I offered students in Introduction To Epidemic Modeling For Infectious Diseases some general guidance on using AI this week, and I thought I’d share it more broadly. We are going to get into specifics for AI-assisted coding over the next few weeks, because that is one area where I think this stuff might really help them in this course.
Introduction to Generative AI in Epi 554
- Not magic — “just” next word prediction
- But it is next word prediction so good that it keeps me up at night, like in existential crisis
- How does it do it? Statistical language model — a conditional probability distribution
- This is the platonic ideal of the philosophical notion of “bullshit”
- BS does not mean useless; it can be useful! For somethings… but…
- Studies have found that AI is good for helping people with average-to-poor skills in an area attain slightly-above-average performance — so what are you average-to-poor at???
- Prof Steve Mooney says: for 554 (and all classes), the only point of doing coursework is to learn what you’re doing. If you learn to use AI to help you code in general, great! That’s a useful skill. BUT if you only learn to use AI to help you complete this coursework, it’s like you just overfit your model – you can’t project forward usefully with it. So, your proper focus ought to be on how AI helps you avoid busywork/debug faster/more deeply understand what you’re doing, not just how to get done sooner.
- ChatBots can help you build on your existing skills. Lauren Wilner (Epi 560 TA) says: I find ChatBots useful for things that are at the edge of what I know. That is slightly different, I think, than areas where I have average-to-poor skills.
- I will be demonstrating its use through ChatBots and not through coding assistants (like GitHub co-pilot); I think this is best matched to this class, but I’m still learning!
- Take responsibility. Lauren Wilner (Epi 560 TA) says: I know it sounds obvious, but I would emphasize that they need to read and edit what ChatGPT or other AI tools give them. A lot of them seem to skip that step and trust it blindly, and I would strongly remind them that they need to use it for advice and feedback, not for answers.
- Don’t hide it. Lauren Wilner (Epi 560 TA) says: The students who are the most transparent with me in office hours or elsewhere in terms of where they are stuck, what they asked ChatGPT, and why they are still stuck, are the students that I find to be the most successful. The students who hide their use of AI struggle more because they often don’t really understand what they are doing. Whatever you can do to create a welcoming environment in terms of AI tools but also a cautionary tale that they can’t just give you straight ChatGPT output, the better results I think you will have!
- Build on what you know. Lauren Wilner (Epi 560 TA) says: Try to use AI to help you build on things you already know. For example, if you are told to write a loop but already know how to do what you want to do by copying and pasting 10 times, write out what you would do and then ask ChatGPT to give you advice on putting it into a loop. That way, you can run your code both using what you wrote and what ChatGPT gave you.
Healthy Algorithms 