[HN Gopher] Conversational AI is a great tool for education
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Conversational AI is a great tool for education
Author : vishnuharidas
Score : 23 points
Date : 2023-11-25 21:06 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| smoldesu wrote:
| Wouldn't you be afraid that the AI is wrong? I've seen AI explain
| some things well, but I've also seen it manufacture completely
| fake concepts to fill in the blank. Maybe textbooks aren't
| perfect either, but at least they're written by accountable
| parties and read hundreds of times before published.
| vishnuharidas wrote:
| Yes, I have experienced this multiple times - for example,
| ChatGPT and Bard giving totally opposite answers to the same
| questions. So I learned to take their answers with a pinch of
| salt and ensure to further research (either Google it, or ask
| another Conv-AI tool) when I start to smell something wrong.
|
| IMO, these Conv-AI tools should indicate to the user when they
| are hallucinating.
| flax wrote:
| Like many human habitual bullshitters, they do not even know
| when they're doing it.
| Groxx wrote:
| "Show when they're hallucinating" is thankfully a very simple
| feature to add:
|
| It's 100% of the time.
|
| There's no "be factual" vs "make things up" choice in them.
| It's all made up, it just _often sounds like an answer_.
| andybak wrote:
| > IMO, these Conv-AI tools should indicate to the user when
| they are hallucinating.
|
| If they could do that, then it would be fairly easy to "not
| hallucinate".
|
| To put it another way the "don't hallucinate" problem and the
| "warn me if you're hallucinating" problem are in the same
| difficulty class.
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| No more than I would be afraid that a person I'm having a
| conversation with could be wrong.
| Karellen wrote:
| Surely some people are more trustworthy than others?
|
| Some people are quite introspective and have pretty good
| meta-awareness, and hedge when they're not sure about
| something. While other people are known to just bullshit
| whenever they don't know something (or when they just feel
| like it), and don't change this behaviour even when lots of
| people have pointed it out.
|
| How much more would you be worried if you were having a
| conversation with a known bullshitter?
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I've used LLMs chat for finding statistics references many
| times; the important part is often surfacing the missing
| keyword or jargon needed to find the actual literature on a
| topic. If there's actual literature, you find it, and if it's a
| hallucination then you get a sense that the idea is at least
| very obscure, if not entirely unstudied. Though I have found
| some very obscure topics by this method...
| stinkbutt wrote:
| depends on how far into the weeds you get and the model you're
| using. gpt4 is pretty reliable at explaining concepts at a high
| level and its better at it than any textbook or wiki page can
| be because of its ability to answer follow-up questions in
| context. its basically the next best thing to a college
| professor's office hours.
| danielvaughn wrote:
| It's more akin to having a conversation with a well educated
| person. They aren't perfect either but it's good enough to pick
| up general knowledge. It's an amazing tool.
| brendev wrote:
| Honestly this is a perfectly valid concern. I mostly use it as
| a jumping off point. Sometimes we don't have the language
| required to do our own search on a subject.
|
| If the LLM can give me a bird's eye view of the subject, then
| it enables me to go off and do my own research and come with my
| own conclusions, even if they don't align with what the LLM
| originally told me.
|
| The fact is, there's a ton of misinformation on the Internet.
| Doesn't matter if you're getting your info from an LLM or not,
| you should almost always be trying to get your info from
| multiple sources if possible.
| larve wrote:
| I think that in many ways this is a plus. It's actually really
| hard outside of actually attending a class with fellow students
| to find examples of something "wrong" that you can then attempt
| to crossreference and correct. But when studying with other
| students, that's what you do all the time.
|
| The friction involved is counterbalanced by the conversational
| aspect which makes it feel less tedious or even fun.
