6 ms·

OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft Back Bill to Fund 'AI Literacy' in Schools

122 points by cdrnsf 6mo ago

https://archive.ph/gLnMk https://archive.ph/gLnMk

fantasizr 6mo ago
this is a step beyond the drug dealers who give you the first sample for free. Attempts at legally mandated injection sites.
- mghackerlady 6mo ago
  Not the first time this has happened. There was a big push for schools to teach windows and microsoft office while conveniently ignoring other things exist. Nowadays some have moved to the google office suite which isn't that much better
  - fantasizr 6mo ago
    the textbook companies give the hard sell too but it's more honorable with traditional palm greasing and what not
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
rebolek 6mo ago
Of course they will back it up. Nice source of income.
- excrementfan 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kerkeslager 6mo ago
    So what? AI companies are buying laws, and a lot of people thinking that's true doesn't make it less true.
schnitzelstoat 6mo ago
It reminds me of the 'IT Literacy' classes we had when I was in high school where they just taught us to use Microsoft Office products.
- Kadecgos 6mo ago
  A lot of those were definitely sponsored by MS and co as well, but at least you did learn a practical, transferable, morph-able skill. You'll come out of that with experience using the features and structures of a general purpose OS, as well as the workflow of mode-base production software (in some cases). Excel at least is also just such a powerful 'everything' tool that I'm not even that mad about it. 'AI Literacy' is just very much not that at all and is just state-mandated brain rot.
  - maniiijiii 6mo ago
    [dead]
  - HeWhoLurksLate 6mo ago
    I was started on learning how to make PowerPoint presentations and present them in kindergarten, and I'm incredibly thankful for that. More broadly, building a slide deck is a critical part of public speaking and presenting and helps kids out a lot. In third grade I got taught how to type properly and hit 60-70 WPM, which is roughly where I still type to this day when doing tasks that require thinking instead of just doing a pre-compiled speed benchmark. Kids really need to learn the fundamentals of things, but on the other hand some of the same arguments came out when calculators were going mainstream and classes just evolved to take the new tools into account. I think eventually we'll see the same thing happen with AI, but I'm not sure what that will look like for every case yet. Probably more paper and pencil work tbh
    - strange_quark 6mo ago
      I hate the calculator argument. Kids still need to learn how to do basic arithmetic by hand. There's a reason that CAS calculators are banned on standardized tests. Even in college, I had classes where profs would force us to do complex calculus by hand even though Mathematica could spit out the answer. Understanding things from first principles is important, and probably even more so with AI!
righthand 6mo ago
I thought AI was so easy to use no one would have to be trained? Are they going to teach the kids to steal copyrighted data? And write AI slop articles? And to evangelize useless side projects as time savings?
- noobermin 6mo ago
  The drug dealers get to get them hooked young.
  - spwa4 6mo ago
    Come on, AI can work both ways. It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject. It's also easy to use AI to prevent yourself from having to learn anything. Both kinds of students will exist.
    - xienze 6mo ago
      > Both kinds of students will exist. Yeah and I'm betting there's gonna be a whole lot more "press the button to have all your work done for you" students than "work hard" students. FFS even before all this there's been an alarming number of students attending college who have to take remedial classes.
    - kerkeslager 6mo ago
      > It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject. It's actually not. It's easy to get an AI to say a lot about a subject, but that doesn't mean anything the AI said was true. There's a significant risk that the AI has simply hallucinated the information, and now you "know" a bunch of false ideas about the subject, which is worse than not knowing anything about it.
      - veber-alex 6mo ago
        Right because without AI everything you read on the internet is 100% true and correct. Learn how to use AI properly just like any tool and you can benefit.
sublinear 6mo ago
It will be interesting to see the backlash to this one.
charcircuit 6mo ago
The entirety of school should eventually be replaced with just this one class. AI is able to teach people anything they may want or need to know and it can design effective ways for people to study. Being able to use, interpret, and work together with AI is going to be one of the most important skills of the 21st century.
- AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
  Maybe so. Still, learning how to tell when the AI is blowing smoke is going to be an important skill, and I'm not sure that AIs are going to be great at teaching that to you. And learning when other people (AI salespeople, say) are blowing smoke is also an important skill. Again, I'm not sure that AIs are great at teaching that.
- armitron 6mo ago
