teachers typically do not write the course text or exercises, and never have. Very few math teachers do their own writing.

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