Fun with Chat GPT

[Gyakuto]

my biggest concern is that these tools are not always able to discern good information from bad, and as they learn, they are amplifying the bad information that the AI generated in the first place.

Yes I was reading something about that this morning : a request for good book about Abe Lincoln and two of the four weren’t even about him! The author rephrased and re-presented his query and again two out of four were nothing to do with the subject.

I don't know about engineers or doctors specifically, but practical degrees are easily assessed with practical exams.

I taught Biomedical Science students as well. A practical course with professions in labs etc and they had no practical exams! They we’re very poorly prepared for working life.

The proof is in the pudding, as they say. My kids have recently graduated with degrees, one in biochemistry and the other in architecture and construction management. There is no way that an AI could have helped them fake it.

I hope they didn’t ask your young architect to draw anything

That said, they both see a lot of potential benefit from AI in their respective fields. For example, an AI could be trained to rough out a series of complex drawings. The AI won't be able to replace a real person, because somewhere along the way, they have to actually build the building. It's still early, but they're both optimistic so far.

Yes that’s a good point. In the late 80s the first diagnosing ECG (EKG) machine became available. You only need to know about 90 things to diagnose every type of arrhythmia so this was very easy to create. But the primitive AI that did this was not allowed to be trusted on it’s own a flesh and blood intelligence (medical doctor) was required to interpret the strip!

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

That said, they both see a lot of potential benefit from AI in their respective fields. For example, an AI could be trained to rough out a series of complex drawings. The AI won't be able to replace a real person, because somewhere along the way, they have to actually build the building. It's still early, but they're both optimistic so far.

The issue is that you still need to know the tools in most professions, even the ones that can be faked. If I take my two professions, since that's what I know:

I could have chatgpt write a powershell script for something that I want it to do, and it could probably write a pretty convincing one. If I was in school, I'd be confident submitting it-if it's not 100% right, it's close enough I'd get a good grade. But then (same as with my own scripts), I'd have to evaluate it to make sure it's actually doing what I want, then test it so nothing breaks. Those would be tougher to evaluate in a classroom, but are equally important, if not more so (I'd rather have nothing, then something that breaks things and no idea what it's breaking or how to unbreak it).

For psychology, there's a practical aspect that's covered in class, and we did practice doing situational therapy/role-play therapy on each other. Similar to your examples, that's not something chatgpt could help with. But, there's a lot of theory involved. That theory helps form a long-term plan, adapt as new information comes out session to session, and form the underlying responses. That's a lot tougher to test in a role-play situation, but is equally important to the soft-skills and responding appropriately session-to-session.

I would assume the same is true in other professions. There are things that essays, tests, etc. determine which aren't always apparent in 'practicals', and that's where it's easy for people to cheat with chatGPT.

 

[Steve]

Yes I was reading something about that this morning : a request for good book about Abe Lincoln and two of the four weren’t even about him! The author rephrased and re-presented his query and again two out of four were nothing to do with the subject.

I taught Biomedical Science students as well. A practical course with professions in labs etc and they had no practical exams! They we’re very poorly prepared for working life.

Well, you know better than me, then. All I know is, my daughter is working in a lab now, and yeah, I don't see how she could fake it. The consequences would be dire, I would guess.

I hope they didn’t ask your young architect to draw anything

In general, I bet you're right, but those kids (my daughter and her husband) are old souls. He takes pride in his artistic skills, and is comfortable drawing freehand and doing renderings in water color, as well as on the computer. If he has an idea, he can put it on paper in a few minutes, while some of his peers are still waiting for their laptops to boot up.

Yes that’s a good point. In the late 80s the first diagnosing ECG (EKG) machine became available. You only need to know about 90 things to diagnose every type of arrhythmia so this was very easy to create. But the primitive AI that did this was not allowed to be trusted on it’s own a flesh and blood intelligence (medical doctor) was required to interpret the strip!

Fingers crossed.

 

[Gyakuto]

Many years ago, there was a debate in which it was posited that student did not need to memorise vast amounts of information but instead, learn how to access it from various digital media and implement. They were essentially a conduit, accessing it and implementing those data due to them having a physical body to do so.

The scenario might be,

Medical assistant: “Medical computer? This person has a dangerously high potassium level. What should I do?”

T800 Medical Computer: <In Austrian accent> Give them insulin via a syringe driver and 10% glucose saline IV and closely monitor potassium and blood glucose levels. I’ll be back.

The medical assistant then gathers the equipment and blindly implements the advice. They don’t need to know that high levels of insulin causes the cellular transmembrane sodium/potassium ATPase pump to change direction and safely pump potassium into the cell thus reducing plasma potassium. They would need to have the skills of venepuncture and setting up drips etc, but little else. The T800 would also talk other medical assistances through heart bypass surgery and…rectal examination.