  This level of naivety is characteristic of certain SV types where wishful thinking is the order of the day. We're already living through the disastrous effects of the "social media" revolution and this is going to be much more of the same, with even worse negative effects on society. Just imagine what this will do to critical thinking, interpersonal relationships and family dynamics in a country where illiteracy is rapidly climbing. I don't think it's a stretch to write that if the unrestrained capitulation in terms of societal costs towards big tech continues, we're setting ourselves up for {generational, class-based} conflict that will rip our country to pieces.
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  > Being able to use, interpret, and work together with AI is going to be one of the most important skills of the 21st century. But I thought the models are so good we don’t need humans anymore?
- Darwins_Toffees 6mo ago
  You know why most kids don't do this already, because they don't know what they don't know. Telling a 2nd grader to go learn anything they want is not going to have the result you apparently think it will.
cavino 6mo ago
The thing about AI is it'll teach you how to use it (aka 'AI literacy').
HomeDeLaPot 6mo ago
Maybe a more general focus on getting students to practice critical thinking and fact-checking would be better. AI could be addressed as a small part of that, since chatbots are everywhere and students need to know how to filter out their BS. But are NSF grants really necessary for this? To what degree is this funneling taxpayer money to buy ChatGPT subscriptions and advertise to students by getting them to use AI in the classroom?
kmeisthax 6mo ago
If by "AI literacy" they mean "learning how AI works and how to use it effectively", then this probably would wind up backfiring. Because when you improve people's AI literacy, they use it less. They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI. Of course, they probably plan to do to education what iPads did to education: deskill children. Apple successfully abliterated the concept of a file from a generation of students by making them do their computing in a straitjacket. I can only imagine how an AI-first or AI-only educational curriculum could make kids even worse at using computers.
- techjamie 6mo ago
  > They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI. Like the time I got given a swelling tablet at work to dispose of and had to go through phone tag to get an answer on what to do with it or how dangerous it was. And my coworker asked "if [I] tried asking AI?" I said I am not relying on ChatGPT for something that might explode, I'll wait for the person who's paid to tell me about this thing that might explode.
slopinthebag 6mo ago
Gotta get em hooked while they're young.
maniiijiii 6mo ago
[dead]
nalekberov 6mo ago
What is ‘AI Literacy’? How to prepare a prompt for maximum token efficiency?
- wiseowise 6mo ago
  Where to buy the subscription, how to convince parents to buy Pro instead of Plus, prevent original thought as early as possible, so they stay addicted - sorry I meant empowered - asap.
hsuduebc2 6mo ago
Of course they do when it must be taught on their products which will hook the users in time and make some money.
ndiddy 6mo ago
The other day I read this piece on how AI is already being used in schools, and it left quite an impression on me. https://archive.is/IW4B3 https://archive.is/IW4B3 > The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one. I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece, and I think that AI could have a role as a teaching aid. It's infinitely patient and it's able to adapt to a student's needs better than a textbook. Still, I hate the idea of students being encouraged to entirely offload their cognitive work onto an online service rather than think for themselves. The point of making fifth graders write essays, make art, design presentations, etc isn't the end product, it's that they now have the experience of having done the assignment. I would rather see students get taught how to think creatively, analyze a piece of writing, coherently explain an opinion, or draw a picture on their own, instead of giving this up in exchange for the nebulous skill of being "AI native" (aka being able to ask a computer to produce work for you).
- NewsaHackO 6mo ago
  Yeah, I cannot imagine how anyone could learn anything well with access to AI. I am grateful that I finished my schooling before AI hit mainstream, because it is just too easy to turn your brain off and just AI a question before thinking about it. Great for getting things done, useless for learning. I guess hallucinations still keep us on our toes.
  - fasterik 6mo ago
    "Useless for learning" is just wrong. I've found LLMs immensely useful for directing my learning projects. Of course, a lot of the actual learning must come from doing things and puzzling through them myself. But I now find LLMs to be indispensable in finding out what I need to learn to accomplish a task, finding keywords to search on Wikipedia or in textbooks, and answering questions when I'm confused about something.
marricks 6mo ago
> Young people increasingly hate AI[1], and children already struggle with AI-enabled harassment that traumatizes them and disrupts their learning. And studies show kids are offloading learning onto AI models, undermining their education and social development. [1] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/gen-z-ai?ref=404media.co https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g... The coyote is already running beyond the cliff so indoctrinating kids won't save them from an AI winter 6-18 months away.
