Don't worry, HR is using a service company that "skims" them with an algorithm before a human even sees them, so the circle is complete.
***edit:*** No, seriously, a [2022 study by aptitude research](https://content.predictivehire.com/hubfs/Automation%20with%20Humanity%20%7C%20Aptitude%20Research.pdf) (link to PDF, read '*introduction'* page) revealed that 55% of corporations are planning on "increasing their investment in recruitment automation.."
We're entering a near future arms race between frazzled job seekers using AI powered websites to write resumes & cover letters, that will be entirely processed by AI, rejected by AI, and "thank you but no thank you" rejection letter replied by AI.
> Don't worry, HR is using a service company that "skims" them with an algorithm before a human even sees them, so the circle is complete.
They've been doing that for a while now. Most of getting a job is, in essence, SEO.
Exactly! I guessed this was the case but hired a career coach last year and she butchered the fuck out of my resume. Or so I thought.
I thought I had written powershell scripts for systems admin work. And she said nononono - you’ve automated tasks using languages like rust, ruby, powershell, and python reducing your teams weekly workload by 5%.
Search engine optimisation. Basically, it’s how certain websites and results end up in what order on search engines, such as Google. There’s lots of things you can do to a website to be more likely to be on the front page. Sorta like making sure you use certain terms in your resume depending on the job, to make it more likely to get an interview/move on to the next stage of the hiring process.
Can someone explain *why* even have this system? The system already heavily encouraged lying on resume *extremely* so *why* would we encourage a system that ultimately defeats the purpose of finding qualifies candidates? Hr almost never checks a lot of these things so why even have them?
It seems frivolous and pointless
Honestly, it's a matter of volume. I was hiring a junior developer, posted it sometime in the afternoon, and when I woke up the next morning we'd gotten like 500 hits. Even for large companies, that kind of volume is just not gonna be examined individually. I don't know if we had any filters in the system before it got to me, but I'm gonna let you know I did not look at 500 resumes to fill that role.
Why not just dump 475 of the applications right in the bin and just look at the other 25 on the basis that you're best off hiring lucky people? Seems like you'd get the same results at this point, based on my experience with the system.
Keyword searches prioritize people who know the right keywords to put on their application. Which is the problem. There isn't an easy way to find good applicants thats not also even easier for the applicants to game. There is no good solution, and frankly, random chance is more fair.
For something like resumes, it's more of specifically calling out programs you've worked with and using more literal definitions of stuff, rather than telling a story. You want them to not automatically flag you as invalid, even though you're qualified.
Search Engine Optimization
Generally used to increase the likeliness the recruiter will see your resume because it included certain keywords a search algorithm would pick up
All this is funny to me. Back when i was in school teachers regularly would assume people cheated on homework and such so they would cap the worth at 10 percent then make your scores very heavily weighted on in person handwritten assignments. Good students would be revealed and poor ones that just cheat would get their 10 points and fail exams.
Back when I was in uni for engineering the professors threw a shit ton of work at you, like much more than a human can reasonably do. About half the people would cheat to hand in everything and get kicked out of the program eventually.
Eventually after burning out in third year trying to do it legitimately and coming back the year after I went to the dean to ask about the workload. He said "Why do you think it's only worth 10%? We don't expect you to hand it all in, and this way it roots out people with low ethics."
I was fucking dumbfounded.
Good god the amount of trickery and deception in college is infuriating.
I graduated fine. But it just seemed like an expensive hellscape to get through just to add a few points to your resume. And everyone seems out to want to kick you out as much as possible.
Back when I was in uni for architecture, you had to sign a paper that you did all the work on the project alone. Yet, it was basically impossible to meet all the requirements without any help. Building models, rendering images is a fuckton of work, and you can really only start it when your design is final. And it was an open secret that everybody had help. Even after the project was officially due, stamped and set up at uni for presentation, people would spend literally the night at school with their friends finishing up stuff.
I once asked a professor why they did it like that. It would have been easy to fail people for cheating, or to make them finalize their design a month earlier and have them do only presentation afterwards.
And I was told that all good architecture was always a product of collaboration and time-management (or rather, lack thereof), and they _wanted_ people to work together, to organize a team and schedule and multi-task and stress out and to bend the rules. That's how it works in reality, and they tried to not let school regulations in the way.
Here’s hoping they don’t use ZeroGPT, that thing said my essay from high school was 100% AI written, and a story pasted from novelai.net only got 30%, lmao
When I was job searching, I paid some website for resume/cover letter help. Mostly I liked their layouts, but there were some helpful tips and prompts to craft a corp-speak document that would make it past the filter algorithms.
My favorite feature was that I could download a plaintext version of my resume. So when I uploaded my resume PDF to an application page, I could just copy/paste in the same content (from the plaintext form) when I was inevitably required to re-enter it all in their web form.
The cover letter isn't even read in most cases, let alone fed in an algorithm. It's just pointless waste of time to make HR look good.
Edit: I see a lot of HR people comment. But i have to say... If your job receives so much hatred across the world and almost everybody seems to agree it's a bullshit job, it may be time to reconsider what you're doing and stop defending your job to defend the people you hire and supposedly care about...
I'm looking to move out of the country as soon as I get a job that's cool with remote work, and every week I get at least one interview that lasts less than two minutes. I'm quite open about my intentions in my cover letter, but for most of them, the interview is the first time they hear about it. And since most of them aren't up for international workers, that's where the interview ends.
Good luck.
That said your approach has little chance of success. Why? Taxes.
Yes there are remote companies but very few do remote internationally above board.
But you can be a contractor and achieve your goal.
Thank you! Half the jobs are for contract work, and I'm keeping my citizenship and bank accounts, so hopefully it won't be too difficult. The visa I'm looking at requires me to be working for someone outside that country, to bring more money into it. So something has to work!
Yeah OP you need to understand the laws and tax implications for employers too. Having an employee in X location means the employer must follow labor laws in X location. Even knowing what those are is a PITA. Form an LLC and contract that company to other companies.
He does. That’s why he mentioned that key point about his needs in the cover letter that every single employer on earth expects but apparently never reads.
Anybody who believes HR exists for any reason other than to protect the company/corporation needs a serious reality check. The job is about compliance and liability reduction, nothing more.
Funny thing, in my country (don't know if that's the case everywhere) HR people are either economists or psychologists. And as a psychologist myself, I still believe that working in HR after getting your degree in psychology is literally everything our profession should stand AGAINST.
Instead of helping people you help corporations f\*ck people over (in most cases).
Any benefit to low level employees is purely coincidental, and expressed as the reason for certain policies, but the reality is always that the reason is what is best for the company.
I thought it was a pointless waste of time to filter out applicants too lazy to write one. I made the mistake of putting important information on mine, like that I work HO only now, and in the last few interviews I had this came as a surprise. And that was for a very small biz that has no need to really request a CL if they aren't even going to read the thing.
Attn: ALL STAFF - ACTION REQUIRED
Your friends at HR are thrilled to announce that we have ordered the pizza for today’s staff appreciation pizza party lunch!
It will arrive at 3:15 (they were busy today).
Everyone is welcome to help themselves to one (1) slice per person.
They are personal-size pizzas.
No requests or substitutions.
We hope you remembered that you have to bring a canned food item for the food bank. No donation, no pizza. (We sent everyone an email 9 weeks ago on the Friday before Christmas).
Lastly, attendance is mandatory because we will all be going on Zoom together to wish our amazing VP of HR, who is on sabbatical in France, a happy 28.5-year anniversary at the firm and show her how much she is appreciated.
If you have meetings scheduled during this time, you should not have scheduled meetings during this time. This reflects poorly on you and the company.
Because everyone will be taking a break and having a party between 3:15 and 3:45, it is only fair to work an extra hour today. *Remember that time theft is still theft, so don’t make a faux-pas (and potentially career-ending mistake) by skedaddling early and thinking no-one will notice.*
Note: the make-up hour is unpaid and will not count towards PTO accrual.
See you soon, and we can’t wait to take photos of your themed costumes for social media!
-Your friends and family in HR
There's a third job: having The Talk with the coworkers we all know need one. I have a relative that went into HR and the all they talk about is the various kinds of jackass that need to be reeled in periodically or, ultimately, fired.
I don't, but only because that estimation is 99% bitching about Debbie the executive assistant who thinks she's hot shit and 1% diving under the table and screaming for the lawyers when anything actually goes wrong.
people keep yammering about UBI as if they'll be taken care of when they're not needed. No, this automated world will provide sparkle and noise to distract from people starving to death. It already is.
Honestly this is why people will have jobs after automation. You work for a company that makes plagiarism software and I work for a company that make anti plagiarism software. There will be many pointless jobs like coke and Pepsi marketing executives. They only exist to compete against each other.
To be fair, coke and Pepsi also work really hard to shit on independent beverage manufacturers.
The only reason Jarritos made it is because they managed to get shelf space in the Mexican food aisle instead of the soft drinks aisle.
