Because AI LLMs are actively ruining the education of children, the actual retaining of information coming from writing your own words and thinking your own thoughts. Because AI is only being used as a cudgel by executives to reduce the workforce of humans with no intention of additional economic justice.
I have school aged children and it’s not AI that’s ruining anything
Curriculum isn’t moving fast enough. Just a few years ago every teacher had to adapt for COVID and go 100% online/remote in many areas. Kids are still turning in every assignment online, even in classroom settings in my district.
So, yeah, kids can just paste the question into ChatGPT and copy the answer. Nobody learns anything.
This isn’t AI ruining education, it’s schools being under-resourced and unable to move as quickly as society is changing.
Teachers are still buying their own supplies, how can they adapt their entire curriculum in the course of a couple years to work under this entirely new paradigm of LLMs?
Give it a bit and I am convinced schools will go back to oral reports, handwritten essays and whatever is needed to make sure children are not just pasting garbage back and forth
Honestly, I think this is what we need to kill toxic social media and phone addiction as well. If AI forces us to talk and interact as a community again, it’s a win. Leave the internet to the bots and AI.
The exact same thing is said for every new form of tech. All tech has its good parts and bad parts. It was true of the black and white television, it was true of the Nintendo, it was true of the cell phone and it will be true if this technology as well.
You either accept that change happens and use your life experience to help shape it in a positive direction or, well… I dunno. Become a old curmudgeon and watch the world blow by you.
We don't allow people to use mustard gas willy nilly as their technology of choice. But sure, your "there's good and bad to everything!!! change is inevitable!!" platitudes are useful too.
And your tech examples don't offload actual process of thinking to others the way AI does. The comparisons are surface level and ignore what I actually said.
Except you didn't offer any evidence for your position, provide any references, or provide any sort of logical argument. You offer your own platitude and then condemn other commenters for doing so, hypocrisy.
The current state of LLMs _can_ be helpful for education. Millions of people use them as such and benefit from it.
A far bigger problem with the technology IMO is the generative aspect. We already have a large problem with disinformation and spam on the internet, and generative AI will increase this by many orders of magnitude. Discerning fact from fiction is already difficult today; it will be literally impossible to do in the future, _unless_ we invent more technology to save us from it. This is a problem we haven't even begun to address. The public is collectively blinded by the novelty of the technology, while entrepreneurs are jumping over themselves trying to profit from the latest gold rush. Very few people with the power to change anything are actually thinking about the long-term, or even mid-term, impacts.
I wouldn’t give up on teachers just yet. The 5-paragraph essay is probably dead as are mathematics homework assignments that are boring variations of the same problem over-and-over. The field is being cleared for new ideas and I bet some of them will prove to be very good.
How in the world did you get from "1:1 student-teacher ratio" to "ruin kids education"? AI is amazing for education. Everyone has their own teacher in their pocket.
Because this needs to be toned down a serious notch. I’ve spent the last year and a half in AI land just to do 95% data work and pretend that it’s now somehow magic AI while OpenAI and the rest are seen as the magic that makes this all work.
Well put. They are useful building blocks but ultimately a lot of the magic is in the data modeling and data engineering and shaping happening behind the scenes. And because it's still slow and costly it's hard to do that well ... and the democratizing frameworks for doing it well haven't been born yet
Because regardless of what we're talking about, a bubble around a thing is still a lie. The faster one bursts, the faster truth lays bare and one can make an actually informed decision. LLMs are here to stay and have probably already found a growing place in our lives. But much energy is currently spent speculating about their future significance. The bubble is about downplaying those are just speculations, while inflating the perception of their importance in our current or upcoming reality.
Well, for a start, the longer it takes to burst, the worse the burst is going to be. Right now, the fallout if it bursts would be fairly limited. Give it another few years of hype, and it may be structurally dangerous when it does go.
Also, it’s inefficient allocation of capital. Every cent being spent on this is money that could be spent on something useful (of course, absent the AI bubble, not _all_ of it would be, but some of it would be).
Bingo - we can focus on the energy on actually modernizing industries and leveraging the (pretty good) AGI we have rather than racing with each other to incinerate more and more money for little to no gains.
I was talking with someone in a non-tech industry and we have such a long way to go for even decades-old information system improvements. They don't even have basic things like an effective system of record or analytics. They have no way to measure the success of any particular initiative. If revenue is down - they don't really know why, they just randomly change stuff until it hopefully goes back up.