- bigyabai 6mo ago
  I swear that I read this same "6-18 months" timeframe 3 years ago.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - gosub100 6mo ago
    that's true, but if calling a crash was that easy, it would have been priced into the market already. regardless of when the crash occurs, I think we can all agree that the current form of AI is financially unsustainable. How much would you allow if you paid its true cost? $300/mo, $500/mo $1k? for intern-level slop.
  - marricks 6mo ago
    Honestly, yeah, fair point. There's enough money in tech to keep the party going for who knows how long. The housing market was unsustainable for a long time and went even further up before it crashed. The smart people who called that have lost a lot of money making reasonable bets against things which should have crashed. The difference now is rich people have positively stupid amounts of money to keep stupid things going for even stupidly longer periods of time.
nathan_compton 6mo ago
This is the reason I recently ran for my kids school board. I use AI every day and I think there is a lot of utility there, but I don't want it anywhere near my kids school. Honestly, I don't think kids need to even lay eyes on a screen until they are in highschool.
wiseowise 6mo ago
Got to train serfs early!
saidinesh5 6mo ago
Putting all the cynicism side.. it's amazing how big the changes in how we deal with information in our life time changed.. When I was younger, to solve a problem, we had to memorize a large amount of information. Or know someone who does. Or visit libraries and pray they have a book on what you need. Then came the internet. All of that memorizing was replaced by web searches. You just focus on solving the problem, figuring out what you don't know and searching for that. Now, it feels like we're automating the searching, connecting the dots and most of the problem solving. We focus on the high level problem description, verification of the results. I wonder what they'd be adding to this curriculum. Now, it feels like we're even offloading
samagragune 6mo ago
The conflict of interest is pretty obvious. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are backing a bill that funds teaching kids to use... OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft products. "AI literacy" as defined in the bill is literally "the ability to use artificial intelligence effectively." That's not literacy, that's onboarding lol. Real digital literacy teaches how systems work, who profits from them, and how to think critically about them. This bill will in practice hand curriculum design to the same vendors who endorsed it. Teaching kids to prompt ChatGPT is not the same as teaching them to understand what ChatGPT is. Nobody funding this wants the latter.
- devanshranjan 6mo ago
  we'd have raised a generation of users not builders. thats exactly whats about to happen with AI if this passes as written.
  - andrekandre 6mo ago
    well, tv got that ball rolling a few generations ago; people learn by doing not watching something else do it for them, now ai will not just tell them or show them but do it as well it would seem...
    - duzer65657 6mo ago
      this is what apple products did as well. They turned something that took some effort and desire (i.e. using a computer) into streamlined entertainment. Watch someone use their phone; it's passive, one-way consumption.
      - andrekandre 6mo ago
        apple is an especially sad case in some respects as steve used to call the mac "a bycicle for the mind" and NeXT was originally a computer/os for higher-ed... but with products like the iphone, locking it down and keeping things passive is the best way to monetize it (sadly)
    - 6mo ago
jmclnx 6mo ago
What a big waste of $, for an example how did the 'coding' schools go ? AI literacy will go the same way. How about funding something useful ? Like real literacy as in reading books ? That will help kids out far better than "AI literacy".
moolcool 6mo ago
This is way too close to the Simpsons joke about the periodic tables provided by Oscar Mayer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohXWbMrXZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohXWbMrXZI
Darwins_Toffees 6mo ago
Imagine telling parents that the new teacher they hired to teach their children just makes shit up like 30% of the time.
wtetzner 6mo ago
If AI worked as advertised then "AI Literacy" would just be "Literacy".
adybray2 6mo ago
[dead]
pessimizer 6mo ago
This is entirely backwards. AI should be used as a tool to tutor kids. Kids shouldn't be learning about AI. I thought the point of AI was that people didn't have to know anything to talk to it. Not to cheat at writing exercises. Writing exercises that children produce in school are immediately thrown into the trash after being graded and reviewed. The product is supposed to be better educated children, not better written papers.
arjie 6mo ago
