Writing those essays will become trivial and irrelevant and be replaced with more interesting tasks with the assistance of AI.
I always think of Star Trek; instead of long-division math questions they will learn skills like “computer, if the trajectory of this rouge planet is reversed and we assume that is was ejected after some massive explosion, calculate the possible causes based on previously observed similar events and report the top candidate cause and confidence interval”.
An example from my academic field: instead of biased, unreproducible research papers we could publish: [1] raw data, [2] hypothesis context, [3] model, [4] seed. The output result can be read based on your own AI chatbot preferences but the conclusion is consistent and reproducible.
However, I also think that you learn by imitation. If you have a text assignment, and that you make a sloppy job, and get a bad grade, what did you learn? But if you do the same text assignment, and improve it by iterating several prompts, then at least you learn something.
Also, learning requires motivation. It's futile to compare learning methods if there is no motivation (e.g; we assume students want to cheat). If instead we assume motivation, and we lower the bar required for learning, then these students will learn more with AI than without.
The only point I'm worried about is about imagination. For instance, it's easy to ask AI for example of names, stories, etc. But there is also benefit in spending time searching these things yourself. Not sure what the tradeoff will be there.
The problem with essays is that what they're asking people to do aren't actually what we want people to be able to do. Sure, you can get a chat bot to write out some arguments about why a character in a story might be female. But you can't get it to, say, write your own experiences, or write your own novel thoughts about something, or basically anything which the AI isn't already familiar with.
AI as a spell checker and maybe filler generator works. AI as an essay generator works. AI as a replacement for the stuff you'll actually want to use your writing skills for past school doesn't work.
They'll certainly still need to use rhetoric and argumentation throughout their lives. That's the point about writing essays as a pedagogical tool; it's not about learning how to write a 3x5 essay, but rather how to construct the arguments that go into that essay.
A decade from now, what happens when one of these students who coasted through school using AI-generated essays is asked to argue on-the-fly, like in a work meeting? What if it's for something high stakes, that could impact their employment or future job trajectory at theory company? You need to be able to develop an argument with logical, supporting evidence, and articulate the complete argument in a compelling, persuasive manner -- oftentimes, on-the-fly, out-loud.
It sounds pastiche to argue with a student that "you won't always have an AI to help you" but in contrast the with a calculator, there are truly scenarios where you definitely _will not_ be able to take the time to reach for an AI crutch to build your argument for you.
Ideally you learned what mistakes you made and how to avoid them in the future. The reliability of this process will depend a lot on the teacher, but I don't see how putting AI in the mix really changes this. You will surely need to learn /something/ about writing before you could even begin to evaluate the quality of a ChatGPT essay.
One should not ever feel obligated to write a love letter, my dude.
Essays are so static. I think a debate format where you are immediately challenged on your arguments or asked to elaborate would give a much better idea of how well the student has mastered the material.
These may not be enough of a watermark to generally detect what was written by an AI and what wasn't yet, but it does suggest that the proliferation of AI-written assignment essays will quickly produce a catalog of plagiarism sources that works with existing tools.
In other words, once people submit enough AI-written essays about popular assignment A, existing plagiarism detection tools will easily start to notice the phrases/sequences/structures that it statistically gravitates towards (because that's what it does by design!) and start detecting these in later work. That software won't know what's AI written or not, but it will think that your submission may be plagiarized because a lot of it looks pretty specifically familiar.
Of course, I wouldn't be particularly surprised if the above effect doesn't manifest. It's very dependent on how much AI writing spreads across numerous areas, and whether kids-these-days do any measurable amounts of long-form reading.
I imagine schools will have to put minimal value in out of person assignments, relying on proctored exams for final grades. This might be an investment opportunity!
But I think many professors who don't accept AI as a writing aide would say that it doesn't satisfy the assignment and is worth zero points.
Now, whether it is ghostwriting is another matter.
Having access to people who can sit down with you and explain things to you when you get stuck, or who can point out mistakes in your existing understanding or your work, can make a huge difference in the outcomes of students.
If AI gets good enough to fill that role, everyone can have that access (or at least something close enough).
That being said, I don't see why what you describe would require AGI. It won't be an excellent teacher or tutor in those tasks, but it may be good enough and make up in the price, availability and repetition.
2. He involved me, and we're making this a great learning experience.
3. Face the facts. This goes really fast. If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.
That's the standard ChatGPT has to beat to make you look good at school.
Likewise, the average comments section is all you have to beat to seem erudite as an adult.
I hope you do not seriously think "comment sections" is how you measure adult scale intelligence. I admit many people are not as intelligent as they should be but that is in fact a source of many of life's ills, and if you care about your life and your society you should want better than "beating the standard."
This is one reason why I wrote "erudite" instead of "intelligent".
Anyhow, my entire point is "beating the comment section" isn't valuable as a threshold because as you hint at, it isn't really a place to find intelligent discussion.
Actual school was basically "prove you actually read this Shakespeare play we assigned to you by mentioning some of these standard points".
