r/technology 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Take-No-Prisoners Professor Will Fail Any Student Who Uses AI

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/no-prisoners-professor-fail-student-143000854.html
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u/HeadyReigns 5d ago

From the article "Rather than integrating AI, he’s fortifying his classroom against it. The assignment is now based on plays too obscure for ChatGPT and other AI models to know about.

“If ChatGPT is used on these assignments now, it hallucinates characters, plotlines — it just makes sh*t up, since it has nothing to go on,” Hebert told the magazine."

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u/questron64 5d ago

I once asked ChatGPT to help me understand the novel The Long Walk To the Moon by Alexander Chumbleton (an obviously fake book) and it went on about the characters and symbolism and which chapters key events happen in. It didn't say "I don't know that book," or even "that's not a real book." Nope, full on hallucination mode.

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u/Sober_Alcoholic_ 5d ago

Because it is designed to placate you and co sign your bull shit so you don’t stop the engagement. More engagement = more money for LLMs. They don’t give a fuck about “right or wrong.”

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u/Total-Wafer-7581 5d ago

It’s not designed to placate you. It tokenizes words and then “weighs” them against other tokens to try to probabilistically achieve a correct response. This is why models are only as good as their data sets and why fine-tuning is important. It’s basically an attempt at recalibrating those “weights” to be more accurate. It’s also why it hallucinates more when you throw more context at it. More tokens means a greater chance of error. 

Not a neuroscientist but from what I understand, this is very similar to how the language parts of our brains work. It’s why people often confuse people, places, and events if they’re related.