The fact people can’t even use their own common sense on Twitter without using AI for context shows we are in a scary place. AI is not some all knowing magic 8 ball and puts out a ton of misinformation.
Going to have generations of people unable to think analytically or creatively, and just as bad, entering fields that require a real detailed knowledge of the subject and they don’t. Going to see a lot of fuck ups in engineering, medicine, etc because of people faking it.
Why do you need to learn reams of facts when you can get an answer in the fraction of a second ? Seems pointless anyway.
Lmao. I’m guessing you don’t work in any of those fields. Got some bad news for ya bud. It’s been that way for decades. Probably centuries.
I am having flashbacks to the scene in Idiocracy where the doctor is talking about his wife.
She’s a pilot now.
…or will be in 480 years.
That’s going to be great fun when the AI bubble pops and the subscription prices go up exponentially.
On the other hand, there have been other opinions about education that say it should be about making or researching something. Give a student a goal and let them figure it out using chatbots or whatever.
That sounds like a way to make a generation of students wholly reliant on AI, much to Altman’s delight. People are going to still need to know how to do stuff in the future and not just how to request the answers to things from somewhere else.
(Disclaimer: this is not a fully formed counter-argument to your statement, merely my thought-vomit).
As a kid growing up in the 90’s you wouldn’t believe the amount of times my parents and teachers vehemently insisted to me that I MUST do dictionary lookup drills because there’s no way I would just always have access to an electronic dictionary in my pocket. I was also told that I absolutely HAD to be fast at paper-based multiplication and long division. It’s not like I would just carry a calculator around with me everywhere I go, that would be insane!
Knowing how to use a physical dictionary or do basic math in your head is absolutely still a good idea, your phone battery can die, your network connection can fail, and doing challenging things with your brain is good for your long term brain health anyway especially while it’s still developing.
Maybe, but are there other things we can focus on? For example, as an ESL teacher, why do my newcomers only get a word to word paper dictionary on end of grade exams? I’m pretty sure the state of North Carolina just hates children? There’s literally no reason for this. Give them a digital dictionary.
Is it a time problem?
Paper is a renewable resource, rare metals used in computers aren’t, and the contents of the dictionary will be the same either way
Yes but the process of obtaining the information is significantly more difficult. We can, you know, reuse the same 20 translation devices for years, and all kids have a laptop… I feel like you’re focused on the wrong thing.
In what universe is an electronic device being handled by children going to last 20 years? Not ours
No, it’s only more difficult for those without the skills to use the Index or Table of Contents in a book. Which is not really much of a difficult skill to learn. You pretty much need to know about alphabetical order and how one is at the front and the other is at the end of the book.
That’s really not true. Paper production takes a lot of (often non-renewable) energy, ink usually consists of non-renewable chemicals, paper is often harvested from nonrenewable destruction of forests (especially in the US with Trump’s plans to cut down national forests), paper production belches a lot of pollution into the air and pollutes a lot of water, etc.
The energy can be obtained from renewable sources any time we decide to quit fucking around and make it happen, wood pulp can be replaced with hemp far more easily than that and requires less chemical treatment in the process. There are no similar options for mitigating the negative impact of mining or making our supply of those metals any bigger.
You sound like my teachers that bitched about calculators and the internet.
If students did useful things, self directed things, were allowed to discover and create, can you imagine how ducking crazy that would be ? Imagine if we didn’t largely waste the bulk of everyone’s youth on boring 1800s style lecturing toiling in mass education factories ?
I guess everyone just gets a completely different education then…? The education system might have its issues, but providing a baseline bulk level of education to the entire population is not exactly straightforward.
Well, pre-recorded video should have LONG ago replaced in person lectures. And we could have had symbolic programs handles all exercises, exams, quiz most of the formulaic interactions that teachers use to bulk up their courses.
All those freed teaching hours could be pooled together to create the video content and refine it more and more.
Instead we’ve got teacher giving the same lecture 6 times a week. Exhausting and unnecessary. Their efforts would be much better spent with rapid one on one tutoring of only those who need help.
And that was all BEFORE we had AI to offload most of the mundane tasks.