As for comments sections… that they're low quality is the reason I chose them as an example, beating them necessarily improves the quality of global discourse - the people writing them don't recognise their poor quality.
I'm just responding to that part
Initial results are WILDLY successful.
Every developed country has a general path to education because you want well balanced citizen and not ultra specialised tools.
> 3. Face the facts. This goes really fast. If you don't use an AI, your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.
Why didn't you write his essay before AI was a thing ? They'd be on top of the heap.
Why don't you pay a cheap freelance copywriter for like 1$ an hour to write the essays ?
The goal of education, especially at that level, is to build your basic skills, not to perform and deliver
I am willing to bet there is no freelance copywriter doing American high school essays for $1 an hour. Or at least none that aren’t using chatGPT :D
I've already heard that schools think that chatbots are a crisis, they can't do essay hand-ins anymore due to this, but maybe there are different approaches where they can handle it. Maybe some think for example that they can see through it and grade down if it is an apparent problem for the handed-in text anyway.
>your essay is going to be at the bottom of the heap. I'd estimate that out of the 35 essays, maybe 25 used AI for assistance.
This is absolutely a terrible attitude. Who cares about the "top essay" if they're all AI generated. None of the 25 students are good students, and unless they will fail into a good job at daddy's hedgefund, you will simply not become a proficient adult letting chatGPT do your homework for you. The entire point of writing essays is to formulate opinions and thoughts and defend them. I understand school sucks and sometimes you have to write essays for things you don't care about, and that is a problem. But, at some point, you need to learn how to write if you want to be a professional. Not doing so just means you're holding yourself back for reasons I don't quite understand.
If you tell AI to write a research paper, even in an abstract field like math or philosophy where experiments are not required, it's not going to actually generate new knowledge. That's the point of learning to write papers in school--evaluating the evidence, and proposing and supporting a thesis. The AI can output something that looks like a paper, but it doesn't actually have any coherent thesis.
I do think it will become more common to use AI as a typing aid (predicting next words/phrases), but having AI actually generate the thesis and arguments of the paper is not doing anything useful. That said, even if you didn't use it at all, I'm not convinced your paper would somehow be worse than all the others, it would just take longer to write.
I had a great assignment in college where the professor gave you all the materials required. You could only use the various articles/essays/news clippings he gave you, and you wrote an essay based on that.
Assignments that don't rely on the internet for research would do a much better job teaching the material and forcing students to read the material. Students wouldn't be able to SparkNote or ChatGPT an essay.
You can cheat all year if you want for homework &co, they're just here to help you get good for the monthly/yearly exams
I've witness several cashiers getting their phone out to calculate basic change. Things like 1 euros - 20ct
So yes definitely
Don't point-of-sale devices do that already? The cashier inputs the total you gave them, and the point-of-sale device shows the exact change on its screen (and releases the cash drawer lock). It might seem useless, but it reduces the risk of an incorrect mental calculation (like R$ 100 - R$ 77 => R$ 33 instead of R$ 23). Some even display which coins and notes, and how many of each, the cashier should get for the change.
It isn't mutually esclusive
Being able to do basic math is definitely good, but I don't think that's nearly as bad as not knowing how to write without an AI. A cashier can reasonably expect to only need to work with a cash register in front of them, but if you can't write, you can't communicate your own ideas. And sometimes in life you are going to need to communicate and support your ideas, not just whatever the AI decides to spit out for that prompt.
I'm thinking about this from a McLuhanesque perspective, i.e. how the medium will shape the user, and in this case learning to write by going through large amounts of generated writing is just a more efficient way than the regular way (reading, getting own output graded, etc.).
When I was in high school (late 1980’s), there was a time each week for what they called USSR - undisturbed, sustained, silent reading (in retrospect, USSR is a strange acronym). They didn’t care what we read and there were no assignments associated with the reading material. The goal was to choose something you want to read and read it, 45 minutes at a time.
Edit: I just looked it up and it turns out it wasn’t a local thing. I had the acronym wrong though - it’s uninterrupted sustained silent reading.
http://ejournal.unp.ac.id/index.php/jelt/article/view/101466
Besides, those burgers won't flip themselves, you know what I mean?
>He was about to send this essay in.
Why would you encourage your child to use ChatGPT like this? "Everyone else is doing it" seems like a great argument for NOT doing it yourself as those kids are going to seriously lack critical thinking skills in a few years as they offload that work to AIs.
It may be, and this part horrifies me, like using a calculator. I remember when they first became affordable, and at that time, the same horror. And from what I've seen, that horror came to fruition, as I see younger(20s to 40s) adults sometimes struggling with simple math.
EG, if the power is out, and manually handling change at a cash register.
Yes, there is intelligence, but also the honing and application of the same. And calculators reduced some of that.
Now enter chatgpt. Here goes the ability to hone arguments, forge essays, etc, etc. Gone!
Imagine when everyone gets a brain link, I bet all long term menory will fall into ruin, too.
