> Today I can ask ChatGPT to write me a 4 pages essay about a novel I've never heard of and call it a day. There's no value gained in the process.
If we take the original article at face value, no you can't do that. ChatGPT will apparently produce something that is obviously ChatGPT produced and fail to fool even the most absent minded of instructors that you have read the material. So even with a ChatGPT LLM to help you out, you're largely going to have to do a modified version of C, replacing your class mate with the LLM and adding in the need to do your own reading and validation to ensure that the text matches the actual book contents.
> If I ask google maps to plot me a directions from Prague to Brussels it will yield a list of turns that will guide me to my destinations, but by any means I can't claim I've learned topography of Germany in the process.
I would argue that even if you plotted a route by hand reading maps, you can't claim to have learned the topography of Germany either. "The map isn't the territory" after all.
ChatGPT and the like are in a weird position at the moment. It's usually pretty clear that you have written it using an LLM, but it's hard to PROVE. And you need to be able to prove it (to some degree, which varies depending on the institution) to reliably count off for it, otherwise the student will challenge your finding that they cheated and the Honor Court (or administrator, or other equivalent) will tell you that you can't do that.
So, you can usually get away with it if there is not some way the professor/TA can prove it.
As things change, this will change, but that's the situation the author of the original article finds themself in, because it's the current situation.
> If we take the original article at face value, no you can't do that. ChatGPT will apparently produce something that is obviously ChatGPT produced and fail to fool even the most absent minded of instructors that you have read the material.
Only if you don't have any custom instructions about style and don't proofread it afterwards. All the usual "tells" of ChatGPT are very obvious to scrub out, and you don't have to use OpenAI's chat wrapper to begin with.
Ok, but if you're going to proofread ChatGPT's output and edit it and massage it until you get something that isn't obviously the output of the LLM, how is that different from taking your buddy's homework and changing enough of the text to make it look like you didn't copy it? In either case you have to read what someone else wrote and comprehend it enough to decide what should or shouldn't change.
If we take the original article at face value, no you can't do that. ChatGPT will apparently produce something that is obviously ChatGPT produced and fail to fool even the most absent minded of instructors that you have read the material. So even with a ChatGPT LLM to help you out, you're largely going to have to do a modified version of C, replacing your class mate with the LLM and adding in the need to do your own reading and validation to ensure that the text matches the actual book contents.
> If I ask google maps to plot me a directions from Prague to Brussels it will yield a list of turns that will guide me to my destinations, but by any means I can't claim I've learned topography of Germany in the process.
I would argue that even if you plotted a route by hand reading maps, you can't claim to have learned the topography of Germany either. "The map isn't the territory" after all.