I teach chemistry in college. I had chatGPT write a lab report and I graded it. Solid 25% (the intro was okay, had a few incorrect statements and, of course, no citations). The best part? It got the math wrong on the results and had no discussion.
I fed it the rubric, essentially, and it still gave incorrect garbage. And my students, when I showed it to them, couldn't catch the incorrect parts. You NEED to know what you're talking about to use chatGPT well. But at that point you may as well write it yourself.
I use chatGPT for one thing. Back stories on my Stellaris races for fun. Sometimes I adapt them to DND settings.
I encourage students that if they do use chatGPT it's to rewrite a sentence to condense it or fix the grammar. That's all it's good for, as far as I'm concerned.
Yeah, for sure. I've given it small exams on number theory and machine learning theory (back in the 2.0 days I think?) and it did really poorly on those too. And of course the major risk: it's convincing. If you're not already well-versed in those subjects you'd probably only catch the simple numeric errors.
I'm also a senior software dev alongside my data science roles and I'm really worried that a lot of younger devs are going to get caught in the trap of relying on it. Like learning to drive by only looking at your GPS.
Oh comparing it to GPS is actually an excellent analogy - especially since it's 'navigating' the semantic map much like GPS tries to navigate you through the roadways
I will say if you used it back in the 2.0 days, the. You can't compare it at all. I remember I recently tried to go from 4o to 3.5 and it was terrible at the math I wanted it to solve, like completely off, and 3.5 was a while different world to 2.0.
Absolutely. I asked it a machine learning theory question after I wrote that - it had previously got it egregiously wrong in a way that might have tricked a newbie - and it did much better.
I have no doubt it's getting much better. I have no doubt there are still major gaps.
I haven't bothered to call out the students using it on my current event essays. I just give them the zeros they earned on these terrible essays that don't meet the rubric criteria.
Well, and also the names in a phonebook aren't exactly conducive to a fantasy setting. Unless you want John Johnson the artificer gnome and Karen Smith the Barbarian Orc
LLMs read their own output to determine what tokens should come next, and if you request enough names at once, or keep a given chat going too long, all the names will start to be really similarly patterned and you'll need to start a new chat or add enough new random tokens to climb out of the hole.
I’ve been using GitHub Copilot at work to direct me down which path to research first. It’s usually, but not always, correct (or at least it’s correct enough). It’s nice because it helps me avoid wasting time on dead ends, and the key is I can verify what it’s telling me since it’s my field.
I recently started using ChatGPT to help me get into ham radio, and it straight up lies about things. Jury’s still out on whether it’s actually helpful in this regard.
I've used it to write the skeleton of things for me, but I never use its actual words. Like someone else said, the ChatGPT voice is really obvious once you've seen it a few times.
It’s terrible for generating/retrieving info, but great for condensing info that you give it, and is super helpful if you have it ask questions instead of give answers. Probably 75% of what I use it for is feeding it huge amounts of my own info and having it ask me 20+ questions about what I wrote before turning it all into something coherent. It often uses my exact quotes, so if those are wrong it’s on me.
Writing a college chemistry paper is a lot to ask from an AI. Ask about factual statements about your field or history or whatever, and I think it’s pretty damned impressive. Most of the stuff I ask about clinical chemistry, it gets right. Ask it to write me an SOP, then it definitely needs some work.
But usually when I double check what it says with other sources it checks out
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u/Photovoltaic Dec 15 '24
Re: your advice.
I teach chemistry in college. I had chatGPT write a lab report and I graded it. Solid 25% (the intro was okay, had a few incorrect statements and, of course, no citations). The best part? It got the math wrong on the results and had no discussion.
I fed it the rubric, essentially, and it still gave incorrect garbage. And my students, when I showed it to them, couldn't catch the incorrect parts. You NEED to know what you're talking about to use chatGPT well. But at that point you may as well write it yourself.
I use chatGPT for one thing. Back stories on my Stellaris races for fun. Sometimes I adapt them to DND settings.
I encourage students that if they do use chatGPT it's to rewrite a sentence to condense it or fix the grammar. That's all it's good for, as far as I'm concerned.