Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?
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@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
@RojoLoco said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Having read many online articles/posts/whatever that were clearly written by some AI, all I can say is that the content it regurgitates is garbage. So the time you will spend editing the output will probably get you even with the effort required to have just written it yourself.
ChatGPT has been pumping out university papers better than average students. Low bar, but it's beating human writers now.
The disconnect between the dignity of work and just doing it to make a quick buck is yuge and really sad.
Being able to stand back, look at something, and say, "I did that!" is a pretty amazing experience. So, did none of the folks bastardizing their writing ever have that experience?
Kind of like never having an anchovy pizza thus not knowing what it would taste or smell like or even go so far as not knowing it even exists? I don't know a better way to explain this.
Where is the honour?
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@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Being able to stand back, look at something, and say, "I did that!" is a pretty amazing experience. So, did none of the folks bastardizing their writing ever have that experience?
Yes, but college isn't work. It's busy work. The entire point of university isn't education or work, but to buy a degree. ChatGPT is the logical path to that. If the students (or their future employers) valued education, they'd test for that. As long as they prefer a piece of paper over actual learning, there is no dignity in the process.
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@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Kind of like never having an anchovy pizza thus not knowing what it would taste or smell like or even go so far as not knowing it even exists? I don't know a better way to explain this.
Where is the honour?There is none, but that's a given given that it is university. If you want honor, do the work when it isn't an assignment and do it to truly learn.
But then one has to ask, where is the honor in doing something that AI could have done. Is it honorable to do labor for its own sake? That's what the industrial revolution taught us, but isn't really true. That's wasted effort. So is it honor? Not really.
Do something only humans can do, something of value. It is the value that makes it honorable, not the waste of labor or time.
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@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Being able to stand back, look at something, and say, "I did that!" is a pretty amazing experience. So, did none of the folks bastardizing their writing ever have that experience?
Yes, but college isn't work. It's busy work. The entire point of university isn't education or work, but to buy a degree. ChatGPT is the logical path to that. If the students (or their future employers) valued education, they'd test for that. As long as they prefer a piece of paper over actual learning, there is no dignity in the process.
I'm of the opinion that University is virtually useless for the bulk of the kids entering there.
If there is mission and purpose with a goal in mind for the kid to teach and use a Masters or PhD then go for it.
Otherwise, go to tech college or get a trade.
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Or ask an employer...
Employee 1 spent ten minutes and ChatGPT and got better results.
EMployee 2 spent a day and did it manually and got worse results.
Which is the better employee that does a better job and is more considerate of their employer? Which has more value?
Employers would say Employee 1 worked "smarter, not harder" and has more value as an employee. Employee 2 was the lazier, less valuable.
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@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Being able to stand back, look at something, and say, "I did that!" is a pretty amazing experience. So, did none of the folks bastardizing their writing ever have that experience?
Yes, but college isn't work. It's busy work. The entire point of university isn't education or work, but to buy a degree. ChatGPT is the logical path to that. If the students (or their future employers) valued education, they'd test for that. As long as they prefer a piece of paper over actual learning, there is no dignity in the process.
I'm of the opinion that University is virtually useless for the bulk of the kids entering there.
If there is mission and purpose with a goal in mind for the kid to teach and use a Masters or PhD then go for it.
Otherwise, go to tech college or get a trade.
Exactly, Hence why something like ChatGPT there isn't shameful or whatever. We aren't sending kids there to learn or gain value. It's just some combination of showing off socially, wasting money, partying, or trying to scam a corrupt system. In any case, using AI to get through more easily shows intelligence and initiative. Busywork never reflects well (on those doing it OR those giving it.)
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@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Or ask an employer...
Employee 1 spent ten minutes and ChatGPT and got better results.
EMployee 2 spent a day and did it manually and got worse results.
Which is the better employee that does a better job and is more considerate of their employer? Which has more value?
Employers would say Employee 1 worked "smarter, not harder" and has more value as an employee. Employee 2 was the lazier, less valuable.
We home school our kids.
Our eldest son is currently getting into trig and calculus. He's extremely resistant to doing the proofs because he knows the answer.
I hand him a string, hose, and tape measure and ask him to build me a shed. He knows now what that means, but it's still a lesson that needs to be learned.
If I have no clue WHY something works because I didn't build it, put it together, thrash the snot out of it, then I won't know WHY or WHERE to look if something is broken.
That's borked. Totally borked to think that one can get through life coasting on another's work, or fake work in this case IMO, and not hit the wall at some point.
EDIT: I find the very idea that one would think they could get through life in that way insulting.
EDIT2: And beneath the dignity of work and the value of that work. -
@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
We home school our kids.
Us too.
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@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
We home school our kids.
Us too.
It's the best decision we ever made. A lot of compromises along the way to make it work but we have.
One has graduated while the other two are working their way through.
