Just out of curiosity. I have no moral stance on it, if a tool works for you I’m definitely not judging anyone for using it. Do whatever you can to get your work done!
High school history teacher here. It’s changed how I do assessments. I’ve used it to rewrite all of the multiple choice/short answer assessments that I do. Being able to quickly create different versions of an assessment has helped me limit instances of cheating, but also to quickly create modified versions for students who require that (due to IEPs or whatever).
The cool thing that I’ve been using it for is to create different types of assessments that I simply didn’t have the time or resources to create myself. For instance, I’ll have it generate a writing passage making a historical argument, but I’ll have AI make the argument inaccurate or incorrectly use evidence, etc. The students have to refute, support, or modify the passage.
Due to the risk of inaccuracies and hallucination I always 100% verify any AI generated piece that I use in class. But it’s been a game changer for me in education.
I should also add that I fully inform students and administrators that I’m using AI. Whenever I use an assessment that is created with AI I indicate with a little “Created with ChatGPT” tag. As a history teacher I’m a big believer in citing sources :)
How has this been received?
I imagine that pretty soon using ChatGPT is going to be looked down upon like using Wikipedia as a source
I would never accept a student’s use of Wikipedia as a source. However, it’s a great place to go initially to get to grips with a topic quickly. Then you can start to dig into different primary and secondary sources.
Chat GPT is the same. I would never use the content it makes without verifying that content first.
Is it not already? I’ve found it to be far less reliable than Wikipedia.
This is why I read through everything I use to make sure it’s accurate.
Well the people that use it know that, but for the average person, chatgpt still has a high reputation
Is it fair to give different students different wordings of the same questions? If one wording is more confusing than another could it impact their grade?
I’m a special education teacher and today I was tasked with writing a baseline assessment for the use of an iPad. Was expecting it to take all day. I tried starting with ChatGPT and it spat out a pretty good one. I added to it and edited it to make it more appropriate for our students, and put it in our standard format, and now I’m done, about an hour after I started.
I did lose 10 minutes to walking round the deserted college (most teachers are gone for the holidays) trying to find someone to share my joy with.
I had a coworker come to me with an “issue” he learned about. It was wrong and it wasn’t really an issue and the it came out that he got it from ChatGPT and didn’t really know what he was talking about, nor could he cite an actual source.
I’ve also played around with it and it’s given me straight up wrong answers. I don’t think it’s really worth it.
It’s just predictive text, it’s not really AI.
I concur. ChatGPT is, in fact, not an AI; rather, it operates as a predictive text tool. This is the reason behind the numerous errors it tends to generate and its lack of self-review prior to generating responses is clearest indication of it not being an AI. You can identify instances where CHATGPT provides incorrect information, you correct it, and within 5 seconds of asking again, it repeat the same inaccurate information in its response.
i think learning where it can actually help is a bit of an art - it’s just predictive text, but it’s very good predictive text - if you know what you need and get good and giving it the right input it can save a huge about of time. you’re right though, it doesn’t offer much if you don’t already know what you need.
More often than not you need to be very specific and have some knowledge on the stuff you ask it.
However, you can guide it to give you exactly what you want. I feel like knowing how to interact with GPT it’s becoming similar as being good at googling stuff.
Isn’t that what humans also do and it’s what makes us intelligent? We analyze patterns and predict what will come next.
A junior team member sent me an AI-generated sick note a few weeks ago. It was many, many neat and equally-sized paragraphs of badly written excuses. I would have accepted “I can’t come in to work today because I feel unwell” but now I can’t take this person quite so seriously any more.
I’ve played around with it for personal amusement, but the output is straight up garbage for my purposes. I’d never use it for work. Anyone entering proprietary company information into it should get a verbal shakedown by their company’s information security officer, because anything you input automatically joins their training database, and you’re exposing your company to liability when, not if, OpenAI suffers another data breach.
The very act of sharing company information with it can land you and the company in hot water in certain industries. Regardless if OpenAI is broken into.
Why should anyone care? I don’t go around telling people every time I use stack overflow. Gotta keep in mind gpt makes shit up half the time so I of course test and cross reference everything but it’s great for narrowing your search space.
I did some programming assignments in a group of two. Every time, my partner sent me his code without further explanation and let me check his solution.
The first time, his code was really good and better than I could have come up with, but there was a small obvious mistake in there. The second time his code to do the same thing was awful and wrong. I asked him whether he used ChatGPT and he admitted it. I did the rest of the assignments alone.
I think it is fine to use ChatGPT if you know what you are doing, but if you don’t know what you are doing and try to hide it with ChatGPT, then people will find out. In that case you should discuss with the people you are working with before you waste their time.
