@dasha as much as I do agree with the ethical concerns (as always), I usually don’t find the appeal to the stupidity of chatbots very genuine. It does come across as gatekeeping, especially when followed by sending students away to libraries, professors and / or other institutions that might stall the learning process or make it more frustrating. And this is on the basis that AI doesn’t “understand”. The understanding is a concept that doesn’t have a single explication, and what chatbots appear to prove is, rather than that they are capable of understanding, that the solely-humanly attributable intelligence might not have as much value as our sense of exceptional importance as a species would suggest.
Also pointing to comprehension capabilities of AI seems to be missing the point here. I’d argue that rather than asking whether chatgpt can “understand” a topic we should ask whether it can help someone with their intended goal, that when it comes to learning, surely involves understanding something. And on this basis, you don’t have to look far for the accounts of its value for learning or research, among many other uses.
One more issue I have with this text: reducing a technology down to its mode of function (predicting next token, generating most plausible text, etc) is sort of a functional essentialism that disregards what a thing emergently does. To fully account for something, we need to go beyond pure mechanics, to get a broader perspective that includes for example how does it actually unfolds in realistic context.
I would recommend this autoethnographic research article as a nice piece of counterweight that also reflects my experience with chatbots pretty well. This experience in summary is that they cannot be used uncritically and in isolation, but when some caution is applied, they can often help you get a grasp of new things pretty damn efficiently. And this is only one of its many uses in learning.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s41239-023-00404-7
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