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Wishful thinking if you read the article. Most of these kids aren't learning anything about how to use AI. They aren't like a Simon Willison or Janus or anythin
by gwern 1y ago
Wishful thinking if you read the article. Most of these kids aren't learning anything about how to use AI. They aren't like a Simon Willison or Janus or anything. They're not learning about confabulations, they're not learning about scaling laws or tokenization, they're not learning to use the API, they're not running multiple models to get a feel for how they think differently, they ain't doing none of that shit you wishfully think they are - because they're cheating to minimize effort so they can go do something else like watch Tiktok. (Even Lee, who is by far the most successful and sophisticated user profiled in OP, is just dumping out stuff as fast as he can to try to make a buck.)
They are copy-pasting the assignment from Blackboard to ChatGPT and vice-versa. As the article points out, they usually aren't even reading the outputs to check that the essay doesn't suddenly start bloviating about Aristotle.
And no one needs to pay a college wage premium, or any wage, for that:
> He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.
- cs702 1y agoI read the article. Those kids are definitely learning how to think, just not in the way educators wish. One of the girls quoted said she loves writing, but finds it helpful to get structure and initial content from generative AI. The kid at Columbia has already launched two startups. Clever kids always figure out how to leverage the tools they have at hand. With the advent of new technology, humanity has no choice but to move up the value chain -- in this case, from executing tasks to judging, supervising, and curating AI work.
- gwern 1y ago> One of the girls quoted said she loves writing, but finds it helpful to get structure and initial content from generative AI. Which shows she's not learning from the AI or even improving on it. All she's doing is filling out the 'structure and initial content' - oh, is that all??? > The kid at Columbia has already launched two startups. Which doesn't require learning anything much from the LLMs, as he did that on his own before them (note the Leetcode). Also, considering that the second one is fraudulent and if it works, exists largely to abet fraud, this is not a ringing endorsement. > With the advent of new technology, humanity has no choice but to move up the value chain -- in this case, from executing tasks to judging, supervising, and curating AI work. ChatGPT couldn't written that ending any better. (I will charitably assume it did not, unless you took the trouble to replace that emdash with a double hyphen just to be cute.) It could have written it about 1000x cheaper, however.
- cs702 1y agoI'm not sure there's a choice. The economic incentives are too strong. Like it or not, those individuals who figure out (i.e., learn) how to leverage AI to do more, faster, and (eventually) better will have an advantage over those individuals who don't. Many kids intuitively seem to understand this. Believe it or not, I write all my comments the old-fashioned way -- without the help of any AI!
- bdangubic 1y agothere is on choice. my kid uses about 11 different AI tools and she is about to turn 12. it is on parents to guide this but any kid who is not all over this at the deep level will be at insurrmountable disadvantage
- gwern 1y agoBTW, this is how it's going with the 'clever kids' and hiring for their cheating startup: https://x.com/im_roy_lee/status/1920206362996343261 https://x.com/im_roy_lee/status/1920206362996343261 it's really fucking hard to find competent engineers. i've interviewed about 20 cs majors who claim to be experts at typescript and only 3 of them have been able to explain what the purpose of useState is (not trolling). (There are at least 2 ways this tweet is embarrassing.)