There is a class of such thing that could be useful. I will likely be teaching my children this literacy myself. Obviously the interstitial pop-ups don't work, and the next generation will not be coming to this technology from the point of view of watching it develop. They will see it as having always existed and while they may be appropriately sceptical, I suspect they will be far more trusting of it. So some degree of understanding the mechanics will probably allow them to learn to treat this technology appropriately. After all, it's nigh magical stuff. A machine that talks to you in common language and is almost always right. If you weren't already prepared for it, you would trust it implicitly. When Wikipedia first came onto the scene, people behaved this way there too. They would believe it was entirely correct. But at some point there was a concerted effort in pedagogy to say things like "You can't cite a Wikipedia article" and that one simply-remembered rule allowed for children to be forced to treat it as an aggregator. Naturally, setting up a fund for this is nearly always a bad structure. Earmarked funds have a bad habit of ending up being written to be primarily a vehicle to transfer money to pet constituencies. Teachers unions and so on are always advocating for these because that's what funds the complex ecosystem of teacher educators, the certification and curriculum development programs, and so on. This is just social welfare by a different means. Funds should be flexibly used to meet some outcome. Earmarked funds have a habit of ratcheting up. When there is no need for programs, they continue to exist, and bleed money from the actual work product of education - informed students. I get why these articles are always written in this style but I really would appreciate some better news media. Students hate a lot of things. Their opinion is mostly moot as to whether a subject is a good thing to learn or not. And all this polemic style of "shoehorn" and so on is completely unnecessary, and just makes me treat this whole thing in the realm of some partisan Twitter post. But the one thing I did appreciate is a link to the text of the bill.
red_admiral 6mo ago
I remember "media literacy", "digital literacy" and "smartphone literacy". Why is no-one pointing out the obvious?
techteach00 6mo ago
As a teacher, if permitted to teach about and have students use chat bots, I think I'd focus on prompting first. The best results I read about on here using LLM's have to do with prompt mastery I think.
Devasta 6mo ago
The Chromebook has already been an unmitigated disaster for computer literacy, this will only make it worse.
caconym_ 6mo ago
I'm going to do everything in my power to keep this dog shit technology away from my daughter for as long as I possibly can. I can imagine implementations that I might be willing to consider for educational applications, but given these companies' demonstrated and profound lack of restraint in cramming AI into literally everything they sell, I almost can't believe anyone who doesn't work for them is suggesting that we should expose children to their products in the same context where they are supposed to be learning. Almost.
- iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
  I can already see a fight on the horizon and it won't be easy. My kid is in a catholic school and they do try to instill some good habits, I am seeing some teachers just kinda checking out. Previously, it was watch a movie/we in class. Now it will be: play with AI. At that point, I might have to submit a withdrawal from class.. If she is gonna use it anyway, I might as well have a say in it.
PunchyHamster 6mo ago
So far AI is funding illiteracy in schools
claysmithr 6mo ago
Proof the people running things are stupid I guess.
rvz 6mo ago
Why think for yourself when you have ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to do all the thinking for you? The owners of these systems do not even use the technologies that they are creating. The deskilling programme will continue, until morale improves.
tsoukase 6mo ago
AI, in the form of LLMs, should be used as an augmenting tool and not as a substituting one. The human must conceive the idea, design the solution and fill most of the gaps. The AI will only refine, improve and suggest options upon an already existing base. As a parent I promote such a use to my kids, rather than ban AI which is futile and might become dangerous in the future.
butforwho 6mo ago
[dead]
lofaszvanitt 6mo ago
The US really wanna ruin themselves and conjure a cyberpunk like reality... the elite seemingly went south there.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
rexpop 6mo ago
Cool, Taylorism 2.0
fyrn_ 6mo ago
I'd back a bill to ban AI from scholls in many contexts, just like phones I think it's pretty obvious what the result will be. I guess like with phones we'll all have to pretend it's not obvious for ten years until we have overwhelming scientific evidence, then wait another ten for US policy makers to start talking about making a committee to design a study to develop a plan
whateveracct 6mo ago
stop it
stuaxo 6mo ago
FFS. This makes me glad that the crappy chromebooks given to kids at my daughter's school aren't used.
classified 6mo ago
You bet they do. Everything that normalizes AI use generates profit for them.
k12sosse 6mo ago
Microsoft just (mid April) removed copilot from their desktop apps. They killed apps for enterprise aka desktop office from being included in A1. Microsoft care about education, care about grabbing that public dollar, that is.

