4 ms·

> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills. I think it's more complex than this. AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding le

by theptip 4mo ago

> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills. I think it's more complex than this. AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning. The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.) On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.

wffurr 4mo ago
There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.
- tacomagick 4mo ago
  LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.
  - rwmj 4mo ago
    It's far from clear that this helps you to learn anything. More likely it's a way for most people to avoid having to think or learn.
    - tacomagick 4mo ago
      I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.
      - hparadiz 4mo ago
        I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
        KittenInABox 4mo ago
        The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?
        hparadiz 4mo ago
        My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.
        beepbooptheory 4mo ago
        Yeah but the teacher says you're wrong even if you're right. The AI tells you you're right either way. The former can facilitate an important lesson, the latter doesn't ever give you the chance to.
        hparadiz 4mo ago
alexashka 4mo ago
Stupid people never have the appetite or ability to 'tackle' anything. It's their defining characteristic. It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow. AI changes nothing.
20k 4mo ago
AI is a terrible teacher though. It makes stuff up all the time, and for some subjects it has a remarkably low accuracy rate
- tacomagick 4mo ago
  I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.
  - runarberg 4mo ago
    It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger. Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.
    - tacomagick 4mo ago
      I have never claimed it to be good enough to replace a qualified educator, however for self learning it is a good tool with no hustle. You also consider how qualified some educators are...
      - hparadiz 4mo ago
        It's far superior in many cases. Teachers get tired, lose patience, etc.
        froggit 4mo ago
        I'd prefer a grumpy teacher over one that cheerfully gaslights me.
      - runarberg 4mo ago
BobbyTables2 4mo ago
Learning is also impacted when homework/test questions are created and graded by AI. The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map… Why have teachers? The AI might as well grade itself.
- tacomagick 4mo ago
  Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.
runarberg 4mo ago
> and the best technology ever invented for learning. This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement. Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.
- QuesnayJr 4mo ago
  Dude, just use it to learn something. It's obviously true. Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.
  - mike_hock 4mo ago
    > Ask a question. > Ask two follow-up questions. > Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question. > Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction." Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."
    - runarberg 4mo ago
      Useful as in “better than nothing” but lacking as in “inferior to almost anything else”.
    - theptip 4mo ago
      I thought the dichotomy would make this clear, but the claim was not that however you use AI, it’s the best thing ever. To be more explicit: _used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript. Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.
grayhatter 4mo ago
[flagged]
- tacomagick 4mo ago
  [flagged]
dosisking 4mo ago
AI has existed for decades. The average person has just discovered it / had it forced upon them. And just a small-subset of AI. The average person does not use real AI. And AI is not even well-defined. Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning. AI will be used as a tool as a way of 'shaping' the mind of young people. Similar to using standardized textbooks. AI is too much of a political tool to be useful. AI is a tool for propaganda.
- scotty79 4mo ago
  > AI is a tool for propaganda. In my experience so far it's less of a propaganda than basically any other medium massively consumed today. It might become it one day though, like all othe media became it.
- master-lincoln 4mo ago
  > Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning I am curious where you were educated to come to this conclusion. I don't think your statement holds generally true for all education as it is by definition teaching knowledge. Sure, there might be institutions that do teaching and propaganda, but I think it shows a lack of awareness to generalize this to all education.
lelanthran 4mo ago
> AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning. Yeah, right. Did you forget a /s https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5d1 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5... This is a popular game, still doing sales almost 18 years after release, with dozens of wiki fansites containing all the information, and with hundreds, if not thousands, of reddit postings... and it falls apart on the first answer! No. Kids in school should not be using AI, because: 1. They won't be using the latest models, and 2. They can't tell if the info is accurate
ifwinterco 4mo ago
The obvious way to square this circle is to go back to how things used to be: less emphasis on coursework and more on old-fashioned tests in an examination environment with just pen and paper. You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine
- IshKebab 4mo ago
  This is definitely what's going to happen. But there is still a problem - people (not just children) are fundamentally lazy and put things off. People always leave assignments until the last minute. I used to smoothly transition from "I've got plenty of time, no need to start" to "there's not enough time to do it, there's no point starting". They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes. So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.
