A Student's Guide to Writing with ChatGPT

I think this is pretty good advice.

I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything (write all the code, write the whole essay). The advice in this article largely mirrors - by analogy - how I use AI for coding. To rubber duck, to generate ideas, to ask for feedback, to ask for alternatives and for criticism.

Usually it cannot write the whole thing (essay, program )in one go, but by iterating bewteen the AI and myself, I definitely end up with better results.

Well, I got chatgpt (gpt4o) to write me a very basic json parser once (and a gltf parser). Although it was very basic and lacking any error checking, it did what i asked it (although not in one go, i had to refine my questions multiple times).

Chatgpt is great for writing regular expressions by the way.

In my experience 4o/Claude are really good at one shotting complicated but isolated components (eg streaming JSON parsers).

Just because it spits out a RE doesn't mean the RE is what you wanted. For one thing, you'll need to be precise in your prompt.

> I think often AI sceptics go too far in assuming users blindly use the AI to do everything

Users are not a monolithic group. Some users/students absolutely use AI blindly.

There are also many, many ways to use AI counterproductively. One of the most pernicious I have noticed is users who turn to AI for the initial idea without reflecting about the problem first. This removes a critical step from the creative process, and prevents practice of critical and analytical thinking. Struggling to come up with a solution first before seeing one (either from AI or another human) is essential for learning a skill.

The effect is that people end up lacking self confidence in their ability to solve problems on their own. They give up much too easily if they don't have a tool doing it for them.

This iterative process hasn’t led to better results than my best effort, but it has led to 90% of my best in a fraction of the time. That’s especially true if I have curated a list of quotes, key phrases, and research literature I know I want to use directly or pull from.

Yeah, absolutely agree with that. Definitely has the potential to be particularly harmful in educational settings of users blindly trusting.

I guess it's just like many tools, they can be used well or badly, and people need to learn how to use the well to get value from them

You don't need to be precise. Just give it an example string and tell it what information you want to extract from it and it usually works. It is just way faster than doing it manually.

I've been using it to debug issues with config files and stuff. I just provide all the config files and error log to Chatgpt and it give a few possibilities which I fix or confirm is not an issue. If it still fails, I send the updated config files and error logs and get a new reply and repeat.

Fools need chatGPT most, but wise men only are the better for it. - Ben Franklin

Claude/ChatGPT has become my man pages.

It does spectacular job with well trodden paths. Asked it to give me a map react control with points plotted and got something working in a jiffy.

I was trying to get it write robot framework code earlier and it was remarkably terrible. I would point out an obvious problem, it would replace the code with something even more spectacularly wrong.

When I pointed out the new error, it just gave me the exact same old code.

This happened again and again.

It was almost entirely useless.

Really showed how the sausage is made, this generation of AI is just regurgitation of patterns it stole from other people.

Yeah, in line with the old RE adage: I had a problem. I used AI. Now I have two problems.

In my experience 4o is really good at ignoring user-provided corrections and insanely regurgitating the same code (and/or the same problems) over and over again.

ChatGPT 4 does much better with corrections, as does Claude. 4o is a pox.

Rhetorical question: Can you ever fully be sure you have the regex you wanted?

This is also a great PR press release for openai. They are telling users NOT to generate content with lazy prompts, but to use as an aid.

Sometimes I tried to be transparent in having used chatgpt like for minor stuff, and I got pooled into being a lazy fuck who submitted slob.

We are probably going to see an end to the bearish wave of ai and a correction towards reasonable AI use.

No, it cannot solve new math problems and is not as smart as Alakazam, but it CAN format your citations and make you a cup of coffee.

Writing regexes by hand is hard so there will always be some level of testing involved. But reading a regex and verifying it works is easier than writing one from scratch.

My overly snide point about regexes was that most of the time "verifying it works" is more like finding and fixing a few more edge cases on the asymptotic journey towards no more brokenness.

I'm terrified when I see people get a whiff of a problem, and immediately turn to ChatGPT. If you don't even think about the problem, you have a roundabout zero chance of understanding it - and a similar chance of solving it. I run into folks like that very rarely, but when I do, it gives me the creeps.

Then again, I bet some of these people were doing the same with Google in the past, landing on some low quality SEO article that sounds close enough.

Even earlier, I suppose they were asking somebody working for them to figure it out - likely somebody unqualified who babbled together something plausible sounding.

Technology changes, but I'm not sure people do.

It gets worst when these users/students run to others when the AI generated code doesn't work. Or with colleagues who think they already "wrote" the initial essay then pass it for others to edit and contribute. In such cases it is usually better to rewrite from scratch and tell them their initial work is not useful at all and not worth spending time improving upon.

I teach basic statistics to computer scientists (in the context of quantitative research methods) and this year every single one of my group of 30+ students used ChatGPT to generate their final report (other than the obvious wording style, the visualizations all had the same visual language, so it was obvious). There were glaring, laughable errors in the analyses, graphs, conclusions, etc.

I remember when I was a student that my teachers would complain that we did “compilation-based programming” meaning we hit “compile” before we thought about the code we wrote, and let the compiler find the faults. ChatGPT is the new compiler: it creates results so fast that it’s literally more worth it to just turn them in and wait for the response than bothering to think about it. I’m sure a large amount of these students are passing their courses due to simple statistics (I.e. teachers being unable to catch every problematic submission).

Agreed! Using AI as a collaborative tool rather than a replacement is the best approach

That 4o is often times worse that GPT 4 has been widely ignored. :/

Using llm blindly will lead to poor results in complex tasks so I'm not sure how much of a problem it might be. I feel like students using it blindly won't get far but I might be wrong.

> One of the most pernicious I have noticed is users who turn to AI for the initial idea without reflecting about the problem first I've been doing that and it usually doesn't work. How can you ask an ai to solve a problem you don't understand at all ? More often than not, when you do that the ai throws a dumb response and you get back to thinking about how to present the problem in a clear way which makes you understand it better.

So you still end up learning to analyze a problem and solving it. But I can't tell if the solution comes up faster or not nor if it helps learning or not.

Yeah I agree with that! 100% test coverage seems impossible when every part of the regex is basically an if condition.

> I'm terrified when I see people get a whiff of a problem, and immediately turn to ChatGPT.

Not a problem for me, I work on prompt development, I can't ask GPT how to fix its mistakes because it has no clue. Prompting will probably be the last defense of reasoning, the only place where you can't get AI help.