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Who wants some good news? Last week I spoke to a middle school class about cybersecurity as a career, and AI came up. I asked if they had tried to use LLMs to do their schoolwork—they all had. But every student in the class said it didn't work. Why? "ChatGPT is too stupid." Kids are alright. 47 comments
@jbhall56 @mttaggart We seem to understand that racism and other negative beliefs are learned, but a lot of people haven’t figured out that despite the contradiction of definitions ignorance is also learned. That is to say I think that there are many (many, many, many) adults that may have actually been more capable of making good decisions when they were children. @jbhall56 @mttaggart Adults have automated a lot of decision making into a set of categories. Brains are hungry beasts, so routines that minimize their use have won the evolutionary race. Those same adults train AI to look like “a reasonable human being”, which translates to “a model of categorization that sounds agreeable”. Meanwhile, adolescents stand in direct opposition to the concept of agreeableness. Evolution seems to have favored that too.  @jbhall56 @mttaggart because being stupid and making a metric ton of fat cash are not mutually exclusive. Greed is a solid motivator and mankind’s single greatest worst invention.  @jbhall56 @mttaggart allow me to answer what I presume is a rhetorical question with an article I find very persuasive: https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/ > I first thought that these were just classic cases of tech bubble enthusiasm [... but] the believers in the “AI” bubble sound very different from those of prior bubbles [...] This specific blend of awe, disbelief, and dread all sound like the words of a victim of a mentalist scam artist—psychics It is like trying to use AI to do science, all they know is dogma, they are literally trained on current text books and take everything in them as the way things are with no variations allowed. Anything that doesn't match dogma is forbidden. Way to think outside, but pressed against, the box. @mttaggart there is a lot of mocking in dedicated communities of AI about "prompt engineers", but like doing a Google Search there is a skill to how you prompt #ChatGPT Plus so few people of any age seem to grasp that the RNG of ChatGPT is tuned incredibly high (temperature) to give unique outputs to each user. Starting over and asking the same question 10 times yields wildly different results. It is a real slot machine on how some consider it "lucky" based on only a few positive "wins".  Wait...so ChatGPT can supposedly pass a bar exam, but it can't do 6th grade homework? What is on bar exams anyway?  @MylesRyden @mttaggart I think the bar exam wasn't as good as they suggested anyway. https://www.fastcompany.com/91073277/did-openais-gpt-4-really-pass-the-bar-exam @MylesRyden it depends on the goal of the questions you ask. If you ask the students to just repeat, chatGPT is good at it. If you ask questions that check if they understand, chatGPT fails (and some students fail, too) @mttaggart @mttaggart yeah this checks out. There were some stories about high schools in the Netherlands that banned mobile phones from the classroom. The students came up with the idea. They felt more relaxed and talked more between classes. Young people usually understand the good and the bad of new things better (said as an aging millennial)
 @FinalOverdrive Maybe, but not before the damage has been done to our information ecosystem. Kids may not want to use it (or at least not now), but advertisers and content farms sure do. The zone is flooded with garbage, and that's yet another mess we're leaving.  @mttaggart They do get it. My students and my kids as students repeat this same impression. They recognize that it’s only helpful if it’s guided by actual knowledge and understanding. I think what this really says, not so much that LLMs are "stupid", but that sixth graders are smart enough to lie when asked if they cheat (and this is a quality lie: "I tried it but didn't like it"). @scottcain Sorry, but I don't agree, and that's a pretty cynical take. 1) They had no reason to lie to me, 2) I have a career behind me of being able to detect middle school lies, and 3) the unanimity and immediacy of the response doesn't track with that theory.  @Lazarou Based on what I've read, Twitter would have done better with X Æ A-12 as the CEO than Elon.  @mttaggart It's funny. It seems that with almost everything these days you see parents saying "but this is going to ruin our kids minds!" and then it's the parents whose minds get ruined by said thing in each case... @nazokiyoubinbou As a technology educator, something I always used to tell parents is that every generation's cognition is shaped by the information technologies of the era. That was true for oral history, writing, printing, radio, television, and the internet. Every generation perceives cognitive differences in their kids as "bad." Different is not necessarily bad. @mttaggart Agreed. I keep seeing things fussing about screen time. How dare kids learn how to operate the technological devices that will fill their futures, right? EDIT: As a side note, I really want to bring up social media. My parents thought stuff like that would wreck my brain. Meanwhile my mother now believes that "They" have laser satellites and burn down towns thanks to her Facebook feed.  @mttaggart @MxVerda @mttaggart It does seem like humans as a whole have a kneejerk reaction to hate anything different don't they? It's ironic people pretend to care all about uniqueness, but the moment someone steps out of the box they lose their minds.  @mttaggart Sadly, the same is not true for writing corporate docs/emails/presentations, which speaks a lot about the general quality of those.  @mttaggart@infosec.exchange ChatGPT and other are great tools to help your brainsmog to clear a bit up (iterating your thoughts and stuff) @mttaggart I think a lot of us adults need to try and remember doing schoolwork when we were kids. We /all/ tried to use shortcuts, tools we found online, etc. The kids trying to use ChatGPT are just doing the same thing we did when we used Spark Notes to write that book essay that's totally due in half an hour and we didn't read the book. @mttaggart one of my fears concerning llm besides the environmental cost is a Borges library scenario with the internet becoming flooded by mediocre or erroneous content so we can't find quality and trustworthy content anymore.  this is literally my #1 source of anxiety and I can't help but feel this election was the first real post-truth example @mttaggart Were any of these students asked if they understood where the underlying LLM obtained its source material, and if they knew how much CO2 was generated by each query on AI? Seems like this behavior changes once they start working. My colleagues think it's great. They use it all the time and don't notice how the replies don't add any value because they don't like & don't want to think about the task/question/problem. They don't want to learn how to do it by themselves. They believe AI can do it better - and that it's fine that way. I can't even put in words how I feel.   A friend of mine and college teacher asked me to do a presentation on cyber security over zoom to his class. That was a lot of fun. Kids all had great questions. This was a few years before chatGPT became common. @mttaggart NPR is still babbling on about the usefulness of AI or something. They went hard for a solid year on this shit with practically no examination of its big glaring obvious flaws, such as it's over hyped bullshit and the massive energy consumption is just an unfortunate but necessary side effect. Is it because they receive funding from Microsoft @BLTpizza I would lean more toward NPR's boomery "hmm interesting" tendencies about tech and their lack of critical thinking in reporting whatever businesses say as fact. @mttaggart I'd agree mostly with that but everyday for nearly a year looks more like an agenda. Maybe it was to gin up interest in buying stock in an AI company? @mttaggart I think that's exactly it's problem, it's too bad at doing stuff correctly, but they are very very good at quickly doing a lot of stuff that looks correct at first glance. Stuff that becomes false news stories, political ammunition and a sea of misinformation used yo drown out real sources :(  @mttaggart also interesting is that the kids were smart enough to recognize how stupid it was. Many adults are not. |
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@mttaggart Which begs the question. If middle schoolers can figure that out, why can't adults? 😉🤦♂️