The other side of the debate suggested that in emergency situations the medical practitioner needs to know that a plasma potassium level above about 4.5mmol/L is high and how to act on it rapidly without logging on, and searching through the options.

The T800 Medical Computer would need to be brilliantly designed probably avoiding Microshaft/Appul. Imagine it updating it’s OS for 30 minutes when powered up in an emergency

ChatGPT is the equivalent of the T800 Medical Computer…

 

[Gyakuto]

Council Post: How To Write A Compelling LinkedIn Headline With ChatGPT

Creating a headline that stands out can be challenging, but ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI, can make it easier to write a compelling LinkedIn headline.

www.forbes.com

If you are unable to write a compelling LinkedIn headline, maybe others wouldn’t wish to do business with you!

https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2023-02-21/chatgpt-launches-boom-in-ai-written-e-books-on-amazon

Having read some utterly rubbish novels, I’m now thinking they might’ve been written by ChatGPT?

 

[JowGaWolf]

Council Post: How To Write A Compelling LinkedIn Headline With ChatGPT

Creating a headline that stands out can be challenging, but ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model developed by OpenAI, can make it easier to write a compelling LinkedIn headline.

www.forbes.com

If you are unable to write a compelling LinkedIn headline, maybe others wouldn’t wish to do business with you!

https://money.usnews.com/investing/news/articles/2023-02-21/chatgpt-launches-boom-in-ai-written-e-books-on-amazon

Having read some utterly rubbish novels, I’m now thinking they might’ve been written by ChatGPT?

ha ha ha.. If you read the article and you were drawn in by the AI, then I guess it works lol

 

[arnisador]

I teach a lot of entry-level math. for engineering majors (calculus, differential equations) and AI will be doing their HW. Of course, they’ve been using websites to help them with this for years. The problem is, how can I get them to learn the easy stuff the AI can do their first 2 years so we can do the advanced, creative stuff we do their last 2 years?

 

[Gyakuto]

I teach a lot of entry-level math. for engineering majors (calculus, differential equations) and AI will be doing their HW. Of course, they’ve been using websites to help them with this for years. The problem is, how can I get them to learn the easy stuff the AI can do their first 2 years so we can do the advanced, creative stuff we do their last 2 years?

This is a thorny situation but there is a ‘solution‘ that will require you to let go of your undoubted egalitarian attitude to teaching.

Appeal ‘intellectual benefit’ to them . Suggest that doing calculus the harder, manual way, will pay dividends in their future education and careers, since it will give them an insight into the intricacies of the technique which may allow them to use it in novel ways and situations. 90% of them will internally respond with ‘Pfft ’ - be not concerned with this group- but 10% will take this onboard. These are the 10% that we know will excel and make a difference. These are the 10% who should be enjoying the ‘pearls of education’.

 

[arnisador]

That’s pretty much been my approach…telling them no one else can do their push-ups for them and hoping I reach a few.

 

[Xue Sheng]

ChatGPT Getting Banned

> New York City Public Schools (the largest school district in the country) banned ChatGPT

> Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia banned ChatGPT on all county-issued devices in January.

> Public schools in Alabama’s Montgomery County have blocked access to the site as well, and officials are mapping out "guidance for teachers and staff as it relates to readiness in their classrooms."

 

[JowGaWolf]

ChatGPT Getting Banned

> New York City Public Schools (the largest school district in the country) banned ChatGPT

> Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia banned ChatGPT on all county-issued devices in January.

> Public schools in Alabama’s Montgomery County have blocked access to the site as well, and officials are mapping out "guidance for teachers and staff as it relates to readiness in their classrooms."

lol so much for worrying about kids using it to cheat in school. lol.

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

lol so much for worrying about kids using it to cheat in school. lol.

I don't really see how school districts can enforce this ban nowadays.

 

[Dirty Dog]

I don't really see how school districts can enforce this ban nowadays.

I don't know exactly how common it is, but some schools provide laptops or tablets to students. One of my grandkids has a laptop that is so locked down by the school that he cannot add my wireless printer. To print things, he has to email the file to himself and print it from his phone.

 

[JowGaWolf]

I don't really see how school districts can enforce this ban nowadays.

They control the IT network that the building uses. They can also create dead zones where phones will only have connections in certain places. The Internet ban would be simple. Block the domain that uses the ChatGPT and the problem is solved.

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

I don't know exactly how common it is, but some schools provide laptops or tablets to students. One of my grandkids has a laptop that is so locked down by the school that he cannot add my wireless printer. To print things, he has to email the file to himself and print it from his phone.

