Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunfish
I see GPT has hit the news with educators worrying that students will be using AI to complete essays, and other futurist types thinking we should bring it on.
Another Turing test?
Indistinguishable from an expert essay or just too much with no discernment?
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Hi Ray,
I say, post 2022, any educator that weighs student assessments heavily on at-home essays is a bit of a dunce
Here in the universities in Australia pre-ChatGPT, cheating had already become a big problem.
Universities had transitioned from places that one came to learn to money making machines.
And an increasing number of the student intake over the years seemed to
simply want to get a degree ultimately for longer term monetary gain
rather than trying to be the best they can be.
I have traveled a lot of the world and there are countries where cheating
at exams had always been rife and was widely reported in the local
press of those places. Australia now is a large market for students
from those very parts of the world where it was essentially standard
cultural practice to cheat at exams.
In our time, if someone were caught cheating at uni they were out.
It seemed rare. Fast forward to today and there are apparently
people in cities like Sydney that will write an essay for you that you then
illegally submit.
Fast forward to 2023 and that unconscionable business model would be
in part challenged with ChatGPT.
As you will be aware, ChatGPT was fed a rich diet of text from the web,
some of it from more credible curated sources such as Wikipedia and some
less credible.
It's a language model and does not always get its facts right.
But that aside, in playing with it over the past few months, I am staggered
by how much it does "know". I've tested it on relatively obscure facts
that I happen to know and was constantly blown away it would know
about it.
What's amazing is that I've asked it things like, "Write me a 1,000 word
essay on the causes of World War I" and it would deliver a result in a few
seconds. I would then read it and it was in the style of having been written
by a well researched academic. Since it remembers your conversation,
I have then said, "Now re-write it in the style of a high school student" and
voilą - there's your assignment that you were suppose to write last night
for school but you have created between breakfast and brushing your teeth.
It's closed door exams from now on.
