Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
>If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer.
A math teacher only has "this class is about math" to transfer, the rest is known. ;-)
Jokes aside, I think we're in a weird transition now where AI is used to generate text that looks good but is bad. In a few years people will know that and be more critical.
I think we went through a similar phase when DTP had it's breakthrough. Suddenly school papers were laser printed 300ppi times new roman and got more attention than better papers written by hand. But eventually that became the baseline.
I think Ai will make it so that well-written texts with clarity, good layout, correct illustrations, callouts etc become the norm, and will no longer impress anyone unless the information itself is actually good.
And if the information is good, it won't matter if it's AI generated or not.
Maybe things will change in the future, but I know where things stand right now. Would you rather learn about math by interacting with the teacher, by using the internet (including public LLMs), or by having the teacher tell an LLM "teach a math class" and then copy-paste its response to you? Option 1 is the best, but option 2 is at least better than option 3.
>Maybe things will change in the future, but I know where things stand right now
It's not an either-or though, LLM generated text already provides lots of value in many situations right now. It's also used for fluff, yes, but much of what humans write is fluff too, reporters often get paid by the word.
The point is that the value in a text has nothing to do with whether it was generated by an LLM or not. What matters is if it's useful or not.
Oh it very much depends, your opinion there is certainly not always true and not shared by everyone; you only know where you stand right now with any certainty.
It depends on the teacher. I’ve had good and bad math classes, and LLMs today are quite a bit better than the bad ones. The worst human teacher in my memory didn’t offer interactions. He walked in, turned his back to the class, wrote equations on the board for 45 minutes, and then left. The best math teachers, the ones better than LLMs, are the ones who share the joy and sense of discovery and history of math, and not just the mechanics. But there aren’t that many teachers of that sort.
Learning by using the internet without LLMs is rarely very good, but more often than not in my experience sucks much worse than using LLMs. If you include using public LLMs in internet usage, then it’s not very different from just using LLMs that search the internet. I have heard that a huge swath of today’s high school and college kids are reaching for chatGPT before Google (which is incidentally OpenAI’s goal), and that many of them would rather talk to chatGPT than talk to a teacher. I’m going to refrain from making any claims, but I believe there are a lot of people who disagree with your ranking of the options.
Foreign language learning is one case where I love using LLMs, because it’s not typically an option otherwise. You can practice non-stop and have conversations with someone fluent in a language who will be infinitely patient with your mistakes. This is true of math and other subjects too; using LLMs to practice, so that the human teacher isn’t the bottleneck, to supplement and reinforce the human interactions, is usually better than using the internet without LLMs. The other reason many people prefer talking to LLMs is the lack of judgement. If you aren’t getting it and ask the teacher one too many basic questions, they treat you differently. Sometimes it’s necessary and helpful, and sometimes it’s harmful and takes a long time to change. LLMs don’t do that, they just explain and explain. That lack of judgement is a big reason many people prefer LLM interaction to human interaction.
Okay, sure. The difference between option 1 and option 2 is completely irrelevant to this discussion and I gave what I thought would be an uncontroversial take on it because I thought it didn't matter. The point is at least one of option 1 or 2 is almost always better than option 3. Option 3 is what I and others are arguing against.
Irrelevant? How so? And why did you present two different options if you thought it was irrelevant? I thought you were trying to make a point about human interaction. From my POV, your options 2 and 3 are much closer together than 1 & 2, so if you’re not suggesting that human interaction is preferable to LLM interaction, then what’s your justification for claiming any option is better than any other? I still completely disagree with your clarified point, and suspect many many other people do too, and are demonstrating that preference by using chatGPT for their classes instead of using either the teacher or Google. It’s a simple fact that interacting with an LLM can be preferable to interacting with some teachers some of the time, and LLMs currently often make interacting with the internet more pleasant and more efficient. Your ‘almost always’ still sounds to me like one person’s opinion that is not shared by all.
