My daughter is only 1 and a half years old now, but my concern is more that she'll be implicitly competing with classmates that are using tools like this, whether we allow her to use them or not.
I don't understand this sentiment, even though it is common among Americans. Why is education seen as a competition between students, even in the younger grades? I've even heard stories of parents of young children fighting with each other over their children's grades.
That seems to be a common theme in the responses to me here.
The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades.
Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?
Entrance to elite colleges is dependent on your academic record. Only so many spots exist. So competition in high schools is common. Then elite high schools only have so many spots, so competition in middle school exists. And so on down to preschool.
> I don't understand this sentiment, even though it is common among Americans. Why is education seen as a competition between students, even in the younger grades?
Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this, especially compared to more competitive educational systems like China. My kid is in second grade and hasn't gotten a real grade yet.
Why wouldn't it be? Education's job is to prepare students for life in the real world, and life in the real world is often a competition with your peers. When I was in grade school (admittedly close to 20 years ago) we had accelerated and slowed tracks for students starting in 5th grade.
Everything in America is a competition. I'm sorry, but I chuckled considering that this _very website_ is devoted entirely to ruthlessly choosing winners and losers in (what purports to be) a cutthroat field. It's Hunger Games over here, buddy.
I hope in-class exams (or even simple questions from the teacher) will define the big part of the grade in the future schools.
This will force ChatGPT-using classmates to either use it as learning _assist_ tool, to help student learn the material; or be 100% reliant on ChatGPT for homework, but fail every in-class assignment and then fail the whole class. Either outcome is fine with me.
It's not a competition. Teach her to use her brain, and hope school will end up being a net positive. You can't fix other parents and their children.
It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will gain you. If you do it right it won't matter whether she is allowed to use those tools or not, she'll use her own brain because that will allow her to get ahead by the time it really matters.
Suggest watching the movie gattaca to understand what happens to kids of parents who think like this in an extreme version. The problem is if you ignore the reality of the competition it’s basically setting your kid up to fail due to prisoner dilemma dynamics.
I'm not sure how that would play out but I think there is some validness in that concern. It's the same with smartphones; you deny your kid one because you want them to socialize in person but if they're the only kid without a smartphone then they'll be socially isolated.
Everything has to be managed in moderation.
As for ChatGPT, I use it all the time for learning. And I've used it to help my kid study. But I wouldn't give my kid unfettered access to it just like I don't give him unfettered access to anything.
My optimistic hope is that for the more basic skills, teachers can adjust grading so that more easily-cheated homework provides less credit, and in-person work (such as a pop quiz) is weighed more heavily. Then, you're effectively setting yourself a time bomb by using LLMs on homework to avoid learning the material.
For higher-level skills, I think using LLMs will probably just become another skillset and part of the toolbox, just like the Internet was for my generation. But I guess we'll see.
Competing with what? Homework is usually the minority of grade weight in almost every course and college entrance is largely based on entrance exams. Using AI to cheat on homework only cheats the students ability to complete and exam, let alone an entrance exam.
People act as if cheating on homework is new with LLms. It’s not. The homework is there to guide you towards the exam, and exams are generally proctored to prevent cheating in ways homework is explicitly not. Generally teachers grade homework to create an incentive for students to practice rigorously for the in course and final exams. Any student who doesn’t avail themselves of that practice invariably flunks their exams. Your homework grade won’t help you then.
So who cares? Sooner or later the cheating student either learns why it doesn’t pay to cheat or suffers the life consequences of not learning in school. This isn’t new with LLMs.
What is new is you have a tool that you can get advice from on topics that are difficult or even get up front grading and advice on homework before turning it in that helps you master the material better. Students who use this will be able to master the material faster, even if their parents both work and can’t invest the time to tutor their children at night.
(N.b., The threads here imply every parent works at a cushy tech job and has plenty of time to be invested in their kids education and any parent who isn’t is negligent - while the truth is many are just struggling to make ends meet - as my parents did … I didn’t get the investment my daughter gets not because they didn’t care but because they were busy feeding me and keeping us from being homeless. I would have loved to have ChatGPT help me as a kid)
I believe uploading neural weights in the form factor of a reaction speed game will become the norm.
Imagine the token weights etc to live an an N dimensional embedding.
Consider a random 2D isometric projection, now imagine plotting (a subset of) the tokens on screen at their respective locations, with the background having patterns conveying the orientation of the projection.
Imagine tokens appearing FIFO, and 95% or so of the tokens at their correct position, and 5% at incorrect positions.
The user is expected to identify misplaced tokens in the projection.
