Technology

I don't even know of this is ChatGPT's fault. This would be the same outcome if someone just gave them the answers to a study packet. Yes, they'll have the answers because someone (or something) gave it to them, but won't know how to get that answer without teaching them. Surprise: For kids to learn, they need to be taught. Shocker.

Traditional instruction gave the same result as a bleeding edge ChatGPT tutorial bot. Imagine what would happen if a tiny fraction of the billions spent to develop this technology went into funding improved traditional instruction.

Better paid teachers, better resources, studies geared at optimizing traditional instruction, etc.

Move fast and break things was always a stupid goal. Turbocharging it with all this money is killing the tried and true options that actually produce results, while straining the power grid and worsening global warming.

What do the results of the third group suggest? AI doesn't appear to have hindered their ability to manage by themselves under test conditions, but it did help them significantly with their practice results. You could argue the positive reinforcement an AI tutor can provide during test preparations might help some students with their confidence and pre-exam nerves, which will allow them to perform closer to their best under exam conditions.

I'm not entirely sold on the argument I lay out here, but this is where I would start were I to defend using chatGPT in school as they laid out in their experiment.

It's a tool. Just like a calculator. If a kid learns and does all their homework with a calculator, then suddenly it's taken away for a test, of course they will do poorly. Contrary to what we were warned about as kids though, each of us does carry a calculator around in our pocket at nearly all times.

We're not far off from having an AI assistant with us 24/7 is feasible. Why not teach kids to use the tools they will have in their pocket for the rest of their lives?

no shit

Shocked, I tell you!

Yea, this highlights a fundamental tension I think: sometimes, perhaps oftentimes, the point of doing something is the doing itself, not the result.

Tech is hyper focused on removing the "doing" and reproducing the result. Now that it's trying to put itself into the "thinking" part of human work, this tension is making itself unavoidable.

I think we can all take it as a given that we don't want to hand total control to machines, simply because of accountability issues. Which means we want a human "in the loop" to ensure things stay sensible. But the ability of that human to keep things sensible requires skills, experience and insight. And all of the focus our education system now has on grades and certificates has lead us astray into thinking that the practice and experience doesn't mean that much. In a way the labour market and employers are relevant here in their insistence on experience (to the point of absurdity sometimes).

Bottom line is that we humans are doing machines, and we learn through practice and experience, in ways I suspect much closer to building intuitions. Being stuck on a problem, being confused and getting things wrong are all part of this experience. Making it easier to get the right answer is not making education better. LLMs likely have no good role to play in education and I wouldn't be surprised if banning them outright in what may become a harshly fought battle isn't too far away.

All that being said, I also think LLMs raise questions about what it is we're doing with our education and tests and whether the simple response to their existence is to conclude that anything an LLM can easily do well isn't worth assessing. Of course, as I've said above, that's likely manifestly rubbish ... building up an intelligent and capable human likely requires getting them to do things an LLM could easily do. But the question still stands I think about whether we need to also find a way to focus more on the less mechanical parts of human intelligence and education.

I mean, is it really that surprising? You're not analyzing anything, an algorithm just spits text at you. You're not gonna learn much from that.

At work we give a 16/17 year old, work experience over the summer. He was using chatgpt and not understanding the code that was outputing.

I his last week he asked why he doing print statement something like

print (f"message {thing} ")

Did those using tutor AI spend less time on learning? That would have been worth measuring

The title is pretty misleading. Kids who used ChatGPT to get hints/explanations rather than outright getting the answers did as well as those who had no access to ChatGPT. They probably had a much easier time studying/understanding with it so it's a win for LLMs as a teaching tool imo.

Would kids do better if the AI doesn't hallucinate?