Studying and Education with AI

[michio]

This thread is for general discussion about how to learn anything while using AI as a tool, also for any discussion about how AI is affecting the education system. Dump any thoughts about those things here.

As of the time of writing this, all of my opinions below are predicated on using GPT4. I have exclusively used GPT4 since March, and it currently blows everything out of the water. None of this applies to GPT3 or other basic models.

Gemini pro is currently powering the Bard chat bot and I recommend using that instead of GPT3. Overall it's better than GPT3, it's free, and the training data is more up-to-date than GPT3.

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AI's effect on student performance

I don't have any hard data about this, but my speculation is that AI is going to cause good, non-lazy students to accelerate beyond their peers faster than usual, and it's going to cause lazy students to fall behind even further. In an AI world, the gap is widening between good students and bad students.

AI can be a powerful tool for learning, but if used incorrectly, it's just cheating and allowing someone else to do your work for you. Students may also adopt the idea of, "Why do I have to learn anything that an AI can tell me or do for me?" and outright refuse to learn something due to this attitude.

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AI as Teachers

AI has been a powerful teacher and mentor for me so far. You can ask it to explain something over and over without it becoming annoyed or tired. You can ask it to explain something at different levels of complexity until you understand. You can try to explain something to the AI in your own words, then ask it if what you've said makes any sense.

Random example. Last month I watched some videos from PBS Space Time PBS Space Time - YouTube , which I highly recommend. I tried watching a video about loop quantum gravity, and the guy completely lost me after like 4 minutes into the video, so I asked ChatGPT to explain some concepts to me. It took me a while, but after talking to ChatGPT for a good hour or two, I was finally able to somewhat wrap my head around the core concepts of LQG. If I used google, there's no way I would have understood any of that and I would have given up quickly.

You can ask the AI to do things teachers would normally do. You give it a topic, including a sample of the materials if you'd like, then ask it to generate flashcards, test questions, essay questions, then you attempt these things on your own.

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Prompt Engineering

I've facetiously criticized "prompt engineering" in the past, as a buzzword made up by grifters or ignorant HR employees that don't understand what AI is, but I'm walking that back here. Both of these things are certainly true, but without getting into a big discussion about it, I recommend learning prompt engineering theory, both to make yourself less vulnerable to white collar layoffs coming in the future, but also to get better responses from LLMs. If you take this even a tiny bit seriously, you are easily in the top 1% of people using AI right now and you'll set yourself apart when the layoffs start hitting white collars in the future.

I recommend ignoring both (1) the people who brush off AI as a fad like crypto, and (2) the people who say you don't need "prompt engineering", but instead you just need to communicate better.

(1) I won't get into that here, good luck to those people is all I can say.

(2) You need both. You need to be a good communicator, but you should also know prompt theory to put yourself in the top 1% of people utilizing LLMs on a regular basis. When I see criticisms of ChatGPT, 95% of the time it ends up being someone who doesn't understand how LLMs work, gave it a terrible prompt, or they're using GPT3 which is trash, often all of the above.

Try asking ChatGPT itself how it works and get it to explain prompt engineering.

There's a weirdly high number of people who will say prompt engineering doesn't exist and is just people with inflated egos selling you something. The former is objectively false, the latter does exist, but the existence of grifters selling you ripoff prompt packages and courses doesn't mean prompt engineering doesn't exist. I don't even know how to respond to this, other than the people saying this are also being arrogant and annoying.

We're in the very early stages of AI, so it's true you could argue prompt engineering is common sense, which I would flat out disagree with, but as AI evolves and people figure out more and more, this will become deeper and more complex with time.

I'm halfway through this prompt engineering course on coursera, and I highly recommend doing it.

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Checking for understanding

The most common way I've been learning new things with AI is checking for understanding by using AI as a tutor. If I'm learning something, anything, and I'm not sure I understand something, I'll explain what I know in my own words, and ask it if I'm making sense or I've misunderstood something.

I've been brushing up on algorithms, and if I'm working through a challenging problem and I just can't make any progress, I'll ask it to drop me a hint.

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Useful Tools

Very good prompt engineering course on coursera

AutoExpert - Bots configured with pre-prompts and custom instructions that will make your responses from ChatGPT much better. Must be a plus user and logged in to access AutoExpert. Type /help when it loads up for instructions on how to use.

AutoExpert Chat - Good for general prompts.

AutoExpert Academic - Will help you work with and understand academic papers. Upload a paper and start asking questions.

AutoExpert Dev - For programming.

AutoExpert Video - Great for youtube. Paste in one or more youtube URLs, it will be able to provide a transcript, a summary, it can generate flashcards, a mindmap, and homework questions.

Prompt databases so you can find useful prompts and learn from others.
PromptBase | Prompt Marketplace: Midjourney, ChatGPT, DALL·E, Stable Diffusion & more.
https://prompthero.com/
FlowGPT