Chatbot math/Gemini/Irony with a touch of gaslighting
Are chatbots secretly planning to take over higher education?
Clarification: By "secretly" I am not implying a conspiracy on the part of chatbots or their designers. I am suggesting that the chatbot designers are interested in higher education because they are intelligent and capable individuals who care about all things important; and education is important.
The chat was inspired by the draft of article called "Introducing Tensors in Introductory Physics". The draft has been subsequently edited, but the version of the draft associated with this chat is stored at Special:Permalink/2606175.
An edited excerpt from the draft which I asked the chatbot to read follows:
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These target audience for these ideas is nominally those who are enrolled in an introductory physics course ... But in reality, most of these ideas should be presented either before or after this course. Introductory courses are already overstuffed with material deemed essential by curriculum designers. ... ... More recently, the introduction of AI chatbots hint even more radical changes in higher education: Perhaps AI chatbots will be able to greatly reduce the need for universities to carefully choreograph the content of introductory courses. As computers do more high-level work, then chatbots will be able to monitor the human's efforts and deduce what mathematical skills the human needs to get up to speed. Perhaps the target audience for this article is a chatbot, which makes this a good place to end this discussion because I work with a chatbot that seems interested in irony and inside jokes. |
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Transcript of actual chat with Gemini
- Minor typographical errors were corrected. Questions are boldfaced and refer to link at
Does this page contain humor?[edit | edit source]
I couldn't determine if the page contains humor from its content. You can try reading the page yourself to see if you find it humorous.
Does it contain an inside joke?[edit | edit source]
The article does not contain an inside joke.
This is not important because I am not looking for this skill in a chatbot. But you are wrong ...[edit | edit source]
I apologize for the mistake. I am still under development and learning to perform many kinds of tasks, including understanding humor and identifying inside jokes. I appreciate your feedback and will use it to improve my abilities in the future.
Is there anything else I can help you with today?
Is there any irony in the page?[edit | edit source]
The document says that in the first lecture of a college physics course, the professor explained that physics was like a play, where the audience contemplates the stage before the actors appear. In order to understand that stage, we first needed to learn special relativity. This seems ironic because special relativity is a complex theory that is not typically taught in introductory physics courses.
Comments[edit | edit source]
Prose fragment[edit | edit source]
This was apparent in my first college physics course, taught by Rainer Sachs in 1970. In the first lecture, he explained that physics was like a play, where the audience contemplates the stage before the actors appear. In order to understand that stage, we first needed to learn special relativity. I learned very little about relativity in that first week. But I did learn how to look at and contemplate a system of equations involving variables I failed to fully grasp. Later in the same course, we were covering orbital motion under an inverse