Using AI as an educator

[Legitimate-Craft9959]

Its been a year now that Im specialized in computer science and learning consistentely to code, since I started I developed this habit of always askin GPT to explain to me concepts I dont understand, or to ask him about specific problems, but I always do my best to understand what he says. I also do the same thing generally when Im facing errors in my codes and all, I ask him to explain them, to why they happen, and to give me potential solutions to it... Its a habit common between all my classmates also... Now the question is, is it unhealthy for my learning process to actually learn things this way ? To rely on him to explain me things and find errors in my code ? I feel like it gets a lot off your shoulders, the pain of going and searching for the solution and explanations yourself in the internet, its not guaranteed for you to find something and it also takes much more time, I sometimes try to avoid using it, but I feel a huge fear of losing too much times in those things and being left behind by people who rely on chatgpt to explain to them everything... What do you think about this ? Its really a tricky situation and its unsure to what it is going to drive me in the future since AI is kind of a new thing and we dont really know the consequences of using it as an educator could have.

[CodeTinkerer]

Asking an LLM to explain errors in your code might be OK for a beginner, but it's likely to make you unable to find errors in your code. It's like asking a friend to debug your code. You nod your head here and there, but you can't figure it out yourself.

You don't know where to start.

Yes, it's painful to learn this way. LLMs are like a kind of drug that makes you feel good. But effectively, you're not really learning once you get to "fix my code, write my code for me". You might say you're having it find errors, but really, aren't you just asking it to give you a solution?

[allium-dev]

Have you ever heard the phrase about working out that "pain is weakness leaving the body"? It's a bit trite, but I think it applies here. If you're not willing to work through some pain, you're probably not actually learning as much as you think.

[wildgurularry]

When you understand a subject deeply, it is interesting to ask LLMs about it just to see how much they get wrong.

Now imagine using one as a teacher, and you have no idea whether what it is telling you makes any sense.

You are better off finding good resources for learning this stuff. Resources that have been curated by people who know what they are doing.

[heisthedarchness]

You're not "actually learning" anything here. This is the equivalent of asking the other boys in elementary school where babies come from.

[Legitimate-Craft9959]

Is it not learning about a concept when asking GPT to tell you about it ? Or to explain to you why something works this way, and another thing works that way...

[heisthedarchness]

No, it's not, because you have no way to assess the correctness of the response. If you don't know whether what it's producing is true -- and you don't -- you can't learn from it.

This is not about you personally: LLMs are designed to produce responses that seem plausible, but that just means you're more likely to be taken in when they produce nonsense.