One of my family members participated in one such project, she wrote scenarios for a number of video lectures for schoolkids. It was bad, it was really fucking bad, and I could write an essay explaining why it was so, there’s a wide variety of reasons ranging across the technical, legal, administrative, etc. Just one example: you’re making a lecture about art? Yeah, go contact the copyright holders if they would be merciful enough to allow us to use the artwork in the video.
And your idea that the default approach should be that kids have no interaction with their teachers is honestly horrifying.
I work in industrial bureaucratic institution and yes, I wouldn’t expect any kind of good results or quality for a very long time if they suddenly pivoted to creative video making.
But we know it’s very possible, if you look at crash course or khan academt and the like, to have something not as tedious as book reading or sterile whiteboard live lectures.
There are simply not enough people for personal individual instruction on everything you need to know.
We have computers, we have on demand video, we have AI, I’ve watched Khan academy and the countless others, it is not a tenable position to tell me this can’t be RADICALLY different because I’ve seen it. I know it can be better. We need to take out the old models and break the mold, the old business model is finished, has been finished for decades and decades but it lives on unchanged because of its own self-healing bureaucracy. It’s institutionalized way of doing things. This is the fuel behind the vapid and dangerous chainsaw wielding freaks who want to privatize it all.
It HAS to change and it has to STOP fighting against progress and change. And for that we have to make this future livable for the people who will be working there.
Why is a baseline bulk level of education the goal? People are different, people live in a society where they can ask others for help. People don’t retain most of what has been crammed into their heads, and the fact that they were threatened with social exclusion if they didn’t cram it in gives many of them an unhealthy attitude towards knowledge that will take them decades to unlearn. Many subjects are propagandistic or taught in a way that makes them irrelevant for the rest of one’s life.
People learn how the mitochondria work but not how to recognize a stroke. How to write a formal proof about triangular equalities but not how to untangle a legal document. How to recognize a baroque painting but not how to make art you enjoy. How to compete at sports but not how to listen to what your body needs. How to memorize what an authority says but not how to pick apart lies.
So sure, let everyone follow a completely different education. Let them learn things at their own individual pace, let them focus on the things they care about and let them use their own interest as a guide. Maybe some will be functionally illiterate, but that is already the case.
TBH, I’d AI can screw up the education system so fast then it is the fault in the education system. AI is bad, but our education system is not good either.
I’m literally teaching a course to teachers on how to use AI in the classroom so that the students don’t use it as their magical answer dispenser.
What are the headline recommendations?
I had the class build a database of ideas, but one I really liked went like this:
You put a bunch of quiz questions into an AI song generator. The students listen to the song and try to provide the answers afterward.
You can make it really stupid and funny if you want.
Another would be to have AI produce a “podcast” about some topic, maybe Elvis interviewing Churchill about who Darwin was. Tell it to use some key points you want the students to take note of, then let them hear it and talk about it afterward.
Sounds like very inventive ways to include AI in teaching and make it fun and interactive.
How are you modifying what you teach? Wikipedia reduced the focus on learning facts, what does AI remove from the syllabus? What areas should be strengthened to leverage AI?
Well in my case, I leverage AI to extract specifics in long texts, such as level-appropriate vocabulary and collocations related to the topic. I can do this with YouTube video transcripts, for example,then use a different tool to quickly spit out learners definitions of all the words extracted, example sentences with fill-in-the blanks (emphasis on the topic of the lesson), and whatnot. I have to verify that the definitions and example sentences are suitable, then I slap everything together in a handout template I have in Affinity Publisher, along with some topic-related discussion questions. The students watch the video, and then I give them the handout afterwards.
That’s just one example.
I know of a company producing experimental AI tests, that basically put you in a D&D role playing scenario. It shows a scenario on screen, narrates a situation, then asks you to respond. Based on your response it’ll take you in one direction or another, the whole time grading your skills behind the scene. The students don’t even know they’re being tested. At the end, it prints out a score, but it feels more like the end of a video game match than a test.
I think that’s cool af.
This 100%.
The education system was not OK, and has not been for a while. Its main goal is limiting liability, not educating kids.
I will take limiting liability and running with it. Not just the schools, but the kids and parents too no one wants to be responsible and step up to fix the problem.
but our education system is not good either.
No Child Left Behind has fucked us for over 20 years…
People are blaming these college kids, but their entire k-12 was under No Child, they were never taught critical thinking, what the fuck are they supposed to do? No one ever taught these kids to think for themselves.