We're not talking about humans vs LLMs in general, we're talking about humans copy-pasting LLM output as if they wrote it themselves. It's less "LLMs are bad" and more "if you want to communicate something specific to me, LLMs are a bad substitute for your own writing".
Oh I see I’ve misunderstood. Your analogy is restricting the scenario to no interaction with LLMs. In that case, there are still some reasons LLM writing might be prefereable for students: for non-native speakers, and for math teachers new to match developing a new curriculum (sucks, I guess, but it certainly happens), just to name a couple.
One question to ask is why is your contrived LLM scenario any different than a math teacher using a textbook, or district/state worksheets? Math teachers typically do not write the course text or exercises, and never have. Very few math teachers do their own writing.
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
Writing is fundamentally the transfer of information from your brain to my brain. If you have 1000 bits of semantic information you want to transfer, you can't give 300 bits of semantic information to an LLM and have it fill in the remaining 700, because it doesn't know what those 700 bits are. If it's able to guess those 700 bits correctly, then they aren't true semantic information, and you really only have 300 bits you want to transfer. You might as well transfer those bits to me directly, rather than having the LLM add on an extra superfluous 700 bits that I then have to filter out.
Kon5ole · · focus · HN ↗
A math teacher only has "this class is about math" to transfer, the rest is known. ;-)
Jokes aside, I think we're in a weird transition now where AI is used to generate text that looks good but is bad. In a few years people will know that and be more critical.
I think we went through a similar phase when DTP had it's breakthrough. Suddenly school papers were laser printed 300ppi times new roman and got more attention than better papers written by hand. But eventually that became the baseline.
I think Ai will make it so that well-written texts with clarity, good layout, correct illustrations, callouts etc become the norm, and will no longer impress anyone unless the information itself is actually good.
And if the information is good, it won't matter if it's AI generated or not.
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
Kon5ole · · focus · HN ↗
It's not an either-or though, LLM generated text already provides lots of value in many situations right now. It's also used for fluff, yes, but much of what humans write is fluff too, reporters often get paid by the word.
The point is that the value in a text has nothing to do with whether it was generated by an LLM or not. What matters is if it's useful or not.
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
It depends on the teacher. I’ve had good and bad math classes, and LLMs today are quite a bit better than the bad ones. The worst human teacher in my memory didn’t offer interactions. He walked in, turned his back to the class, wrote equations on the board for 45 minutes, and then left. The best math teachers, the ones better than LLMs, are the ones who share the joy and sense of discovery and history of math, and not just the mechanics. But there aren’t that many teachers of that sort.
Learning by using the internet without LLMs is rarely very good, but more often than not in my experience sucks much worse than using LLMs. If you include using public LLMs in internet usage, then it’s not very different from just using LLMs that search the internet. I have heard that a huge swath of today’s high school and college kids are reaching for chatGPT before Google (which is incidentally OpenAI’s goal), and that many of them would rather talk to chatGPT than talk to a teacher. I’m going to refrain from making any claims, but I believe there are a lot of people who disagree with your ranking of the options.
Foreign language learning is one case where I love using LLMs, because it’s not typically an option otherwise. You can practice non-stop and have conversations with someone fluent in a language who will be infinitely patient with your mistakes. This is true of math and other subjects too; using LLMs to practice, so that the human teacher isn’t the bottleneck, to supplement and reinforce the human interactions, is usually better than using the internet without LLMs. The other reason many people prefer talking to LLMs is the lack of judgement. If you aren’t getting it and ask the teacher one too many basic questions, they treat you differently. Sometimes it’s necessary and helpful, and sometimes it’s harmful and takes a long time to change. LLMs don’t do that, they just explain and explain. That lack of judgement is a big reason many people prefer LLM interaction to human interaction.
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
hatthew · · focus · HN ↗
dahart · · focus · HN ↗
One question to ask is why is your contrived LLM scenario any different than a math teacher using a textbook, or district/state worksheets? Math teachers typically do not write the course text or exercises, and never have. Very few math teachers do their own writing.