mabcat
“Potential misuse” is a bit of a weasel phrase… student use of AI assistants is rampant, the ways they use them are almost always academic misconduct, so it’s actual misuse.
Our institution bans use of AI assistants during assessments, unless permitted by a subject’s coordinator. This is because using ChatGPT in a way that’s consistent with academic integrity is basically impossible. Fixing this means fixing ChatGPT etc, not reimagining academic integrity. Attribution of ideas, reliability of sources, and individual mastery of concepts are more important than ever in the face of LLMs’ super-convincing hallucinations.
There are no Luddites where I teach. Our university prepares students for professional careers, and since in my field we use LLMs all day long for professional work, we also have to model this for students and teach them how it’s done. I demonstrate good and bad examples from Copilot and ChatGPT, quite frequently co-answer student questions in conversation with ChatGPT, and always acknowledge LLM use in materials preparation.
I also have a side project that provides a chat interface to the subject contents (GPT4 synthesis over a vector store). It dramatically improves the quality of AI assistant answers, and makes it much easier to find where in the materials a concept was discussed. Our LMS search sucks even for plain text content. This thing fixes that and also indexes into code, lecture recordings, slides, screenshots, explainer videos… I’m still discovering new abilities that emerge from this setup.
I think the future is very uncertain. Students who are using ChatGPT to bluff their way through courses have no skills moat and will find their job roles automated away in very short order. But this realisation requires a two-year planning horizon and the student event horizon is “what’s due tomorrow?” I haven’t seen much discussion of AI in education that’s grounded in educational psychology or a practical understanding of how students actually behave. AI educational tools will be a frothy buzzword-filled market segment where a lot of money is made/spent but overall learning outcomes remain unchanged.
The genius move is to get ChatGPT to write the essay and the critique. I don’t even have to try this, to know the output would be better quality than a student’s own critique. From a teaching perspective the worst thing about this is the essay and critique would both be full of subtle errors, and writing feedback about subtle errors takes hours. These hours could have been spent guiding students who did work and actually have subtle misunderstandings.
I just tried this out with Github. My passkey lives in 1Password so it’s backed up and synced across devices. It also lets me sign in with normal MFA/TOTP if I don’t have the passkey, or use a recovery code. Incidentally @brian@programming.dev this is working in Firefox now.
I love how every Show HN top comment is always “cool but easy to do on your own with [3 steps each more painful than the last]”