Comment by DiscourseFan

Comment by DiscourseFan 2 months ago

I had a wonderful philosophy professor in a 100-level class I was taking to fulfill a gen ed req, he was some old retired guy and he had no mandatory attendance and only one assignment for the whole semester: a single, 15 page final paper.

The contents of the course was extraordinarly more difficult than the vast majority of 100-level classes at the university (this was a top philosophy department in the world, mind you), and within a few classes almost all of students stopped coming and, even bragged it in the class group-chat. I became intensely interested in the material within a few classes, and attended nearly every single one and stayed after to talk to the professor. Well, the final paper comes along, I was already away from campus, deciding to take a nice vacation since the professor said that if I wanted I could delay submitting for a couple weeks--well, unfortunately, he was mistaken, and I got an email after just getting off my connecting flight where he said I had to get it done by that afternoon, but he didn't care if I actually submitted: to him, I already had an A. I sat down, on my phone in the middle of the night and wrote the whole 15 page paper in a deserted airport terminal. I got an A. Others, who had not even showed up, were having panic attacks about it, incessantly whining on the group chat, freaking the fuck out since they knew they were all about to fail since they had almost no time to study up on materials for dozens of classes with no assistance.

This was all before the advent of ChatGPT. I have no idea if that 15-page paper would be such a killer today. Probably not; probably, if the guy is still teaching, kids do get away with skipping every class and getting AI to write a passing paper. But, the principle is still there: you just need a paper test now!

bongodongobob 2 months ago

I don't understand. Your professor said the paper wasn't due, then bumped up the date, told you about it last minute, said you didn't have to turn the paper in, but you did anyway?

I'm lost.

Reply View 2 replies

DiscourseFan 2 months ago

>I don't understand. Your professor said the paper wasn't due, then bumped up the date, told you about it last minute, said you didn't have to turn the paper in, but you did anyway?
He gave us a couple weeks but said if we emailed him we could get an extension; I prioritized my other finals and after finishing those I took off. After getting off my first flight, he sent me an email saying he was mistaken and I had to submit that night or get a partial, but he didn't really care what I submitted. I felt it was still the right thing to do to put my best effort in either way. And I wanted it off my mind for my trip.

Reply View | 0 replies
sfink 2 months ago

It was a little unclear, but my reading is that the professor didn't actually care if it was submitted, but the school did. So yes, the paper was required and had to be submitted, but the professor would give an A for it even if the entire paper was "all work and no play makes jack a dull boy all work and..."

Reply View | 0 replies

jcranmer 2 months ago

> This was all before the advent of ChatGPT. I have no idea if that 15-page paper would be such a killer today.

The thing about ChatGPT is that it's not very good at producing essays. For a freshman-level class, it's likely to produce a C-quality paper, but my understanding is that trying to get it to produce a coherent longer essay is much more difficult, to the point that it'd be dubious if it would be a passing grade.

Reply View 3 replies

starfezzy 2 months ago

I've seen this insane take frequently, and I think I've found an explanation:
1. Almost NOBODY, I mean literally nobody I've ever met that uses LLMs besides myself, uses the paid version. It shocked me to learn people are actually USING the free version. These people are commonly of low intelligence, exactly the sort of people who cheat. Cheaters are using the shittiest models lmao, and many of them are using some knockoff on data-harvesting websites whose models are even worse than the free ChatGPT.
2. AI skeptics are frequently old people, and in any case are so skeptical that they formed an opinion about all AI services based on extremely limited experimenting with the free ChatGPT a whole year ago. They don't know about Claude 3.5 Sonnet, they've never compared it to GPT-4 (may 2024 version, API not the chatbot) let alone to GPT-4o. There's absolutely no way they know about Gemini 1.5 Pro 0826 via AIstudio.
These people have no capacity to recognize that AI services are making huge leaps in capability and the quality of outputs (ESPECIALLY if iterated on and hand-held). They say things like "the thing about ChatGPT is that it's not very good at producing essays".
How about this? I have a 4.0 in college. I never cheated because I don't need to. I've taken some intelligence tests (and learned that some standardized tests are essentially a proxy for intelligence testing) and learned that I'm kind of smart—OK whatever, this is to establish that I don't need to cheat. Even when ChatGPT was new and not very good (albeit, the original GPT4 which was decently capable), I was able to use it as a writing aid (you give it the assignment and it generates an outline, but then you feed it back the assignment and its outline, and have it generate the first section, then you iterate on that section, then you do all the sections, then you feed it the assignment and the completed essay and iterate on THAT, then you change a lot of the parts so it seems like a human wrote it) and earned an award for the best essay the department had seen in a long time. Again, that was when the AIs were shit compared to now.
People who think AIs are not capable are just a little out of touch, they're using them wrong or uncreatively, or they're not using them at all, or they're using the free version, or they're judging AIs by the results of low intelligence people who use the free version.

Reply View | 2 replies
- uneoneuno 2 months ago
  
  You have to be smart enough to know how to prompt and how to iterate on the LLM response. If you can't use the tool effectively, you're gonna get bad results.
  I'm in my mid 30's, well into my professional career as an engineer.
  I frequently use gpt to tune / tweak / see if I am missing anything in proposals and other documents I create. I'll give GPT a broad idea of what I'm writing and ask for bullet points, then review what it came up with and compare to what I've written. It almost always makes my output better - I find there's some customer disclaimer or other scope clarification that the gpt came up with that I incorporate into my document.
  Asking GPT to make you something or "do your essay" wont work. You have to know enough about the thing you want out of it in order to be able to ask GPT for it.
  So yes, the people who know things and know how to use a LLM are going to have more polished outputs. Most other people just plugging and chugging get junk or uninspired goop.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies
- BeFlatXIII 2 months ago
  
  > they're using the free version
  …and they're not going to spend their own money to try out the real deal, for understandable skepticism on the RoI.
  
  Reply View | 0 replies