It's a great treat to spend the amount of time we have with our kids.
They are the better for it and so are we.
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@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
If I have no clue WHY something works because I didn't build it, put it together, thrash the snot out of it, then I won't know WHY or WHERE to look if something is broken.
That's borked. Totally borked to think that one can get through life coasting on another's work, or fake work in this case IMO, and not hit the wall at some point.I find this like saying that you can't understand a house if you didn't drive the nails with your forehead. You don't do that, you use a hammer, a tool. Humans excel by using tools and eventually tools to make tools.
ChatGPT is a tool. It's doing a part of the work that is no longer necessary for humans to do. Doing that work for no value is a negative value.
And doing busy work is NOT learning how things work. That's not at all what it is. College papers are not to learn English. They are to waste time.
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Every generation spends time learning new tools. Every old generation feels like this is lazy. But just as we use printers instead of type writers. And our grandparents used typewriters instead of pen and paper. And their great great great grandparents used pens instead of chisels and rocks... it's not that we are increasingly lazy. It is that we are able to reduce the amount of wasted effort so that we can spend more time on the parts that are important.
Today we can write more intelligent discourse and communicate about it in minutes than stone age man could record in a month and share with no one. The use of tools to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary allows time to focus on real learning, growth, and productivity.
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@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Every generation spends time learning new tools. Every old generation feels like this is lazy. But just as we use printers instead of type writers. And our grandparents used typewriters instead of pen and paper. And their great great great grandparents used pens instead of chisels and rocks... it's not that we are increasingly lazy. It is that we are able to reduce the amount of wasted effort so that we can spend more time on the parts that are important.
Today we can write more intelligent discourse and communicate about it in minutes than stone age man could record in a month and share with no one. The use of tools to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary allows time to focus on real learning, growth, and productivity.
The closest thing that I can think of as far as my attitude towards ChatGPT is plagiarism.
I do not see it as a tool when someone takes a few moments of work from ChatGPT and presents it as their own.
That is not honourable at all.
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@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Every generation spends time learning new tools. Every old generation feels like this is lazy. But just as we use printers instead of type writers. And our grandparents used typewriters instead of pen and paper. And their great great great grandparents used pens instead of chisels and rocks... it's not that we are increasingly lazy. It is that we are able to reduce the amount of wasted effort so that we can spend more time on the parts that are important.
Today we can write more intelligent discourse and communicate about it in minutes than stone age man could record in a month and share with no one. The use of tools to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary allows time to focus on real learning, growth, and productivity.
Just remembered another example: Cole's Notes.
Papers written based on a reading of Cole's Notes as opposed to actually reading the book, absorbing it, understanding it, and then being able to see the author's intent would be very different.
I want real the real person and their real experience.
https://open.spotify.com/track/73CKjW3vsUXRpy3NnX4H7F?si=ac956108dbb54fd4
^^^
Fake Plastic Trees -
See also: South Park s26ep04 - Deep Learning.
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It's kind of like how our generation had to write C and Machine language, Assembler or whatever to get things done.
Then along came Java, C# and other languages that made it "easy".
Then they got PHP and it was easier still.
Then Laravel and ORMs and all kinds of abstractions.
Are programmers getting lazier? No. Do they do less work today? No. They just don't have to do the boilerplate as much. They get to spend more time doing what differentiates their work, more time focusing on their human value and less doing repetitive or unnecessary steps.
Same thing with my kids and making video games. I used to have to write my own code for a game engine to make the simplest thing. Today, they can skip that and spend time on the story telling or puzzles instead.
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@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Every generation spends time learning new tools. Every old generation feels like this is lazy. But just as we use printers instead of type writers. And our grandparents used typewriters instead of pen and paper. And their great great great grandparents used pens instead of chisels and rocks... it's not that we are increasingly lazy. It is that we are able to reduce the amount of wasted effort so that we can spend more time on the parts that are important.
Today we can write more intelligent discourse and communicate about it in minutes than stone age man could record in a month and share with no one. The use of tools to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary allows time to focus on real learning, growth, and productivity.
The closest thing that I can think of as far as my attitude towards ChatGPT is plagiarism.
I do not see it as a tool when someone takes a few moments of work from ChatGPT and presents it as their own.
That is not honourable at all.
It's only plagiarism in the way doing any research is; or using Grammarly. That is to say... not at all. Plagiarism is copying from others, and that is exactly what this doesn't do. This does what every student is taught... use tools to paraphrase what others have written.
If this is plagiarism, all school (as normally taught) is plagiarism. Which suggests that really... anything that CAN be done with ChatGPT is something we might need to consider and being without purpose. When is it ever useful to just regurgitate other peoples' opinions in our own words?
