Abel Molina
abelmolina's profile header
Abel Molina

@abelmolina@mstdn.social

In this feed, we believe prosperity should spread widely beyond the 1%, with no bigoted scapegoating when that fails to occur. Posts own.

January 18, 2023

The era of ChatGPT is kind of horrifying for me as an instructor of mathematics... Not because I am worried students will use it to cheat (I don't care! All the worse for them!), but rather because many students may try to use it to learn.

For example, imagine that I give a proof in lecture and it is just a bit too breezy for a student (or, similarly, they find such a proof in a textbook). They don't understand it, so they ask ChatGPT to reproduce it for them, and they ask followup questions to the LLM as they go.

I experimented with this today, on a basic result in elementary number theory, and the results were disastrous... ChatGPT sent me on five different wild goose-chases with subtle and plausible-sounding intermediate claims that were just false. Every time I responded with "Hmm, but I don't think it is true that [XXX]", the LLM responded with something like "You are right to point out this error, thank you. It is indeed not true that [XXX], but nonetheless the overall proof strategy remains valid, because we can [...further gish-gallop containing subtle and plausible-sounding claims that happen to be false]."

I know enough to be able to pinpoint these false claims relatively quickly, but my students will probably not. They'll instead see them as valid steps that they can perform in their own proofs.

Elk Logo

Welcome to Elk!

Elk is a nimble Mastodon web client. You can login to your Mastodon account and use it to interact with the fediverse.

Expect some bugs and missing features here and there. Elk is Open Source and we're actively improving it as a community project. Join us and let's build it together!

If you'd like to report a bug, help us testing, give feedback, or contribute, reach out to us on GitHub and get involved.

To boost development, you can sponsor the Team through GitHub Sponsors. We hope you enjoy Elk!

Joaquín SánchezTAKAHASHI ShuujiPatak三咲智子 Kevin DengDaniel RoeAnthony Fu

The Elk Team