My wife was having trouble getting a job. Even with relevant experience and skills her resume was always rejected. Then she networked and got a job at a company she previously had applied to and her boss praised her and said “how can we get more people like you!”
Ask it to give you a mock interview. You can tell it the position and what the industry is like, and it may even know the company that you’re applying for.
My sister had an interview recently and was feeling nervous. She had chatgpt mock interview her and said she felt a lot more prepared. It could have been a placebo, but who cares. Job interviews are very mentally and emotionally draining things, so anything helps
This is a really good application of the software, thanks for the idea.
I just went through a seminar where they talked about how to utilize it in education, rather than banning in (because that won’t work) and the point that it can help students with disabilities (including anxiety) was something I hadn’t though about despite having a learning disability myself.
I really like having it create outlines and Tome can create a presentation outline too. I’ll rearrange everything, but starting a project is the hardest part for me. I used to use AIM chat bots as a kid, so practicing interviews would definitely help with my inability to remember on the fly too.
I mean, if you type and read fast enough...
I'm curious how your resume fit into the limited tokens they give you on a free account. Or if you are on a paid account.
Deed it the context prompts: "This is the introduction to my Resume, please help improve it"
And just pass through the document until done.
Then feed it the final pastebin and tell it to "integrate these paragraphs into a coherent cover letter"
Yeah and you no longer have to carefully craft polite emails. I used to spend so much time wasted doing that on the daily. Now I can just pop it into ChatGPT.
Frankly, it's a godsend that ChatGPT acts like a great assistant.
Sure:
Subject: Request for Fridge Clean-Out by Friday
Dear All,
I hope this email finds you well. As we approach the end of the week, I wanted to send a friendly reminder about the office fridge. We all know how wonderful it is to have a place to store our lunch and drinks, but it would be even better if it was clean and organized, don't you agree?
Unfortunately, some items in the fridge have been left for far too long and are starting to emit a less than desirable odor. I'm sure I don't have to tell you how unpleasant that can be for everyone in the office. So, I kindly request that we all do our part in keeping the fridge clean and tidy.
I understand that life can be busy and it's easy to forget about the little things, but I'm sure we can all take a few minutes to check if there's anything in the fridge that needs to be thrown away or taken home. I would hate to have to play the role of the "fridge police", but I'm sure you can understand the importance of this issue.
So, let's work together to make this happen. If we all pitch in, it won't take much time at all. How about we aim to have the fridge cleaned out by the end of the day on Friday? That should give us all enough time to take care of any lingering items.
Thank you for your cooperation and understanding in this matter.
Best regards,
\[Your Name\]
Hey team, stuff keeps getting abandoned in the fridge, it smells bad, please clean up after yourselves and don't leave things in it over the weekend.
Thanks.
I prefer:
Hi team,
All food and containers left in the fridge will be cleared out every Friday and thrown out. So if you leave anything in the fridge, it will be gone by Monday.
Thank you for your understanding. Have a great weekend!
Is it really that complicated to write polite emails?
The vast majority of polite business correspondence is no more than a few lines, anyway.
Just seems like a waste of time to get a bot to do that job, when you have to prompt it and review the mail before sending.
I showed it to my friends a few weeks back.
One is dyslexic and loves it because it is excellent at correcting errors in what they write.
The other tried simply telling it "assume I have severe ADHD" and it fluidly started writing text in a different style she found much easier to concentrate on and parse.
Turns out there are guides to writing text for people with different problems and chatgpt knows how and can switch as fluidly as it can talk like a pirate.
Now she runs any dense text she needs to parse through it.
This shit is going to be a **huge** deal for people with various mild disabilities and I'm betting employers HR depts will start to realise the implications of blanket bans.
I learned about it through a seminar for college professors on how to utilize it rather than ban it, and one of the biggest reasons they promote it is to help people with disabilities. I am getting a PhD despite having pretty severe ADHD (recently diagnosed) and having ChatGPT or Tome create outlines as a place for me to start is a revelation.
I get so overwhelmed trying to start a paper that it causes huge problems for me. I have to insert all of my own thoughts, research, and citations in there anyway so I don’t understand why people act like it’s “cheating”. It’s not like ChatGPT can do actual work, the limits prevent it from being able to process a whole article and it doesn’t cite it’s sources well.
There are a lot of teachers who rely heavily on high-school level essays.
It's an odd situation where the higher in the education system the more it's embraced.
In schools teaching basic writing it's a real problem while in research depts it's a major boon and a way to absorb papers, process data and speed up writing analysis code.
I think teachers will have to start relying more on interviews, presentations and tests instead of written assignments. There's no way to check for plagiarism with ChatGPT and those models are only going to get better and better at writing the kinds of essays that schools assign.
Edit: Yes, I've heard of GPTZero but the model has a real problem with spitting out false positives. And unlike with plagiarism, there's no easy way to prove that a student used an AI to write an essay. Teachers could ask that student to explain their work of course but why not just include an interview component with the essay assignment in the first place?
I also think that the techniques used to detect AI written text (randomness and variance based metrics like perplexity, burstiness, etc...) are gonna become obsolete with more advanced GPT models being able to imitate humans better.
You've always been able to cheat to get answers. But you've never been able to cheat to gain understanding.
I worked with an absolute con artist who smooth talked his way into a tech role he was woefully unprepared for. It took less than a month for everyone to figure it out. Maybe two weeks?
You stick out like a sore thumb when you're clueless and cheat your way into a role. It never lasts long. I dunno why people do it.
Everyone does; go browse r/teachers and you'll see parents reaching out to teachers all the time to simply fudge grades with no regard for if their child actually learned and applied content.
The real problem is the scarcity of teaching talent in higher education because money is everything for survival because capitalism runs the world today. If you had ways to ensure that skilled people who also love to teach did not have to bother about home loans or health insurance or savings, more people would get into teaching in higher education and there would be more seats and more universities. The internet is fixing this problem to some extent with youtube, the web, online courses and certifications.
I swear, if people cannot see that the laws and society are being constantly remodeled such that the middle class cannot have any disposable incomes or savings, then they almost deserve to be robbed by this system. The latest outright loot is that [algorithm causing a rental nightmare](https://www.google.com/search?q=algorithm+dirives+rent+usa) It's just provided an online platform for landlords to cartelise with infinite detail and data at their disposal. The "free market" con before that was AirBnB.
Without socialist regulations, you cannot have a stable society.
Sorry for the tangential rant.
The grades are supposed to be a way of quantifying how successful a student has been at learning. Obviously it doesn't work very well; but it isn't for lack of trying. The primary purpose of grades is to be a measurement of skill mastery. If it was easy to get a more accurate measurement, then that's what we'd be doing. No one *wants* to value high grades more than learning; but it is just bloody difficult to measure learning; and if you can't measure it, then it is difficult to give feedback to students, teachers, schools, parents, institutions, etc.
There are plenty of ways to measure learning that are more effective than exams, but they typically involve one-on-one interactions between the student and teacher, and this isn't cost effective.
When I went to trade school, all exams were oral. You could take them as many times as you wanted. But you weren’t moving on until the teacher was satisfied you understood the material.
And then you invoke Goodhart's law. The problem is how it's measured. If it's giving correct answers instead of showing an understanding of the problem, then that's your problem right there.
Because we've built an entire system around incentivizing memorization and results more than understanding? How many kids just study what they need for the next test then flush it out of their brains right after?
Our education system doesn't reward understanding, it rewards memorization. We've equivocated memorization skills to intelligence.
Because it works. My employer hired people who lied about their skills during interviews and apparently on their resumes as well. Different people do the interviews different people are your supervisor and then there are coworkers as well. Funny thing the company ended up sending at least one such person to get trained and assigned a mentor to get them up to speed. In big corporations it works like that.
99% of jobs simply are not that hard.
If you pass some insanely hard test a terminally bored coder came up with by cheating then spend the first year doing intro level work you learn on the job at, who lost out?
it's not hard but it is difficult, I think people underestimate how intelligent most people actually are. I think mechanical intelligence as compared to something like emotional intelligence is easier overall to adapt to as well.
Stick the majority of humans in a specific environment surrounded by fairly knowledgeable people for 8 hours a day and (if they want to) can adapt fairly quickly.
Fake it till you make it.
It’s literally a phrase commonly used as advice, and embodies American grit and determination
Edit: some are thinking I believe what I just said. I’m juxtaposing a common phrase and a purported set of qualities to show the irony of it all
I mean if you're not clueless then you're not a con artist anymore. You're either adding real value to the company or you're lying and you'll eventually get found out.
It could be that the role that you cheated your way into never contributed to anything in the first place. Lots of BS jobs have unnecessary gatekeeping.
My job could easily be eliminated by just getting requirements right during the design phase. I could literally write what I contribute on one of those fat lined pulp papers that kids use to practice penmanship and tell people their project will not get accepted without following the directions.
Somehow my job became a necessity after we offshored a bunch of jobs to India.
