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by idopmstuff 763 days ago
Remember when Chegg's stock price tanked? That's because GPT is extremely valuable as a homework helper. It can make mistakes, but that's very infrequent on well-understood topics like English, math and science through the high school level (and certainly if you hire a tutor, you'd pay a whole lot more for something that can also make mistakes).

Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do?

2 comments

If you follow much of the education world, it's inundated with teachers frantically trying to deal with the volume and slop their students produce with AI tools. I'm sure it can be useful in an educational context, but "replacing a poor-quality cheating tool with a more efficient poor-quality cheating tool" isn't exactly what I'd call "meaningful."

The most interesting uses of AI tools in a classroom I've seen is teachers showing students AI-generated work and asking students to critique it and fact check it, at which point the students see it for what it is.

> Is that not a very meaningful thing to be able to do?

No? Solving homework was never meaningful. Being meaningful was never the point of homework. The point was for you to solve it yourself. To Learn with your human brain, such that your human brain could use those teaching to make new meaningful knowledge.

John having 5 apples after Judy stole 3 is not interesting.