122 points by cdrnsf 6mo ago

https://archive.ph/gLnMk https://archive.ph/gLnMk

this is a step beyond the drug dealers who give you the first sample for free. Attempts at legally mandated injection sites.

mghackerlady 6mo ago
Not the first time this has happened. There was a big push for schools to teach windows and microsoft office while conveniently ignoring other things exist. Nowadays some have moved to the google office suite which isn't that much better
- fantasizr 6mo ago
  the textbook companies give the hard sell too but it's more honorable with traditional palm greasing and what not
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]

rebolek 6mo ago

Of course they will back it up. Nice source of income.

excrementfan 6mo ago
[flagged]
- kerkeslager 6mo ago
  So what? AI companies are buying laws, and a lot of people thinking that's true doesn't make it less true.

schnitzelstoat 6mo ago

It reminds me of the 'IT Literacy' classes we had when I was in high school where they just taught us to use Microsoft Office products.

Kadecgos 6mo ago
A lot of those were definitely sponsored by MS and co as well, but at least you did learn a practical, transferable, morph-able skill. You'll come out of that with experience using the features and structures of a general purpose OS, as well as the workflow of mode-base production software (in some cases). Excel at least is also just such a powerful 'everything' tool that I'm not even that mad about it. 'AI Literacy' is just very much not that at all and is just state-mandated brain rot.
- maniiijiii 6mo ago
  [dead]
- HeWhoLurksLate 6mo ago
  I was started on learning how to make PowerPoint presentations and present them in kindergarten, and I'm incredibly thankful for that. More broadly, building a slide deck is a critical part of public speaking and presenting and helps kids out a lot. In third grade I got taught how to type properly and hit 60-70 WPM, which is roughly where I still type to this day when doing tasks that require thinking instead of just doing a pre-compiled speed benchmark. Kids really need to learn the fundamentals of things, but on the other hand some of the same arguments came out when calculators were going mainstream and classes just evolved to take the new tools into account. I think eventually we'll see the same thing happen with AI, but I'm not sure what that will look like for every case yet. Probably more paper and pencil work tbh
  - strange_quark 6mo ago
    I hate the calculator argument. Kids still need to learn how to do basic arithmetic by hand. There's a reason that CAS calculators are banned on standardized tests. Even in college, I had classes where profs would force us to do complex calculus by hand even though Mathematica could spit out the answer. Understanding things from first principles is important, and probably even more so with AI!

righthand 6mo ago

I thought AI was so easy to use no one would have to be trained? Are they going to teach the kids to steal copyrighted data? And write AI slop articles? And to evangelize useless side projects as time savings?

noobermin 6mo ago
The drug dealers get to get them hooked young.
- spwa4 6mo ago
  Come on, AI can work both ways. It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject. It's also easy to use AI to prevent yourself from having to learn anything. Both kinds of students will exist.
  - xienze 6mo ago
    > Both kinds of students will exist. Yeah and I'm betting there's gonna be a whole lot more "press the button to have all your work done for you" students than "work hard" students. FFS even before all this there's been an alarming number of students attending college who have to take remedial classes.
  - kerkeslager 6mo ago
    > It's easy to use AI to greatly increase your knowledge of a subject. It's actually not. It's easy to get an AI to say a lot about a subject, but that doesn't mean anything the AI said was true. There's a significant risk that the AI has simply hallucinated the information, and now you "know" a bunch of false ideas about the subject, which is worse than not knowing anything about it.
    - veber-alex 6mo ago
      Right because without AI everything you read on the internet is 100% true and correct. Learn how to use AI properly just like any tool and you can benefit.

sublinear 6mo ago

It will be interesting to see the backlash to this one.

charcircuit 6mo ago

The entirety of school should eventually be replaced with just this one class. AI is able to teach people anything they may want or need to know and it can design effective ways for people to study. Being able to use, interpret, and work together with AI is going to be one of the most important skills of the 21st century.

AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
Maybe so. Still, learning how to tell when the AI is blowing smoke is going to be an important skill, and I'm not sure that AIs are going to be great at teaching that to you. And learning when other people (AI salespeople, say) are blowing smoke is also an important skill. Again, I'm not sure that AIs are great at teaching that.
armitron 6mo ago
This level of naivety is characteristic of certain SV types where wishful thinking is the order of the day. We're already living through the disastrous effects of the "social media" revolution and this is going to be much more of the same, with even worse negative effects on society. Just imagine what this will do to critical thinking, interpersonal relationships and family dynamics in a country where illiteracy is rapidly climbing. I don't think it's a stretch to write that if the unrestrained capitulation in terms of societal costs towards big tech continues, we're setting ourselves up for {generational, class-based} conflict that will rip our country to pieces.
wiseowise 6mo ago
> Being able to use, interpret, and work together with AI is going to be one of the most important skills of the 21st century. But I thought the models are so good we don’t need humans anymore?
Darwins_Toffees 6mo ago
You know why most kids don't do this already, because they don't know what they don't know. Telling a 2nd grader to go learn anything they want is not going to have the result you apparently think it will.

cavino 6mo ago

The thing about AI is it'll teach you how to use it (aka 'AI literacy').

