[jll29]

LLMs also take away the motivation from students to properly concentrate and deeply understand a technical problem (including but not limited to coding problems); instead, they copy, paste and move on without understanding. The electronic calculator analogy might be appropriate: it's a tool appropriate once you have learned how to do the calculations by hand.

In an experiment (six months long, twice repeated, so a one-year study), we gave business students ChatGPT and a data science task to solve that they did not have the background for (develop a sentiment analysis classifier for German-language recommendations of medical practices). With their electronic "AI" helper, they could find a solution, but the scary thing is they did not acquire any knowledge on the way, as exist interviews clearly demonstrated.

As a friend commented, "these language models should never have been made available to the general public", only to researchers.

[simonw]

> As a friend commented, "these language models should never have been made available to the general public", only to researchers.

That feels to me like a dystopian timeline that we've only very narrowly avoided.

It wouldn't just have been researchers: it would have been researchers and the wealthy.

I'm so relieved that most human beings with access to an internet-connected device have the ability to try this stuff and work to understand what it can and cannot do themselves.

[tokinonagare]

I'm giving a programming class and students uses LLMs all the time. I see it as a big problem because:

- it puts focus on syntax instead of the big picture. Instead of finding articles or posts on Stack explaining things beyond how to write them. AI give them the "how" so they don't think of the "why"

- students almost don't ask questions anymore. Why would they when an AI give them code?

- AI output contains notions, syntax and API not seen in class, adding to the confusion

Even the best students have a difficult time answering basic questions about what have been seen on the last (3 hours) class.

[fullstackwife]

Job market will verify those students, but the outcome may be potentially disheartening for you, because those guys may actually succeed one way or another. Think punched cards: they are gone along with the mindset of "need to implement it correctly on first try".

[tokinonagare]

> but the outcome may be potentially disheartening for you, because those guys may actually succeed one way or another

Your sentence is very contradictory to say the least! I'll be very glad for each of them to succeed in any way.

[8note]

students pay for education such that at the end, they know something. if the job market filters them out because they suck, the school did a bad job teaching.

the teachers still need to figure out how to teach with LLMs around

[butterlettuce]

I wish I had an LLM as a student because I couldn’t afford a tutor and googling for information was tedious.

It’s the college’s responsbility now to teach students how to harness the power of LLMs effectively. They can’t keep their heads in the sand forever.

[tpmoney]

I had this realization a couple weeks ago that AI and LLMs are the 2025 equivalent of what Wikipedia was in 2002. Everyone is worried about how all the kids are going to just use the “easy button” and get nonsense that’s in-checked and probably wrong and a whole generation of kids are going to grow up not knowing how to research, and trusting unverified sources.

And then eventually overall we learned what the limits of Wikipedia are. We know that it’s generally a pretty good resource for high level information and it’s more accurate for some things than for others. It’s still definitely a problem that Wikipedia can confidently publish unverified information (IIRC wasn’t the Scottish translation famously hilariously wrong and mostly written by an editor with no experience with the language?)

And yet, I think if these days people were publishing think pieces about how Wikipedia is ruining the ability of students to learn, or advocating that people shouldn’t ever use Wikipedia to learn something, we’d largely consider them crackpots, or at the very least out of touch.

I think AI tools are going to follow the same trajectory. Eventually we’ll gain enough cultural knowledge of their strengths and weaknesses to apply them properly and in the end they’ll be another valuable asset in our ever growing lists of tools.

[layer8]

It’s not the same because you can’t ask Wikipedia to do your homework or programming task without even reading the result.

[tpmoney]

You can't ask an AI to do that either. I mean, you physically can, but it would be the same thing as copying and pasting a wikipedia article verbatim into your essay.

[layer8]

What I mean is, people do actually do this with LLMs, but most assignments do not map 1:1 to a Wikipedia article you can copy (certainly programming tasks don't). Or to put it differently, it's relatively trivial to formulate assignments for which a blind Wikipedia copy & paste wouldn't be applicable; in contrast to the LLM case.

[currymj]

it's particularly bad for students who should be trying to learn.

at the same time in my own life, there are tasks that I don't want to do, and certainly don't want to learn anything about, yet have to do.

For example, figuring out a weird edge case combination of flags for a badly designed LaTeX library that I will only ever have to use once. I could try to read the documentation and understand it, but this would take a long time. And, even if it would take no time at all, I literally would prefer not to have this knowledge wasting neurons in my brain.