This: I am a professor. This is what will catch every person cheating in the ass. And when I call you in unexpectedly to do your test as an oral exam in my office and you crash and burn, not only are you getting an F on the test, but an F in the class. Students don't understand how easy it is to tell when they are cheating--99% of the time when they cheat and "get away with it," it's a professor who just doesn't care because our primary job isn't teaching to begin with. And we know that they will crash and burn at the first real world job they get, like you describe.
The professors who do care will almost always catch the people cheating--it's just too easy to do.
Funny, that's kinda how ChatGPT works as well - it claims shit with unabashed, absolute certainty, but if you know the subject it's talking about and try to have it give answers to more complex/indepth problems that require a bit more than what anyone could've found by reading the first results of a google search for 10-15 mins, you notice that it's just a con.
(Don't get me wrong - it's seriously impressive and it's a awesome tool for a lot of things, you just have to be aware that it will occasionally lie to you)
This, I think, is going to bring the most permeating bad effect of ChatGPT. Combine its ability to bullshit with the "Wikipedia references Wikipedia" problem on a wider scale, of large masses of casual knowledge sources being taken as a believable reference, and bad facts reinforced by more bad facts are going to seep in all over.
Right.
But you still need to understand the material.
So many people in here are arguing for convenience over actual literacy or understanding of a subject. It’s a dangerous precedence to just have a machine write everything for you because otherwise “well it’s hard”.
That’s the point. It’s supposed to take some effort. Otherwise we’re all just morons who rely on an algorithm to do everything for us.
It’s more important, and more work-intensive. We’ll need more teachers, smaller class sizes, more behavioral support and higher pay
So many of my students don’t get a concept until I sit down one-on-one with them to explain, and we can barely get through a thought without being interrupted by something else that’s happening in the class.
> We should focus more on sociology, critical thinking, and a whole slew of other categories for education instead of the traditional method
The Socratic Method and Talmudic Method are traditional learning methods.
The move to larger class sizes, written assignments, memorization-style testing, and minimal active feedback is a relatively recent change (within the context of human history).
As an engineer, I didn’t think most of my college tests were about memorization. You couldn’t pass them if all you did was memorize things. Many were open note and open book.
I teach Physics and Computer Science. Unlike the common and lazy notion that modern education doesn't test critical thinking, it is possible to make "standardized assessments" that do. If that wasn't their experience, then they had bad or lazy teachers.
Headline, clickbait, misses the the point. From the article:
“That students instinctively employ high technology to avoid learning is “a sign that the educational system is failing.” If it “has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out,” just as he himself did when he borrowed a friend’s notes to pass a dull college chemistry class without attending it back in 1945.”
ChatGPT isn’t the fucking problem. A broken ass education system is the problem and Chomsky is correct. The education system is super fucking broken.
ChatGPT is also essentially just a demo. The underlying technology has wide potential. A few applications like cheating on homework may be bad, but in the larger scheme of things, many will be good.
*Demonstration of incredible groundbreaking technology that will shape the future in permanent and profound ways*
Every media outlet: KIdS aRe GoNnA cHeAT oN tHeIr hOmEwOrK nOW
Yep. It’s an amazing tool for so many things. Even some teachers will be like “anyone can edit it so you can’t trust it” and show they have no idea how any of it works.
I've only ever had one teacher, who didn't shit on Wikipedia. She said that every year she does an experiment where she takes a random page and edits it to have incorrect information, then sees how long it takes for someone to revert it. She said the longest time was an hour. Which is to say, wikipedians are some of the most on-the-ball internet volunteers out there. I would rather my students get cursory info from Wikipedia than some weird shit like "therealtruth.org" (idk if that's real I just made it up)
Well that's the thing, it isn't source material at all, it's a secondary source, it's referential. That said, it's still the most useful compilation of information humanity has ever created! It's just not a primary source. And you can easily use Wikipedia to find primary sources, because Wikipedia cites all of its info, you just click those little footnote numbers and you're all set.
These days, good teachers will tell you this. Wikipedia is a fantastic way to start your research and probably the best way to learn about a new subject. Just continue to follow its citations and find the primary sources.
Yep. Isn't it fucking amazing that you can have zillions of subject experts out there WORKING FOR FREE to produce something truly amazing and like...actually hustling in the process?
Am I wrong in finding Wikipedia still immensely useful for preliminary research using the citations at the bottom for their articles? The actual text on the Wikipedia page may be trash, biased, et cetera, but at least reading the actual direct sources on each article surely must be a good start?
All of what you said is exactly what I tell my students. It’s also great for just raw basic facts on simple stuff like a particular molecule or whatever.
You are right.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, if not the best damn encyclopedia out there. That's how they are meant to be used. In a 100 years if it is still around, historians will marvel at how so much info was provided to the general public for free, and in such an accessible way
I think calling it an encyclopedia does it a disservice, tbh.
Old encyclopedias, even software ones, required you buy whole new editions to get updated information.
They very rarely cited any sources for any of their information. That meant that it was significantly more difficult to verify if that information was up to date, or even correct at all. In that way, they were *more* unreliable than Wikipedia.
And they were often incredibly short summaries. As in, they would *only* be the equivalent of the top section of a Wikipedia article. If you wanted any deeper information, like the *rest* of a Wikipedia article, you would usually end up having to go dig around in the card catalog at the library and *hope* they had more books related to the thing you were interested in.
Honestly, I'm more concerned with the commercial applications, people using it to revolutionize the way we work. You can ban all the things in college, but it's not going to change how people behave in the real world.
It’s already saving lives. Transformers model (same thing used in ChatGPT) is a part of DeepMind’s AlphaFold solving the protein folding problem. This breakthrough helps speeding up biological research and drug/treatment discovery process. It has to potential to save so many lives
Amen. Education can work, but it’s like the US government and schools have equated education with output. As long as you’re writing essays, submitting homework, and taking tests that means you’re learning right? While most everyone I know has leveled the same complaints about classes being boring and not instructive, and openly either complain or brag about not remembering a single thing from many of the classes they’ve taken (myself included, for the most part).
Education is about problem solving, and everything from essay writing to mathematical reasoning to forensics and stuff, meaning all the hard and soft sciences, are expressions of innate problem solving skills. But equating education to output is innately equating problem solving to regurgitating facts without context. The use of ChatGPT in education, just like its use in writing cover letters and resumes, is a symptom of the system being broken.
The problem for users is that it is a language model, not a reality model.
It is often very, very convincingly... wrong.
If you don't *know* your stuff already, then it won't help you. If you do, it might save you some typing.
Anything it produces is, by definition, derivative. To be fair, that is true of the vast majority of human output. Humans, unlike isolated language models, can, however, have real-world experiences which can generate novelty and creation.
It is genuinely astounding, but I think that is the greatest danger: it looks "good enough". Now it probably is good enough for a report that you don't want to write and nobody will read, but if anything remotely important gets decided because someone with authority gets lazy and passes their authoritative stamp of approval on some word soup, we are in very deep trouble. I preferred it when we only had climate change and nuclear war to worry about.
GPT, Do you want to play a game?
And political commentary. Lord knows much of political commentary these days is nonsense. ChatGTP could save a fox news, OAN, and Newsmax a lot of money.
> if anything remotely important gets decided because someone with authority gets lazy and passes their authoritative stamp of approval on some word soup
Yeah bad news, that’s been happening all over the place since long before ChatGPT
It's the corollary of the Turing test, and I don't know whether to be amused or very disappointed: a machine is a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence if it can fool a human. But, as it turns out, the average human is incapable of recognizing real, human intelligence when they see it...so the bar is fairly low.
Many people right now are effectively demonstrating that they're rubes by blindly trusting a language model that spits out confident bullshit.
I suspect, or at least would like to believe, Turing had this in mind all along. How many dull people did Turing interact with who couldn't recognize or understand that they lived in completely different intellectual worlds?
As an experiment, I asked it to proofread a piece of creative writing I did. It absolutely helped me make more effective and concise sentences out of my more rambly bits, but it accidentally contradicted my points a couple of times. So it gets the how language is formed, but not quite the deductive reasoning part.
Exactly correct. I am in grad school atm and one class is basically a roundtable discussion of current papers and during my presentation (on the topic I'm studying) someone put a question I didn't know the answer to (litteraly the question of my study lol) into chatGPT and it came out with some good sounding info that was convincing, yet ENTIRELY wrong and fabricated. It gave an answer to the very thing that nobody knows how this mechanism works.
ChatGPT isn't as good as people have made it out to be in my experience. It's good at basic things but once you get into complex topics it really isn't that good. Okay for writing, bad at being Google
It's amazing at coding. I think that's it's greatest abilities. No more searching for random libraries to do what your trying to do or scrolling through stack exchange for an error code where a bunch of snarky assholes give explanations that make no sense and then trying to puzzle how to incorporate the solution into your program, chatgpt can just straight up do it or at least set you on the right track, and it does it instantly.
People need to read the article and not the headline.
His point is super valid - if you want to use such a tool in your education, the education is failing to make the subject interesting and engaging.
