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Now that you've all tried it ... ChatGPT web traffic falls 10%
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2023
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It's Summer. Students are on break, lots of people on vacation, etc. Let's wait to see if the trend persists before declaring another AI winter.
Agreed. I think being between academic years is likely a much bigger factor than we realize. I’m a college professor, and at the end of spring quarter we had a lot of conversations with undergrads, grad students, and faculty about how people are actually using AI.
Literally every undergrad student I spoke with said they use it for every written assignment (for the large part in non-cheating legit educational resource ways). Most students used it for all or most of their programming assignments. Most use it to summarize challenging or long readings. Some absolutely use it to just do all their work for them, though fewer than you might expect.
I’d be pretty surprised if there isn’t a significant bounce-back in September.
This worries me though. I've found chatgpt to be wrong in basically every fact-based question I've asked it. Sometimes subtly, sometimes completely, but it always hallucinates. You cannot use it as a source of truth.
Honestly I feel like at this point its unreliability is kind of helpful for students. They have to learn how to use it most effectively as a tool for producing their own work and not a replacement. In my classes the more relevant “problem” for students is that GPT produces written work that on the surface feels composed and sensible but is actually straight up garbage. That’s good. They turn that in, it’s extremely obvious to me, and they get an F (because that’s the grade AI earned with the garbage paper).
But they can and should use it for things it’s great at: reword this long sentence I’m having trouble phrasing concisely, help me think of a title for my paper, take my pseudocode and help me turn it into a while loop in R, generate a list of current researchers on this topic and two of their most recent publications, translate this paragraph of writing from Foucault/Marx/Bourdieu/some-good-thinker-and-bad-writer into simpler wording…
I have a calculator in my pocket even though my teachers assured me I wouldn’t. Students will have access to and use AI forever now. The worry should be that we fail to teach them the difference between a homework-bot and an incredible, versatile tool to leverage.