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@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Every generation spends time learning new tools. Every old generation feels like this is lazy. But just as we use printers instead of type writers. And our grandparents used typewriters instead of pen and paper. And their great great great grandparents used pens instead of chisels and rocks... it's not that we are increasingly lazy. It is that we are able to reduce the amount of wasted effort so that we can spend more time on the parts that are important.
Today we can write more intelligent discourse and communicate about it in minutes than stone age man could record in a month and share with no one. The use of tools to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary allows time to focus on real learning, growth, and productivity.
Just remembered another example: Cole's Notes.
Papers written based on a reading of Cole's Notes as opposed to actually reading the book, absorbing it, understanding it, and then being able to see the author's intent would be very different.
I want real the real person and their real experience.
https://open.spotify.com/track/73CKjW3vsUXRpy3NnX4H7F?si=ac956108dbb54fd4
^^^
Fake Plastic TreesIf reading Cole's Notes produces enough to write a good paper it tells us one of two things...
- The notes are as good as the "real thing" or...
- The evaluation of the assessment is bad and pointless.
If the goal is to enjoy the material, you don't need to be tested on it. If the goal is to pass a test, the notes are normally vastly superior.
If you know the goal, you can decide which is the better approach. If doing this for school and not for personal growth (the two are opposing concepts) then Cole's Notes are much better as the time spent reading something not good enough to read without it being assigned is wasted and the value is in passing the assessment.
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@PhlipElder said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
@scottalanmiller said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
Every generation spends time learning new tools. Every old generation feels like this is lazy. But just as we use printers instead of type writers. And our grandparents used typewriters instead of pen and paper. And their great great great grandparents used pens instead of chisels and rocks... it's not that we are increasingly lazy. It is that we are able to reduce the amount of wasted effort so that we can spend more time on the parts that are important.
Today we can write more intelligent discourse and communicate about it in minutes than stone age man could record in a month and share with no one. The use of tools to eliminate or reduce the unnecessary allows time to focus on real learning, growth, and productivity.
The closest thing that I can think of as far as my attitude towards ChatGPT is plagiarism.
I do not see it as a tool when someone takes a few moments of work from ChatGPT and presents it as their own.
That is not honourable at all.
It 100% depends on how you use it. It's not plagiarism by its own, not at all.
If your boss says he wants an outline of a given tech, and you can get it accurately in a few minutes versus a coworker who spends a day on it, it's totally not plagiarism and are way more valuable as an employee.
If you use chatgpt to write a book and is 100% copy from chatgpt output, that is not plagiarism either.
If your English professor wants you to write an essay, and you didn't write it, then I see a problem.
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@Obsolesce said in Staying in Ethics and Legal with ChatGPT usage?:
If your English professor wants you to write an essay, and you didn't write it, then I see a problem.
Problem, yes. But not plagiarism. And not quite cheating, either. It's a weird grey area. Because it's a universal tool.
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@Obsolesce Here is where it gets tricky in the homework or essay situation...
- Can you use tools like paper and pen? What about a typewriter? What about a word processor on a computer? What about a spell checker? What about a grammar processor like Grammarly (this is built into Zoho, for example.) What about something like Google Translate to help with language barriers?
- Can you use books as a reference? What about speeches? Or conversations? Conferences? Internet articles?
In 99.999% of cases, we establish that it is allowed to use extensive technological tools to improve our English writing. This is so understood to be how people write today that we don't even mention them and we expect that they will be use and grading curves depend on you using those tools or you are at a huge disadvantage (how can someone spell THAT wrong, didn't they use a spell checker?)
In 99.999% of cases, we also establish that all the info on the Internet (and elsewhere) is fair game as reference material, with tons of it being generated by humans (real intelligence) or automation (AI). So we are already using tools like, and in many cases better, than ChatGPT to produce the research materials.
So the use of tooling, like ChatGPT, is so ubiquitous that we have it not so much as a foregone conclusion that it will be used, but essentially a requirement (try getting a good grade without using those resources today - the professors are trained to expect it as every single student uses them and it creates a baseline of quality.) ChatGPT is essentially just an extremely advanced version of the above put together. It's a computerized tool for language checking AND for information searching, just combined into one (Google is already this, too.)
There's no single aspect of ChatGPT that isn't covered by how people do essays already. It's only that it is vastly better at it.
If you look at it from a kid in 1980's perspective, Google's web search is already so advanced and does so much AI and the work for you that 90% or more of the work that was considered a requirement for writing essays back then is all automated today. And Grammarly replaces so much of the English training knowledge.
I think you'd find from a historic perspective that this isn't the huge game changing moment, but just a line along a continuum.
And one can easily argue, that a student not using the industry standard tools for research and writing is being lazy and foolish because the point of school is to train you and if you are doing work that will never be required in the real world, that's not teaching you useful skills. The bigger skill today is learning how to use tools like ChatGPT effectively and how to check their output to see if it is good.
