The growing number of students using the AI program ChatGPT as a shortcut in their coursework has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.

College professors are going back to paper exams and handwritten essays to fight students using ChatGPT::The growing number of students using the AI program ChatGPT as a shortcut in their coursework has led some college professors to reconsider their lesson plans for the upcoming fall semester.

  • TimewornTraveler@lemm.eeEnglish
    813·
    1 year ago

    The only real requirement for AI is that a machine take actions in an intelligent manner.

    There’s the rub: defining “intelligent”.

    If you’re arguing that traffic lights should be called AI, I’m on the same page. We believe the same things: that ChatGPT isn’t any more “intelligent” than a traffic light. But you want to call them both intelligent and I want to call neither so.

    • throwsbooks@lemmy.caEnglish
      113·
      1 year ago

      I think you’re conflating “intelligence” with “being smart”.

      Intelligence is more about taking in information and being able to make a decision based on that information. So yeah, automatic traffic lights are “intelligent” because they use a sensor to check for the presence of cars and “decide” when to switch the light.

      Acting like some GPT is on the same level as a traffic light is silly though. On a base level, yes, it “reads” a text prompt (along with any messaging history) and decides what to write next. But that decision it’s making is much more complex than “stop or go”.

      I don’t know if this is an ADHD thing, but when I’m talking to people, sometimes I finish their sentences in my head as they’re talking. Sometimes I nail it, sometimes I don’t. That’s essentially what chatGPT is, a sentence finisher that happened to read a huge amount of text content on the web, so it’s got context for a bunch of things. It doesn’t care if it’s right and it doesn’t look things up before it says something.

      But to have a computer be able to do that at all?? That’s incredible, and it took over 50 years of AI research to hit that point (yes, it’s been a field in universities for a very long time, with most that time people saying it’s impossible), and we only hit it because our computers got powerful enough to do it at scale.

    • sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      7·
      1 year ago

      I’m with you on this and think the AI label is just stupid and misleading. But times/language change and you end up being a Don Quixote type figure.