We failed an entire generation, and it’s too late to fix it for them now, the best we can do is fix it for the kids that will start public education in a few years.
But we’ll be paying the price for decades
I would go further back than that. Our entire education system has failed to adapt to the fact that rote memorization is not the most important form of learning and that any question that could be answered in a multiple choice manner is not really worth asking to verify if someone understood the taught material.
We have an education system that has failed to adapt to the easy availability of references which should have resulted in a focus on teaching a “skeleton” of knowledge to students since the exact details can always be looked up as long as you know the information exists and how to interpret it (e.g. you don’t need to memorize which element carbon is and how much it weighs, you need to understand what an element is and what important properties of chemical elements are).
We have an education system that failed to adapt to the availability of video recording which would have meant it would be easy to have every student understanding the same language watch the most engaging individuals instead of the average ones, presenting the content in a way designed by entire teams of top teachers, falling back on the average ones only for the interactive parts of education.
We have an education system that still struggles with the teacher for a subject as a single source of failure, both in terms of absence and in terms of that teacher not being very compatible in their explanations with the way specific students think instead of having some kind of online forum or matching of teacher to student for one on one questions in a more flexible manner.
We have an education system that still rigidly adheres to categories like physics, chemistry, mathematics, languages, history, geography,… designed in the 19th century for its degrees even though many jobs require more flexible mixes of knowledge and many also require learning for the entire life, not just at the start.
Students today learn for exams a few days before they happen, then purge that knowledge again a few days or hours afterwards.
There are many, many things wrong with our education system and we failed to even acknowledge that there are possible alternatives.
On the other hand, people don’t realize how far we’ve come especially for rural areas.
I got an uncle still alive and kicking whose school had to combine grades because there were so few kids.
So for the bulk of his public education it was just him and another girl like 2 years younger than him. That was the whole class, and it was literally a one room school. Not “one classroom” it was a one room log cabin with an outhouse. One single teacher “teaching” literally everything to 1st graders and the rare person who stayed till 12th at the same time.
Oregon Trail generation really looks more like the exception than the rule every year. It seemed like a terrible education at the time, but we’re sandwiched between complete farces of an education system.
2 person classes would be a dream compared to the overburdened 30+ person classes of today. You get half of a private tutor? Hell yeah.
half of a private tutor?
That teaches everything. You think every one room schoolhouse was staffed by someone who knew every topic well enough to teach others?
If something wasn’t in the handful of textbooks, there was no way to get that information.
I don’t think he ever made it to algebra, definitely nothing like chemistry or physics. Biology would have been a joke, and astronomy likely limited to memorizing the order of planets.
It was not a good education.
And I’m guessing in the era of no internet where you couldn’t easily self-teach subjects you didn’t know so that you could pass that onto the kids.
The only point I will disagree on it’s about video. Today’s teaching actually over relies on video media precisely under the hypothesis you suggested. Unfortunately modern science knows that showing and telling is the lowest and most primitive form of learning. Effective learning happens when the student starts using the knowledge in interaction with others. For example practicing using said knowledge to solve problems and later teaching others about the topic. The old medical adage has been proven to be true: see (hear), do, teach. Video is less effective at knowledge transfer than reading and for the worse, reading proficiency is at an all time low. Precisely because of pedagogic inertia in adapting evidence based strategies and depending on tradition based strategies.
Well, video of an actual good teacher is still better than having to passively listen to a bad one in front of you though. I agree that something more interactive and involving the students more actively would probably be even better though.
The same argument could be made of every point in their post. But you’re missing the main point. You’re seeking perfection and ignoring progress in the search of.
You nailed it.
Like all things republican, you ruin the public service, then tell everybody we need to get rid of this public service cause only the free market can provide that service in good quality.
Vouchers will save us our children!
It’s simply easier to exert control over society through private corporations than in the light of day with public goods and services. Especially when what you desire is of minority opinion.
It’s ok, they dismantled the department of education. Surely the states can figure it out!
looks over at Oklahoma
…fuck
One of my professors had an AI policy. Using AI for an outline or to find resources was okay, as long as it was cited with the exact prompt used. I think having rules for how to use AI on her assignments actually cut down on use compared to professors who outright banned it.