>Now enter chatgpt. Here goes the ability to hone arguments, forge essays, etc, etc. Gone!
It's just not the same. If you take an essay prompt and just paste it into ChatGPT and then paste the output into your homework submission what skill exactly are you exercising or learning? There IS value in having to think about a problem and make a coherent argument in text form and you certainly lose that if you never practice it because you just let ChatGPT do it. At least with some of the current models, e.g. ChatGPT, we can't even be sure of the veracity of it's outputs so not only are you not learning any skills you can potentially output blatantly false information as well.
Seems all they learned was to improve the questions to feed the bot, not ant critical thinking skills.
AI is there, and more of it will come. The best you can do as a parent is to help your children to use it correctly. I'm pretty sure that using it correctly will help to improve the critical thinking, and will help children to express themselves in a better way (by virtue of example, or correction, etc -- possibilities are countless).
New technology doesn't mean people will regress.
It doesn't always, and the value of different skills change over time... But where horse riding is pretty well obsoleted by the alternatives, unassisted writing and the associated cognitive skills are unlikely to be. It's a good idea to be concerned with potential regression there.
The Washington Post and Associated Press use AI to generate articles. In the real world, only results matter. Using technology isn't cheating.
The solution is not to make students manually do what AI can do perfectly well. Instead, give them assignments that are too complex for AI to solve unassisted. Raise the bar so high that a ChatGPT generated essay will earn them a C and they need to do substantially better than that to get an A.
That assignment was made with a goal of getting students practice doing careful reading, thinking and analysis, getting them to do a certain quantity of "repetitions" as exercise in that; the essay was just a token to signify that the exercise was done and get feedback on its form. And as you say, "only results matter" and the result obviously wasn't achieved if this was written by an AI. It's like having a weightlifter come in to a gym to repeatedly lift barbells with a crane - he's getting no results out of that.
>It's like having a weightlifter come in to a gym to repeatedly lift barbells with a crane - he's getting no results out of that.
To use your own analogy, the weightlifter doesn't NEED to get physically strong anymore, they do it for competitive reasons or as a personal challenge.
Chess may also be a good example, currently no human can beat the best Chess AIs but since Chess isn't a particularly important Economic endeavor it just exists as a game and the chess AIs are kind of a novelty. But if chess were super critical to Economies then its unlikely humans would be involved in it at all for anything other than fun. The chess AIs would dominate completely.
In this case, the main point of an essay is effectively as a "proof of work" token, to use a cryptocurrency analogy - and just as with cryptocurrencies, if some shortcut is found that allows faking that "proof of work" then the whole process starts to become shaky. In this case we don't really want to abandon that core work done by the learner (since in some cases we have good reasons to prefer that particular type of work) but this rises a need to some alternative to essays that would achieve a similar result but not be as vulnerable to fakes.
But regarding your initial point - IMHO if at some point we decide that people don't need to learn mental skills such as analysis of concepts because an AI can do all of that better, that certainly might be possible at some point, but at that point the whole notion of "why study stuff" disappears as well; I'd say that we stop needing to train people for that when we stop needing to train people, period; when the whole notion of studying any mental skill becomes as irrelevant as studying chess is now, and we can simply shut down higher education as such. And we (and our discussion) are not yet at this point, for now we still do care how to train people to do all of that.
Maybe so but that's not what is currently happening.
> like this
This is the key phrase. There are ways to use LLMs to help with both research and writing that don’t involve surrendering your own part in the process.
Research with LLMs is often much better than search engines for surface level information. You should accept nothing that they say as truth, but they will often turn up names, book titles, etc that you can follow for more information.
Editing with LLMs is great - they were born for it. “What is a more expressive way to say ‘Lincoln’s presidency was a time of great change for the United States’?”, etc.
From there the only logical step is to have AI be a generally accepted tool in everyone’s life like we have smartphones now. The extremely long term view on this is the lack of need for education at all as soon as we get the future AGI version of chatGPT directly plugged into our brains.
The lesson you tought your son is far more valuable than what he could have possibly learned writing the essay as intended. AI is a tool he can use to augmentent his capabilities. But he shouldn't rely on it blindly. That's true for every technology (remember the Graphing Calculator on PowerPC Macs?).
> Next time I see her, I'll urge the teacher to adopt a similar approach as in the article.
Don't. This gives your son a competitive advantage over the kids who will simply turn up what the AI wrote (and get a 0) or spend too long writing their own essays.
In what competition?
I was helping my son with his homework. He had to write an essay about why the gender of the protagonist might be female (although this is never mentioned in the short story). Fortunately for him, ChatGPT knew the story and was happy to write an essay with arguments. [Btw, according to him pretty much everyone in class routinely has the AI do their essays]
He was about to send this essay in. But as we were admiring the prose of the computer (which is much better than either of can), we found out that some of the arguments actually didn't make much sense. So we went to through a rewrite exercise like in the article, improving the essay and our understanding of the issues.
Next time I see her, I'll urge the teacher to adopt a similar approach as in the article.