I’ve had partners like that in the past. If ChatGPT didn’t exist they would’ve found another way to cheat or avoid work.
The type of partner who takes the task you asked them to complete, posts the task description on an online forum and hope someone gives them the answer.
Yes but I think it is a bit different because it just lowers the bar for this a lot. You also really lose trust in everything once you realize that you have spent a lot of time interacting with and checking AI generated stuff without knowing.
I get that. Before ChatGPT if I had a bad partner it is very quickly obvious that their work is bad.
Now you might be tricked into thinking they’re competent, which I can imagine is more frustrating because it’s unpredictable.
I guess that right now people are overusing it as it’s so new, but in the end the people who want to graduate without trying to learn will always try to abuse whatever tools they have to cheat. Usually they face the consequences at some point in their lives.
To really be successful you need to be curious enough to want to understand things at a deep level. With LLMs people who don’t really care well learn even less than before.
This is the key with all the machine learning stuff going on right now. The robot will create something, but none of them have a firm understanding of right, wrong, truth, lies, reality, or fiction. You have to be able to evaluate its output because you have no idea if the robot’s telling the truth or not at that moment. Images are pretty immune to this because everyone can evaluate a picture for correctness or realism, and even if it’s a misleading photorealistic image, well, we’ve already had Photoshops for a long time. With text, you always have to keep in mind that the robot might be low quality or outright wrong, and if you aren’t equipped to evaluate its answers for that, you shouldn’t be using it.
Even with images, unless you’re looking for it most people will miss glaring problems. It’s like that basketball video psychology experiment.
The problem is definitely bigger with LLMs though since you need to be an expert to check the output for validity. I will say when it’s right it saves a ton of time, but when it’s wrong you need to know enough to tell.
He should’ve at least looked at the code and tested it before sending it to you. Ugh. Hate doing assignments with people who do the bare minimum and just waste your time.
Yes, LLMs are great as a research assistant if you know what to look for, but they’re a horrible learning tool. It’s even worse if you don’t know the correct way to search for an answer, it will set you down a completely wrong path. I don’t use any answer without cross referencing and testing it myself. I also rewrite most of the code it spits out too since a lot of it follows terrible programming patterns and outdated standards.
The problem with using it is that you might be sending company proprietary or sensitive information to a third party that’s going to mine that information and potentially expose that information, either directly or by being hacked. For example, this whole thing with Samsung data: https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/02/samsung-bans-use-of-generative-ai-tools-like-chatgpt-after-april-internal-data-leak/
We’ve been instructed to use ChatGPT generically. Meaning, you ask it generic questions that have generic usage, like setting up a route in Express. Even if there is something more specific to my company, it almost always can be transformed into something more generic, like “I have a SQL DB with users in it, some users may have the ‘age’ field, I want to find users that have their age above 30” where age is actually something completely different (but still a number).
Just need to work carefully on ChatGPT.
not chatGPT - but I tried using copilot for a month or two to speed up my work (backend engineer). Wound up unsubscribing and removing the plugin after not too long, because I found it had the opposite effect.
Basically instead of speeding my coding up, it slowed it down, because instead of my thought process being
- Think about the requirements
- Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I’m working on
- Write the code
It would be
- Think about the requirements
- Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I’m working on
- Start writing the code and wait for the auto complete
- Read the auto complete and decide if it does exactly what I want
- Do one of the following depending on 4 5a. Use the autocomplete as-is 5b. Use the autocomplete then modify to fix a few issues or account for a requirement it missed 5c. Ignore the autocomplete and write the code yourself
idk about you, but the first set of steps just seems like a whole lot less hassle then the second set of steps, especially since for anything that involved any business logic or internal libraries, I found myself using 5c far more often than the other two. And as a bonus, I actually fully understand all the code committed under my username, on account of actually having wrote it.
I will say though in the interest of fairness, there were a few instances where I was blown away with copilot’s ability to figure out what I was trying to do and give a solution for it. Most of these times were when I was writing semi-complex DB queries (via Django’s ORM), so if you’re just writing a dead simple CRUD API without much complex business logic, you may find value in it, but for the most part, I found that it just increased cognitive overhead and time spent on my tickets
EDIT: I did use chatGPT for my peer reviews this year though and thought it worked really well for that sort of thing. I just put in what I liked about my coworkers and where I thought they could improve in simple english and it spat out very professional peer reviews in the format expected by the review form
Those different sets of steps basically boil down to a student finding all the ways they can to cheat and spending hours doing it, when they could have just used less time to study for the test.
Not saying that you’re cheating, just that it’s the same idea. Usually the quickest solution is to just tackle the thing head-on rather than find the lazy workaround.