HomeDeLaPot 6mo ago

Maybe a more general focus on getting students to practice critical thinking and fact-checking would be better. AI could be addressed as a small part of that, since chatbots are everywhere and students need to know how to filter out their BS. But are NSF grants really necessary for this? To what degree is this funneling taxpayer money to buy ChatGPT subscriptions and advertise to students by getting them to use AI in the classroom?

kmeisthax 6mo ago

If by "AI literacy" they mean "learning how AI works and how to use it effectively", then this probably would wind up backfiring. Because when you improve people's AI literacy, they use it less. They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI. Of course, they probably plan to do to education what iPads did to education: deskill children. Apple successfully abliterated the concept of a file from a generation of students by making them do their computing in a straitjacket. I can only imagine how an AI-first or AI-only educational curriculum could make kids even worse at using computers.

techjamie 6mo ago
> They don't swear off it, but because they know what it is and is not good for, they are way more cautious in their application of AI. Like the time I got given a swelling tablet at work to dispose of and had to go through phone tag to get an answer on what to do with it or how dangerous it was. And my coworker asked "if [I] tried asking AI?" I said I am not relying on ChatGPT for something that might explode, I'll wait for the person who's paid to tell me about this thing that might explode.

slopinthebag 6mo ago

Gotta get em hooked while they're young.

maniiijiii 6mo ago

[dead]

nalekberov 6mo ago

What is ‘AI Literacy’? How to prepare a prompt for maximum token efficiency?

wiseowise 6mo ago
Where to buy the subscription, how to convince parents to buy Pro instead of Plus, prevent original thought as early as possible, so they stay addicted - sorry I meant empowered - asap.

hsuduebc2 6mo ago

Of course they do when it must be taught on their products which will hook the users in time and make some money.

ndiddy 6mo ago

The other day I read this piece on how AI is already being used in schools, and it left quite an impression on me. https://archive.is/IW4B3 https://archive.is/IW4B3 > The Chromebooks, which the students use in every class and for homework, came pre-installed with an all-ages version of Gemini, a suite of A.I. tools. When my daughter, who is in sixth grade, begins writing an essay, she gets a prompt: “Help me write.” If she is starting work on a slide-show presentation, the prompt is “Help me visualize.” She shoos away these interruptions, but they persist: “Help me edit.” “Beautify this slide.” The image generator is there, if she’d ever wish to pull the plug on her imagination. The Gemini chatbot is there, if she ever wants to talk to no one. I'm not as anti-AI as the author of the piece, and I think that AI could have a role as a teaching aid. It's infinitely patient and it's able to adapt to a student's needs better than a textbook. Still, I hate the idea of students being encouraged to entirely offload their cognitive work onto an online service rather than think for themselves. The point of making fifth graders write essays, make art, design presentations, etc isn't the end product, it's that they now have the experience of having done the assignment. I would rather see students get taught how to think creatively, analyze a piece of writing, coherently explain an opinion, or draw a picture on their own, instead of giving this up in exchange for the nebulous skill of being "AI native" (aka being able to ask a computer to produce work for you).

NewsaHackO 6mo ago
Yeah, I cannot imagine how anyone could learn anything well with access to AI. I am grateful that I finished my schooling before AI hit mainstream, because it is just too easy to turn your brain off and just AI a question before thinking about it. Great for getting things done, useless for learning. I guess hallucinations still keep us on our toes.
- fasterik 6mo ago
  "Useless for learning" is just wrong. I've found LLMs immensely useful for directing my learning projects. Of course, a lot of the actual learning must come from doing things and puzzling through them myself. But I now find LLMs to be indispensable in finding out what I need to learn to accomplish a task, finding keywords to search on Wikipedia or in textbooks, and answering questions when I'm confused about something.

