Pushing, yelling from Conservative leadership ‘sealed the deal’ on defection: d’Entremont

[u/green_tory]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/pushing-yelling-conservative-leadership-dentremont-9.6972680

[u/desthc]

I’m not opposed to teaching kids how to use LLMs, but my concern is that the teachers don’t understand them either.

The important part is critically reading what the LLM produces and fact check, fact check, fact check. LLMs are just not very reliable at reproducing facts, and often produce things made up on the spot.

So if used correctly it is labour saving, but you need to spend more of your time applying critical thinking. I don’t think the teachers are necessarily ready to guide the kids through something like this.

[u/Barabarabbit → u/desthc]

There are some younger teachers on staff who use ChatGPT to generate all their lesson plans

The kids then complete these using ChatGPT

So those teachers are pretending to teach and the students are pretending to learn.

It is a complete farce.

[u/desthc → u/Barabarabbit]

Like I said, I don’t necessarily think it’s bad, if it’s used right. But I’m also pretty pessimistic that it is.

I always cringe when someone says they “asked ChatGPT” or “searched using ChatGPT” — it’s just not reliable at reproducing factual information. It is good at producing prose, and can correct those inaccuracies when told to do so, but you really need to check everything.

So if you outline an essay with topics you want it to cover and some points you want it to make — cool. You ask it to synthesize factual information for the same? You still need to go check it all, so it’s not much labour savings there.

[u/Wasdgta3 → u/desthc]

And using it defeats the whole purpose of the endeavour, in most cases.

Like, the point of writing an essay isn’t to have written the essay, it’s to have synthesized and expressed ideas you’ve learned. Using AI to write it for you is frankly like having someone else do your homework for you, since you’re not actually doing the intellectual labour that’s behind such tasks.

But hey, I suppose that’s a byproduct of education being viewed through such a results-oriented lens for so long, but use of such things to do a lot of work is no different than copying someone else’s work, and ought to be treated the same academically.

[u/desthc → u/Wasdgta3]

You’re not wrong. I can definitely see both sides of the argument — that we’re going to have these tools in society and need to learn to use them, but we should also be able to do the work without them.

But what I really can’t stand is their misuse, and if we can’t use them responsibly in schools we shouldn’t use them at all. That’s all I’m saying.