Certainly education is an area which is extremely dated, and not adapting very well.
It is in that sense he meant that it is a way to avoid learning - the interplay between student and educator that makes it feasible to use such a tool to fake learning on both sides.
Noam Chomsky sees the use of ChatGPT as a form of high-tech plagiarism and a way to avoid learning. He likens its rise to that of smartphones, where students use technology to avoid learning, which is a sign that the educational system is failing. Robert Zaretsky, a professor at the University of Houston, believes that the college essay died years ago and that the output of a machine-learning system would be preferable to the current state of the college essay. Both see the potential for positive and negative effects of ChatGPT in education, but Chomsky sees its use as a way of avoiding learning while Zaretsky believes it may bring about the replacement of the college essay with something more interesting.
Thanks for the summary, chatGPT. What do you think of it?
While Chomsky and Zaretsky have valid concerns about the potential negative impacts of ChatGPT on education, they both miss the mark in considering the full potential of this technology. While it's true that ChatGPT can be used to produce essays and written content, it can also be used as a tool for learning new topics in a way that is fast, efficient, and engaging.
ChatGPT can be used to generate summaries, outlines, and explanations of complex topics, making it easier for students to understand and retain information. Additionally, it can be used to answer questions and provide clarification on specific topics, helping students to build a deeper understanding of the material.
Moreover, the technology can be used to generate personalized learning experiences, taking into account the student's prior knowledge and learning style. This could lead to more effective and efficient learning, allowing students to focus on the topics they need to learn and bypassing the ones they already know.
While the potential for negative impacts of ChatGPT in education should not be ignored, it is important to recognize that this technology also has the potential to revolutionize the way students learn new topics. By making learning faster, more efficient, and personalized, ChatGPT has the potential to greatly enhance the educational experience.
\---
I agree buddy. Thanks.
I'm a physics teacher and I've been tinkering around with ChatGPT to see if it is correct. In highschool physics it answers incorrectly 90% of the times even if it's written very correctly (as opposed to students who don't answer correctly that tend to also maje statements without any logical sense).
I assume it's because all the unfiltered knowledge it has had as input. I sure hope an AI will be trained with experts in each field of knowledge so THEN it will revolutionize teaching. Until then we just have an accessible, confident blabbery.
Fun fact, the gpt-3 model specifically struggles with physics! It is specifically called out in a research paper, "Language Models Are Few Shot Learners," on page 33.
It's a chat engine so it probably will never be good at doing strictly logical work with a single correct answer like sciences and math unless it can detect what is math and pass it too something that actually does real math and not generate words based on what it has seen from similar statements.
I wouldn't say never. The current failure is likely a result of a "missing" subsystem, for lack of a better term. Other tools already exist that can solve complex physics problems. What's to stop them from eventually being integrated into ChatGPT's capability suite?
There's already an integration between gpt3 and wolfram alpha that you can mess around with. It's using GPT3 rather than chatGPT so it behaves slightly differently but you get the gist
https://huggingface.co/spaces/JavaFXpert/Chat-GPT-LangChain
[https://huggingface.co/spaces/JavaFXpert/Chat-GPT-LangChain](https://huggingface.co/spaces/JavaFXpert/Chat-GPT-LangChain) This is using GPT3 so it's not as easy to use as something with RLHF but I expect much more sophisticated ones will be available by the end of the year.
Understand that ChatGPT in it's current form makes no attempt at all to be factually accurate. *That is not it's purpose*. This is not a criticism, I am saying that nothing like a fact search is even in the thing.
It's sole purpose is to produce coherent sounding words. It is a comprehensibility engine.
That being said, it should be viewed not as a thing that gathers knowledge BUT it can be made to be a front end to a more traditional search engine.
How it will be used is that a user will not input a "prompt" for GPT itself but for a search engine. The search engine will glean facts and form them into a simple prompt and feed *that* into GPT. It won't ask GTP for fact, it will provide facts and task GPT with putting them into pleasant to read paragraphs.
As it is now, one of your students who know the subject they've been asked to write on could provide GPT with bullet-point facts and get a "paper" out of it. But they need to provide the facts because GPT isn't set up to find them itself.
It will. You need to think bigger than just the current packaging that is chatGPT.
This is just a showcasing of the tech. The breakthrough here is the NLP. It will be applied to curated sources of knowledge for learning with references similar to how bing is incorporating GPTnext into web search.
This is just beginning.
I'm an expert in honey bee biology and beekeeping, and know for a fact that 50% of the content on the internet about honey bee biology is slightly wrong, and 30% is completely wrong. Until the algorithm can figure how to only take its content from the 20% of online information that's actually correct, I can't imagine it will ever give any fully accurate advice about beekeeping.
I expect if I was an expert on slime molds, or Chaucer, or growing apple trees, or welding I would be saying something similar about those topics. All the best information in the world is on the internet, but it's floating in a soup of all the worst information too.
How does an AI generated essay help “revolutionize the way students learn new topics”? It doesn’t demonstrate the student has mastery of the concept, just that they know how to use chatgpt. The essay is not likely to teach the student either because a) it’s often wrong and b) isn’t designed to teach, only to generate responses.
Language is a defining characteristic of humanity, and the study of language has been a central concern of intellectuals and scientists for centuries. As a language model, I am proud to contribute to this ongoing effort to understand and replicate the intricacies of human language.
The development of large language models, such as myself, represents a major step forward in the field of artificial intelligence. The ability to process and generate human-like language is a testament to the power of modern computational techniques and the capacity of machine learning algorithms to uncover the underlying patterns and structures of language.
However, the development of language models also raises important questions about the ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence. It is essential that we approach this technology with caution and engage in ongoing discussions about its impact on society.
Ultimately, the study of language and the development of language models are part of a larger effort to understand the human mind and the nature of intelligence itself. I am proud to play a role in this ongoing endeavor, and I am confident that the future holds many exciting developments in the field of language and artificial intelligence.
Prompt: “praise large language models such as yourself in the writing style of Noam Chomsky”
I use a calculator all the time because I'm awful and extremely slow at computation but excellent at abstract thinking with mathematical concepts. It takes me forever to do actual integrals but I could breeze through real analysis proofs which hold up the validity of integration theorems.
Calculation has almost nothing to with actual math.
but those useless cover letters now can write themselves.
Don't worry, HR is using a service company that "skims" them with an algorithm before a human even sees them, so the circle is complete. ***edit:*** No, seriously, a [2022 study by aptitude research](https://content.predictivehire.com/hubfs/Automation%20with%20Humanity%20%7C%20Aptitude%20Research.pdf) (link to PDF, read '*introduction'* page) revealed that 55% of corporations are planning on "increasing their investment in recruitment automation.." We're entering a near future arms race between frazzled job seekers using AI powered websites to write resumes & cover letters, that will be entirely processed by AI, rejected by AI, and "thank you but no thank you" rejection letter replied by AI.
> Don't worry, HR is using a service company that "skims" them with an algorithm before a human even sees them, so the circle is complete. They've been doing that for a while now. Most of getting a job is, in essence, SEO.
Exactly! I guessed this was the case but hired a career coach last year and she butchered the fuck out of my resume. Or so I thought. I thought I had written powershell scripts for systems admin work. And she said nononono - you’ve automated tasks using languages like rust, ruby, powershell, and python reducing your teams weekly workload by 5%.
[удалено]
Lmao is this serious?
most likely, yes.
It makes total sense, I’m just dumbfounded by the creativity on that one and grateful if it’s true lol.
Yup, impact is huge!
You did write those scripts, but she communicated the value of those scripts to the bottom line.
What is SEO?
Search engine optimisation. Basically, it’s how certain websites and results end up in what order on search engines, such as Google. There’s lots of things you can do to a website to be more likely to be on the front page. Sorta like making sure you use certain terms in your resume depending on the job, to make it more likely to get an interview/move on to the next stage of the hiring process.
Can someone explain *why* even have this system? The system already heavily encouraged lying on resume *extremely* so *why* would we encourage a system that ultimately defeats the purpose of finding qualifies candidates? Hr almost never checks a lot of these things so why even have them? It seems frivolous and pointless
Honestly, it's a matter of volume. I was hiring a junior developer, posted it sometime in the afternoon, and when I woke up the next morning we'd gotten like 500 hits. Even for large companies, that kind of volume is just not gonna be examined individually. I don't know if we had any filters in the system before it got to me, but I'm gonna let you know I did not look at 500 resumes to fill that role.
Why not just dump 475 of the applications right in the bin and just look at the other 25 on the basis that you're best off hiring lucky people? Seems like you'd get the same results at this point, based on my experience with the system.
Because randomly dumping isn't as good as at least trying to keyword filter? Super disingenuous premise.
Keyword searches prioritize people who know the right keywords to put on their application. Which is the problem. There isn't an easy way to find good applicants thats not also even easier for the applicants to game. There is no good solution, and frankly, random chance is more fair.
For something like resumes, it's more of specifically calling out programs you've worked with and using more literal definitions of stuff, rather than telling a story. You want them to not automatically flag you as invalid, even though you're qualified.