Sounds kinda similar to how Wikipedia was approached by instructors. I remember an English teacher proudly proclaiming she had participated in a “Kill Wikipedia” seminar at a convention. Just a few years later, they’re instructing students on how to properly use Wikipedia as a starting point and not a primary source.
The cynical view of America’s educational system—that it is merely a means by which privileged co-eds can make the right connections, build “social capital,” and get laid—is obviously on full display here.
Cynical? I call that realistic. That’s what privileged co-eds have been using it for the past 100 years.
more like 200
deleted by creator
Wait wait, can this be where we get “a load of Bologna (baloney)” from? Or is that because no one knows what’s actually in bologna…
Student: AI, write my thesis for me!
Prof: AI, was this thesis generated by AI?
AI: yes, of course, you poor human!
Prof: …shrug…
Workaround 1: AI write my thesis in French. Translator app, translate my thesis into English.
Workaround 2: AI write my thesis and insert „Hadouken“ randomly everywhere. AI remove „Hadouken“ from my thesis.
AI, please write my thesis in the style of Shakespeare. Good luck detecting THAT as AI writing.
I thought my class to write a standard 5-paragraph essay and made all tests essay questions, written in class by pencil- had to have an opening statement, complete sentences, well organized, and a conclusion…was told I was asking too much for a final day of school and everyone I failed got a C minus.
Hi,
I would have failed every single one of your tests. Not because I don’t understand the material, or the English language, but because structured writing, to this day, makes me seize up. Blank space is one of my biggest triggers for executive dysfunction/PDA. Turning everything into a cookie-cutter essay is just a different form of trying to fit everyone into the same box. More selective than making everything multiple guess, but no better. I feel bad for your students.
Signed,
Former “gifted” kid (with then-undiagnosed AuDHD) who got sick of bad teachers 30+ years ago
Removed by mod
if you’re in academia you should be able to produce a five paragraph essay.
So, K-12 is “academia” now?
Being able to produce a narrative is an essential life skill.
Lots of essential life skills are difficult for lots of people. Something we get reminded about every time it comes up by people who have no clue what they’re talking about yet see fit to tell others what they should and shouldn’t do, and how to feel about it.
The world isn’t going to cater to you
No fucking shit.
your self diagnosed executive dysfunction
I’m sorry Dr. Jackson, I’ll have to let my old neurologist, psychologist, neuropsychologist, and psychiatrist know that The Internet told me that the assessments I had done at ages 23 and 44 are all in my head.
learning to adapt is probably a useful habit.
You’re right! I’m just going to do that instead of being in constant psychological agony. Where were you all of my life? ❤️ If only I had someone talking down to me saying Just Do The Thing over and over again, from childhood onwards, life would have been so much easier.
🤡
Removed by mod
There are good teachers, and there are good methods for writing essays. Did anyone ever give you a graphic organizer to plan an essay? You should know how to put an essay together after coming up with an organized outline, and you should never write an essay from beginning to end without planning it out first in some way or another.
bad teachers 30+ years ago
I might have an idea why you freeze up with structured writing to this day, and I think it might have less to do with disabilities than you imply.
…so you just gonna leave everyone in suspense? The internet loves armchair psychology!
The answer is in the reply.
Final day of school. Yeah you’re a real piece of shit. Why wait until the last day to pull some shit like that. I bet you gave them a time limit and critiqued their handwriting styles too huh.
thought my class to write a standard 5-paragraph essay and made all tests essay questions,
I would rather teach them to give short and precise answers LOL
Yes and no. Remember that rich kids could always hire ghost writers. ChatGPT made that available to the masses, but that particular problem goes back centuries.
What we have seen is that the curriculum is often decided by a distant committee who actually doesn’t understand life on the ground. In reality, there are easy ways for teachers to undercut the utility of ChatGPT, if they have the freedom to make changes. But that depends on teachers having control and the time to make changes to how they teach.
What’s breathtaking is how clueless education system administrators are failing at their jobs. They’ve been screwing up the system for a very long time, and now they have a whole new set of shiny objects to spend your money on.
In my former school district they paid a ton to some consultancy firm to “use AI to optimize the bus route”. The first day of testing the new route many kids didn’t get home until after 9pm. They cancelled school for the rest of the week and then immediately reverted to the old route.
Yeah my university (California State University system) has some chatgpt school partnership now.