Each the frame the perspective slowly changes.
Since we guarantee ~95% of the tokens on screen are correctly placed this enables the human to absorb their correct high dimensional location subconsciously.
Imagine this game is made a bit addictive.
Imagine eventually the user gets high scores and thus knows most of the coordinates of the token embeddings in a coordinate free way (no axes had to be drawn)
At that point all the information the ANN required is undisputedly present in the humans brain, absent how those coefficients are used. This is where the fun starts.
The alcorithm can calculate the likelihood of observing 2 tokens in a certain order. It can generate more probable pairs, this will correlate with the information in the brain.
For example imagine the user knows some spanish, and that the language model was multilingual. Suddenly the brain starts picking up the correlation between close juxtapositions of certain tokens, and their positions learnt from the computer game.
While playing and getting better scores in the game, the user starts noticing its own grammar and vocabulary improve, because the brain has been helped in better estimating next tokens...
People will be able to learn math, languages, programmnig languages, tables of chemistry, etc... with substantially less effort.
Funny, I'm worried about classmates not being good enough for my girls. I'm worried that other kids will normalize bad ideas/behaviors growing up, and some day they'll end up in a dating scene that looks like today's, alone, or with a loser. I'd love to have them grow up into a world of strong, competent, conscientious, and honest peers.
So this kind of development adds to my pile of worries about their future, but for exactly the opposite reason.
I honestly wouldn't worry about that aspect of it too much. Effective understanding and use of tools is important for this next generation (which is why we have restrictive but reasonable rules for tech use for our kids). However, unless ChatGPT and other such tools start being allowed in SATs and in the classroom and etc, there's no substitute for true education and understanding.
The essay my 8 year old can currently write in scribbly handwriting certainly won't compete with the essay a classmate "writes" using ChatGPT. But the facade is paper thin and ever so short lived. Seeing how much better my kids write now, vs 2 years ago, proves how much they're learning and the incredible power of practice. Someone relying on such a serious crutch will be left behind. I guarantee it.
Unless there's some dystopian future where every aspect and communication in our lives are managed and filtered by some kind of AI middle layer. I doubt it.
Tech advancements always lead to this struggle, but it's rarely as stark as you might think. My kids are still learning cursive in school, though I can't imagine when they'll ever use it.
> my concern is more that she'll be implicitly competing with classmates that are using tools like this, whether we allow her to use them or not.
What makes this different from competing with classmates that cheat in general? You also had parents that do most of the tasks for their kids since forever
What makes LLMs stands out of the pack of other forms of assistance (parents, older siblings, software, online solutions, etc.)
Cheating (at least when I was school age) was fairly rare and not terribly difficult to detect. My concern is that both of those might be false with LLMs, and that'd make the circumstances different.
That will make her better than them, what with some personal resiliency, autonomy and, for lack of a better term, grit. I would not worry about (1) the details of what your 1-yr-old 's world will look like in 10+ years, (2) that making a kid struggle and work a bit will put them at a disadvantage.
Want to give them a leg up, get the 'What every first grader should know' books, and continue with the next one each year. There's way less friction in learning when your child experiences multiple exposures to the material being taught.
I had an interesting conversation with a friend from India. He was talking to his daughter back home in first grade. He actively encouraged her to look around in an exam, to copy off of others, to cheat in an examination. I overheard him and asked him why he wants to put so much pressure on a child. Like even if you don't care about the ethics of cheating in an exam, wouldn't it be better to have less pressure as a child and have a good childhood?
I clearly don't understand how difficult life is outside the US. Yes, it is important to know the material. However, it is also important to know your surroundings and what everyone else is doing. If you are in India and literally everyone else is cheating in exams, well you better start doing that as well just to keep up. If you are gen alpha and everyone else is using ChatGPT to polish essays, ...
In the US, this is not how things are done. Grades are literally everything within the education system. Learning how the system works and playing how your final grading is weighted including but not limited in regard to tests, assignments, and homework is a gigantic portion of how a student's aptitude is determined.
A lot of the system is based off of memorization and paperwork anyways. Something an AI can do all day, every day.
With a lot of caveats. You are in competition with these peers for grades, college admissions, and job applications. In many cases, the benefits of actually accruing knowledge and the consequences of failure to do so is delayed decades into the future.
How long have we been saying that rote memorization is not learning? ChatGPT makes it clearer than ever that we need to focus on teaching children to be able to analyze and solve problems, not memorize a bunch of facts.
What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution.
Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.
This will be "better in the long run" for her, in one way.