marricks 6mo ago

> Young people increasingly hate AI[1], and children already struggle with AI-enabled harassment that traumatizes them and disrupts their learning. And studies show kids are offloading learning onto AI models, undermining their education and social development. [1] https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/gen-z-ai?ref=404media.co https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920401/g... The coyote is already running beyond the cliff so indoctrinating kids won't save them from an AI winter 6-18 months away.

bigyabai 6mo ago
I swear that I read this same "6-18 months" timeframe 3 years ago.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- gosub100 6mo ago
  that's true, but if calling a crash was that easy, it would have been priced into the market already. regardless of when the crash occurs, I think we can all agree that the current form of AI is financially unsustainable. How much would you allow if you paid its true cost? $300/mo, $500/mo $1k? for intern-level slop.
- marricks 6mo ago
  Honestly, yeah, fair point. There's enough money in tech to keep the party going for who knows how long. The housing market was unsustainable for a long time and went even further up before it crashed. The smart people who called that have lost a lot of money making reasonable bets against things which should have crashed. The difference now is rich people have positively stupid amounts of money to keep stupid things going for even stupidly longer periods of time.

nathan_compton 6mo ago

This is the reason I recently ran for my kids school board. I use AI every day and I think there is a lot of utility there, but I don't want it anywhere near my kids school. Honestly, I don't think kids need to even lay eyes on a screen until they are in highschool.

wiseowise 6mo ago

Got to train serfs early!

saidinesh5 6mo ago

Putting all the cynicism side.. it's amazing how big the changes in how we deal with information in our life time changed.. When I was younger, to solve a problem, we had to memorize a large amount of information. Or know someone who does. Or visit libraries and pray they have a book on what you need. Then came the internet. All of that memorizing was replaced by web searches. You just focus on solving the problem, figuring out what you don't know and searching for that. Now, it feels like we're automating the searching, connecting the dots and most of the problem solving. We focus on the high level problem description, verification of the results. I wonder what they'd be adding to this curriculum. Now, it feels like we're even offloading

samagragune 6mo ago

The conflict of interest is pretty obvious. OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are backing a bill that funds teaching kids to use... OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft products. "AI literacy" as defined in the bill is literally "the ability to use artificial intelligence effectively." That's not literacy, that's onboarding lol. Real digital literacy teaches how systems work, who profits from them, and how to think critically about them. This bill will in practice hand curriculum design to the same vendors who endorsed it. Teaching kids to prompt ChatGPT is not the same as teaching them to understand what ChatGPT is. Nobody funding this wants the latter.

devanshranjan 6mo ago
we'd have raised a generation of users not builders. thats exactly whats about to happen with AI if this passes as written.
- andrekandre 6mo ago
  well, tv got that ball rolling a few generations ago; people learn by doing not watching something else do it for them, now ai will not just tell them or show them but do it as well it would seem...
  - duzer65657 6mo ago
    this is what apple products did as well. They turned something that took some effort and desire (i.e. using a computer) into streamlined entertainment. Watch someone use their phone; it's passive, one-way consumption.
    - andrekandre 6mo ago
      apple is an especially sad case in some respects as steve used to call the mac "a bycicle for the mind" and NeXT was originally a computer/os for higher-ed... but with products like the iphone, locking it down and keeping things passive is the best way to monetize it (sadly)
  - 6mo ago

jmclnx 6mo ago

What a big waste of $, for an example how did the 'coding' schools go ? AI literacy will go the same way. How about funding something useful ? Like real literacy as in reading books ? That will help kids out far better than "AI literacy".

moolcool 6mo ago

This is way too close to the Simpsons joke about the periodic tables provided by Oscar Mayer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohXWbMrXZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pohXWbMrXZI

Darwins_Toffees 6mo ago

Imagine telling parents that the new teacher they hired to teach their children just makes shit up like 30% of the time.

wtetzner 6mo ago

If AI worked as advertised then "AI Literacy" would just be "Literacy".

adybray2 6mo ago

[dead]

pessimizer 6mo ago

This is entirely backwards. AI should be used as a tool to tutor kids. Kids shouldn't be learning about AI. I thought the point of AI was that people didn't have to know anything to talk to it. Not to cheat at writing exercises. Writing exercises that children produce in school are immediately thrown into the trash after being graded and reviewed. The product is supposed to be better educated children, not better written papers.