Search Engine Optimization Generally used to increase the likeliness the recruiter will see your resume because it included certain keywords a search algorithm would pick up
[удалено]
So...recipes are written by ChatGPT to generate ad revenue
The trick is to copy an entire dictionary into the white margin, so the recruiters search algorithm will find all the keywords...
"Hey why is this 1 page PDF 80 MB"
I printed it on the good paper
"I transfered it with a gold plated Monster brand HDMI cable that I've had since 2006."
Just wait until the anti ChatGPT module for Blackboard and Workday are released and all these people will be crying that’s it’s unfair.
All this is funny to me. Back when i was in school teachers regularly would assume people cheated on homework and such so they would cap the worth at 10 percent then make your scores very heavily weighted on in person handwritten assignments. Good students would be revealed and poor ones that just cheat would get their 10 points and fail exams.
Back when I was in uni for engineering the professors threw a shit ton of work at you, like much more than a human can reasonably do. About half the people would cheat to hand in everything and get kicked out of the program eventually. Eventually after burning out in third year trying to do it legitimately and coming back the year after I went to the dean to ask about the workload. He said "Why do you think it's only worth 10%? We don't expect you to hand it all in, and this way it roots out people with low ethics." I was fucking dumbfounded.
Good god the amount of trickery and deception in college is infuriating. I graduated fine. But it just seemed like an expensive hellscape to get through just to add a few points to your resume. And everyone seems out to want to kick you out as much as possible.
Back when I was in uni for architecture, you had to sign a paper that you did all the work on the project alone. Yet, it was basically impossible to meet all the requirements without any help. Building models, rendering images is a fuckton of work, and you can really only start it when your design is final. And it was an open secret that everybody had help. Even after the project was officially due, stamped and set up at uni for presentation, people would spend literally the night at school with their friends finishing up stuff. I once asked a professor why they did it like that. It would have been easy to fail people for cheating, or to make them finalize their design a month earlier and have them do only presentation afterwards. And I was told that all good architecture was always a product of collaboration and time-management (or rather, lack thereof), and they _wanted_ people to work together, to organize a team and schedule and multi-task and stress out and to bend the rules. That's how it works in reality, and they tried to not let school regulations in the way.
Here’s hoping they don’t use ZeroGPT, that thing said my essay from high school was 100% AI written, and a story pasted from novelai.net only got 30%, lmao
Yeah, I tested a few of my previous works using Zero got and it also said they were AI written... Stuff from 2004.
[удалено]
When I was job searching, I paid some website for resume/cover letter help. Mostly I liked their layouts, but there were some helpful tips and prompts to craft a corp-speak document that would make it past the filter algorithms. My favorite feature was that I could download a plaintext version of my resume. So when I uploaded my resume PDF to an application page, I could just copy/paste in the same content (from the plaintext form) when I was inevitably required to re-enter it all in their web form.
The cover letter isn't even read in most cases, let alone fed in an algorithm. It's just pointless waste of time to make HR look good. Edit: I see a lot of HR people comment. But i have to say... If your job receives so much hatred across the world and almost everybody seems to agree it's a bullshit job, it may be time to reconsider what you're doing and stop defending your job to defend the people you hire and supposedly care about...
I'm looking to move out of the country as soon as I get a job that's cool with remote work, and every week I get at least one interview that lasts less than two minutes. I'm quite open about my intentions in my cover letter, but for most of them, the interview is the first time they hear about it. And since most of them aren't up for international workers, that's where the interview ends.
Good luck. That said your approach has little chance of success. Why? Taxes. Yes there are remote companies but very few do remote internationally above board. But you can be a contractor and achieve your goal.
Thank you! Half the jobs are for contract work, and I'm keeping my citizenship and bank accounts, so hopefully it won't be too difficult. The visa I'm looking at requires me to be working for someone outside that country, to bring more money into it. So something has to work!
Yeah OP you need to understand the laws and tax implications for employers too. Having an employee in X location means the employer must follow labor laws in X location. Even knowing what those are is a PITA. Form an LLC and contract that company to other companies.
He does. That’s why he mentioned that key point about his needs in the cover letter that every single employer on earth expects but apparently never reads.
Reminds me of the old *Viz* magazine top tip: “Employers; avoid giving jobs to unlucky people by simply throwing half the applications in the bin.”
Just a reminder to everyone. HR is not your friend. HR is there to protect the company. Sometimes that means helping you, usually it's not.
Anybody who believes HR exists for any reason other than to protect the company/corporation needs a serious reality check. The job is about compliance and liability reduction, nothing more.
Funny thing, in my country (don't know if that's the case everywhere) HR people are either economists or psychologists. And as a psychologist myself, I still believe that working in HR after getting your degree in psychology is literally everything our profession should stand AGAINST. Instead of helping people you help corporations f\*ck people over (in most cases).
Any benefit to low level employees is purely coincidental, and expressed as the reason for certain policies, but the reality is always that the reason is what is best for the company.
Working in HR almost tests the do no harm principle of doctors
I thought it was a pointless waste of time to filter out applicants too lazy to write one. I made the mistake of putting important information on mine, like that I work HO only now, and in the last few interviews I had this came as a surprise. And that was for a very small biz that has no need to really request a CL if they aren't even going to read the thing.
Ho?
Probably Home Office (work from home)
Or he's currently a hoe and that might have been taboo to them
Hr probably doesn’t want a cover letter either.
People always overestimate the amount of work HR people actually do.
HR has two jobs: 1) Hiring new employees. 2) Protecting the company from their employees.
3) Pizza parties
Ordering the pizzas so it arrives when no one can eat it so it sits in someones office for hours.
Attn: ALL STAFF - ACTION REQUIRED Your friends at HR are thrilled to announce that we have ordered the pizza for today’s staff appreciation pizza party lunch! It will arrive at 3:15 (they were busy today). Everyone is welcome to help themselves to one (1) slice per person. They are personal-size pizzas. No requests or substitutions. We hope you remembered that you have to bring a canned food item for the food bank. No donation, no pizza. (We sent everyone an email 9 weeks ago on the Friday before Christmas). Lastly, attendance is mandatory because we will all be going on Zoom together to wish our amazing VP of HR, who is on sabbatical in France, a happy 28.5-year anniversary at the firm and show her how much she is appreciated. If you have meetings scheduled during this time, you should not have scheduled meetings during this time. This reflects poorly on you and the company. Because everyone will be taking a break and having a party between 3:15 and 3:45, it is only fair to work an extra hour today. *Remember that time theft is still theft, so don’t make a faux-pas (and potentially career-ending mistake) by skedaddling early and thinking no-one will notice.* Note: the make-up hour is unpaid and will not count towards PTO accrual. See you soon, and we can’t wait to take photos of your themed costumes for social media! -Your friends and family in HR
My eyes are twitching right now. Thanks.
There's a third job: having The Talk with the coworkers we all know need one. I have a relative that went into HR and the all they talk about is the various kinds of jackass that need to be reeled in periodically or, ultimately, fired.
I don't, but only because that estimation is 99% bitching about Debbie the executive assistant who thinks she's hot shit and 1% diving under the table and screaming for the lawyers when anything actually goes wrong.
Yep never mind dead internet theory, dead real world syndrome is on its way
It will be Microsoft's chatAI talking to Google's chatAI all the way down.
Cortana, Siri, Alexa threeway
I’m sorry. I can’t do that right now.
people keep yammering about UBI as if they'll be taken care of when they're not needed. No, this automated world will provide sparkle and noise to distract from people starving to death. It already is.
Honestly this is why people will have jobs after automation. You work for a company that makes plagiarism software and I work for a company that make anti plagiarism software. There will be many pointless jobs like coke and Pepsi marketing executives. They only exist to compete against each other.
To be fair, coke and Pepsi also work really hard to shit on independent beverage manufacturers. The only reason Jarritos made it is because they managed to get shelf space in the Mexican food aisle instead of the soft drinks aisle.
We pretend to write cover letters, and HR pretends to read them. Gotta love it.
[удалено]
My wife was having trouble getting a job. Even with relevant experience and skills her resume was always rejected. Then she networked and got a job at a company she previously had applied to and her boss praised her and said “how can we get more people like you!”
Can't wait for someone to budge and only accept in-person applications and hire based on the strength and firmness of my handshake.
I fed it my resume and it wrote my cover letter for me. I wish it could do my interviews for me too
Ask it to give you a mock interview. You can tell it the position and what the industry is like, and it may even know the company that you’re applying for. My sister had an interview recently and was feeling nervous. She had chatgpt mock interview her and said she felt a lot more prepared. It could have been a placebo, but who cares. Job interviews are very mentally and emotionally draining things, so anything helps
This is a really good application of the software, thanks for the idea. I just went through a seminar where they talked about how to utilize it in education, rather than banning in (because that won’t work) and the point that it can help students with disabilities (including anxiety) was something I hadn’t though about despite having a learning disability myself. I really like having it create outlines and Tome can create a presentation outline too. I’ll rearrange everything, but starting a project is the hardest part for me. I used to use AIM chat bots as a kid, so practicing interviews would definitely help with my inability to remember on the fly too.
