#unrebloggable because i know how unreasonable people get as soon as llm are mentioned here

[elinaline]

While I am concerned about many uses of LLMs by students such as those who use them as a research engine or as a verification tool (not what it's made to do ! Will be wrong !) I think the specific example of using it to write assignment is really good and I think that professor spoken about in this tweet

has the correct stance on it. As someone who does teaching, I know from a pragmatic point of view you cannot prevent students from using all the tools they can find –after all I was a student not so long ago and I too was tempted to use the matrix diagonalization tool on my calculator rather than learn how to do the Gauss algorithm by hand. ChatGPT and other similar generative AIs are tools to reformulate your sentences. That's what they do and this they're pretty fucking good at. If a student has the correct ideas with good connections but has difficulty expressing themself for whatever reason (foreign student, learning disability, just a general hard time with words), I think ChatGPT is a fantastic tool to help them show that they understood and can think critically, rather than be stuck of words and a level of language they're struggling to acquire. I had an intern this summer who was fucking brilliant, but she was more brilliant in Portuguese than English, and she used ChatGPT to allow herself to talk as fluently in English in her graded report, and that's the good use of this tool ! Her report will also be useful in my research so I would much rather it was written clearly than that she struggled on turning her sentences correctly between three languages as we were talking mostly in French together.

Another point this raises is the question of what, why, and how we grade work in university especially. If the important part here is the act of production and not the finished product why is it graded ? Why grade students when you're at the step where you want them to understand what they're doing, when grading is meant to evaluate their performance and more importantly is actively used to discriminate between students for more advanced curriculums and for jobs ? And what in the assignment is being graded specifically ? Is it the correctness of the answers, in which case yeah ChatGPT will fuck them up at least 50% of the time. If it is the "quality" of the writing, how is it evaluated exactly if it's a creative class ? Does ChatGPT really deprive students of critical thinking skills if they use it for any reason in a creative writing class ?

Like genuinely don't get me wrong, there are many ways I am against the use of this tool, the concern it raises on workers' rights is up there, the fact that it's so widely used when it has one precise job and will be dangerously wrong for anything else is scaring me, too. But thinking just because a new tool exists, students will lose their ability to think by themselves? Nuhuh I think we're fine on that. I think if anything this allows to catch the cheaters who did anything but work but hid it well more efficiently.