"What did students do before chatgpt?"

we used to do this thing called "learning".

It's called git gudding now.
- git -f gud
I think using ChatGPT for learning is okay, assuming the user is actually interested in learning. If you just want to get something done, you're absolutely cheating the task at hand, and your future self.
ChatGPT truly shines when you ask it follow-up questions on the thing you want to learn about and really "delve" (hate that AI ass word) into different aspects to internalize them yourself.
- The dangerous part is that it makes stuff up and you won't have the knowledge to tell.
- Except when it lies. Then it is the opposite of what you want it to be.

"what did students do before chatgpt?"

Is this supposed to be an actual quote? Like, someone said this unironically?

"what did students do before smartphones/tablets?"
"what did students do before laptops?"
"what did students do before the internet?"
it's not at all weird to me that this could have been uttered fully seriously.
Edit: only difference are those other technologies still requires critical thinking and won't magically write your assignments. Unless plagiarized.
Grew up before the internet.
One thing I have come to realize is how much of history I learned passively from movies and comic books. The first time I saw Edgar Allan Poe was in an The Atom comic, and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon. Pretty much everyone I knew first hear classical music when they played it behind Bugs Bunny.
These days, there's a tiny handful of historically based shows and movies compared to earlier times.
- '... and Julius Cesar was in a cartoon.'
  Asterix taught me a lot of history too 😁
I have no doubt about it...
Yep.
Parts of Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A, will 100% seriously tell you that learning basically anything other than how to prompt ChatGPT is a stupid waste of time.
They'll all go feral when they can no longer afford it or the power goes out or the system crashes for a significant amount of time, as they've never learned how to think, nor anything useful to think about.
Well of course. LLMs have been able to automate so many bullshit assignments for students. I am not talking about the ones where they actually have to learn about a subject that is important to things in life. But the ones where the entire point of the assignment is to write pages.
Education still hasn't caught up with the many technological advances in the latest years. Some still act like it are the 1950's.
- Did you read the OP? The point is, writing pages of bullshit is how you get better at writing. It's like saying "Oh yeah I don't want to do all these bullshit exercises at the gym too build muscle I should just sit at home and let a robot do them for me" the whole point is building the skill not producing the assignment.
- I never had a single assignment in college where the only point was to write pages.

We haven't had LLMs that long. Are people seriously already forgetting the concept of learning skills?

Since computers became common, it's seemed like an increasing number of people don't know how to, and don't think they should have to, learn skills.
Nah, people have been cheating and faking it forever.
In the U.S., the issue is that our education system is already fundamentally broken and doing a terrible job of teaching kids. Adding LLMs to that is like striking a match in the tinderbox.
I teach collegiate intro programming classes, I can say it definitely seems that way. My office hours will be an absolute ghost town, nobody has any questions for me in class, and then when a project is due about 1/3 of the submissions are AI slop.
I know cheating has always been rampant, but I've never seen it this bad before.
- Are you allowed to fail them? Everything I've heard about primary and secondary school in the US is that teachers can no longer punish or fail to pass students who are cheating or failing or have major disciplinary problems. I hope that it's different after high school.
It makes the dumb even dumber. In 10 years we will see the effect of it, just like ipad babies.
- Hate to be that guy, but you’re looking for effect here. You’re describing the effect (end result) of a change, not the affect (change) itself.
at least it took a bit more effort than just a prompt or two.
lucky if your search terms just bring up someone else's work I suppose lol

My nephew wants to be instantly good at things and it drives me crazy. He'll roll his eyes and say "of course you're going to make that shot (in billiards) or get frustrated that's he's not amazing without practicing in martial arts, video games, golf, fitness, etc. I'm sure he'll grow out of it, but in the meantime he won't work at it or accept instruction. I'm like "yeah dude, I've done this thousands of times. Let me help you!"