I see such competition as hare vs tortoise races, where the students who get an early unfair advantage end up cheating themselves out of an education, in the sense that all they come to know is how to prompt an LLM, rather than break down and solve hard problems.
It's still heartbreaking to consider both the early discrimination she will likely encounter, and the later failures that will anticipate her classmates, and the society that they will come to inhabit as adults.
competing with what? your score doesnt vary based on others.
i came here to laugh at this thread.. no different than calculators and google both of which were misused in the same way. and then people who are "worried" about it and use that as an excuse to do it themselves. and now you know why the tech industry sucks
> competing with what? your score doesnt vary based on others.
Grading on a curve is very much a thing. Rarer in lower levels but not completely unheard of.
Even if it weren't GPA is still used for ranking students for opportunities like college or summer programs with limited slots. The effect of GPT'd homework depends on how well they perform on the tests though but some classes are predominantly take home work or at least were when I was going through school.
segasaturn|1 year ago
moduspwnens14|1 year ago
The teachers set the course material and grading standards at least partially on how well the students are performing. Maybe not for a given class or year, but certainly over time. Scholarships are competitive. Slots in higher level courses are competitive, and often (at least partially) based on grades.
Can you imagine that the coursework and education overall might, over time, look quite different if half or more of students are regularly using LLMs, without explicitly disclosing it?
fnimick|1 year ago
lazide|1 year ago
HWR_14|1 year ago
seanmcdirmid|1 year ago
Oh wow, I thought Americans were super lax when it came to this, especially compared to more competitive educational systems like China. My kid is in second grade and hasn't gotten a real grade yet.
itishappy|1 year ago
fivelorn|1 year ago
theamk|1 year ago
This will force ChatGPT-using classmates to either use it as learning _assist_ tool, to help student learn the material; or be 100% reliant on ChatGPT for homework, but fail every in-class assignment and then fail the whole class. Either outcome is fine with me.
Freak_NL|1 year ago
It starts now for you by the way. Keep her away from screens for now, and be a good role model when handling devices (and the apps on them). You have ten years to show them what computers can do for you, but also what being the master of your own cognitive skills will gain you. If you do it right it won't matter whether she is allowed to use those tools or not, she'll use her own brain because that will allow her to get ahead by the time it really matters.
pavel_lishin|1 year ago
As a parent whose child has been in two school systems, respectfully: yes, it is. And it begins earlier than you think.
ikiris|1 year ago
wvenable|1 year ago
Everything has to be managed in moderation.
As for ChatGPT, I use it all the time for learning. And I've used it to help my kid study. But I wouldn't give my kid unfettered access to it just like I don't give him unfettered access to anything.
moduspwnens14|1 year ago
My optimistic hope is that for the more basic skills, teachers can adjust grading so that more easily-cheated homework provides less credit, and in-person work (such as a pop quiz) is weighed more heavily. Then, you're effectively setting yourself a time bomb by using LLMs on homework to avoid learning the material.
For higher-level skills, I think using LLMs will probably just become another skillset and part of the toolbox, just like the Internet was for my generation. But I guess we'll see.
florbo|1 year ago
Sarcasm aside, making informed decisions on how to do those things can be a challenge.
fnordpiglet|1 year ago
People act as if cheating on homework is new with LLms. It’s not. The homework is there to guide you towards the exam, and exams are generally proctored to prevent cheating in ways homework is explicitly not. Generally teachers grade homework to create an incentive for students to practice rigorously for the in course and final exams. Any student who doesn’t avail themselves of that practice invariably flunks their exams. Your homework grade won’t help you then.
So who cares? Sooner or later the cheating student either learns why it doesn’t pay to cheat or suffers the life consequences of not learning in school. This isn’t new with LLMs.
What is new is you have a tool that you can get advice from on topics that are difficult or even get up front grading and advice on homework before turning it in that helps you master the material better. Students who use this will be able to master the material faster, even if their parents both work and can’t invest the time to tutor their children at night.
(N.b., The threads here imply every parent works at a cushy tech job and has plenty of time to be invested in their kids education and any parent who isn’t is negligent - while the truth is many are just struggling to make ends meet - as my parents did … I didn’t get the investment my daughter gets not because they didn’t care but because they were busy feeding me and keeping us from being homeless. I would have loved to have ChatGPT help me as a kid)
achierius|1 year ago
Not in the US it isn't. Grades > Exams > Extracurriculars is the usual hierarchy.
fn-mote|1 year ago
DoctorOetker|1 year ago
Imagine the token weights etc to live an an N dimensional embedding.