Which would be super easy to get around. Without even getting into ways they can get around it on their school laptop/tablet..simply using a personal laptop for the stuff you want to do chatgpt with, then emailing it to yourself and saving it in your h drive or wherever would solve that issue. Or if you don't have a personal laptop, just use it on your phone which I highly doubt schools are putting restrictions on (and if they are it'd be easy enough to give them a burner phone).

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

They control the IT network that the building uses. They can also create dead zones where phones will only have connections in certain places. The Internet ban would be simple. Block the domain that uses the ChatGPT and the problem is solved.

From my understanding, most schools don't set up dead zones. use it on your phone, email the results to a personal email address, and you've got it on your laptop. Back when I was in school, there were also proxy sites that got changed daily where we'd just go through them to find which ones work, and use one of those to access the blocked domains. Not sure if that still works, but if not there are still plenty of ways to get around it.

And none of those would impact students using it for homework, which is the main spot that I think it'd come up-I wasn't under the assumption students used laptops for in-class essays.

 

[JowGaWolf]

I don't know exactly how common it is, but some schools provide laptops or tablets to students. One of my grandkids has a laptop that is so locked down by the school that he cannot add my wireless printer. To print things, he has to email the file to himself and print it from his phone.

I used to work in IT for a school and you are correct. We lock those computers down big time. School doesn't want to get sued for providing a tool that would give kids access to things that they shouldn't be looking at or doing on the Internet. The other issue is that locking it down helped us to keep the computer configurations clean as well as provide security. We didn't want the kids to pick up a computer virus and then bring it back to infect the school.

We even locked down the USB ports on the laptops.

 

[JowGaWolf]

Without even getting into ways they can get around it on their school laptop/tablet

The school system that I worked for thought of that. If kids get around the security restrictions then the servers wouldn't allow that device back on the school network and the account would be locked. Now the child is out of a working laptop and their school account is locked in addition. The only fix for this is a reimage. During the time I was there I only had 5 or 6 students that I know of who got around the security measures. As soon as they did their laptop became useless "Congratulation little one. You were too smart for your own good and now you have nothing." The only way they could get their laptop fixed was to come to the IT department and we knew right away what they did to be in their situation. After a year the number of bricked laptops reduced greatly. Eventually, they learned that getting around the system wasn't worth it.

What they do at home is on the parents to monitor. If I had young kids, I would simply block the domain via the router and that will end ChatGPT in the house. I used to do that with some of the websites when my son was 6. I also did the same thing for some older family members who kept going to sites where people were trying to hack their laptop. Stopped it all at the router.

 

[JowGaWolf]

From my understanding, most schools don't set up dead zones. use it on your phone, email the results to a personal email address, and you've got it on your laptop.

The schools that my son went to had dead zones. The drama of taking a phone away from a child was no big deal. They got to keep their phones as the dead zones killed the signals. I would recommend it for any school system. Some kids will do as you say, but I think kids are too lazy to put in that much work. I used to teach computer classes to kids and teens and they were so used to one step access. that going through multiple steps like that was too much for them.

I talked to an end user today who wanted to copy from excel and pace multiple columns into a word label template. He wanted to copy column A (branch #'s) and paste it into the first column of the word label template. Then he wanted to copy Column B (addresses) from excel and then paste them in first column of word without overwriting what was pasted before. I went through that entire call thinking "dude just copy and paste one cell at a time."

That type of the "one step" desire is the norm where I work. Kids are 10 times as worse today with that short attention span unless they are interested in it. Kids today can't just sit down and watch a movie anymore. They have to be on the TV +phone+ computer at the same time. When they get a task that requires them to focus on one thing, they become less interested and give up easily.

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

The school system that I worked for thought of that. If kids get around the security restrictions then the servers wouldn't allow that device back on the school network and the account would be locked. Now the child is out of a working laptop and their school account is locked in addition. The only fix for this is a reimage. During the time I was there I only had 5 or 6 students that I know of who got around the security measures. As soon as they did their laptop became useless "Congratulation little one. You were too smart for your own good and now you have nothing." The only way they could get their laptop fixed was to come to the IT department and we knew right away what they did to be in their situation. After a year the number of bricked laptops reduced greatly. Eventually, they learned that getting around the system wasn't worth it.

What they do at home is on the parents to monitor. If I had young kids, I would simply block the domain via the router and that will end ChatGPT in the house. I used to do that with some of the websites when my son was 6. I also did the same thing for some older family members who kept going to sites where people were trying to hack their laptop. Stopped it all at the router.

I doubt most of NYC public schools are being that strict, at least compared to what they were even 5 years ago. And again, if they can't ban it at home (which they can't) it ultimately doesn't matter if they ban it as they'll still be able to use chatgpt for their assignments anyway. Or have a friend who can.