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I really dislike this narrative about AI helping people learn. Learning is the act of actively reaching for something you didn't know before and making it your

I really dislike this narrative about AI helping people learn. Learning is the act of actively reaching for something you didn't know before and making it yours. You do not learn by simply reading information that has been given to you. You learn by playing with the concepts and elaborating them yourself (other than memorizing them). If the elaboration is done by an AI your brain is doing zero work and thus not learning properly. Asking an AI to "explain this concept differently" and reading its output is entirely different from thinking about the stuff and coming up with the results yourself. AI is terrible for learning, but it's terrific for getting good grades. But ask yourself, what is the point of school then? Do you want to cheat your way out and find yourself without a sliver of knowledge when you're 25? Sure, it's romantic to think that "I'm just gonna let the AI write all those boring essays while I learn how to program in Python in my newly found free time! that'll show those boring professors!" but we know that's just a fantasy

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
We already have tons of schools were people defactor "cruise" and the levels there will plumet even more. Education in some countries consists mainly of bribing the teachers to sign the magic "you know now" paper. I think we will actually see a paper spam in the "bad" academic sector, and the emergence of a good academic sector. Publishing something refined and condensed once a year. Rejecting to even look at the "filler".
Barrin92 4y ago
>. If the elaboration is done by an AI your brain is doing zero work and thus not learning properly. yup, it's basically stackoverflow copy-pasting on steroids. There's a reason John Carmack's ideal learning environment is to literally go to a cabin in the woods, read a bunch of papers and reimplement what he wants to learn from scratch. I think there's two aspects to it. One is that you can't genuinely learn something until you really dig in. But also psychologically, tool assisted learning promotes a sort of learned-helplessness. It's sad how often I hear people say nowadays that they think they're not capable of sitting down with a foundational book and starting from the bottom up.
zone411 4y ago
If you don't learn anything from reading, I think you're in the minority. I agree that active doing, writing, thinking are often better but those aren't the only ways people learn.
- rob74 4y ago
  You don't learn anything from reading, you learn from understanding what you have read. Memorizing what you have read will only get you so far...
  - zone411 4y ago
    You're splitting hairs and being too literal. We're comparing learning from a lecture, a book or a video to learning from an AI. The amount of thinking is the same (or more if the AI is personalized).
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  Depends on what you mean by learning. Anything that requires active work (STEM subjects or crafts) cannot be learnt by just reading. Of course if you read a history book simply reading and remembering the information is considered learning in that case.
  - zone411 4y ago
    I've been reading many machine learning papers to keep up with the field in the last year and only implemented some. Are you saying that I completely wasted my time reading by them and learned nothing?
    - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
      It depends. If you are well versed in ML then you know the concepts very well and have already played with them extensively. Thus reading a paper might be enough to learn it because you have done all the conceptual work up front. But even if you didn't learn the papers you still have built a mental catalogue of ML results that you can go back to learning when the occasion to implement them arises. So yes, you probably learned a chunk of them and some you simply remember, but that's ok.
morsch 4y ago
You can use an AI for learning if you go beyond treating it as a machine for cheating on your homework, and instead think of it as a 1:1 tutor. Imagine the AI having a teaching curriculum that it tends to go through, but in a conversational manner that invites the student (or a group of students) to ask questions, go on tangents, etc. I think that's what he has in mind. And it's easy to get excited about. I wouldn't call it studying, but I did have some enlightening conversations about cooking and baking with ChatGPT. That said, I found the article quite breathless and one-sided. For example, he's obviously convinced about the AI teacher thing, but only mentions the fact checking requirement in a half sentence aside: AI makes up stuff, and I'm not sure having to double check basically everything your school teacher tells you makes for a good learning environment, even if it's a good life lesson. Also, leading every paragraph with an emoji is kind of obnoxious.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  We can certainly imagine that (e.g. The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson is a good example of such a system), however, this is not what we are going through now. The currently built systems mess up the pedagogical tools and curricula we have, but do not yet provide an equivalent or better replacement, so at least in the short term it does make learning worse. Also, if someone can use a chatbot for exploring material does not mean that this is a good pedagogical tool for that - one of the functions that grading has in pedagogy is motivation to nudge learners to actually do the work, and that is a valuable function; expecting people to self-motivate for self-guided education will work for some but will completely fail many those learners who most need education.
zuminator 4y ago
When the article is talking about AI helping people learn, I don't think that's about AI's creating shortcuts and doing work for us. I think it's talking about bespoke lessons devised by AI to maximixe the potential of each student's innate abilities. We already know that spaced repitition can help us learn things faster. What if we got exactly the optimal amount of spaced repitition in all our subjects because the syllabus was designed for us by our AI tutor? What if the tutor knew the kinds of topics that kept us most engaged, what if the tutor was infinitely patient and would never get tired of explaining points that we were having a particularly hard time with? What if the tutor knew exactly when we needed a break, and when to double up on the homework? What if the tutor could tell if we were falling behind before we realized it ourselves, and adjusted things accordingly without us ever knowing?
ttoinou 4y ago
I feel the same than you, I also feel like the users of ChatGPT are lazy people who didn't seem to like learning stuff before. So why would they like it now they have ChatGPT ? They're just going to cheat life But frankly yes school is useless. I'm glad everyone has now a cheating tool, it's a free get out of jail card
imtringued 4y ago
There is also the problem that the author assumes permanent dependence on AI in every situation. The moment you are separated from your tool of choice you become worthless and unless the AI is opensource, you will have to pay steep fees as if the AI was your landlord.
ranting-moth 4y ago
Once the aforementioned AI's output can be trusted, I think it definitely has a place in learning (for the disciplined student). For example, I hated not having answers to maths some problems. I'd spend hours on problems and I just wanted to know if my solution was correct. People have a tendency to give up when they get stuck. But it's a tricky best, as it's also often a moment when you learn new (end even unrelated) things. Wonderful feeling afterwards, but frustration during the process. I think that a AI (that can be trusted) definitely has a place in giving you hints and helpful information. But hard problem solving is something you need to do. I think what will happen is that homework will be reduced to 0% of your final grade. There will be in person, offline exams. That'll weed out all those who can't solve the problems themselves.

