alt Hacker NewsShe says she can usefully steer LLMs, but how would she know? What knowledge of the research topic, methods and their applicability would she use to judge that, if all she’s doing is writing a prompt asking ChatGPT to write a summary of her research topic, methods and their applicability?
Supposing using LLMs as research tools is fine, the chalk talk is still necessary to test that the researcher has the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary to discriminate usefully between alternative responses, and refine prompts and such. You can’t just get a response from an LLM and then refine it for your specific needs by saying “now refine that reply for my specific needs”. You need to know and understand what those are, and why.
Line one is "I recently interviewed for a tenure-track position" which suggests she has a resume that ... actually qualifies for an interview? And did every single step up until now correctly?
Like, I'm sorry, you can't just walk into those off the street. Don't be absurd. I suppose you could say the entire system was happy to spend 4 years lying to her about her grades? But at that point it's "corrupt system completely fails a young student who was enthralled by new technology"
> test that the researcher has the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary to discriminate usefully between alternative responses
... and how, exactly, is she gonna demonstrate that if she can't prompt it in the first place?
> “now refine that reply for my specific needs”
That absolutely works if you've discussed your specific needs with the model for four years and it has dozens of memories and reference files to work from.