arjie 6mo ago

There is a class of such thing that could be useful. I will likely be teaching my children this literacy myself. Obviously the interstitial pop-ups don't work, and the next generation will not be coming to this technology from the point of view of watching it develop. They will see it as having always existed and while they may be appropriately sceptical, I suspect they will be far more trusting of it. So some degree of understanding the mechanics will probably allow them to learn to treat this technology appropriately. After all, it's nigh magical stuff. A machine that talks to you in common language and is almost always right. If you weren't already prepared for it, you would trust it implicitly. When Wikipedia first came onto the scene, people behaved this way there too. They would believe it was entirely correct. But at some point there was a concerted effort in pedagogy to say things like "You can't cite a Wikipedia article" and that one simply-remembered rule allowed for children to be forced to treat it as an aggregator. Naturally, setting up a fund for this is nearly always a bad structure. Earmarked funds have a bad habit of ending up being written to be primarily a vehicle to transfer money to pet constituencies. Teachers unions and so on are always advocating for these because that's what funds the complex ecosystem of teacher educators, the certification and curriculum development programs, and so on. This is just social welfare by a different means. Funds should be flexibly used to meet some outcome. Earmarked funds have a habit of ratcheting up. When there is no need for programs, they continue to exist, and bleed money from the actual work product of education - informed students. I get why these articles are always written in this style but I really would appreciate some better news media. Students hate a lot of things. Their opinion is mostly moot as to whether a subject is a good thing to learn or not. And all this polemic style of "shoehorn" and so on is completely unnecessary, and just makes me treat this whole thing in the realm of some partisan Twitter post. But the one thing I did appreciate is a link to the text of the bill.

red_admiral 6mo ago

I remember "media literacy", "digital literacy" and "smartphone literacy". Why is no-one pointing out the obvious?

techteach00 6mo ago

As a teacher, if permitted to teach about and have students use chat bots, I think I'd focus on prompting first. The best results I read about on here using LLM's have to do with prompt mastery I think.

Devasta 6mo ago

The Chromebook has already been an unmitigated disaster for computer literacy, this will only make it worse.

caconym_ 6mo ago

I'm going to do everything in my power to keep this dog shit technology away from my daughter for as long as I possibly can. I can imagine implementations that I might be willing to consider for educational applications, but given these companies' demonstrated and profound lack of restraint in cramming AI into literally everything they sell, I almost can't believe anyone who doesn't work for them is suggesting that we should expose children to their products in the same context where they are supposed to be learning. Almost.

iugtmkbdfil834 6mo ago
I can already see a fight on the horizon and it won't be easy. My kid is in a catholic school and they do try to instill some good habits, I am seeing some teachers just kinda checking out. Previously, it was watch a movie/we in class. Now it will be: play with AI. At that point, I might have to submit a withdrawal from class.. If she is gonna use it anyway, I might as well have a say in it.

PunchyHamster 6mo ago

So far AI is funding illiteracy in schools

claysmithr 6mo ago

Proof the people running things are stupid I guess.

rvz 6mo ago

Why think for yourself when you have ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to do all the thinking for you? The owners of these systems do not even use the technologies that they are creating. The deskilling programme will continue, until morale improves.

tsoukase 6mo ago

AI, in the form of LLMs, should be used as an augmenting tool and not as a substituting one. The human must conceive the idea, design the solution and fill most of the gaps. The AI will only refine, improve and suggest options upon an already existing base. As a parent I promote such a use to my kids, rather than ban AI which is futile and might become dangerous in the future.

butforwho 6mo ago

[dead]

lofaszvanitt 6mo ago

The US really wanna ruin themselves and conjure a cyberpunk like reality... the elite seemingly went south there.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

rexpop 6mo ago

Cool, Taylorism 2.0

fyrn_ 6mo ago

I'd back a bill to ban AI from scholls in many contexts, just like phones I think it's pretty obvious what the result will be. I guess like with phones we'll all have to pretend it's not obvious for ten years until we have overwhelming scientific evidence, then wait another ten for US policy makers to start talking about making a committee to design a study to develop a plan

whateveracct 6mo ago

stop it

stuaxo 6mo ago

FFS. This makes me glad that the crappy chromebooks given to kids at my daughter's school aren't used.

classified 6mo ago

You bet they do. Everything that normalizes AI use generates profit for them.

k12sosse 6mo ago

Microsoft just (mid April) removed copilot from their desktop apps. They killed apps for enterprise aka desktop office from being included in A1. Microsoft care about education, care about grabbing that public dollar, that is.