<story><title>AI breakthrough ChatGPT raises alarm over student cheating</title><url>https://www.ft.com/content/2e97b7ce-8223-431e-a61d-1e462b6893c3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aeternum</author><text>Training people (or anything) using a flawed objective function is not useful.&lt;p&gt;Writing essays, specifically expanding a list of well-reasoned bullet points into communicative written prose will be a worthless operation in the future, and likely already is.</text></item><item><author>mrtksn</author><text>Yeah, no. Training people doesn&amp;#x27;t work like that. Education is about training people, we don&amp;#x27;t utilize the output of the kids and reward them with grades that they can exchange for food and toys.&lt;p&gt;The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware of their development so we can improve it. Another thing we do is selecting the particularly good ones for further advanced training.&lt;p&gt;The problem with cheating is that it provides wrong data about their progress, you don&amp;#x27;t want to end up with a generation that cheated their way up  without learning anything.&lt;p&gt;The selection for further training is probably not that big of a problem, its mostly about supply and demand and ChatGPT won&amp;#x27;t change that.</text></item><item><author>kypro</author><text>I guess I have a fairly cynical take on this. I think this just exposes that AI is fundamentally going to undermine the value of education in certain fields. The fact some tests can be &amp;quot;cheated&amp;quot; by AI really just suggests that some skills have little to no value in our future AI-prevalent world. Stopping people cheating is going to change that.&lt;p&gt;In the same way that in the past being able to do fast, accurate calculations in your head or on paper might have landed you job as a &amp;quot;computer&amp;quot;, today technology makes the idea of hiring someone to be a computer absurd. And therefore any tests that test someone&amp;#x27;s ability to multiply and divide large numbers is basically a worthless test in today&amp;#x27;s world.&lt;p&gt;Fields where there&amp;#x27;s value humans can add won&amp;#x27;t be cheatable by AI (at least today&amp;#x27;s generations). Tests in these fields will hold value. In some cases it will mean the education and tests will evolve to educate and test areas where humans can still add value - arguably this has already happened in maths. But many fields could be replaced entirely.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t mean to sound unsympathetic to those who&amp;#x27;s jobs and professions will replaced by AI in the coming years and decades. It makes me sad that someone could spend years obtaining and perfecting skills which might soon become redundant, but for better or worse AI systems like ChatGPT will fundamentally change the value of some skills and educational fields. The sooner we accept this the better we can adapt society for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mrtksn</author><text>Have you not noticed that when you write something down with the purpose of summarising it in a structured way you tend to understand it better?&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s no market for kids essays, we never made them write these things with the purpose of being useful output. The market for essays for grown ups is also very small,  making kids write things down was not with the purpose of covering the case of them becoming journalists or something.  It&amp;#x27;s just that makes them learn to think and structure their thought process. That&amp;#x27;s why people take notes and write down things even if its not going to be graded or read by anyone else.</text></comment>
<story><title>AI breakthrough ChatGPT raises alarm over student cheating</title><url>https://www.ft.com/content/2e97b7ce-8223-431e-a61d-1e462b6893c3</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>aeternum</author><text>Training people (or anything) using a flawed objective function is not useful.&lt;p&gt;Writing essays, specifically expanding a list of well-reasoned bullet points into communicative written prose will be a worthless operation in the future, and likely already is.</text></item><item><author>mrtksn</author><text>Yeah, no. Training people doesn&amp;#x27;t work like that. Education is about training people, we don&amp;#x27;t utilize the output of the kids and reward them with grades that they can exchange for food and toys.&lt;p&gt;The whole point of testing is to put them in hypothetical situations and grade their progress with purpose of being aware of their development so we can improve it. Another thing we do is selecting the particularly good ones for further advanced training.&lt;p&gt;The problem with cheating is that it provides wrong data about their progress, you don&amp;#x27;t want to end up with a generation that cheated their way up  without learning anything.&lt;p&gt;The selection for further training is probably not that big of a problem, its mostly about supply and demand and ChatGPT won&amp;#x27;t change that.</text></item><item><author>kypro</author><text>I guess I have a fairly cynical take on this. I think this just exposes that AI is fundamentally going to undermine the value of education in certain fields. The fact some tests can be &amp;quot;cheated&amp;quot; by AI really just suggests that some skills have little to no value in our future AI-prevalent world. Stopping people cheating is going to change that.&lt;p&gt;In the same way that in the past being able to do fast, accurate calculations in your head or on paper might have landed you job as a &amp;quot;computer&amp;quot;, today technology makes the idea of hiring someone to be a computer absurd. And therefore any tests that test someone&amp;#x27;s ability to multiply and divide large numbers is basically a worthless test in today&amp;#x27;s world.&lt;p&gt;Fields where there&amp;#x27;s value humans can add won&amp;#x27;t be cheatable by AI (at least today&amp;#x27;s generations). Tests in these fields will hold value. In some cases it will mean the education and tests will evolve to educate and test areas where humans can still add value - arguably this has already happened in maths. But many fields could be replaced entirely.&lt;p&gt;I don&amp;#x27;t mean to sound unsympathetic to those who&amp;#x27;s jobs and professions will replaced by AI in the coming years and decades. It makes me sad that someone could spend years obtaining and perfecting skills which might soon become redundant, but for better or worse AI systems like ChatGPT will fundamentally change the value of some skills and educational fields. The sooner we accept this the better we can adapt society for it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lemmsjid</author><text>There is a progression though.&lt;p&gt;For students, the objective is to write what to an adult would be mediocre essays, because they are on a path to writing adult level essays.&lt;p&gt;The AI can write mediocre essays, but not adult level essays.&lt;p&gt;Assuming that a student must write a bunch of mediocre essays in order to progress past the AI to write adult level essays, then they need to be evaluated on writing a bunch of mediocre essays.&lt;p&gt;If the teacher cannot distinguish between AI output and the student&amp;#x27;s output, and the result is that we give up on evaluating mediocre student essays, then the students are ultimately inhibited from progression to adult level essays, which, currently, are superior to the AI&amp;#x27;s output.</text></comment>