We’ve been needing to rework education for years now anyway. At least this will force the teachers to change & adapt, whether they like it or not.
My point is that it’s a somewhat outdated skill, and these kids have enough to figure out without the encumbrance of a paper dictionary. Most of my kids have never used one before, and yes, I can show them how to use it, but it’s not a functional testing accommodation. Testing accommodations should not include learning skills that are only tangentially related, especially not when there is a reasonable alternative.
I’m thinking the only way people will be able to do schoolwork without cheating now is going to be to make them sit in a monitored room and finish it there.
How is this kind of testing relevant anymore? Isn’t it creating an unrealistic situation, given the brave new world of AI everywhere?
Because it test what you actually retained, not what you can convince an AI to tell you.
But what good is that if AI can do it anyway?
That is the crux of the issue.
Years ago the same thing was said about calculators, then graphing calculators. I had to drop a stat class and take it again later because the dinosaur didn’t want me to use a graphing calculator. I have ADD (undiagnosed at the time) and the calculator was a big win for me.
Naturally they were all full of shit.
But this? This is different. AI is currently as good as a graphing calculator for some engineering tasks, horrible for some others, excellent at still others. It will get better over time. And what happens when it’s awesome at everything?
What is the use of being the smartest human when you’re easily outclassed by a machine?
If we get fully automated yadda yadda, do many of us turn into mush-brained idiots who sit around posting all day? Everyone retires and builds Adirondack chairs and sips mint juleps and whatever? (That would be pretty sweet. But how to get there without mass starvation and unrest?)
Alternately, do we have to do a Butlerian Jihad to get rid of it, and threaten execution to anyone who tries to bring it back… only to ensure we have capitalism and poverty forever?
These are the questions. You have to zoom out to see them.
Because if you don’t know how to tell when the AI succeeded, you can’t use it.
To know when it succeeded, you must know the topic.
The calculator is predictable and verifiable. LLM is not
I’m not sure what you’re implying. I’ve used it to solve problems that would’ve taken days to figure out on my own, and my solutions might not have been as good.
I can tell whether it succeeded because its solutions either work, or they don’t. The problems I’m using it on have that property.
That says more about you.
There are a lot of cases where you can not know if it worked unless you have expertise.
This still seems too simplistic. You say you can’t know whether it’s right unless you know the topic, but that’s not a binary condition. I don’t think anyone “knows” a complex topic to its absolute limits. That would mean they had learned everything about it that could be learned, and there would be no possibility of there being anything else in the universe for them to learn about it.
An LLM can help fill in gaps, and you can use what you already know as well as credible resources (e g., textbooks) to vet its answer, just as you would use the same knowledge to vet your own theories. You can verify its work the same way you’d verify your own. The value is that it may add information or some part of a solution that you wouldn’t have. The risk is that it misunderstands something, but that risk exists for your own theories as well.
This approach requires skepticism. The risk would be that the person using it isn’t sufficiently skeptical, which is the same problem as relying too much on their own opinions or those of another person.
For example, someone studying statistics for the first time would want to vet any non-trivial answer against the textbook or the professor rather than assuming the answer is correct. Answer comes from themself, the student in the next row, or an LLM, doesn’t matter.
The problem is offloading critical thinking to a blackbox of questionably motivated design. Did you use it to solve problems or did you use it to find a sufficient approximation of a solution? If you can’t deduce why the given solution works then it is literally unknowable if your problem is solved, you’re just putting faith in an algorithm.
There are also political reasons we’ll never get luxury gay space communism from it. General Ai is the wet dream of every authoritarian: an unverifiable, omnipresent, first line source of truth that will shift the narrative to whatever you need.
The brain is a muscle and critical thinking is trained through practice; not thinking will never be a shortcut for thinking.
If you want to compare a calculator to an LLM, you could at least reasonably expect the calculator result to be accurate.
It often is. I’ve got a lot of use out of it.
Why. Because you put trust into the producers of said calculators to not fuck it up. Or because you trust others to vet those machines or are you personally validating. Unless your disassembling those calculators and inspecting their chips sets your just putting your trust in someone else and claiming “this magic box is more trust worthy”
A combination of personal vetting via analyzing output and the vetting of others. For instance, the Pentium calculation error was in the news. Otherwise, calculation by computer processor is understood and the technology is acceptable to be used for cases involving human lives.
