Hacker News Reader

Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

If original writing is so valuable, people will pay the premium for it in cases where it matters.

The reality people don’t want to accept is that in many cases, original work doesn’t matter. There is no value in an original booking reminder for my dentist or most travel agency blogs on reasons to go to Thailand.

Most courses don’t even need original work. Is there really any value in having profs generate thousands of different explanations of the same concept for the same topic? I don’t think so, especially as most don’t put much effort in.

Thousands of explanations have been written on how to do an integral or how hydrogen bonds to oxygen. That’s not useful in most cases.

View on HN

> Most courses don’t even need original work. Is there really any value in having profs generate thousands of different explanations of the same concept for the same topic? I don’t think so, especially as most don’t put much effort in.

I actually used ChatGPT to generate homework assignments when I was a professor last year. I of course double-checked the questions to make sure they made sense, and I would solve them myself to make sure that the solution was something that I could realistically expect a student to be able to figure out.

It was honestly great; making homework and exams was a huge time sink for me the semester before (the supervising professors didn't give me any of the materials like he was supposed to, so I had to improvise), I was teaching another class the next semester, so having ChatGPT give me assignments took a task that took me about three or four hours before to about 30 minutes.

Do the students need 100% of the assignments to be my completely unique perspective of Object Oriented Programming? I don't think so, a lot of this stuff is just practice, and they still got my perspective on things during the lectures.

> Is there really any value in having profs generate thousands of different explanations of the same concept for the same topic? I don’t think so, especially as most don’t put much effort in.

Would you be satisfied with a professor who is mindlessly reading back to you information from external course materials? I know I wasn't when I was in school. It was only the professors who made the effort to teach what _they_ knew who were worth learning from.

There can be a mix though.

I mentioned in a sibling comment that I used ChatGPT to generate homework. I tried pretty hard to get it to generate questions that I thought would be fun and interesting, instead of kind of boring cookie-cutter stuff that was in every textbook (e.g. shapes and animals to represent classes and inheritance and interfaces...boring!). I was very happy with the results (my favorite was getting the students to implement a rough version of the Pokemon battle system in Java).

I was a bit of a weird professor since I had like 11 years of industry experience at the time, and had been a college dropout not long before I was a professor (I did have my bachelors and was pursuing a doctorate while teaching, don't worry), and I do think that I was able to put a unique spin on things and explain stuff from a more industrial perspective, but I honestly feel like AI helped me with that, instead of making the stuff boring by regurgitating the textbook.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com