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The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition
(www.forkingpaths.co)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
The problem with AI here is that it tends to prefer agreeing to you over being correct and it's very likely that it teaches patterns and terminology to you that doesn't exist.
For example, I just asked ChatGPT to explain a "backflip" in the context of agile development (I claimed I was an university student and that a teacher used that term in the context of moving tickets), and it came up with this:
It just takes the nonsensical word, makes something up, and claims that it's right.
I believe you and agree.
I have to be carful to not ask the AI leading questions. It’s very happy to go off and fix things that don’t need fixing when I suggest there is a bug, but in reality it’s user error or a configuration error on my part.
It’s so eager to please.
Yeah, as soon as the question could be interpreted as leading, it will directly follow your lead.
I had a weird issue with Github the other day, and after Google and the documentation failed me, I asked ChatGPT as a last-ditch effort.
My issue was that some file that really can't have an empty newline at the end had an empty newline at the end, no matter what I did to the files before committing. I figured, that something was adding a newline and ChatGPT confirmed that almost enthusiastically. It was so sure that Github did that and told me that it's a frequent complaint.
Turns out, no, it doesn't. All that happened is that I first committed the file with an empty newline by accident, and Github raw files has a caching mechanism that's set to quite a long time. So all I had to do was to just wait for a bit.
Wasted about an hour of my time.
The joke is on you (and all of us) though. I'm going to start using "backflip" in my agile process terminology.