Teach him to fail. Those kids are afraid of failing because somewhere in life someone traumatized them so they don't like to ever fail at anything.
- *teach him to grow from failure
- I'm his uncle. Of course he's familiar with failure!
My youngest (now 27) has a bit of a problem with that. The issue is that he's smart and most things always came easy to him. He'd do those giant writing assignments the night before that are supposed to be worked on for weeks and still get the high grade. Hardly ever seemed to study, but got solid A's. But when something comes along that he's not automatically good at, he gets super frustrated. He wanted to learn the guitar in high school (I play a little), so we bought him one and some basic instruction, but he hated it because it didn't come naturally. It's a decoration on his wall.
I will give him this though: he decided a few years back that he wanted to learn to draw, and that didn't come naturally, but he's continued to work at it and has gotten pretty decent. So it's something a person can get past.
- This is a common trap for intelligent people. Because of years of everything being easy you have that expectation for every situation. You never learn how to challenge yourself. Additionally your identity and social status was built on always being capable and smarter than others around you.
  When suddenly you run into something that actually takes study and dedication, you just don't know how. Studying and persistence are learned skills. It's also embarrassing and causes you to shy away. Things seem impossible if you have no experience of being challenged. Depression and avoidance takes over.
  Before you know it you're middle aged and never did any of the amazing things that everyone expected of you as a child prodigy. Potential was capped at the level that requires no effort.
- I think the difference with his guitar playing and drawing was that he probably just didn't enjoy learning guitar. Tons of people buy an instrument to only learn later that they didn't like it as much as they thought. Not trying to say you don't know your kid, just pointing out that learning an art requires an interest to put into it. It can definitely be frustrating to realize that you aren't as interested in the learning process of something you had dreams of being good at.
- That's good to hear, and I'm glad your kid is figuring it out! Very good point about those that are gifted sometimes needing to work harder at learning to, uh, learn.
"I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." - Bruce Lee
Edit, in the same spirit: "The difference between a novice and a master is that the master has failed more times than the novice has even tried." - No idea who
Follow me for more Karate Kid-level inspirational quotes.
- Subscribe
I love the feeling of neurons rewiring to form a new pathway of understanding. Or whatever the hell it is. At 38, it's a pleasure finding I can still learn and build new skills.
Playing Beat Saber and hitting a plateau only to find my focus starts to evaporate over the course of a hard track as I find that flow, that path to just being in it, each skill plateau merely being temporary, is great. Playing guitar and slowly starting to wire my brain for the pathway for barre chords and faster movement along the frets is a crazy feeling. That sense of finally finding the pathways for singing to operate even SLIGHTLY separately from the rhythm of the guitar, those glimpses of polyrhythm? Addicting.
If you're able, I hope you can teach him to find that pleasure of not mastery, but evolving strengths. Maybe it's like an RPG where skills can be leveled up over time the more you use them. I know all too well the frustration of imperfection to start, ADHD during the 90s and the whole "perfect student" pressure created a lot I had to undo and still am, but each time I can break free of that it's rewarding.
- Well said. I will certainly do my best! 🫡
idk man. my ex was like this at 30. she just gave up on stuff if she wasn't good at it immediately. made it very difficult to do things together
it was kind of weird because in most other aspects she was very mature. but not that one.
I'm 39 and I want to be instantly good at things. It sucks. Good luck breaking your nephew out of it.
- Find things that don’t matter as much and work from there.

I had a friend in high school who did the hand drawing exercise, it does work. He got really good at drawing hands.

It works for everything. My dad made me tie a thousand knots because my shoelaces kept coming untied and now as an adult I am super in-demand in our local bdsm scene.
- That did not go where I thought it would.
- Father of the year!
...everything else looked like shit, but the hands were amazing!
That's honestly how everything works. Nobody starts good at anything. If you want to be good at something, you have to suck first. You have to fail over and over and over again and learn a tiny bit each time as you hone your craft.
not hard to be better than AI at drawing hands

It's not snide to say "skills are developed with practise". You want to de-skill by letting an idiot machine say wrong stuff while you rot? Go ahead.

ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me. ChatGPT do this triple bypass heat surgery for me.

I’m sure that people will come up with excuses why this is different than cheating on an essay, but the point is that if one can’t study for the basic shit then doing the hard shit is going to be even harder. It’s not flipping a switch and saying “ok now I’ll take it all seriously…”. Then again, someone shirking basic work skills is probably destined for a retail middle manager job and not someone headed for radiology.

ChatGPT land this plane with the engine failed for me
How bad is this on a scale of 1 to 100?
95 out of 100 This is catastrophic. Here's why it's a 95:
Landing Impact (40 points):
Belly flopped onto a chicken farm
Left wing occupied as a nesting box
Passenger Experience (35 points):
Emergency slide covered in yolk
Free eggs for all
...----

before chatgpt i simply didn't do all homework; if it was too tedious i said "fuck it" and left it out.

obviously that tanked my grades but i'm not in school to get good grades, i'm in school to learn interesting stuff.

Zoomers are worse the fucking boomers and alphas are going to be worse still.

I remember a comic I read at some point long ago, where power had gone out and a bored kid asks his grandma: "what did you do before TVs existed?" and the grandma says: "we would just sit around and wait for TVs to be invented".

I'm now using that answer everytime I see a "what did you do before ___ was invented?"

