myrmepropagandistJun 15, 2023

Chat GPT is great. If you are a teacher with writer’s block you can ask for something like “End of year comment for student who needs to have more confidence in their work and who asks good questions” and it will spit out *paragraphs* of the most bland, corporate, superlative content-free, schlock you’ve ever seen. This will make you so angry that you’ll remember how to write.

It’s all “actionable” this and “out of the box” that … omg just poke both my eyes out right now.

Show threadTalen LeeJun 16, 2023
@futurebird I taught a class with students using chatgpt this semester and universally, the students who did well are the ones who got chatgpt text and went 'hm, no, that's wrong, I don't like that' and changed it to be to their tastes.
Show threadZ O R A N G R B I C
@Talen_Lee @futurebird I wonder if that will help with learning. They become editors of somebody else's work. Studies aren't just about finding the correct answer but instead learning how to obtain it.
Jun 16, 2023 at 10:45amWeb
Show threadmyrmepropagandistJun 16, 2023

@zorangrbic @Talen_Lee

I think it would be wise to do some studies on the progress children make learning to write with their own voice — depending on if they use such tools or not.

Though this feels a lot like the “calculators in the math classroom” debate all over again and it will probably produce similarly murky and still bickered over results.

Show threadQueen of AnxietyJun 16, 2023
@Talen_Lee @futurebird @zorangrbic We are finding that AI makes our good developers better and our bad developers worse. It helps with a lot of the more rote operations, but it has its limits, and the good devs know that and would be testing their code anyway. The bad devs accept whatever it tells them, do no testing, and just throw it into PRs without knowing if it even works, let alone works correctly.
Show threadAllan ChowJun 16, 2023
@queenofnewyork @Talen_Lee @futurebird @zorangrbic kinda like scaffolding on steroids.
Show threadCassandrichJun 16, 2023
@queenofnewyork @Talen_Lee @futurebird @zorangrbic If you have these rote operations at all, that's a sign of deficiency in your language/tooling that would better be remedied by making a rigorous higher level abstraction and build time expansion of it than committing unmaintainable generated boiler plate garbage into your projects.
Show threadQueen of AnxietyJun 16, 2023
@dalias @Talen_Lee @futurebird @zorangrbic I don't know what you use, but any language or framework I've used has always required some grunt work. ChatGPT and Copilot can help reduce the load of that grunt work, but nothing makes it go away completely.
Show threadCassandrichJun 16, 2023

@queenofnewyork @Talen_Lee @futurebird @zorangrbic To me the difference is whether there's "grunt work" where it's clear what you need to do, but the actual work is unique to the task you're doing and requires attention to detail that would be just as costly if you were reviewing the output of LLMs...

...if there's "grunt work" that is repeating the same pattern over and over in N different places, where the actual work is just writing the parameters that differ between instantiations.