Consider a random 2D isometric projection, now imagine plotting (a subset of) the tokens on screen at their respective locations, with the background having patterns conveying the orientation of the projection.
Imagine tokens appearing FIFO, and 95% or so of the tokens at their correct position, and 5% at incorrect positions.
The user is expected to identify misplaced tokens in the projection.
Each the frame the perspective slowly changes.
Since we guarantee ~95% of the tokens on screen are correctly placed this enables the human to absorb their correct high dimensional location subconsciously.
Imagine this game is made a bit addictive.
Imagine eventually the user gets high scores and thus knows most of the coordinates of the token embeddings in a coordinate free way (no axes had to be drawn)
At that point all the information the ANN required is undisputedly present in the humans brain, absent how those coefficients are used. This is where the fun starts.
The alcorithm can calculate the likelihood of observing 2 tokens in a certain order. It can generate more probable pairs, this will correlate with the information in the brain.
For example imagine the user knows some spanish, and that the language model was multilingual. Suddenly the brain starts picking up the correlation between close juxtapositions of certain tokens, and their positions learnt from the computer game.
While playing and getting better scores in the game, the user starts noticing its own grammar and vocabulary improve, because the brain has been helped in better estimating next tokens...
People will be able to learn math, languages, programmnig languages, tables of chemistry, etc... with substantially less effort.
ndriscoll|1 year ago
So this kind of development adds to my pile of worries about their future, but for exactly the opposite reason.
fivelorn|1 year ago
jayrot|1 year ago
The essay my 8 year old can currently write in scribbly handwriting certainly won't compete with the essay a classmate "writes" using ChatGPT. But the facade is paper thin and ever so short lived. Seeing how much better my kids write now, vs 2 years ago, proves how much they're learning and the incredible power of practice. Someone relying on such a serious crutch will be left behind. I guarantee it.
Unless there's some dystopian future where every aspect and communication in our lives are managed and filtered by some kind of AI middle layer. I doubt it.
Tech advancements always lead to this struggle, but it's rarely as stark as you might think. My kids are still learning cursive in school, though I can't imagine when they'll ever use it.
shprd|1 year ago
What makes this different from competing with classmates that cheat in general? You also had parents that do most of the tasks for their kids since forever
What makes LLMs stands out of the pack of other forms of assistance (parents, older siblings, software, online solutions, etc.)
moduspwnens14|1 year ago
dowager_dan99|1 year ago
_DeadFred_|1 year ago
JumpCrisscross|1 year ago
This isn’t a competing with kids issue, though. A kid handicapped by ChatGPT will fail in-class examinations.
casey2|1 year ago
To me it sounds like you are worried more about the competition for resources than giving your daughter an education.
skywhopper|1 year ago
rolph|1 year ago
she wont need a chatGPT, she will develop one in her nervous system, like a normally functioning human
nyrikki|1 year ago
mcny|1 year ago
I clearly don't understand how difficult life is outside the US. Yes, it is important to know the material. However, it is also important to know your surroundings and what everyone else is doing. If you are in India and literally everyone else is cheating in exams, well you better start doing that as well just to keep up. If you are gen alpha and everyone else is using ChatGPT to polish essays, ...
6SixTy|1 year ago
A lot of the system is based off of memorization and paperwork anyways. Something an AI can do all day, every day.
s1artibartfast|1 year ago
taylodl|1 year ago
What we need to start focusing on is teaching children how to use AI to evaluate their solutions. We also need an AI built for students that can mentor children and help them develop their own solution.
Shielding children from the technologies that's going to be part of their world doesn't seem wise. They'll push the technology in new and unexpected directions.
ceejayoz|1 year ago
MattGaiser|1 year ago
MonkeyClub|1 year ago
I see such competition as hare vs tortoise races, where the students who get an early unfair advantage end up cheating themselves out of an education, in the sense that all they come to know is how to prompt an LLM, rather than break down and solve hard problems.
It's still heartbreaking to consider both the early discrimination she will likely encounter, and the later failures that will anticipate her classmates, and the society that they will come to inhabit as adults.
frontporch|1 year ago
i came here to laugh at this thread.. no different than calculators and google both of which were misused in the same way. and then people who are "worried" about it and use that as an excuse to do it themselves. and now you know why the tech industry sucks
rtkwe|1 year ago
Grading on a curve is very much a thing. Rarer in lower levels but not completely unheard of.
Even if it weren't GPA is still used for ranking students for opportunities like college or summer programs with limited slots. The effect of GPT'd homework depends on how well they perform on the tests though but some classes are predominantly take home work or at least were when I was going through school.
fragmede|1 year ago