[thegrim33]

To use a slightly more extreme example .. if you were hiring someone to maintain a nuclear power plant, and when you asked them a question about what actions to take to avoid a meltdown, and they had to ask ChatGPT to figure it out, would you really be OK with hiring that person to maintain your nuclear plant? When they don't actually have the knowledge they need to succeed, but instead have to rely on external tools to decide things? If they need to ask ChatGPT for the answer, how do they know if the answer is right? You really think that person, who relies on tools, is just as good of a hire as someone that fully internally knows what they need to know?

Yeah, hiring someone to code a website isn't the same as maintaining a nuclear plant, but it's the same concept of someone that knows their craft vs. someone that needs to rely on tools. There's a major difference in my mind.

[hackit2]

I hope your statement is hyperbolic because we're all doomed if you expect a person to know how to operate a nuclear power plant. Normally, your testing if they can follow operational procedure that were created by people who designed the power plant in the first place.

Similar it is unreasonable and bordering on negligence to assume a person has the skill set unique to your situation.

[TeMPOraL]

If the job at your nuclear power plant were so simple you only needed the employee to follow operational procedures, then you'd be better off scripting it instead, or training a monkey.

Consider e.g. being a pilot, or a surgeon - two other occupations known for their extensive use of operational procedures today. People in those jobs are not being hired for their ability to stick to a checklist, but rather for their ability to understand reasons behind it, and function without it. I.e. the procedures are an important operational aid, not the driver.

Contrast with stereotypical bureaucrats who only follow procedures and get confused if asked something not covered by them.

Now, IMHO, the problem here is that, if you're hiring someone who relies on an LLM to function, you're effectively employing that LLM, with its limitations and patterns of behavior. As an employer, you're entitled to at least being made aware of that, as it's you who bears responsibility and liability for fuckups of your hires.

[anileated]

Like a university diploma is a signal of being able to learn or at least comply, use of a chatbot is a signal of not bothering enough to learn or comply.

I can see how an applicant who cheats interview with chatbot would later not bother to internalize operation instructions for the job.

[zerbinxx]

I’d like to believe the common line that chat GPT is “just a tool” and that it can actually be used to learn/comply just as much as a university degree can be obtained by mere compliance or demonstration of learning (or merely giving the appearance of such).

My experience with Chat GPT ranges from “it’s really good for rapidly getting a bearing with a certain topic” to “it’s a woeful substitute for independently developing a nuanced understanding of a given topic.” It tends to do an OK with programming and a very poor job with critical theory.

[anileated]

> a university degree can be obtained by mere compliance or demonstration of learning

Exactly. It “only” shows you can & willing to at least understand the requirements, internalize them well enough, and comply with them. It shows your capability of understanding & working together with other humans.

Which is key.

In my impression, almost always the knowledge you receive at the uni is not really pertinent to any actual job, and anyone can have PhD level understanding of a subject without having finished high school.

It is the capability of understanding and working in a system that matters.

Similarly with a chatbot. Using it to game interviews in ways described does not mean candidate is stupid, or something like that. It is, though, a negative signal of one’s willingness and intrinsic motivation to do things like internalizing job responsibilities & procedures, or just simply behave in good faith.

Mental capacity to do mundane things is often important when it comes to, say, maintaining a nuclear reactor.

> just a tool

> it’s really good for rapidly getting a bearing with a certain topic

Perhaps. Personally I prefer using Google, so that I at least know who wrote what and why rather than completely outsourcing this to an anonymous team of data engineers at ClosedAI or whatnot, but if it is efficient to get some knowledge then why not?

It’s using it to blatantly cheat and do the key part for you where it becomes questionable.

[hackit2]

ChatGPT like all transformers (language models) depends on how well you prime the model as it can only predict the next series of tokens over a finite probability space (the dimensions it was trained on) , it is up to you as the prompt creator to prime that model so it can be used as a foundation for further reasoning.

Normally people who get bad results from it would also get similar results if they asked a domain expert. Similarly different knowledge domains use a different corpus of text for their core axioms/premises, so if you don't know the domain area or those keywords your not going to be able to prime the model to get anything meaningful from it.

[fragmede]

in terms of tools, I absolutely want the nuclear power plant engineer to use a wrench and pliars and tongs and a forklift and a machine while wearing a lead lined safety suit instead of wandering over to the reactor in a t-shirt to pull out the control rods with their bare hands. You could be Edward Teller and know everything there is to know about nuclear physics but you're not getting anywhere without tools.

to your point though, a person needs both. all of one and none of the other is useless. You don't want someone who doesn't know what they're doing to play around disabling safety systems so you don't get Chernobyl, but for the everyday crud website you can just hire the coding monkey at a reduced cost.