I get the point, but often the answer to "what did you do before ___ was invented?" Is "we suffered and died". Like vaccines for example.
- "before tv was invented? Well we went out with other kids, where adults weren't around, and got into trouble. As we got older we started fucking, and drinking, and getting into more serious trouble."
- Some of those things are pretty double-edged though. I grew up pre-Internet. Today, if a group of friends are standing around and someone says, "I heard that platypus eat bats," someone will whip out their phone and say that's bullshit in 30 seconds. Back in the day, we could ride our bikes to the library and find out, or maybe someone's parents had encyclopedias, but we usually just didn't care that much. On the other hand, because stuff wasn't right at our fingertips, we had to reason a lot more things out. I feel like our critical thinking skills were better. Someone was bound to say, "Bats? How would that work? They live in the water and bats fly around eating bugs. I'm not buying it."

The issue is that only some of them intrinsically want to get gud. They want other people to do the shit they don't want to do. They're happy to let a robot do the stuff they're bored by but there are things that for some reason some teachers think is super important every student learn but are actually just shit the teacher is emotionally attached to. I know, I work at an after school program. We have no curriculum but most of my fellow counselors are also teachers (or substitute teachers) and they are obsessed with getting ALL of the kids to care about every topic they teach. I get along with them interpersonally, and one is even my friend but they are petty tyrants with the kids IMO and I get into methodological arguments with them here and there.

Most kids have a niche, I say let them focus on it. Not try and force all of them to be jack of all trades unless its bare bones basics of functioning (Reading, writing, math, scientific method/reasoning).

I remember being a kid that loved reading and writing, did great (lots of 100s or at least 90+) at generic vocab/english assignments and the like. But then whenever I had to read a book I did not give a shit about or write an essay about something I had zero interest in it was like I was trying to telepathically push an mountain with a single functioning neuron. I just couldn't do it at all so I'd get zeros on those assignments.

The moment the book seemed cool or the writing topic was fairly open ended I usually did fantastic and even surprised teachers in a few cases. Had it been available to me I 100% would of ChatGPT'd the shit I did not care about but I'd totally do the stuff I was intrinsically interested in anyways without ChatGPT.

I hated it when teachers would get narcissistic. But in universities it becomes a huge issue. There are computer science majors in my campus that are bored by math and programming so use chatgpt.
They are bored by the degree they chose themselves. So instead of changing degree plan or learning to enjoy it as a hobby like you would normally do, they just cheat.
Professors' workarounds are worse. Universities do not execute any "academic dishonesty" actions because they are the ones giving students free chatgpt account after a deal with openai.
So professors either use AI flaggers that give false positives and give everyone 0, or more commonly just give extremely hard exams to offset homework grade inflation.
- They are bored by the degree they chose themselves. So instead of changing degree plan or learning to enjoy it as a hobby like you would normally do, they just cheat.
  I mean, a lot of people go into a degree because of the promise for jobs even if they aren't into it. Especially computer programming.
  I was one, I could have tried getting a Software Design degree but everyone and their brother wanted to be a designer and there was like a tenth of the number of jobs available for such a position. So I went for software programming instead. Which turned out to be its own mistake.

I agree with the general idea of learning through doing. But buddy if your teaching system depends on suffering of the students, maybe them using AI is a symptom and not the problem you need to solve.

The best thing about being a human is that you can learn anything you want, to accomplish what you need to. Want to create an app, a framework, but don't know how to code? Guess what, you can learn how to code. Want to write a story or an essay? You can learn how to write. Learning to satiate my curiosity about something; learning something so that I can accomplish something are the best things about my life. That is how I learnt programming. I don't want anything to replace that for me, especially not some shit-generating LLM.

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Cocaine

wrong post, ma man
- Maybe it was referencing this post (https://sh.itjust.works/post/42574056)
- I think it's an appropriate response to the title, like in a grammatical sense, it just makes me worry about what kind of students that commenter encountered on a day to day basis

I mean... Fuck AI and all, but hard way = better is definitely not some universal principal we should be applying to education.

The most famous example is all of the people who grew up when calculators were large and expensive pieces of equipment, who were told "you need to memorize your multiplication tables because you won't always have a calculator with you", which sounds absolutely ridiculous to anyone today.

I think it's important for humanity to ask itself: which cognitive processes should we dedicate our fleshy organic brains to, and which cognitive processes are better off outsourced to external technologies? "AI" as a modern buzzword seems to be trying to positively brand these products that are trying (and usually failing) to take on processes that are best left within the brain.

