Charlie StrossFeb 21, 2023

Reddit: "My friend is in university and taking a history class. The professor is using ChatGPT to write essays on the history topics and the students need to mark up its essays and point out where ChatGPT is wrong and correct it."

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/117gtom/my_friend_is_in_university_and_taking_a_history/

Honestly, this is great! The students learn to check sources, discover that ChatGPT is unreliable, *and* can't use it to generate essay question answers for them, all at the same time!

My friend is in university and taking a history class. The professor is using ChatGPT to write essays on the history topics and the students need to mark up its essays and point out where ChatGPT is wrong and correct it.

My friend is in university and taking a history class. The professor is using ChatGPT to write essays on the history topics and as the...

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Show threadPhiala Sarah Goslee
@cstross ChatGPT will write plausible computer code that often runs but may not give the correct answer. I have colleagues making students generate, debug, and explain that code.
Feb 21, 2023 at 4:05pmWeb
Show threadLanda Feb 21, 2023

@phiala @cstross a colleague and I played with it in that regard. Sometimes when it’s told it’s wrong, it will try to fix the problem, generating even worse bugs.

Once it insisted on being right, confabulating a quote that looked like it came from the actual language documentation, used all the right words and phrases but was completely wrong in the same way the program it wrote was.

I wonder if it invented that or if chatgpt itself fell victim to a form of this: https://git-man-page-generator.lokaltog.net/ 😁

Git man page generator

Create an infinite amount of straightforward and readable git manual pages.

Show threadPhiala Sarah GosleeFeb 21, 2023
@cstross @Landa I’m fascinated by the fake citations. Another colleague actually got a request for a reprint, for a plausible paper that chatGPT completely fabricated.
Show threadGeoJoeKFeb 26, 2023
@cstross @phiala Several of my colleagues and I use it to learn libraries that are poorly documented / help troubleshoot issues with our own code. While it may occasionally be inaccurate and not write the best code, it’s a whole lot less toxic than searching and asking stack exchange.