The summer is over, schools are back, and the data is in: ChatGPT is mainly a tool for cheating on homework.::ChatGPT traffic dropped when summer began and schools closed. Now students are back, and they’re using the AI tool again more.
“You can use AI such as ChatGPT or Copilot on your senior projects, just make sure the code works, you understand it enough to document it, and your sponsor is ok with external code use” - paraphrased from my Software Engineering department head about our senior capstone projects.
“I have the kids ask ChatGPT for an essay and then have the (8th grade) kids treat it like a rough draft so they have practice editing it” - my English teacher Father
The best way to handle it is to embrace and use it to augment your skills, much like calculators in math classes.
Both of these methods require the student to understand the work. My old man brain insists they should have to code assembly from scratch and walk through snow storms to a library for their essay research, but in reality this is likely how this technology will be used. It’s a practical approach. The 8th grade version should probably include fact checking.
I’m thinking of LLMs like calculators when I was in school.
It’s good to have a fundamental understanding of how it all works, but let the tool be the workhorse and just learn to validate.
you can understand how subtraction or multiplication works, but if you don’t do them repeatedly in your head and on paper you will end up needing a calculator for the most ridiculous things. Like getting change or splitting a bill with a friend, or whatever.
Really it needs to start a little younger: in 5th or 6th grade they should be writing short essays in class, by hand, and then move onto outlining for larger essays, and then they can start using AI to do the drafts at home.
I was definitely outlining and writing essays in early grades but was on an accelerated track. My friends from the neighborhood who went to a different junior high entered high school without ever have done this. That blew my mind at the time and still does today decades later.
A calculator calculates. An AI bullshits.
The only thing ChatGPT can actually do might be marketing speeches, since they are nonsensical to start with and made by things pretending to be humans.
It’s arguable that most of what we generate is mostly vague partially inaccurate bullshit.
