[eropple]

> LLMs are great explainers of known theory.

When they don't lie. When they don't make up citations that don't exist.

I think GPT-4 is moderately useful for software development, and I use it daily, but I have to check even very minor things, and having ~25 years of programming experience means I can do that intuitively. A kid doesn't have that.

[justrealist]

> When they don't lie. When they don't make up citations that don't exist.

I think this will be close to 0 of a problem when explaining to a HS biology student something like, what a mitochondria does or what mitosis is. It only fails (increasingly rarely) when you push the boundaries of human knowledge.

[eropple]

That assumes that the asker doesn't then ask follow-up questions that do probe beyond the could've-been-a-Wikipedia-page starting point. And I don't know about you, but how `structlog` should be configured had better not be "the boundaries of human knowledge". As I experienced yesterday evening, GPT-4 doesn't even do that right without human assistance.

LLMs are useful tools. They are dramatically less useful if you can't detect bullshit. By definition, a student is poorly equipped to do so, and moreso if allowed to atrophy in the area of research capacity because they can just ask an LLM. (A pocket calculator is a good analogy--life carries much less friction when you can efficiently do arithmetic and basic algebra in your head, because the affordances of dragging out a calculator to know how to minimize the change you get back are bad.)

[justrealist]

GPT4 with no tuning produces less bullshit than 99% of teachers.