In contrast, there are several documented cases where LLM’s have been incorrect in the news to a point where I don’t need personal vetting. No one is anywhere close to stating that LLM’s can be used in cases involving human lives.
How exactly do you think those instances got into the news in the first place. I’ll give you a hint. People ARE vetting them and reporting when they’re fucking up. It is a bias plain and simple. People are absolutely using Ai in cases involving humans.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/well/ai-drug-repurposing.html
https://www.advamed.org/2024/09/20/health-care-ai-is-already-saving-lives/
https://humanprogress.org/doctors-told-him-he-was-going-to-die-then-ai-saved-his-life/
Your opinions are simply biased and ill-informed. This is only going to grow and become a larger and larger dataset. Just like the auto driving taxis. Everyone likes to shit on them while completely ignoring the truth and statistics. All while acting like THIS MOMENT RIGHT NOW is the best they’re ever going g to get.
but what good is that if AI can do it anyway?
It can’t. It just fucking can’t. We’re all pretending it does, but it fundamentally can’t.
Creative thinking is still a long way beyond reasoning as well. We’re not close yet.
It’s already capable of doing a lot, and there is reason to expect it will get better over time. If we stick our fingers in our ears and pretend that’s not possible, we will not be prepared.
If you read, it’s capable of very little under the surface of what it is.
Show me one that is well studied, like clinical trial levels, then we’ll talk.
We’re decades away at this point.
My overall point of it’s just as meaningless to talk about now as it was in the 90s. Because we can’t convince of what a functioning product will be, never mind it’s context I’m a greater society. When we have it, we can discuss it then as we have something tangible to discuss. But where we’ll be in decades is hard to regulate now.
Alpha Fold. We’re not decades away. We’re years at worst.
The faulty logic was supported by a previous study from 2019
This directly applies to the human journalist, studies on other models 6 years ago are pretty much irrelevant and this one apparently tested very small distilled ones that you can run on consumer hardware at home (Llama3 8B lol).
Anyway this study seems trash if their conclusion is that small and fine-tuned models (user compliance includes not suspecting intentionally wrong prompts) failing to account for human misdirection somehow means “no evidence of formal reasoning”. Which means using formal logic and formal operations and not reasoning in general, we use informal reasoning for the vast majority of what we do daily and we also rely on “sophisticated pattern matching” lmao, it’s called cognitive heuristics. Kahneman won the Nobel prize for recognizing type 1 and type 2 thinking in humans.
Why don’t you go repeat the experiment yourself on huggingface (accounts are free, over ten models to test, actually many are the same ones the study used) and see what actually happens? Try it on model chains that have a reasoning model like R1 and Qwant and just see for yourself and report back. It would be intellectually honest to verify things since we’re talking about critical thinking in here.
Oh add a control group here, a comparison with average human performance to see what the really funny but hidden part is. Pro-tip: CS STEMlords catastrophically suck when larping being cognitive scientists.
So you say I should be intellectually honest by doing the experiment myself, then say that my experiment is going to be shit anyways? Sure… That’s also intellectually honest.
Here’s the thing.
My education is in physics, not CS. I know enough to know what I try isn’t going to be really valid.
But unless you have peer reviewed searches to show otherwise, because I would take your home grown experiment to be as valid as mine.
And here’s experimental verification that humans lack formal reasoning when sentences don’t precisely spell it out for them: all the models they tested except chatGPT4 and o1 variants are from 27B and below, all the way to Phi-3 which is an SLM, a small language model with only 3.8B parameters. ChatGPT4 has 1.8T parameters.
1.8 trillion > 3.8 billion
ChatGPT4’s performance difference (accuracy drop) with regular benchmarks was a whooping -0.3 versus Mistral 7B -9.2 drop.
Yes there were massive differences. No, they didn’t show significance because they barely did any real stats. The models I suggested you try for yourself are not included in the test and the ones they did use are known to have significant limitations. Intellectual honesty would require reading the actual “study” though instead of doubling down.
