It’s absolutely terrifying. I am a returning student to uni in my thirties and the only person not using any AI. They literally depend on it.

I just had a classmate the other day turn to me, frustrated, saying “You ever ask chat(gpt) a question and it gives you a whole, like, paragraph you then have to read? like, why can’t it simplify it?”

So yeah, even reading paragraphs is too much for these people. Future workforce is fucking cooked.

I’m almost 50 doing a doctorate in engineering. ChatGPT is very helpful to do homework but won’t really teach you to do things. That said, I’m very glad to have it because this program would be so much harder without something to check my answers and understanding.

…except that it doesn’t really “check your answers and understanding”…

Sure it does. It’s a calculator and can tell me if I did my statistics homework correctly. I can also ask it to summarize a concept I find difficult.

No, it actually doesn’t. How LLMs work is that it takes in written words and makes a sentence based on the likelihood of what the next word will be based on human readable text. That’s literally it.

Hence, there’s absolutely no guarantee that ChatGPT’s ‘review’ of your homework will always be 100% correct because it is probable that the answer was written incorrectly in the billions of lines of text it has been fed.

On the other hand, a calculator has been superficially wired for it’s purpose to process an input. 1 + 1 will always equal 2.

I’d wager your supervisor will be horrified to learn that you’re getting an LLM to learn from rather than your peers. This is why i absolutely hate that it’s being used as a substitute what essentially makes us human: art, music, research, learning etc.

It’s a tool that needs a licence because you need to know how to use it to complement your existing skills, not supplement it.

We’re allowed to use them. We just have to provide the prompt used and the answer given.

Ah very interesting. Still, it’s a shame cutting out the peer to peer discussions to expand one’s own learning and understanding.

To do an in person degree I’d have to quit my job. I have been waiting for years for a program like this. That said, doing it in person would be a better experience and I wish I’d had the opportunity to do something like that years ago.

TLDR; should have had my doctorate years ago. I went to Argentina and had to abandon my work when the economy collapsed.

For sure; nothing beats in person but you have to make do with what you can. I wish you the best of luck in your doctorate (from another mature age student and soon to be commencing Masters).