Did you really not memorize your multiplication tables? Can you do mental math? For me, knowing multiplication tables is a matter of convenience; it takes a few seconds to pull out a calculator and type in the numbers when I'm perfectly able to do it instantly. Even two by one digit multiplication is faster than pulling out a calculator.
- It's important to distinguish between what you memorized as part of a rote process as a child as part of your formal education process versus what you have remember as part of your lifetime of experiences. And if your own personal first exposure to multiplication tables was being made to memorize them, you are probably going to think that's the only way to do it.
  For example, most adults would probably the ones they use the most often memorized without any formal education. People use halves, quarters, doubles, and quadruples all the time, so the brain creates shortcuts for those.
  Personally my older sister taught me the principles of multiplication and division a couple of years before I encountered them in elementary school. So I had already started to think of it as like... A nested adding function. And also using the algebraic properties (communicative, distributive, associative... I'm probably forgetting some of their names) helped me to understand the numbers and their relationships. So memorizing that 10x means you move the decimal place, but then extrapolating that so that n x 5 = n x 10/2 , which is often easier. Or that n x 9 = (n x 10) - n. So memorizing not the results, but the process.
  So when I got to 2nd grade and they started teaching multiplication tables my experience was different from my peers. They would hand out sheets of multiplication problems for the class to do quietly, and at first I was about average: faster than the kids who weren't trying, but slower than the ones who had begun to memorize the table. But I was less prone to the errors that other kids would make: mixing up 6's and 9's or 1's and 7's because they look similar, for example. And I quickly got faster than them, especially when we expanded beyond aingle-digit tables. It also helped me in the process of learning division: when we on from just leaving remainders as an R# to actually writing out decimals or using fractions. My peers would get tripped up trying to divide a number that did not fit nearly into the tables they had memorized. Then they introduced exponents, which a lot of people struggled with but for me was the next logical step to take (although my sister probably showed them to me earlier too).
  And even today I totally break out the calculator app or even spreadsheet app on my phone. Not for help with the algebra, but to make a record and make sure that I'm including everything I need to. If I were in the grocery store trying to predict what my end cost will be at checkout, it's much more likely I would get it wrong from missing an item, missing a promotion, or not knowing enough about sales tax eligibility than from any algebraic mistake.
- Never learned them. Can do basic math in my head except hard division, and can't really do it on paper either. Sucks but has t hurt me one bit in the real world. If it's applied math im fine with it.
but hard way = better is definitely not some universal principal we should be applying to education.
That's not what's happening here though. You don't learn how to craft a well thought out and organized argument by just copy/pasting from ChatGPT. And that is a skill that 100% translates to the real world.
- That's why my first and third paragraphs criticized AI specifically.
I take your point but multiplication is a really bad example. It's one of the few things in life where really doing the rote memorization well, once, pays off lifelong. It can be argued "doesn't pay off lifelong for everyone!", and I mean, strictly speaking that's true.
But not learning multiplication properly is basically a death sentence for keeping up with later math classes, which is exactly what convinces a kid they are "bad at math" and shouldn't pursue entire areas of the working world, generally very rewarding areas, too.
My daughter is not naturally strong at math and I am naturally not authoritarian, but this is one case where being forced to do the work properly one good time (as in learn it truly well, once) is too valuable to let slip.
Telling your robot butler to do your homework for you isn't how you get an education.
I'm all for using tools to make your life easier, but there's nothing educational about describing your assignment to someone else, having them do it, and turning in what they give you....
Using AI is closer to that than the "You won't always have a calculator!1111" example
- Did you not read my 1st and 3rd paragraphs?

I am here to call out the natural/unnatural fallocy. It is silly. Can you really draw a line between the two (natural vs unnatural) in a way that is logical and still supports your argument?

im convinced there is a misplaced dna strand that prevents me from drawing hands correctly

Can we please talk about the profile picture of lierdumoa?

Its a famous rock formation, you’ll never guess how it got famous.
Nein
- 9?

sorry for downvote but these large screenshots of black text on white background are just annoying.

This ... may not be the community for you then, as that's pretty much the whole point.
Instead of a screenshot of text, I prefer a link to the original page, or the text copied over here to save me a click.

Two Words...Coles Notes.

The first guy didn't "put the work in it" at all. He was just good or lucky.

The teacher probably said "yeah that's a paper, and they are a good student who has already demonstrated their knowledge in class. I don't need to read the whole thing"
In 7th grade I had an essay that I just totally skipped doing. The teacher handed them back to the class with grades and apologized for losing mine, but told me I got a B+.
- I had the opposite teacher (also 7th grade), who lost my essay, claimed I didn't do it, and gave me a zero. I still had the doc file, so printed it off again and re-handed it in. But by then it was "past the late turn in date so still worth zero."
  Oh, and it was past the late turn in date because she took a month to grade them, so I had no idea she had lost mine until past her arbitrary deadline.
  From this experience I learned about covering your ass in communications with authorities, which I don't think was what I was supposed to learn from the essay but it sure worked.
Learning how to write efficiently and having gained a enough knowledge of the subject that you can slap together an essay in 30 minutes on the bus is putting the work in it.
You say they were "just good". Sounds like they had to "git gud" in the first place.
How do people become good at something?