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago

We already have tons of schools were people defactor "cruise" and the levels there will plumet even more. Education in some countries consists mainly of bribing the teachers to sign the magic "you know now" paper. I think we will actually see a paper spam in the "bad" academic sector, and the emergence of a good academic sector. Publishing something refined and condensed once a year. Rejecting to even look at the "filler".

Barrin92 4y ago

>. If the elaboration is done by an AI your brain is doing zero work and thus not learning properly. yup, it's basically stackoverflow copy-pasting on steroids. There's a reason John Carmack's ideal learning environment is to literally go to a cabin in the woods, read a bunch of papers and reimplement what he wants to learn from scratch. I think there's two aspects to it. One is that you can't genuinely learn something until you really dig in. But also psychologically, tool assisted learning promotes a sort of learned-helplessness. It's sad how often I hear people say nowadays that they think they're not capable of sitting down with a foundational book and starting from the bottom up.

zone411 4y ago

If you don't learn anything from reading, I think you're in the minority. I agree that active doing, writing, thinking are often better but those aren't the only ways people learn.

rob74 4y ago
You don't learn anything from reading, you learn from understanding what you have read. Memorizing what you have read will only get you so far...
- zone411 4y ago
  You're splitting hairs and being too literal. We're comparing learning from a lecture, a book or a video to learning from an AI. The amount of thinking is the same (or more if the AI is personalized).
AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Depends on what you mean by learning. Anything that requires active work (STEM subjects or crafts) cannot be learnt by just reading. Of course if you read a history book simply reading and remembering the information is considered learning in that case.
- zone411 4y ago
  I've been reading many machine learning papers to keep up with the field in the last year and only implemented some. Are you saying that I completely wasted my time reading by them and learned nothing?
  - AstixAndBelix 4y ago
    It depends. If you are well versed in ML then you know the concepts very well and have already played with them extensively. Thus reading a paper might be enough to learn it because you have done all the conceptual work up front. But even if you didn't learn the papers you still have built a mental catalogue of ML results that you can go back to learning when the occasion to implement them arises. So yes, you probably learned a chunk of them and some you simply remember, but that's ok.

morsch 4y ago

You can use an AI for learning if you go beyond treating it as a machine for cheating on your homework, and instead think of it as a 1:1 tutor. Imagine the AI having a teaching curriculum that it tends to go through, but in a conversational manner that invites the student (or a group of students) to ask questions, go on tangents, etc. I think that's what he has in mind. And it's easy to get excited about. I wouldn't call it studying, but I did have some enlightening conversations about cooking and baking with ChatGPT. That said, I found the article quite breathless and one-sided. For example, he's obviously convinced about the AI teacher thing, but only mentions the fact checking requirement in a half sentence aside: AI makes up stuff, and I'm not sure having to double check basically everything your school teacher tells you makes for a good learning environment, even if it's a good life lesson. Also, leading every paragraph with an emoji is kind of obnoxious.

PeterisP 4y ago
We can certainly imagine that (e.g. The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson is a good example of such a system), however, this is not what we are going through now. The currently built systems mess up the pedagogical tools and curricula we have, but do not yet provide an equivalent or better replacement, so at least in the short term it does make learning worse. Also, if someone can use a chatbot for exploring material does not mean that this is a good pedagogical tool for that - one of the functions that grading has in pedagogy is motivation to nudge learners to actually do the work, and that is a valuable function; expecting people to self-motivate for self-guided education will work for some but will completely fail many those learners who most need education.

zuminator 4y ago

When the article is talking about AI helping people learn, I don't think that's about AI's creating shortcuts and doing work for us. I think it's talking about bespoke lessons devised by AI to maximixe the potential of each student's innate abilities. We already know that spaced repitition can help us learn things faster. What if we got exactly the optimal amount of spaced repitition in all our subjects because the syllabus was designed for us by our AI tutor? What if the tutor knew the kinds of topics that kept us most engaged, what if the tutor was infinitely patient and would never get tired of explaining points that we were having a particularly hard time with? What if the tutor knew exactly when we needed a break, and when to double up on the homework? What if the tutor could tell if we were falling behind before we realized it ourselves, and adjusted things accordingly without us ever knowing?

ttoinou 4y ago

I feel the same than you, I also feel like the users of ChatGPT are lazy people who didn't seem to like learning stuff before. So why would they like it now they have ChatGPT ? They're just going to cheat life But frankly yes school is useless. I'm glad everyone has now a cheating tool, it's a free get out of jail card

imtringued 4y ago

There is also the problem that the author assumes permanent dependence on AI in every situation. The moment you are separated from your tool of choice you become worthless and unless the AI is opensource, you will have to pay steep fees as if the AI was your landlord.

ranting-moth 4y ago

Once the aforementioned AI's output can be trusted, I think it definitely has a place in learning (for the disciplined student). For example, I hated not having answers to maths some problems. I'd spend hours on problems and I just wanted to know if my solution was correct. People have a tendency to give up when they get stuck. But it's a tricky best, as it's also often a moment when you learn new (end even unrelated) things. Wonderful feeling afterwards, but frustration during the process. I think that a AI (that can be trusted) definitely has a place in giving you hints and helpful information. But hard problem solving is something you need to do. I think what will happen is that homework will be reduced to 0% of your final grade. There will be in person, offline exams. That'll weed out all those who can't solve the problems themselves.