Slow June, people voting with their feet amid this AI craze, or something else?
It’s Summer. Students are on break, lots of people on vacation, etc. Let’s wait to see if the trend persists before declaring another AI winter.
Agreed. I think being between academic years is likely a much bigger factor than we realize. I’m a college professor, and at the end of spring quarter we had a lot of conversations with undergrads, grad students, and faculty about how people are actually using AI.
Literally every undergrad student I spoke with said they use it for every written assignment (for the large part in non-cheating legit educational resource ways). Most students used it for all or most of their programming assignments. Most use it to summarize challenging or long readings. Some absolutely use it to just do all their work for them, though fewer than you might expect.
I’d be pretty surprised if there isn’t a significant bounce-back in September.
This worries me though. I’ve found chatgpt to be wrong in basically every fact-based question I’ve asked it. Sometimes subtly, sometimes completely, but it always hallucinates. You cannot use it as a source of truth.
Honestly I feel like at this point its unreliability is kind of helpful for students. They have to learn how to use it most effectively as a tool for producing their own work and not a replacement. In my classes the more relevant “problem” for students is that GPT produces written work that on the surface feels composed and sensible but is actually straight up garbage. That’s good. They turn that in, it’s extremely obvious to me, and they get an F (because that’s the grade AI earned with the garbage paper).
But they can and should use it for things it’s great at: reword this long sentence I’m having trouble phrasing concisely, help me think of a title for my paper, take my pseudocode and help me turn it into a while loop in R, generate a list of current researchers on this topic and two of their most recent publications, translate this paragraph of writing from Foucault/Marx/Bourdieu/some-good-thinker-and-bad-writer into simpler wording…
I have a calculator in my pocket even though my teachers assured me I wouldn’t. Students will have access to and use AI forever now. The worry should be that we fail to teach them the difference between a homework-bot and an incredible, versatile tool to leverage.
I have been using it to do deep dives into subjects. Especially text analysis. Do you want to know the entire voc of the Gospel of Mark in original greek for example? 1080. Now how does this compare to a section of Plato’s republic of the same size? About 6-7x as large.
So right there we can see why Mark is often viewed as a direct text while Plato is viewed as a more ambiguous writer.
Mark is a direct and terse narrative of a specific segment of Jesus’s life and teachings while the republic is an attempt to expound a philosophy and system of government.
I agree with you, but I’m not sure I’d call him a more ambiguous writer, mark is a ‘just the facts, ma’am’ notation of verbal histories near contemporary, with the other gospels being attempts to add on contemporary allegories and legends attributed by different groups to Jesus (or John who just did his own thing).
I’d be curious at the comparison of the apology and crito, similar narratives of a similar figure in a specific segment of his life (the end of it). It’s fairly direct and terse as Socrates was portrayed as being direct and terse, but otherwise the styles are similar as (throw on hard hat) Jesus appears to have been attributed many of the allegories of Socrates in the recorded gospels, which makes sense if you’re trying to appeal to followers of hellenic religions such as those in Rome and Greece.
I think you’re being a bit self-centered, i’s always going to be summer somewhere. This is a tool used globally.
It’s not just that the novelty has worn off, It’s progressively gotten less useful. Any god damn question I ask gets 90,000 qualifiers and it refuses to provide any data at all. I think OpenAI is so terrified of liabilty they have significantly dumbed down it’s utility in the public release. I can’t even ask ChatGPT to provide a link to study it references, if it references anything at all rather than making ambiguous statements.
Also, ChatGPT 4 came out but is still only available to people who pay (as far as I know). So using ChatGPT 3 feels like only having access to the leftovers. When it first came out, that was exciting because it felt like progress was going to be rapid, but instead it stagnated. (Luckily interesting LLM stuff is still happening, it’s just nothing to do with OpenAI.)
I pay for it and it’s… Okay for most things. It’s pretty great at nerd stuff though*. Pasting an error code or cryptic log file message with a bit of context and it’s better than googling for 4 days.
*If you know enough to sus out the obviously wrong shit it produces every once in a while.
Pasting an error code or cryptic log file message with a bit of context and it’s better than googling for 4 days.
I usually can find what I’m looking for unless it’s really obscure with days of searching. If something is that obscure, it seems kind of unlikely ChatGPT is going to give a good answer either.
If you know enough to sus out the obviously wrong shit it produces every once in a while.
That’s one pretty big problem. If something really is difficult/complex you likely won’t be able to tell the difference between a wrong answer from ChatGPT and one that’s correct unless it just says something obviously ridiculous.
Obviously humans make mistakes too, but at least when you search you see results in context, other can potentially call out/add context to things that might not be correct (or even misleading), etc. With ChatGPT you kind of have to trust it or not.
It’s because it’s summer and students aren’t using it to cheat on their assignments anymore.
Well yeah it’s kinda cool but the novelty will wear off. It’s useful sometimes but it’s not a magic elixer.
I use it for quick dnd ideas. Need an NPC on the fly? Chatgpt will help you out
It’s really fucking annoying getting “As an AI language model, I don’t have personal opinions, emotions, or preferences. I can provide you with information and different perspectives on…” at the beginning of every prompt, followed by the driest, most bland answer imaginable.
Yeah, it’s boring as shit, if want a conversation partner there’s better (if less reliable) options out there, and groups like personal.ai that repackage it for conversation. There’s even scripts to break through the “guardrails”
I love the boring. Every other day, I think "man, I really don’t want to do this annoying task. I’m not sure if it even saves much time since I have to look over the work, but it’s a hell of a lot less mentally exhausting.
Plus, it’s fun having it Trumpify speeches. It’s tremendous. I’ve spent hours reading the bigglyest speeches. Historical speeches, speeches about AI, graduation speeches where bears attack midway through… Seriously, it never gets old
It definitely has its uses but it also has massive annoyances as you pointed out. One thing has really bothered me, I asked it a factual question about Mohammed the founder of Islam. This is how I a human not from a Muslim background would answer
“Ok wikipedia says this ____”
It answered in this long winded way that had all these things like “blessed prophet of Allah”. Basically the answer I would expect from an Imam.
I lost a lot of trust in it when I saw that. It assumed this authority tone. When I heard about that case of a lawyer citing madeup caselaw from it I looked it as confirmation. I don’t know how it happened but for some questions it has this very authoritative tone like it knows this without any doubt.