What I think ChatGPT is great for in programming is ‘I know what I want to do but can’t quite remember the syntax for how to do it’. In those scenarios it’s so much faster than wading through the endless blogspam and SEO guff that search engines deal in now, and it’s got much less of a superiority complex than some of the denizens of SO too.
I’m a DM using ChatGPT to help me build things for my DnD campaign/world and not telling my players. Does that count? I still do most of the heavy lifting but it’s nice to be able to brainstorm and get ideas bounced back. I don’t exactly have friends to do that with.
I do the same thing; it’s been great. ChatGPT is often problematic in other scenarios because it will sometimes just make stuff up, but that’s nothing but a positive for brainstorming D&D plots. I did tell my players though.
It’s phenomenal for making statblocks for NPCs too. fleshes out the whole thing in seconds. spells, feats, abilities, everything.
I use Midjourney to create illustrations of what I’m trying to describe as well as NPCs and PCs.
Midjourney isn’t free though, correct? I was thinking about doing this, but I’m also just bit behind the curve with image generation AI and just not sure about how to best go about it.
There’s a free tier of you have patience.
Some of my co-workers use it, and it’s fairly obvious, usually because they are putting out even more inaccurate info than normal.
Not because their grammar and phrasing improved suddenly?
They mainly use it for code and scripts.
Only used it a couple of times for work when researching some broad topics like data governance concepts.
It’s a good tool for learning because you can ask it about a subject and then ask it to explain the subject “as a metaphor to improve comprehension” and it does a pretty good job. Just make sure you use some outside resources to ensure you’e not being hallucinated all over.
My bosses use it to write their emails (ESL).
ESL is actually a great use, although there’s a risk someone might not catch a hallucination/weird tone issue. Still it would be really helpful there.
yeah my biggest use case it quick summaries of things. it’s great getting a few bullet points, and i miss details a lot less.
I use it to write performance reviews because in reality HR has already decided the results before the evaluations.
I’m not wasting my valuable time writing text that is then ignored. If you want a promotion, get a new job.
To be clear: I don’t support this but it’s the reality I live in.
This is exactly what I use it for. I have to write a lot of justifications for stuff like taking training, buying equipment, going on business travel, etc. - text that will never be seriously read by anyone and is just a check-the-box exercise. The quality and content of the writing is unimportant as long as it contains a few buzz-phrases.
Just chiming in as another person who does this, it’s absolutely perfect. I just copy and paste the company bs competencies, add in a few bs thoughts of my own, and tell it to churn out a full review reinforcing how they comply with the listed competencies.
It’s perfect, just the kinda bs HR is looking for, I get compliments all the time for them rofl.
Work smarter, not harder, lol.
My supervisor uses ChatGPT to write emails to higher ups and it’s kinda embarrassing lol. One email he’s not even capitalizing or spell checking, and the next he has these emails are are over explaining simple things and are half irrelevant.
I’ve used it a couple times when I can’t fully put into words that I’m trying to say, but I use it more for inspiration than anything. I’ve also used it once or twice in my personal life for translating.
I might tell them just as I might tell them I used google to find out something. Doesn’t really pop up in conversation that often, but I wouldn’t hide the fact. It’s just almost totally irrelevant.
For code snippets especially. I mean the thing is limited to input sizes and doesn’t remember context of running conversations that well
When I’m pissed off I use it to make my emails sound friendly.
I use GPT-4 daily. I worked with it to create a quick and convenient app on my smartwatch, which allows it to provide wisdom and guidance fast whenever I need it. For more grandular things, I use its BingChat interface which can search the web and see images. The AI has helped me with understanding how to complete tasks, providing counseling for me, finding bugs in my code, writing functions, teaching me how to use software like Excel and Outlook, and giving me random information about various curiosities that pop into mind.
I don’t keep it a secret and tell anyone who asks. Plus it’s kinda obvious that something is going on with me. I always wear bone conducting headsets that allow the AI to whisper in my ear without shutting me out to the world, and sometimes talk to my watch
The responses to knowing what I’m doing have almost always been extreme: very positive or very negative. The machine is controversial, and when some can no longer stay in comfortable denial of its efficacy they turn to speaking out against its use
Edit: just fixed its translation method. Now the watch will hear non-english speech and automatically translate it for me too (uses Whisper API)
Coworker of mine admitted to using this for writing treatment plans. Super unethical and unrepentant about it. Why? Treatment plans are individual, and contain PII. I used it for research a few times and it returned sources that are considered bunk at best and hated within the community for their history. So I just went back to my journal aggregation.
Super unethical and unrepentant about it.
Super illegal in most jurisdictions too.