|
| I often like to have the ai:
|
| - provide exercises
|
| - play the student asking me the e teacher to clarify and
| answer questions
|
| - have it put on a little theater play with different students
|
| I was talking about this earlier on mastodon:
|
| - https://hachyderm.io/@mnl/111471750626975201
|
| - https://hachyderm.io/@mnl/111467764783141450
|
| - https://typeshare.co/go-go-golems/posts/ai-driven-self-
| educa...
|
| I also find it one of the most effective ways of learning, and
| complement it with the usual book/video learning and (very
| importantly) writing down the important points learned during
| the conversation (potentially coming up with Flashcards which
| can then also be "cosplayed" by gpt), because gpt transcripts
| are just indigestible.
| andybak wrote:
| Yeah but no but...
|
| Generally - the areas where GPT starts to become unreliable are
| usually fairly "off-piste". My gut feeling is that in most
| standard educational contexts it would probably be fine.
|
| Curious to hear _specific_ examples where people have found
| this not to be the case.
| tkgally wrote:
| Yes, you need to be aware of the possibility of confabulation
| by the AI. But you can minimize that problem by:
|
| - Using an LLM that hallucinates less. GPT-4 is more reliable
| than GPT-3.5, and the just-released Claude 2.1 is reportedly
| better than its predecessor. In my experience, Bard
| confabulates too much to be useful for many purposes.
|
| - Using the AI to explore relatively general topics. In my
| tests, GPT-4 is excellent for getting an overview of, say,
| linguistic theories, the history of ethics, or the differences
| between quantum and classical physics. The more focused the
| topic is--how a particular verb conjugates in Romanian, what
| David Hume said about the death penalty, how gravity affects
| neutrinos--the more you need to double-check with other
| sources.
|
| - Focusing not on learning facts but on the interactive
| exploration. One interesting exercise is to discuss
| counterfactuals: How might human civilization have developed if
| electricity had not been harnessed? What would have happened if
| a fifty-meter-diameter asteroid had struck the Rhine Valley in
| May 1944? There are no right or wrong answers to such
| questions, but exploring them with the AI can be very
| rewarding.
|
| I agree with the OP: Interaction with LLMs can be a great way
| to learn, and it will get only better as their reliability
| improves further and they become more customizable for the
| individual learner. What I want most now is for them to have a
| persistent memory of our past conversations. Better multimodal
| capabilities would also be nice.
| makach wrote:
| I completely agree. The power of LLM and conversational AI will
| give each student their own private tutor, ofc. there are issues
| today, but the future will be wonderful for whoever is able to
| embrace this technology.
|
| I already used GPT to help me tutor my kids, and for my kids to
| use it when they get stuck. They get unstuck faster. They are
| critical but also more willing to accept response as fact, we
| discuss this regularly and they seem to be getting the point.
|
| so many kids get left behind because a teacher is unable to spend
| time with them, how amazing will it not be for each student to
| have their own supporting teacher?
|
| hopefully, we will be able to harness AI for the better and good.
| mym1990 wrote:
| I think as long as they also learn to stay somewhat skeptical
| and question things, this is great! Even for adult learning,
| this is a great approach.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| obviously need some work to reduce/eliminate hallucination but
| LLMs will definitely transform learning. At worst you'll
| occasionally need to text search your notebook to confirm certain
| facts. Stuff like RAG and fine-tuning is already being done to
| improve those issues and I assume improvements will be made at
| the model level eventually
|
| When combined with the ability to run code and read images I
| think it will really help with learning math. Show it your work,
| have it tell you why you got a wrong answer, and then it can tell
| you the concepts you need to review
| sugiero wrote:
| Breathless anecdata like this always talk about self education.
|
| The op is saying "I learned <TECHNICAL_JARGON>" but did they? How
| are they quantifying learning? How do they know what they
| "learned" is even correct.
|
| I agree with the headline but I think it needs a qualifier of "in
| the presence of an educator". The educator, can be a technical
| text, is there to sanity check the conversational agent.
|
| In my experience the best use of such agents at this time is in a
| domain where I'm already an expert and I want it to do some
| remedial work or lookups for me.
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