Just out of curiosity. I have no moral stance on it, if a tool works for you I’m definitely not judging anyone for using it. Do whatever you can to get your work done!
High school history teacher here. It’s changed how I do assessments. I’ve used it to rewrite all of the multiple choice/short answer assessments that I do. Being able to quickly create different versions of an assessment has helped me limit instances of cheating, but also to quickly create modified versions for students who require that (due to IEPs or whatever).
The cool thing that I’ve been using it for is to create different types of assessments that I simply didn’t have the time or resources to create myself. For instance, I’ll have it generate a writing passage making a historical argument, but I’ll have AI make the argument inaccurate or incorrectly use evidence, etc. The students have to refute, support, or modify the passage.
Due to the risk of inaccuracies and hallucination I always 100% verify any AI generated piece that I use in class. But it’s been a game changer for me in education.
I should also add that I fully inform students and administrators that I’m using AI. Whenever I use an assessment that is created with AI I indicate with a little “Created with ChatGPT” tag. As a history teacher I’m a big believer in citing sources :)
How has this been received?
I imagine that pretty soon using ChatGPT is going to be looked down upon like using Wikipedia as a source
I would never accept a student’s use of Wikipedia as a source. However, it’s a great place to go initially to get to grips with a topic quickly. Then you can start to dig into different primary and secondary sources.
Chat GPT is the same. I would never use the content it makes without verifying that content first.
I’m a special education teacher and today I was tasked with writing a baseline assessment for the use of an iPad. Was expecting it to take all day. I tried starting with ChatGPT and it spat out a pretty good one. I added to it and edited it to make it more appropriate for our students, and put it in our standard format, and now I’m done, about an hour after I started.
I did lose 10 minutes to walking round the deserted college (most teachers are gone for the holidays) trying to find someone to share my joy with.
It’s one of the fascinating paradoxes of education that the more you teach to standardized tests, the worse test results tend to be. Improved test scores are a byproduct of strong teaching - they shouldn’t be the only focus.
Teaching is every bit as much an art as it is a science and straight-jacketing teachers with canned curricula only results in worse test scores and a deteriorated school experience for students. I don’t understand how there are admins out there that still operate like this. The failures of No Child Left Behind mean we’ve known this for at least a decade.
A junior team member sent me an AI-generated sick note a few weeks ago. It was many, many neat and equally-sized paragraphs of badly written excuses. I would have accepted “I can’t come in to work today because I feel unwell” but now I can’t take this person quite so seriously any more.
I had a coworker come to me with an “issue” he learned about. It was wrong and it wasn’t really an issue and the it came out that he got it from ChatGPT and didn’t really know what he was talking about, nor could he cite an actual source.
I’ve also played around with it and it’s given me straight up wrong answers. I don’t think it’s really worth it.
It’s just predictive text, it’s not really AI.
i think learning where it can actually help is a bit of an art - it’s just predictive text, but it’s very good predictive text - if you know what you need and get good and giving it the right input it can save a huge about of time. you’re right though, it doesn’t offer much if you don’t already know what you need.
Can you hand me an example? I keep hearing this but every time somebody presents something, be it work related or not, it feels like at best it would serve as better lorem ipsum
I’ve had good success using it to write Python scripts for me. They’re simple enough I would be able to write them myself, but it would take a lot of time searching and reading StackOverflow/library docs/etc since I’m an amateur and not a pro. GPT lets me spend more time actually doing the things I need the scripts for.
I’ve played around with it for personal amusement, but the output is straight up garbage for my purposes. I’d never use it for work. Anyone entering proprietary company information into it should get a verbal shakedown by their company’s information security officer, because anything you input automatically joins their training database, and you’re exposing your company to liability when, not if, OpenAI suffers another data breach.
Run llama locally: https://github.com/cocktailpeanut/dalai
not chatGPT - but I tried using copilot for a month or two to speed up my work (backend engineer). Wound up unsubscribing and removing the plugin after not too long, because I found it had the opposite effect.
Basically instead of speeding my coding up, it slowed it down, because instead of my thought process being
- Think about the requirements
- Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I’m working on
- Write the code
It would be
- Think about the requirements
- Work out how best to achieve those requirements within the code I’m working on
- Start writing the code and wait for the auto complete
- Read the auto complete and decide if it does exactly what I want
- Do one of the following depending on 4 5a. Use the autocomplete as-is 5b. Use the autocomplete then modify to fix a few issues or account for a requirement it missed 5c. Ignore the autocomplete and write the code yourself
idk about you, but the first set of steps just seems like a whole lot less hassle then the second set of steps, especially since for anything that involved any business logic or internal libraries, I found myself using 5c far more often than the other two. And as a bonus, I actually fully understand all the code committed under my username, on account of actually having wrote it.
I will say though in the interest of fairness, there were a few instances where I was blown away with copilot’s ability to figure out what I was trying to do and give a solution for it. Most of these times were when I was writing semi-complex DB queries (via Django’s ORM), so if you’re just writing a dead simple CRUD API without much complex business logic, you may find value in it, but for the most part, I found that it just increased cognitive overhead and time spent on my tickets
EDIT: I did use chatGPT for my peer reviews this year though and thought it worked really well for that sort of thing. I just put in what I liked about my coworkers and where I thought they could improve in simple english and it spat out very professional peer reviews in the format expected by the review form