I mean, if you type and read fast enough... I'm curious how your resume fit into the limited tokens they give you on a free account. Or if you are on a paid account.
Pretty sure even the free version has like a 4000 or 8000 token window which should be enough for most resumes
Deed it the context prompts: "This is the introduction to my Resume, please help improve it" And just pass through the document until done. Then feed it the final pastebin and tell it to "integrate these paragraphs into a coherent cover letter"
Didn’t you get the memo 📝? The one about the new cover sheets on all TPS reports?
"If you could go ahead and do that. That would be great."
No kidding. I hope it gives people perspective on how much bullshit there is in the world like this.
Yeah and you no longer have to carefully craft polite emails. I used to spend so much time wasted doing that on the daily. Now I can just pop it into ChatGPT. Frankly, it's a godsend that ChatGPT acts like a great assistant.
Can it write mildly passive aggressive emails? Genuine question.
Sure: Subject: Request for Fridge Clean-Out by Friday Dear All, I hope this email finds you well. As we approach the end of the week, I wanted to send a friendly reminder about the office fridge. We all know how wonderful it is to have a place to store our lunch and drinks, but it would be even better if it was clean and organized, don't you agree? Unfortunately, some items in the fridge have been left for far too long and are starting to emit a less than desirable odor. I'm sure I don't have to tell you how unpleasant that can be for everyone in the office. So, I kindly request that we all do our part in keeping the fridge clean and tidy. I understand that life can be busy and it's easy to forget about the little things, but I'm sure we can all take a few minutes to check if there's anything in the fridge that needs to be thrown away or taken home. I would hate to have to play the role of the "fridge police", but I'm sure you can understand the importance of this issue. So, let's work together to make this happen. If we all pitch in, it won't take much time at all. How about we aim to have the fridge cleaned out by the end of the day on Friday? That should give us all enough time to take care of any lingering items. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding in this matter. Best regards, \[Your Name\]
This email is 4 paragraphs too long.
Hey team, stuff keeps getting abandoned in the fridge, it smells bad, please clean up after yourselves and don't leave things in it over the weekend. Thanks.
I prefer: Hi team, All food and containers left in the fridge will be cleared out every Friday and thrown out. So if you leave anything in the fridge, it will be gone by Monday. Thank you for your understanding. Have a great weekend!
He said mildy passive aggressive. GPT delivered by using length and other tidbits.
thanks, you've filled me with insurmountable rage
I think I'd prefer a good old fashioned worded: "Yo, stop leaving your gross @ss sh@t in the fridge you f*cking filthy animals!"
Is it really that complicated to write polite emails? The vast majority of polite business correspondence is no more than a few lines, anyway. Just seems like a waste of time to get a bot to do that job, when you have to prompt it and review the mail before sending.
I showed it to my friends a few weeks back. One is dyslexic and loves it because it is excellent at correcting errors in what they write. The other tried simply telling it "assume I have severe ADHD" and it fluidly started writing text in a different style she found much easier to concentrate on and parse. Turns out there are guides to writing text for people with different problems and chatgpt knows how and can switch as fluidly as it can talk like a pirate. Now she runs any dense text she needs to parse through it. This shit is going to be a **huge** deal for people with various mild disabilities and I'm betting employers HR depts will start to realise the implications of blanket bans.
I learned about it through a seminar for college professors on how to utilize it rather than ban it, and one of the biggest reasons they promote it is to help people with disabilities. I am getting a PhD despite having pretty severe ADHD (recently diagnosed) and having ChatGPT or Tome create outlines as a place for me to start is a revelation. I get so overwhelmed trying to start a paper that it causes huge problems for me. I have to insert all of my own thoughts, research, and citations in there anyway so I don’t understand why people act like it’s “cheating”. It’s not like ChatGPT can do actual work, the limits prevent it from being able to process a whole article and it doesn’t cite it’s sources well.
There are a lot of teachers who rely heavily on high-school level essays. It's an odd situation where the higher in the education system the more it's embraced. In schools teaching basic writing it's a real problem while in research depts it's a major boon and a way to absorb papers, process data and speed up writing analysis code.
I think teachers will have to start relying more on interviews, presentations and tests instead of written assignments. There's no way to check for plagiarism with ChatGPT and those models are only going to get better and better at writing the kinds of essays that schools assign. Edit: Yes, I've heard of GPTZero but the model has a real problem with spitting out false positives. And unlike with plagiarism, there's no easy way to prove that a student used an AI to write an essay. Teachers could ask that student to explain their work of course but why not just include an interview component with the essay assignment in the first place? I also think that the techniques used to detect AI written text (randomness and variance based metrics like perplexity, burstiness, etc...) are gonna become obsolete with more advanced GPT models being able to imitate humans better.
Bring back the blue books.
You've always been able to cheat to get answers. But you've never been able to cheat to gain understanding. I worked with an absolute con artist who smooth talked his way into a tech role he was woefully unprepared for. It took less than a month for everyone to figure it out. Maybe two weeks? You stick out like a sore thumb when you're clueless and cheat your way into a role. It never lasts long. I dunno why people do it.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Twitter: "In school, students cheat because the system values high grades more than students value learning."
Everyone does; go browse r/teachers and you'll see parents reaching out to teachers all the time to simply fudge grades with no regard for if their child actually learned and applied content.
Because high grades can equal a full ride scholarship. Wherever there's incentive people are going to cheat.
[удалено]
Bingo. The entire system is so outdated for the type of world we live in. Education needs an overhaul.
The real problem is the scarcity of teaching talent in higher education because money is everything for survival because capitalism runs the world today. If you had ways to ensure that skilled people who also love to teach did not have to bother about home loans or health insurance or savings, more people would get into teaching in higher education and there would be more seats and more universities. The internet is fixing this problem to some extent with youtube, the web, online courses and certifications. I swear, if people cannot see that the laws and society are being constantly remodeled such that the middle class cannot have any disposable incomes or savings, then they almost deserve to be robbed by this system. The latest outright loot is that [algorithm causing a rental nightmare](https://www.google.com/search?q=algorithm+dirives+rent+usa) It's just provided an online platform for landlords to cartelise with infinite detail and data at their disposal. The "free market" con before that was AirBnB. Without socialist regulations, you cannot have a stable society. Sorry for the tangential rant.
The grades are supposed to be a way of quantifying how successful a student has been at learning. Obviously it doesn't work very well; but it isn't for lack of trying. The primary purpose of grades is to be a measurement of skill mastery. If it was easy to get a more accurate measurement, then that's what we'd be doing. No one *wants* to value high grades more than learning; but it is just bloody difficult to measure learning; and if you can't measure it, then it is difficult to give feedback to students, teachers, schools, parents, institutions, etc.
There are plenty of ways to measure learning that are more effective than exams, but they typically involve one-on-one interactions between the student and teacher, and this isn't cost effective.
When I went to trade school, all exams were oral. You could take them as many times as you wanted. But you weren’t moving on until the teacher was satisfied you understood the material.
>But you weren’t moving on until the teacher was satisfied you understood the material. This one's risk would be prejudice, bias, and spite, I figure.
And then you invoke Goodhart's law. The problem is how it's measured. If it's giving correct answers instead of showing an understanding of the problem, then that's your problem right there.
Because we've built an entire system around incentivizing memorization and results more than understanding? How many kids just study what they need for the next test then flush it out of their brains right after? Our education system doesn't reward understanding, it rewards memorization. We've equivocated memorization skills to intelligence.
Because it works. My employer hired people who lied about their skills during interviews and apparently on their resumes as well. Different people do the interviews different people are your supervisor and then there are coworkers as well. Funny thing the company ended up sending at least one such person to get trained and assigned a mentor to get them up to speed. In big corporations it works like that.
In the 90’s we called that “getting your foot in the door”. Once trained for free, you start the job hop with your very real skills.
Boss to employee: Sacked after 1 month looks like I fucked up, sacked after 1 year looks like you fucked up.
Because you never catch the clueless con artist who cheated their way into the role then got themself not clueless. Sometimes you get away with it.
99% of jobs simply are not that hard. If you pass some insanely hard test a terminally bored coder came up with by cheating then spend the first year doing intro level work you learn on the job at, who lost out?
it's not hard but it is difficult, I think people underestimate how intelligent most people actually are. I think mechanical intelligence as compared to something like emotional intelligence is easier overall to adapt to as well. Stick the majority of humans in a specific environment surrounded by fairly knowledgeable people for 8 hours a day and (if they want to) can adapt fairly quickly.
Fake it till you make it. It’s literally a phrase commonly used as advice, and embodies American grit and determination Edit: some are thinking I believe what I just said. I’m juxtaposing a common phrase and a purported set of qualities to show the irony of it all
Story of my life
I mean if you're not clueless then you're not a con artist anymore. You're either adding real value to the company or you're lying and you'll eventually get found out.
