The summer is over, schools are back, and the data is in: ChatGPT is mainly a tool for cheating on homework.::ChatGPT traffic dropped when summer began and schools closed. Now students are back, and they’re using the AI tool again more.
Terrible article, let me save you all the time. Students using ChatGPT = Cheating , there you go, that’s the article.
Clearly an article written to fit a headline rather than the other way around. They talk about use in education settings as a sign that the use cases are limited, despite accounting for only a 12% increase.
In other news, pencil use is up 100% in the last month, signaling that pencils have limited use cases and are only good for cheating on homework.
Bro the capability of a pencil is a far better medium to expresses concepts. One could argue that a pencils ability to express shades of grey exceeds the capability of the pen. In some ways the pen has an effect of finality.
Homework is a tool for repetition and drudgery. Kids are in school all day. They shouldn’t need homework.
I hate to say it but there are simply so many subjects to cover in a single day that it’s hard to reinforce the lessons learned in class within the given amount of time in a school session. Maybe if schools were structured in a way in which fewer subjects were taught each day would the lessons stick better without the need of homework.
Fr. Just do the homework in school, proctored, if it matters so much to the teacher.
Ultimately the kids will get a test, and it should include an essay section, which they obviously have to write on the spot. I don’t really think it matters how much homework they did or didn’t do or what tools they used to “cheat”, as long as they can perform come test day that’s what matters.
do you think someone will be capable to write an essay if it is literally the first essay they ever write, since they were using AI all the previous times? This is like reading solved math equations and believing that in a test you’ll be able to solve them on the spot, without having tried to solve any by yourself before.
No! And they’ll fail, retake the class, and learn from their mistakes. I see no problems.
Homework should be reading, class should be demonstration and practice
Repetition is how people learn to remember things and improve their skills. I fail to see how that’s bad.
“You can use AI such as ChatGPT or Copilot on your senior projects, just make sure the code works, you understand it enough to document it, and your sponsor is ok with external code use” - paraphrased from my Software Engineering department head about our senior capstone projects.
“I have the kids ask ChatGPT for an essay and then have the (8th grade) kids treat it like a rough draft so they have practice editing it” - my English teacher Father
The best way to handle it is to embrace and use it to augment your skills, much like calculators in math classes.
Both of these methods require the student to understand the work. My old man brain insists they should have to code assembly from scratch and walk through snow storms to a library for their essay research, but in reality this is likely how this technology will be used. It’s a practical approach. The 8th grade version should probably include fact checking.
Really it needs to start a little younger: in 5th or 6th grade they should be writing short essays in class, by hand, and then move onto outlining for larger essays, and then they can start using AI to do the drafts at home.
I was definitely outlining and writing essays in early grades but was on an accelerated track. My friends from the neighborhood who went to a different junior high entered high school without ever have done this. That blew my mind at the time and still does today decades later.
It blows mine, too. I remember having to do the outlines and hating it, but it really helps you understand the structure of an essay even if you never write that way again.
I think outlining will actually become an important tool with generative AI. For example, I used it to generate a letter of recommendation last week. So to do that, I had to:
- Write a prompt with enough background for the AI to work with, and include all my talking points
- Generate the output
- Read over everything to make sure what it generated was relevant and accurate
- Edit the draft to reflect my voice, add a sentence or two to emphasize things I wanted to stand out, remove some of the fluff, etc.
It still turned what was probably an hour’s worth of work into 15 minutes, but at least currently you need to understand what you’re doing to use it this way. Specifically, knowing how to outline made it easy to write a concise yet detailed prompt so I could generate what I wanted on the first try.
I’m thinking of LLMs like calculators when I was in school.
It’s good to have a fundamental understanding of how it all works, but let the tool be the workhorse and just learn to validate.
you can understand how subtraction or multiplication works, but if you don’t do them repeatedly in your head and on paper you will end up needing a calculator for the most ridiculous things. Like getting change or splitting a bill with a friend, or whatever.
A calculator calculates. An AI bullshits.
The only thing ChatGPT can actually do might be marketing speeches, since they are nonsensical to start with and made by things pretending to be humans.
This video only takes up the entire screen. Why can’t it be bigger?
ChatGPT is mainly a tool for cheating on homework.
I disagree. The chart shows a 12% growth. How does it make ChatGPT a tool that is mainly being used by students? Some of these 12% are probably people, who came back from vacations.
That’s me, yup. Barely touched it over the summer, but I use it all the time to help lesson plan, invent fake case studies, and more.
Also, not necessarily cheating even if used for school. I have a college professor that words homework so weird, I run it through ChatGPT to “translate”
The data is in: Business Insider is mainly a tool.
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However, if usage is only recovering because students are back, that may be a bad sign because it suggests there’s a limited range of use cases for ChatGPT and other AI-powered chatbots.
Or maybe kids have always been the early adopters for computer tech?
At work when I write certain emails or code snippets I’ll paste them into ChatGPT and ask it to make the email sound “more professional” or “optimize this code.” ChatGPT also talks to me like SHODAN from System Shock 😆
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Prompt better. I use it extensively and the code I get is usually a good start. But it can’t do anything.
I hope you know what you’re doing. That’s a good way to share company secrets with outsiders, also it’s uncertain whether you’re even legally allowed to use the resulting code.
Trends don’t confirm hypotheses like this one. And they don’t appear to have the data for a proper causal analysis. At best, they have an interesting data point.
In many countries, schools only care about grades. I was pretty good at getting good grades by understanding what will be tested and minimizing the effort to get there. I would’ve totally used ChatGPT to do my homework.
Egh Moody adults are ignorant to how it works, how to prompt well, and are scared of using it at work.
Kids are going to gobble that shit up. It’s being used for cheating until the kids get into the workforce.
If anything, people who like chatGPT are the ones ignorant of how it works (spoiler: it doesn’t).
And kids with their understanding of technology being limited to youtube and tiktok have no clue about what an AI is. They see it, like most people, as a magic black box that is incredibly smart. Apart from being a black box, none of that is true.
Literally unusable.
Same as calculators. So what! Kids don’t have to waste mental cycles with your tedious and borderline sadistic amounts of homework. Go fly a kite.
I never said anything to the contrary. Using ti86 was cheating when I was in school, now it’s taught in 6th grade.
I was agreeing and speaking more at the article. Sorry for the confusion :)
Only if you don’t have the patience to use Chatgpt properly.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
ChatGPT was supposed to be the fastest-growing tech product in history, so this reversal got the technosphere theorizing as to why the chatbot wasn’t so hot anymore.
Then there’s the amusing comparison with interest in Minecraft, a popular video game that kids love to play when they’re not using ChatGPT to cheat on their homework.
However, if usage is only recovering because students are back, that may be a bad sign because it suggests there’s a limited range of use cases for ChatGPT and other AI-powered chatbots.
Mark Shmulik, a top internet analyst at Bernstein, made this point at the start of the summer, when usage fell.
In other words, if a big part of ChatGPT growth is driven by cheating students, this means the technology, or at least the chatbot format, may not be the dominant computing platform of the future.
OpenAI did release this guide for teachers at the end of August, which suggests ways to use ChatGPT in the classroom, including prompts and lesson plans.
The original article contains 470 words, the summary contains 168 words. Saved 64%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
discussion in here looking like old r/teenagers with predictable takes
There shouldn’t be homework to begin with. Kids go to school FULL TIME, not including commute.
