That's what so surprising to me - they data clearly shows the experiment had terrible results. And the write up is nothing but the author stating: "glowing success!".
And they didn't even bother to test the most important thing. Were the LLM evaluations even accurate! Have graders manually evaluate them and see if the LLMs were even close or were wildly off.
This is clearly someone who had a conclusion to promote regardless of what the data was going to show.
> And they didn't even bother to test the most important thing. Were the LLM evaluations even accurate!
This is not true; the professor and the TAs graded every student submission. See this paragraph from the article:
(Just in case you are wondering, I graded all exams myself and I asked the TA to also grade the exams; we mostly agreed with the LLM grades, and I aligned mostly with the softie Gemini. However, when examining the cases when my grades disagreed with the council, I found that the council was more consistent across students and I often thought that the council graded more strictly but more fairly.)
At the risk of perhaps stating the obvious, there appears to be a whiff of aggression from this article. The "fighting fire with fire" language, the "haha, we love old FakeFoster, going to have to see if we change that" response to complaints that the voice was intimidating ... if there wasn't a specific desire to punish the class for LLM use by subjecting them to a robotic NKVD interrogation then the authors should have been more careful to avoid leaving that impression.
Tried it in earnest. Definitely detect some aggression, and would feel stressed if this were an exam setting. I think it was pg who said that any stress you add in an interview situation is just noise, and dilutes the signal.
Also, given that there's so many ways for LLMs to go off the rails (it just gave me the student id I was supposed to say, for example), it feels a bit unprofessional to be using this to administer real exams.
Not that bad? I gave it a random name and random net ID and it basically screamed at me to HANG UP RIGHT NOW AND FIGURE OUT THE CORRECT NET ID. Hahaha
That does not resemble any good professor I've ever heard. It's very aggressive and stern, which is not generally how oral exams are conducted. Feels much more like I'm being cross examined in court.
Also tried it and it could have been a lot better. If I had any type of interview with that voice (press interview, mentor interview, job interview) I would think I was being scammed, sold something, or had entered the wrong room.
The belligerence about changing the voice is so weird. And it does sort of set a tone straight off. "We got feedback that the voice was frightening and intimidating. We're keeping it tho."
I've got a long standing disagreement with an AI CEO that believes LLM convergence indicates greater accuracy. How to explain basic cause and effect in these AI use cases is a real challenge. The essential basic understanding of what an LLM is is not there, and that lack of comprehension is a civilization wide issue.
I don't think they're terrible, but I'm grading on a curve because it's their first attempt and more of a trial run. It seems promising enough to fix the issues and try again.
And they didn't even bother to test the most important thing. Were the LLM evaluations even accurate! Have graders manually evaluate them and see if the LLMs were even close or were wildly off.
This is clearly someone who had a conclusion to promote regardless of what the data was going to show.