Wow, homework is an insane example of a "workforce."
Homework is in some ways the opposite of actual economic labor. Students pay to attend school, and homework is (theoretically) part of that education; something designed to help students learn more effectively. They are most certainly not paid for it.
Having a LLM do that "work" is economically insane. The desired learning does not happen, and the labor of grading and giving feedback is entirely wasted.
Students use ChatGPT for it because of perverse incentives of the educational system. It has no bearing on economic production of value.
Importantly, the _reason_ that ChatGPT is good at this kind of homework, is that the homework is _intended_ to be toil. That's how we learn- through doing things, and through repetition.
The problem set or paper you turn in is not the product. The product is the learning that the human obtains from the _process_.
The homework is just there, being graded, to evaluate your progress at performing the required toil.
I’ve got much better education reading and researching myself than I did from most of my classes in undergrad where an underpaid TA or professor who was just there for their mandatory minimum teaching time before returning to their research, just reading out loud portions of the textbook and then even doing shit as dumb as giving us physics labs that had a fill in the blank sheet with an answer bank on the paper as the homework.
There are good schools where you can get an actual education you couldn’t on your own but a lot of universities are similarly only interested in getting your money in exchange for a qualification.
Like, all the advertising I saw from schools was about job placement rates after graduation, not praising the education itself
I have. Reading assignments and writing papers on them gave me a good command of topics I carry to this day.
And I never would have been able to learn math without doing a bunch of problems early on... you can think you understand something in class but it takes applying it a bunch of times in different scenarios to really embed that knowledge in useful ways.
Homework is in some ways the opposite of actual economic labor. Students pay to attend school, and homework is (theoretically) part of that education; something designed to help students learn more effectively. They are most certainly not paid for it.
Having a LLM do that "work" is economically insane. The desired learning does not happen, and the labor of grading and giving feedback is entirely wasted.
Students use ChatGPT for it because of perverse incentives of the educational system. It has no bearing on economic production of value.