Maybe consider the possibility that a. STEMlords in general may know how to do benchmarks but not cognitive testing type testing or how to use statistical methods from that field b. this study being an example of a few “I’m just messing around trying to confuse LLMs with sneaky prompts instead of doing real research because I need a publication without work” type of study, equivalent to students making chatGPT do their homework c. 3.8B models = the size in bytes is between 1.8 and 2.2 gigabytes d. not that “peer review” is required for criticism lol but uh, that’s a preprint on arxiv, the “study” itself hasn’t been peer reviewed or properly published anywhere (how many months are there between October 2024 to May 2025?) e. showing some qualitative difference between quantitatively different things without showing p and using weights is garbage statistics f. you can try the experiment yourself because the models I suggested have visible Chain of Thought and you’ll see if and over what they get confused about g. when there are graded performance differences with several models reliably not getting confused at least more than half the time but you say “fundamentally can’t reason” you may be fundamentally misunderstanding what the word means
Need more clarifications instead of reading the study or performing basic fun experiments? At least be intellectually curious or something.
It can and it has done creative mathematical proof work. Nothing spectacular, but at least on par with a mathematics grad student.
Specialized AI like that is not what most people know as AI. Most people reffer to it as LLMs.
Specialized AI, like that showcased, is still decades away from generalized creative thinking. You can’t ask it to do a science experiment with in a class because it just can’t. It’s only built for math proof.
Again, my argument is that it won’t never exist.
Just that it’s so far off it’d be like trying to regulate smart phone laws in the 90s. We would have only had pipe dreams as to what the tech could be, never mind its broader social context.
So tall to me when it can, in the case of this thread, clinically validated ways of teaching. We’re still decades from that.
Show me a human that can do it.
What do you think testing is for? It’s to show what you know/have learned
Education and learning are two different things. School tests are to repeat back what has been educated to you. Meaningful learning tends to be internally motivated and AI is unlikely to fulfill that aspect.
This is the purpose of essay questions.
AI is not your enemy. It IS the future whether you like it or not. Your kids will benefit from AI in ways you cannot even imagine.
Unpopular opinion:
I am a public school teacher and I support public schools, but there have been a lot of issues with our education system for a long time. Talk to any kid with ADHD who had to sit through 12 years, and they are indicative of a larger problem. Our idea of school now is as a place that teaches kids to behave and mostly follow rote instruction. Wouldn’t it be so much better if we were teaching kids to be creative thinkers, work well in groups, problem solve, and think critically about the information they’re getting? We know that’s what school should be, but maybe now we will be forced to go there. Yes, there will be issues like learned helplessness and certain skills being difficult to teach, but it’s kind of exciting too.
Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?
Man, I am 38. When I was in highschool I was in an alternative curriculum Math program called IMP, and it is/was literally what your talking about.
Instead of memorizing equations we were instead given a hypothetical situation and learned to solve it socratically both through conversations as a class with the teacher, and in small groups to try and figure out how to solve it. It made me love math so much I almost made it my life, it was literally everything I needed as a severely ADHD teen. Everything was a puzzle to be solved, and when you solved it you gained not just knowledge, but the perspective to know where the knowledge applies.
This is me with coding. Learn the rules. See a problem. Code a solution.
OpenSciEd is a model that teaches science like that. There’s been a ton of pushback from conservatives.
“Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?”
Trump and Republicans would like nothing more than to turn this country into another Russia where your kids have to pay through the nose go abroad to get a decent education.
deleted by creator
I work with special needs kids in a school district and the amount of access kids with even mild symptoms is atrocious. It’s a huge problem.
Do you mind clarifying what you mean is a problem? Are you saying kids with mild symptoms aren’t getting access? Or there are far too many kids accessing the special needs services than can be accommodated?
I wouldn’t call it unpopular because how the education system works in America and several other countries has been a very obvious problem for decades. What we should be teaching is more barometer question
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question
The student admitted that he knew the expected “conventional” answer, but was fed up with the professor’s "teaching him how to think … rather than teaching him the structure of the subject.
only the wealthy kids will be well-educated
You could argue we’re already way too far down this road. Quality of education is very dependent on location. Some of it is rich districts but also richer states. Whatever level of granularity you want, there’s always sone more willing or more able to spend money on better educating their children.
For all its faults, Department of Education was at least trying to set minimum standards for those areas unwilling to invest in a good education system and minimum investments for those unable. We desperately needed to raise this bar, not remove it
Anyhow my kids school leaned into ai a bit and taught the kids some valuable lessons about how it works, where it helps, and especially its limitations. There’s nothing wrong with ai as a tool, as by long as you don’t treat it as a magical thing that can think for you
There is plenty wrong with generative AI as a tool if you think of it in those terms.