[thierrydamiba]

What do you think is the big difference between these tools and calculators?

[remexre]

Imagine a calculator that computes definite integrals, but gives non-sensical results on non-smooth functions for whatever reason (i.e., not an error, but an incorrect but otherwise well-formed answer).

If there were a large number of people who didn't quite understand what it meant for a function to be continuous, let alone smooth, who were using such a calculator, I think you'd see similar issues to the ones that are identified with LLM usage: a large number of students wouldn't learn how to compute definite or indefinite integrals, and likely wouldn't have an intuitive understanding of smoothness or continuity either.

I think we don't see these problems with calculators because the "entry-level" ones don't have support for calculus-related functionality, and because people aren't taught how to arrange the problems that you need calculus to solve until after they've given some amount of calculus-related intuition. These conditions obviously aren't the case for LLMs.

[Izkata]

The TI-83 Plus had an equation solver that didn't actually do any solving, it would test lots of inputs and converge towards the correct answer. If it was a rational number it worked, but it couldn't do fractions so anything else and you'd only get an approximation when it hit its limit.

[simonw]

I think we don't see these problems with calculators because we have figured out how to teach people how to use them.

We are still very early in the process of figuring out how to teach people to use LLMs.

[exceptione]

I will bite. Correct question would be:

  What do you think is the big difference between these tools and *outsourcing*?

AI is far more comparable to delegating work to *people*. Calculators and compilers are deterministic. Using them doesn't change the nature of your work.

AI, depending on how you use it, gives you a different role. So take that as a clue: if you are less interested in building things and more interested into getting results, maybe a product management role would be a better fit.

[adverbly]

Calculators do not accept ambiguous instructions and they work 100% of the time.

[andrehacker]

>> Calculators do not accept ambiguous instructions and they work 100% of the time.

That is stated with a lot of confidence :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43066953 https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/resources/example... https://matheducators.stackexchange.com/questions/27702/what...

[adverbly]

Fair point!

Love me some edge cases :D

Let's call it 100% of the time in 99%+ of scenarios.

[rusk]

If you divide by 0 you’ll get an “E” - LLM will just make something up

[bigfishrunning]

I would say "E" is the correct answer.

[rusk]

So would I

[snickerbockers]

Fundamentally nothing, but everybody already knows that you shouldn't teach young kids to rely on calculators during the basic "four-function" stage of their mathematics education.

Calculators for the most part don't solve novel problems. They automate repetitive basic operations which are well-defined and have very few special cases. Your calculator isn't going to do your algebra for you, it's going to give you more time to focus on the algebraic principles instead of material you should have retained from elementary school. Algebra and calculus classes are primarily concerned with symbolic manipulation, once the problem is solved symbolically coming to a numerical answer is time-consuming and uninteresting.

Of course, if you have access to the calculator throughout elementary school then you're never going to learn the basics and that's why schoolchildren don't get to use calculators until the tail-end of middle school. At least that's how it worked in the early 2000s when i was a kid; from what i understand kids today get to use their phones and even laptops in class so maybe i'm wrong here.

Previously I stated that calculators are allowed in later stages of education because they only automate the more basic tasks; Matlab can arguably be considered a calculator which does automate complicated tasks and even when i was growing up the higher-end TI-89 series was available which actually could solve algebra and even simple forms of calculus problems symbolically; we weren't allowed access to these when i was in high school because we wouldn't learn the material if there was a computer to do it for us.

So anyways, my point (which is halfway an agreement with the OP and halfway an agreement with you) is that AI and calculators are fundamentally the same. It needs to be a tool to enhance productivity, not a crutch to compensate for your own inadequacies[1]. This is already well-understood in the case of calculators, and it needs to be well-understood in the case of AI.

[1] actually now that i think of it, there is an interesting possibility of AI being able to give mentally-impaired people an opportunity to do jobs they might never be capable of unassisted, but anybody who doesn't have a significant intellectual disability needs to be wary of over-dependence on machines.

[SpicyLemonZest]

There's a reason we don't let kids use calculators to learn their times tables. In order to be effective at more advanced mathematics, you need to develop a deep intuition for what 9 * 7 means, not just what buttons you need to push to get the calculator to spit out 63.

[tyre]

Calculators either get you through math you won't use in the real world or can aid in calculating when you know the right formula already.

Calculators don't pretend to think or solve a class of problems. They are pure execution. The comparison in tech is probably compilers, not code.