I was trying to do a memory test to see how far back 3.5 could recall information from previous prompts, but it really doesn’t seem to like making pseudorandom seeds. 😆
I regularly use ChatGPT to generate questions for junior high worksheets. You would be surprised how easily it fucks up “generate 20 multiple choice and 10 short answer questions”. Most frequently at about 12-13 multiple choice it gives up and moves on. When I point out its flaw and ask it to finish generating the multiple choice, it continues to find new and unique ways to fuck up coming up with the remaining questions.
I would say it gives me simple count and recall errors in about 60% of my attempts to use it.
I use it as a brainstorming tool. I haven’t had a single question make it as-is to a student’s worksheet. If the tool can’t even count to 20 successfully, I’m not sure how anyone could trust it to generate meaningful questions for an ELA program.
Well, it’s terrible at factual things and counting, and even when it comes to writing code it will often hallucinate APIs and libraries that don’t exist - But when given very limited-scope, specific-domain problems with enough detail and direction, I’ve found it to be fairly competent as a rubber ducky for programming.
So far I’ve found ChatGPT to be most useful for:
Writing SQL. Seriously, it’s fantastic at writing SQL if you tell it the relevant schema and what you’re trying to achieve.
Brainstorming feature flow - Tell it the different parts of a feature, ask for thoughts on how the user should be guided through the process, and it does a decent job of suggesting ideas.
Generating alternative names/labels for buttons and such. “In X feature, I have a button that does Y when the user has Z. Currently I have that button labelled ‘Start Y’, but it feels robotic and impersonal. List 10 suggestions for what such a button could say to be more personal and friendly.” and the like. My favorite was a button that was labelled “Map Incoming Data to Job Details”. Wound up renaming the whole process to just “Job Ingestion” because it sounded so good.
Reformatting data. Give it a data structure and tell it you want that data in some other data structure, and it is really accurate at reformatting it. I don’t think I’d trust it with a huge amount of data that way, but for an unimportant one-off it was a nice time savings.
I haven’t had much luck with it writing stuff from scratch, but it does a great job of helping with debugging and figuring out why complex equations are doing what they’re doing.
I put together a pretty complex shader recently, and gpt 3.5 did a great job of helping me figure out why it wasn’t doing quite what I wanted.
I wouldn’t trust it to code anything without my input, but it’s great for advice and explanations and certain kinds of problem solving. Just don’t assume it has the right answer, you still have to do the work
I’ve tried it with languages I don’t know, and it managed to write simple working functions by just iterating over:
Ask it to write the code
Try to run the code, write down any errors
Look up the errors, and ask it to fix them in the code
Repeat from 2 until there are no more errors
It seems to lose context easily, like if you ask it to fix one error, then another, it might revert the first fix, but asking it to fix both at once, tends to work.
I think someone could feasibly write several working functions or modules, without knowing much about a given language, as long as they are clear about what they want them to do… but of course spotting obvious errors and fixing them by hand, can be faster. Fixing integration problems is where I think it might get harder (haven’t tried though, could be interesting).
Maybe we let professionals decide what tool is best for their field
Hey, really appreciated. Having random potentially uneducated, inexperienced people chime in on what they think I’m doing wrong in my classroom based on the tiniest snippet of information really shouldn’t matter, but it’s disheartening nontheless.
While I take their point, I also wouldn’t walk into a garage and tell someone what they’re doing wrong with a vehicle, or tell a doctor I ran into on the streets that they’re misdiagnosing people based on a comment I overheard. Yet, because I work with children, I get this all the time. So, again, appreciated.
I definitely get that. I do think it’s a little different, though, because every single human being has been a child, while no human has been a car. We tend to have opinions on education because the prevailing wisdom often failed us during our own school years.
I don’t think that it’s totally unreasonable to expect some amount of input by other people who’ve been through the education system.
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I regularly use ChatGPT to generate questions for junior high worksheets. You would be surprised how easily it fucks up “generate 20 multiple choice and 10 short answer questions”. Most frequently at about 12-13 multiple choice it gives up and moves on. When I point out its flaw and ask it to finish generating the multiple choice, it continues to find new and unique ways to fuck up coming up with the remaining questions.
I would say it gives me simple count and recall errors in about 60% of my attempts to use it.
Consider keeping school the one place in a child’s life where they aren’t bombarded with AI-generated content.
I use it as a brainstorming tool. I haven’t had a single question make it as-is to a student’s worksheet. If the tool can’t even count to 20 successfully, I’m not sure how anyone could trust it to generate meaningful questions for an ELA program.
Yet people claim it writes all their programming code…
Well, it’s terrible at factual things and counting, and even when it comes to writing code it will often hallucinate APIs and libraries that don’t exist - But when given very limited-scope, specific-domain problems with enough detail and direction, I’ve found it to be fairly competent as a rubber ducky for programming.
So far I’ve found ChatGPT to be most useful for:
I haven’t had much luck with it writing stuff from scratch, but it does a great job of helping with debugging and figuring out why complex equations are doing what they’re doing.
I put together a pretty complex shader recently, and gpt 3.5 did a great job of helping me figure out why it wasn’t doing quite what I wanted.
I wouldn’t trust it to code anything without my input, but it’s great for advice and explanations and certain kinds of problem solving. Just don’t assume it has the right answer, you still have to do the work
I’ve tried it with languages I don’t know, and it managed to write simple working functions by just iterating over:
It seems to lose context easily, like if you ask it to fix one error, then another, it might revert the first fix, but asking it to fix both at once, tends to work.
I think someone could feasibly write several working functions or modules, without knowing much about a given language, as long as they are clear about what they want them to do… but of course spotting obvious errors and fixing them by hand, can be faster. Fixing integration problems is where I think it might get harder (haven’t tried though, could be interesting).
Yes. Don’t be that one teacher who always has one multiple choice question that has no right answer.
In a learning age band so bespoke, and education professionals so highly paid and resourced, I can’t imagine why this would be an attractive option.
Maybe we let professionals decide what tool is best for their field
Hey, really appreciated. Having random potentially uneducated, inexperienced people chime in on what they think I’m doing wrong in my classroom based on the tiniest snippet of information really shouldn’t matter, but it’s disheartening nontheless.
While I take their point, I also wouldn’t walk into a garage and tell someone what they’re doing wrong with a vehicle, or tell a doctor I ran into on the streets that they’re misdiagnosing people based on a comment I overheard. Yet, because I work with children, I get this all the time. So, again, appreciated.
I definitely get that. I do think it’s a little different, though, because every single human being has been a child, while no human has been a car. We tend to have opinions on education because the prevailing wisdom often failed us during our own school years.
I don’t think that it’s totally unreasonable to expect some amount of input by other people who’ve been through the education system.
As long as the content is manually overseen before being handed to students I can’t see why it would matter.
A school question is a school question no matter who or what made it.