I would say that if the depth of analysis is limited to “AI” or “genAI” then use of it in schools is overwhelmingly bad. If that’s the limit of our ability to frame the issue, then banning AI would appear inevitable, and any graded assignment that might encourage AI use should be banned.
But if you want to break things down, you can find specific tools (i.e., calculators, grammar checkers) that could be labeled as AI or specific uses of genAI (i.e., brainstorming) that have use. And it is this latter approach – clearly identifying positive uses – that is difficult for students, media writers, and apparently policy makers to do.
How are other countries handling it? I can’t imagine AI being an American only education issue.
American education isn’t actually about education, but about creating compliant cogs for the machinery of the corporate oligarchy. When the goal is the betterment of individuals and society, the methods with which you teach and assess progress will be dramatically different. This is more of an “American problem” than the rest of the world precisely because of how the American system is designed and implemented. It does not value, measure, reinforce, or reward individual betterment… but rote memorization and how compliant you are under the arbitrary authoritarian structure of the system.
American education isn’t actually about education, but about creating compliant cogs for the machinery of the corporate oligarchy.
Well, historically that’s true.
But the modern American education system is about Stack Ranking to create the illusion of meritocracy. So the functional purpose of the system is to score better than the rest of your classmates. Since the actual lesson plan doesn’t matter and only the honors you get from completing the course are perceived to have value, you either want to cheat the hell out of every course to beat the herd. Or you want to find a degree plan where you can appear to be the Best Kid In Class, either through grade inflation or by participating in a class full of dropouts/fake students.
It does not value, measure, reinforce, or reward individual betterment… but rote memorization and how compliant you are under the arbitrary authoritarian structure of the system.
Rote memorization is easy to evaluate, because the answers are discrete and can be fed into a binary grading engine.
It’s also easy to cheat, because you don’t need to know how to solve the problems, just how to source the correct pattern of answers.
Despite your wall of text this isn’t just a problem in the United States.
I never said it was. However it is a much bigger problem in the US.
How are other countries different?
It’s in France and I guess everywhere else. Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?
I’ve also seen a few young engineers using ChatGPT to do their job because it’s easier than working. When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I’m not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.
We’re doomed.
Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?
In theory, they need to study in order to learn the skills necessary to be gainfully employed. But in practice, the promise of the future is “automate everything”, so might as well learn how to maximize the outputs of the Big Grifting Machine while you’re still young.
Why waste time mastering comprehensive writing when there won’t be any employers left to read what you wrote? Why waste time developing technical skills when everything gets outsourced to the lowest bidding firm in the South Pacific? Why waste time developing a talent for artistry, music, or cinema when we’ve decided the future of performative arts is whatever bot-farm best self-promotes AI slop to the top of the most trending Spotify playlist?
When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I’m not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.
Why do they care if the code is full of bugs? They’ll be changing jobs in another two years anyway, because that’s the only way to get a raise. They aren’t invested in the success of their current firm, much less the profitablility of the clients they work for (who are, themselves, likely going to be outsourcing this shit to India in another few years). And all this work is just about maximizing the bottom line for private equity anyway, so why does anyone care if the project succeeds? It’s not like my quality of life hinges on my ability to do useful productive work.
And if quality of life declines? Just find someone to blame. Migrants. The Wrong Politicians. China. Lizard People. Fuck, I’ll just ask ChatGPT why my life sucks and believe everything it tells me, because… why not? Its not like everyone else isn’t lying.
I code for fun, have been doing so for decades and using AI as an helper has been amazing.
My coding skill in my cursed basic variants (VB6/VBA/vb.net)
translated overnight to basically any language that I want, it’s just amazing.
I can almost code in javascript by hand just from exposure, despite never formally trying to learn it
Apropos of nothing, I read a post claiming that the phonetic pronunciation of “ChatGPT” in France translates to “Cat I farted.” So I used Google Translates audio and sure enough, “ChatGPT” and “Chat j’ai pété” sound nearly identical when piped through the app’s audio feature.
Yeah, I figure this isn’t going to be an American only problem.
