[R] Amazing AI

[John Kane]

Does not Medians <- apply(numeric_data, 1, median) give us the rom medians?

On Mon, 19 Dec 2022 at 05:52, Milan Glacier <news using milanglacier.com> wrote:

> On 12/18/22 19:01, Boris Steipe wrote:
> >Technically not a help question. But crucial to be aware of, especially
> for those of us in academia, or otherwise teaching R. I am not aware of a
> suitable alternate forum. If this does not interest you, please simply
> ignore - I already know that this may be somewhat OT.
> >
> >Thanks.
> >------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >You very likely have heard of ChatGPT, the conversation interface on top
> of the GPT-3 large language model and that it can generate code. I thought
> it doesn't do R - I was wrong. Here is a little experiment:
> >Note that the strategy is quite different (e.g using %in%, not
> duplicated() ), the interpretation of "last variable" is technically
> correct but not what I had in mind (ChatGPT got that right though).
> >
> >
> >Changing my prompts slightly resulted it going for a dplyr solution
> instead, complete with %>% idioms etc ... again, syntactically correct but
> not giving me the fully correct results.
> >
> >------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >Bottom line: The AI's ability to translate natural language instructions
> into code is astounding. Errors the AI makes are subtle and probably not
> easy to fix if you don't already know what you are doing. But the way that
> this can be "confidently incorrect" and plausible makes it nearly
> impossible to detect unless you actually run the code (you may have noticed
> that when you read the code).
> >
> >Will our students use it? Absolutely.
> >
> >Will they successfully cheat with it? That depends on the assignment. We
> probably need to _encourage_ them to use it rather than sanction - but
> require them to attribute the AI, document prompts, and identify their own,
> additional contributions.
> >
> >Will it help them learn? When you are aware of the issues, it may be
> quite useful. It may be especially useful to teach them to specify their
> code carefully and completely, and to ask questions in the right way. Test
> cases are crucial.
> >
> >How will it affect what we do as instructors? I don't know. Really.
> >
> >And the future? I am not pleased to extrapolate to a job market in which
> they compete with knowledge workers who work 24/7 without benefits,
> vacation pay, or even a salary. They'll need to rethink the value of their
> investment in an academic education. We'll need to rethink what we do to
> provide value above and beyond what AI's can do. (Nb. all of the arguments
> I hear about why humans will always be better etc. are easily debunked, but
> that's even more OT :-)
> >
> >--------------------------------------------------------
> >
> >If you have thoughts to share how your institution is thinking about
> academic integrity in this situation, or creative ideas how to integrate
> this into teaching, I'd love to hear from you.
>
> *NEVER* let the AI misleading the students! ChatGPT gives you seemingly
> sound but actually *wrong* code!
>
> ChatGPT never understands the formal abstraction behind the code, it
> just understands the shallow text pattern (and the syntax rules) in the
> code. And it often gives you the code that seemingly correct but indeed
> wrongly output. If it is used with code completion, then it is okay
> (just like github copilot), since the coder need to modify the code
> after getting the completion. But if you want to use ChatGPT for
> students to query information / writing code, it is error proning!
>
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-- 
John Kane
Kingston ON Canada

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