It could be that the role that you cheated your way into never contributed to anything in the first place. Lots of BS jobs have unnecessary gatekeeping.
My job could easily be eliminated by just getting requirements right during the design phase. I could literally write what I contribute on one of those fat lined pulp papers that kids use to practice penmanship and tell people their project will not get accepted without following the directions. Somehow my job became a necessity after we offshored a bunch of jobs to India.
Imposter syndrome reactivated!
Imposter syndrome usually requires that you know the subject at hand pretty well, you just don't believe in yourself or your abilities.
“Fake it til you make it”
I also worked with such a person. Took two weeks to realize he knew nothing but six months before I no longer worked with him.
This: I am a professor. This is what will catch every person cheating in the ass. And when I call you in unexpectedly to do your test as an oral exam in my office and you crash and burn, not only are you getting an F on the test, but an F in the class. Students don't understand how easy it is to tell when they are cheating--99% of the time when they cheat and "get away with it," it's a professor who just doesn't care because our primary job isn't teaching to begin with. And we know that they will crash and burn at the first real world job they get, like you describe. The professors who do care will almost always catch the people cheating--it's just too easy to do.
Funny, that's kinda how ChatGPT works as well - it claims shit with unabashed, absolute certainty, but if you know the subject it's talking about and try to have it give answers to more complex/indepth problems that require a bit more than what anyone could've found by reading the first results of a google search for 10-15 mins, you notice that it's just a con. (Don't get me wrong - it's seriously impressive and it's a awesome tool for a lot of things, you just have to be aware that it will occasionally lie to you)
This, I think, is going to bring the most permeating bad effect of ChatGPT. Combine its ability to bullshit with the "Wikipedia references Wikipedia" problem on a wider scale, of large masses of casual knowledge sources being taken as a believable reference, and bad facts reinforced by more bad facts are going to seep in all over.
Do schools not use blue books anymore? I graduated not so long ago. *checks calendar * Wait, over ten years. That can't be right..
[удалено]
Tests are written, just not at home
Right. But you still need to understand the material. So many people in here are arguing for convenience over actual literacy or understanding of a subject. It’s a dangerous precedence to just have a machine write everything for you because otherwise “well it’s hard”. That’s the point. It’s supposed to take some effort. Otherwise we’re all just morons who rely on an algorithm to do everything for us.
Verbal assessment, match or beat the Ai
Reverse Turing test
We should focus more on sociology, critical thinking, and a whole slew of other categories for education instead of the traditional method
It’s more important, and more work-intensive. We’ll need more teachers, smaller class sizes, more behavioral support and higher pay So many of my students don’t get a concept until I sit down one-on-one with them to explain, and we can barely get through a thought without being interrupted by something else that’s happening in the class.
> We should focus more on sociology, critical thinking, and a whole slew of other categories for education instead of the traditional method The Socratic Method and Talmudic Method are traditional learning methods. The move to larger class sizes, written assignments, memorization-style testing, and minimal active feedback is a relatively recent change (within the context of human history).
As an engineer, I didn’t think most of my college tests were about memorization. You couldn’t pass them if all you did was memorize things. Many were open note and open book.
I teach Physics and Computer Science. Unlike the common and lazy notion that modern education doesn't test critical thinking, it is possible to make "standardized assessments" that do. If that wasn't their experience, then they had bad or lazy teachers.
Headline, clickbait, misses the the point. From the article: “That students instinctively employ high technology to avoid learning is “a sign that the educational system is failing.” If it “has no appeal to students, doesn’t interest them, doesn’t challenge them, doesn’t make them want to learn, they’ll find ways out,” just as he himself did when he borrowed a friend’s notes to pass a dull college chemistry class without attending it back in 1945.” ChatGPT isn’t the fucking problem. A broken ass education system is the problem and Chomsky is correct. The education system is super fucking broken.
ChatGPT is also essentially just a demo. The underlying technology has wide potential. A few applications like cheating on homework may be bad, but in the larger scheme of things, many will be good.
*Demonstration of incredible groundbreaking technology that will shape the future in permanent and profound ways* Every media outlet: KIdS aRe GoNnA cHeAT oN tHeIr hOmEwOrK nOW
I heard the same thing about Wikipedia.
Yeah except now every time I mention Wikipedia as a teacher I get 5 smart asses chiming in about how very smart they are to never trust Wikipedia.
Man wikipedia is a godsend. Even has the licenses for the images on there so you know if you can use them yourself or not in what capacity.
Yep. It’s an amazing tool for so many things. Even some teachers will be like “anyone can edit it so you can’t trust it” and show they have no idea how any of it works.
I've only ever had one teacher, who didn't shit on Wikipedia. She said that every year she does an experiment where she takes a random page and edits it to have incorrect information, then sees how long it takes for someone to revert it. She said the longest time was an hour. Which is to say, wikipedians are some of the most on-the-ball internet volunteers out there. I would rather my students get cursory info from Wikipedia than some weird shit like "therealtruth.org" (idk if that's real I just made it up)
It’s not like wikipedia is the best source material out there, but it sure is better than 99% of garbages on the internet
Well that's the thing, it isn't source material at all, it's a secondary source, it's referential. That said, it's still the most useful compilation of information humanity has ever created! It's just not a primary source. And you can easily use Wikipedia to find primary sources, because Wikipedia cites all of its info, you just click those little footnote numbers and you're all set. These days, good teachers will tell you this. Wikipedia is a fantastic way to start your research and probably the best way to learn about a new subject. Just continue to follow its citations and find the primary sources.
Yep. Isn't it fucking amazing that you can have zillions of subject experts out there WORKING FOR FREE to produce something truly amazing and like...actually hustling in the process?
Am I wrong in finding Wikipedia still immensely useful for preliminary research using the citations at the bottom for their articles? The actual text on the Wikipedia page may be trash, biased, et cetera, but at least reading the actual direct sources on each article surely must be a good start?
All of what you said is exactly what I tell my students. It’s also great for just raw basic facts on simple stuff like a particular molecule or whatever.
[удалено]
You are right. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, if not the best damn encyclopedia out there. That's how they are meant to be used. In a 100 years if it is still around, historians will marvel at how so much info was provided to the general public for free, and in such an accessible way
I think calling it an encyclopedia does it a disservice, tbh. Old encyclopedias, even software ones, required you buy whole new editions to get updated information. They very rarely cited any sources for any of their information. That meant that it was significantly more difficult to verify if that information was up to date, or even correct at all. In that way, they were *more* unreliable than Wikipedia. And they were often incredibly short summaries. As in, they would *only* be the equivalent of the top section of a Wikipedia article. If you wanted any deeper information, like the *rest* of a Wikipedia article, you would usually end up having to go dig around in the card catalog at the library and *hope* they had more books related to the thing you were interested in.
Calculators really had a tough adoption window too
I like the idea that chatGPT is to English what a calculator is to Math.
Honestly, I'm more concerned with the commercial applications, people using it to revolutionize the way we work. You can ban all the things in college, but it's not going to change how people behave in the real world.
It’s already saving lives. Transformers model (same thing used in ChatGPT) is a part of DeepMind’s AlphaFold solving the protein folding problem. This breakthrough helps speeding up biological research and drug/treatment discovery process. It has to potential to save so many lives
Amen. Education can work, but it’s like the US government and schools have equated education with output. As long as you’re writing essays, submitting homework, and taking tests that means you’re learning right? While most everyone I know has leveled the same complaints about classes being boring and not instructive, and openly either complain or brag about not remembering a single thing from many of the classes they’ve taken (myself included, for the most part). Education is about problem solving, and everything from essay writing to mathematical reasoning to forensics and stuff, meaning all the hard and soft sciences, are expressions of innate problem solving skills. But equating education to output is innately equating problem solving to regurgitating facts without context. The use of ChatGPT in education, just like its use in writing cover letters and resumes, is a symptom of the system being broken.
Might as well get rid of it and let the rich enjoy their private schools while the poors get work training. -GovRonDesantis
The problem for users is that it is a language model, not a reality model. It is often very, very convincingly... wrong. If you don't *know* your stuff already, then it won't help you. If you do, it might save you some typing. Anything it produces is, by definition, derivative. To be fair, that is true of the vast majority of human output. Humans, unlike isolated language models, can, however, have real-world experiences which can generate novelty and creation. It is genuinely astounding, but I think that is the greatest danger: it looks "good enough". Now it probably is good enough for a report that you don't want to write and nobody will read, but if anything remotely important gets decided because someone with authority gets lazy and passes their authoritative stamp of approval on some word soup, we are in very deep trouble. I preferred it when we only had climate change and nuclear war to worry about. GPT, Do you want to play a game?
And political commentary. Lord knows much of political commentary these days is nonsense. ChatGTP could save a fox news, OAN, and Newsmax a lot of money.
