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Show HN: Generate quiz questions using AI

by jwblackwell on 10/30/22, 6:04 PM with 47 comments

One of the coolest things I've been able to get GPT-3 to do is generate questions based on a piece of text.

So, I built a simple site to help others do the same. Hopefully, this can be useful to teachers, trainers, or just anyone who wants to create a fun and unique quiz.

  • by peytoncasper on 10/31/22, 1:59 AM

    This is a really awesome application of GPT-3. You should definitely consider turning this into a service and adding the ability to generate Anki decks or flash cards from summary notes.

    That coupled with the quizzing capability could be huge for students in medical school for example.

  • by jwblackwell on 10/31/22, 8:56 AM

    This has blown up more than expected. Thanks, everyone.

    I will unfortunately have to put a restriction in place though as I am going to exhaust my OpenAI quota. I am waiting for them to approve an increase.

    Please follow me on Twitter and register an account on the site for updates. I'll give the first 100 or so users extra free credits in the future

  • by Vt71fcAqt7 on 10/30/22, 11:46 PM

    Tommorow:

    Show HN: answer quiz questions using AI (answerowl.com)

  • by chickenimprint on 10/31/22, 6:10 AM

    It seems to spit out nonsense questions with little relevance to the text. Given a text about grass, it might ask: "what is green?" followed by 3 actually green things, one of them being grass.

    It's a fancy cloze generator. It has no understanding of which constituent parts of a sentence are related to the subject and does not generate alternative answers that are reliably wrong.

  • by barryvan on 10/31/22, 3:40 AM

    Awesome idea, and I really like the implementation! It'd be great to see an integration with something like Moodle -- so that educators could generate quiz questions based on course content automatically, eliminating the "blank page" when they start putting together a quiz.

  • by imranq on 10/31/22, 2:54 AM

    I've been looking for something like this for a while. Really nice and clean UI. there's so much potential for question generation, but one of them is helping people understand whether they got through a page or section with good comprehension before they move on to the next section

  • by nyc111 on 10/31/22, 5:37 AM

    Very nice! I entered this text: “Whereas most of his preceding lectures simply come to an end, Feynman ends this one more philosophically, speculating that the order in the universe we see today is not a statistical fluctuation but a memory of initial conditions.”

    These are the questions:

    Which of the following is true?

    A) Most of Feynman's lectures simply come to an end)

    B) This lecture ends more philosophically)

    C) Feynman speculates that the order in the universe is a statistical fluctuation)

    Answer: B

    What does Feynman speculate about the order in the universe?

    A) That it is a statistical fluctuation)

    B) That it is a memory of initial conditions)

    C) That it is something else entirely)

    Answer: B

    What is the order in the universe?

    A) Random

    B) Organized

    C) Unknown

    Answer: B

    How does Feynman end this lecture?

    A) With a question)

    B) With a thought)

    C) With an answer)

    Answer: B

    What does Feynman speculate about the order in the universe we see today?

    A) That it is a statistical fluctuation)

    B) That it is a memory of initial conditions)

    C) That it is something else entirely)

    Answer: B

  • by ronnier on 10/31/22, 3:51 AM

    Blown away by this. I copy text from a CNN article and the questions were spot on. So good that it seemed human generated.

  • by asmmoto on 10/30/22, 6:49 PM

    Great work! I copy-pasted an article from Wikipedia and it generated one wrong question (all the answers were correct), but the quality of the questions was pretty good.

  • by oneepic on 10/31/22, 7:26 AM

    The site is being hugged to death unfortunately (or something... I'm getting HTTP 500's on every attempt). I was trying to get it to quiz me on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us, but sadly I'll have to try again later.

  • by domlebo70 on 10/30/22, 10:37 PM

    This is amazing. You going to monetize this? Another idea would be to accept a Wikipedia URL and have it generate questions

  • by barbariangrunge on 10/31/22, 5:27 AM

    Please no. Writing good quizzes is really hard and the last thing we need is to throw ai into the mix

  • by blowski on 10/31/22, 12:46 AM

    This looks really useful. I run pub quizzes in the UK and often have to go through this process manually.

    The manual text entry worked well. But the “from URL” option returned 10 questions of “what is the answer to this question?”.

  • by EvanDotPro on 10/31/22, 1:09 AM

    Just showed this to a middle school science and math teacher I'm friends with and wanted to share that she thinks this is awesome and will probably save her a ton of time. Great idea and great work. :)

  • by stefs on 10/31/22, 10:41 AM

        Text too long. Please enter less than 5000 characters. 

    (...)

    There was a problem

        The text must not be greater than 3000 characters.

  • by notefuel on 10/31/22, 1:34 PM

    Shameless plug about our note-taking and flashcards app Notefuel that is built on this idea: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/notefuel-notes-flashcards/id14...

    Uses GPT-3 to generates question, fill-in-the-blanks, multiple choice and couples it with spaced repetition.

  • by planetsprite on 10/31/22, 12:50 AM

    Make sure to rate limit so noone can drain your credits

  • by vore on 10/31/22, 5:26 AM

    Very cool! Though I did put in the physics example and got this:

      2. What is a physicist?

  Choices

  [ ] A scientist who studies the natural world
  [x] A scientist who studies the field of physics
  [ ] A scientist who specializes in the field of physics
  [ ] A scientist who intersects with many interdisciplinary areas of research

  Whoops! Try again

  • by bil7 on 10/31/22, 1:36 AM

    this is actually amazing! no sign up, just an awesome, powerful, useful, application of AI.

  • by kamban on 11/1/22, 12:58 PM

    This is really cool. I saw a similar tool, https://www.questgen.ai/, I am not a teacher, though.

  • by moritonal on 10/30/22, 11:39 PM

    Very cool, I created essentially the same product but hadn't launched due to all the boilerplate I wanted. It's lovely isn't it watching how cleanly the questions and answers come out?

  • by paxvinci on 11/2/22, 11:27 AM

    I tried with a text in Non-English language and it understood very well the text and the questions were "translated" in English.

  • by furbol on 10/31/22, 2:39 AM

    This could be used on any any commenting system or even Reddit to check if the user has read the article and or have knowledge of something before commenting. Sort of a captcha.

  • by boomeranked on 10/31/22, 9:18 AM

    Fantastique. I'd be happy to pay for this service with an API access. We run team building events and trivia is so popular. Your service would save us hours monthly.

  • by aliu22 on 11/3/22, 5:17 PM

    If someone built this as a Chrome extension to quiz based off my browsing I’d totally pay for it.

  • by TotoHorner on 10/31/22, 1:15 AM

    Can you talk a little bit about how you built this?

    What kind of prompt etc?

    I'd like to do something similar but with a much, much higher word count.

    Thank you.

  • by 91Jacob on 10/31/22, 3:53 AM

    This is a threat to English learning book publishers. It literally generates a reading comprehension test.

  • by strangus on 10/31/22, 2:57 AM

    This is great.

  • by Le0C on 10/30/22, 11:55 PM

    Great idea! Will you make the model or source code available? I would love to play with this locally.

  • by shadeslayer_ on 10/31/22, 7:43 AM

    This is not working anymore, getting 500's on every attempt.

  • by endisneigh on 10/30/22, 8:54 PM

    This is pretty neat. Is it open source?