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.
>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.