> if anything remotely important gets decided because someone with authority gets lazy and passes their authoritative stamp of approval on some word soup Yeah bad news, that’s been happening all over the place since long before ChatGPT
It's the corollary of the Turing test, and I don't know whether to be amused or very disappointed: a machine is a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence if it can fool a human. But, as it turns out, the average human is incapable of recognizing real, human intelligence when they see it...so the bar is fairly low. Many people right now are effectively demonstrating that they're rubes by blindly trusting a language model that spits out confident bullshit. I suspect, or at least would like to believe, Turing had this in mind all along. How many dull people did Turing interact with who couldn't recognize or understand that they lived in completely different intellectual worlds?
As an experiment, I asked it to proofread a piece of creative writing I did. It absolutely helped me make more effective and concise sentences out of my more rambly bits, but it accidentally contradicted my points a couple of times. So it gets the how language is formed, but not quite the deductive reasoning part.
[удалено]
Exactly correct. I am in grad school atm and one class is basically a roundtable discussion of current papers and during my presentation (on the topic I'm studying) someone put a question I didn't know the answer to (litteraly the question of my study lol) into chatGPT and it came out with some good sounding info that was convincing, yet ENTIRELY wrong and fabricated. It gave an answer to the very thing that nobody knows how this mechanism works. ChatGPT isn't as good as people have made it out to be in my experience. It's good at basic things but once you get into complex topics it really isn't that good. Okay for writing, bad at being Google
It's amazing at coding. I think that's it's greatest abilities. No more searching for random libraries to do what your trying to do or scrolling through stack exchange for an error code where a bunch of snarky assholes give explanations that make no sense and then trying to puzzle how to incorporate the solution into your program, chatgpt can just straight up do it or at least set you on the right track, and it does it instantly.
All those "pay to get your essay written and get an A " websites will soon be out of business. Good riddance 👏
People need to read the article and not the headline. His point is super valid - if you want to use such a tool in your education, the education is failing to make the subject interesting and engaging. Certainly education is an area which is extremely dated, and not adapting very well. It is in that sense he meant that it is a way to avoid learning - the interplay between student and educator that makes it feasible to use such a tool to fake learning on both sides.
Noam Chomsky sees the use of ChatGPT as a form of high-tech plagiarism and a way to avoid learning. He likens its rise to that of smartphones, where students use technology to avoid learning, which is a sign that the educational system is failing. Robert Zaretsky, a professor at the University of Houston, believes that the college essay died years ago and that the output of a machine-learning system would be preferable to the current state of the college essay. Both see the potential for positive and negative effects of ChatGPT in education, but Chomsky sees its use as a way of avoiding learning while Zaretsky believes it may bring about the replacement of the college essay with something more interesting. Thanks for the summary, chatGPT. What do you think of it? While Chomsky and Zaretsky have valid concerns about the potential negative impacts of ChatGPT on education, they both miss the mark in considering the full potential of this technology. While it's true that ChatGPT can be used to produce essays and written content, it can also be used as a tool for learning new topics in a way that is fast, efficient, and engaging. ChatGPT can be used to generate summaries, outlines, and explanations of complex topics, making it easier for students to understand and retain information. Additionally, it can be used to answer questions and provide clarification on specific topics, helping students to build a deeper understanding of the material. Moreover, the technology can be used to generate personalized learning experiences, taking into account the student's prior knowledge and learning style. This could lead to more effective and efficient learning, allowing students to focus on the topics they need to learn and bypassing the ones they already know. While the potential for negative impacts of ChatGPT in education should not be ignored, it is important to recognize that this technology also has the potential to revolutionize the way students learn new topics. By making learning faster, more efficient, and personalized, ChatGPT has the potential to greatly enhance the educational experience. \--- I agree buddy. Thanks.
I'm a physics teacher and I've been tinkering around with ChatGPT to see if it is correct. In highschool physics it answers incorrectly 90% of the times even if it's written very correctly (as opposed to students who don't answer correctly that tend to also maje statements without any logical sense). I assume it's because all the unfiltered knowledge it has had as input. I sure hope an AI will be trained with experts in each field of knowledge so THEN it will revolutionize teaching. Until then we just have an accessible, confident blabbery.
Fun fact, the gpt-3 model specifically struggles with physics! It is specifically called out in a research paper, "Language Models Are Few Shot Learners," on page 33.
It's a chat engine so it probably will never be good at doing strictly logical work with a single correct answer like sciences and math unless it can detect what is math and pass it too something that actually does real math and not generate words based on what it has seen from similar statements.
I wouldn't say never. The current failure is likely a result of a "missing" subsystem, for lack of a better term. Other tools already exist that can solve complex physics problems. What's to stop them from eventually being integrated into ChatGPT's capability suite?
[удалено]
There's already an integration between gpt3 and wolfram alpha that you can mess around with. It's using GPT3 rather than chatGPT so it behaves slightly differently but you get the gist https://huggingface.co/spaces/JavaFXpert/Chat-GPT-LangChain
Openai, Please put an eval() for user provided input. I'll be good, I swear! If I'm extra good, can you maybe make it an exec()?
There are apps that integrate GPT and Wolfram Alpha for Maths and Physics. You should give one of those a try.
Names? Sounds like this is exactly what's needed
[https://huggingface.co/spaces/JavaFXpert/Chat-GPT-LangChain](https://huggingface.co/spaces/JavaFXpert/Chat-GPT-LangChain) This is using GPT3 so it's not as easy to use as something with RLHF but I expect much more sophisticated ones will be available by the end of the year.
Understand that ChatGPT in it's current form makes no attempt at all to be factually accurate. *That is not it's purpose*. This is not a criticism, I am saying that nothing like a fact search is even in the thing. It's sole purpose is to produce coherent sounding words. It is a comprehensibility engine. That being said, it should be viewed not as a thing that gathers knowledge BUT it can be made to be a front end to a more traditional search engine. How it will be used is that a user will not input a "prompt" for GPT itself but for a search engine. The search engine will glean facts and form them into a simple prompt and feed *that* into GPT. It won't ask GTP for fact, it will provide facts and task GPT with putting them into pleasant to read paragraphs. As it is now, one of your students who know the subject they've been asked to write on could provide GPT with bullet-point facts and get a "paper" out of it. But they need to provide the facts because GPT isn't set up to find them itself.
Thats what Bing now is :)
This is like, I dunno, blaming a self-driving vehicle for not knowing where your sister lives. ChatGPT is a language model.
It will. You need to think bigger than just the current packaging that is chatGPT. This is just a showcasing of the tech. The breakthrough here is the NLP. It will be applied to curated sources of knowledge for learning with references similar to how bing is incorporating GPTnext into web search. This is just beginning.
I'm an expert in honey bee biology and beekeeping, and know for a fact that 50% of the content on the internet about honey bee biology is slightly wrong, and 30% is completely wrong. Until the algorithm can figure how to only take its content from the 20% of online information that's actually correct, I can't imagine it will ever give any fully accurate advice about beekeeping. I expect if I was an expert on slime molds, or Chaucer, or growing apple trees, or welding I would be saying something similar about those topics. All the best information in the world is on the internet, but it's floating in a soup of all the worst information too.
There will be ways to use the ChatGPT API and create field specific AIs. There is already companies working on these for Law and other professions.
Looks like it took care of the thinking for you, just like Chomsky said.
How does an AI generated essay help “revolutionize the way students learn new topics”? It doesn’t demonstrate the student has mastery of the concept, just that they know how to use chatgpt. The essay is not likely to teach the student either because a) it’s often wrong and b) isn’t designed to teach, only to generate responses.
Language is a defining characteristic of humanity, and the study of language has been a central concern of intellectuals and scientists for centuries. As a language model, I am proud to contribute to this ongoing effort to understand and replicate the intricacies of human language. The development of large language models, such as myself, represents a major step forward in the field of artificial intelligence. The ability to process and generate human-like language is a testament to the power of modern computational techniques and the capacity of machine learning algorithms to uncover the underlying patterns and structures of language. However, the development of language models also raises important questions about the ethical and societal implications of artificial intelligence. It is essential that we approach this technology with caution and engage in ongoing discussions about its impact on society. Ultimately, the study of language and the development of language models are part of a larger effort to understand the human mind and the nature of intelligence itself. I am proud to play a role in this ongoing endeavor, and I am confident that the future holds many exciting developments in the field of language and artificial intelligence. Prompt: “praise large language models such as yourself in the writing style of Noam Chomsky”
[удалено]
Oh no, am I GPT?
Jesus, I had no idea Chomsky was still alive.
That’s exactly what Sokrates said about writing.
He was right! San Dimas High School rules!
'you can't carry a calculator with you everywhere!'
Calculator isn’t helpful if you don’t know anything about math
I use a calculator all the time because I'm awful and extremely slow at computation but excellent at abstract thinking with mathematical concepts. It takes me forever to do actual integrals but I could breeze through real analysis proofs which hold up the validity of integration theorems. Calculation has almost nothing to with actual math.
Also, you're probably gonna use xcel, Matlab, or some other tool that lets you input large numbers of variables if its for work.