  - VorpalWay 4mo ago
    In what countries were the exams only once a year? When I grew up in the 90s in Sweden we would have tests and exams frequently, usually at the end of each module. This continued all the way through university. I think we had 3 separate exams for the first math course (which lasted a quarter of a year, so roughly one exam per month). (Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)
    - IshKebab 4mo ago
      In the UK. In high school (age ~11 to 16) the only exams that mattered were SATs at ages 7, 11 and 14 (though I just checked and apparently they've scrapped the 14 year old ones for some reason), and GCSEs at 16. After that you have A-levels for two years (age 17 and 18) where IIRC it was just one big group of exams at the end of each year, and then university where I guess maybe it varies but at least at Cambridge it was one big group of 3-hour long exams at the end of each year. Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI. Your way definitely sounds better to me.
habagav 4mo ago
It’s not complex. One must first learn HOW TO LEARN before they can use any tool to help them learn. There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers). Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?
- theptip 4mo ago
  I agree that the human touch is valuable. I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights. I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
  - habagav 4mo ago
    Well, what we’re seeing in society is the opposite effect. Kids with phones and AI bots are doing, on average, terrible in school compared to folks who didn’t have those growing up. University professors will likely agree that AI makes students worse at learning overall. No need to cite this there are articles all over the place. So whatever solution you’re talking about, even when purpose-built, should be replaced by higher paid teachers. Ultimately the AI-First model is about moving money into mega-corps and paying teachers less.
    - theptip 4mo ago
      I agree that we are seeing the negative effects of AI-done-wrong. (The best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, as I said.) I don’t agree that this means all potential or current uses of AI are harmful. I also don’t agree that simply paying teachers more is a solution. This lever has always existed and as a society we fail to pull it. So for the majority of people who use public schools, improving quality at current spend levels would be a major win, and we should explore the obvious possibilities here. I’m also pretty skeptical about your culture-war assertion that this is about wealth transfer to mega-corps. This can easily be a sovereign AI product. (I also never proposed “AI first” FWIW, I am a proponent of humans augmented by AI for this and most use-cases. Banning AI entirely operates at the margin of forbidding mostly-human use-cases from using any AI.)
cuvert 4mo ago
I understand the first part, but I don't understand the second one. It's probably my ignorance for not having children and being out of touch with schooling. When I was in school very little grading was based on homework, mostly was grading by testing in class. For example math, I'm absolutely sure it was 100% a few grading tests every semester. You could cheat by copying the homework of your classmates, it was the same set of problems for, but with 0 understanding, you would not pass.
amelius 4mo ago
It's the same old argument about knives and technology. But we don't give children knives.
- theptip 4mo ago
  But we do give them bicycles, so the lesson would be “give them technology that is safe to use”. And then we are back to the discussion at hand none the wiser; what forms of AI are safe to use for kids?
  - jplusequalt 4mo ago
    The kind that doesn't allow a child to anthropomorphize it, or rely on it for learning.
blitzar 4mo ago
I presume kids still learn to add 1 and 1, do their multiplication tables and long division before being given a calculator ?
kakacik 4mo ago
This is what schools enforce, second, even more important part is what parents do/allow/pay for at home. Every single household I've seen benevolent use of phones/tablets/tv/computer/consoles (quite often all of it), kids were unruly, had shitty grades, living empty lives without good role models and very little passions or hobbies, and overall were more depressed than happy. I do get why - its supremely easier to just throw tech at them and let them drown in endless cheap dopamine content, triple that for already-addicted parents. The whole principle of active screen itself is so overpowering and addictive compared to good old physical toys, drawing, paint, reading etc. As a parent of young kids, its much harder to come up, continuously, with good motivating program out there, or even indoors, ie climbing. But - I didn't get kids to have easiest possible life, coursing through our short lives deep in comfort zone is a failure IMHO, thats not life well lived, that's life avoided. I am not kind to such parents - its the biggest achievement, or failure, in one's life, biggest challenges bring biggest rewards. Rather few people put in corresponding effort continuously, compared to careers, relaxing and other aspects of adult lives. And then folks wonder why so many old people are sour, seeing in more life-successful others all the stuff one could/should have done if not so lazy is deeply depressing, usually amounts to biggest life regrets.
fouc 4mo ago
> take-home essay assignments Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways. Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this: Division I / early elementary - no formal assignments should be made, though 5–10 minutes of systematic study or reading was recommended. Division II / upper elementary - formal homework could be assigned at the teacher’s discretion, but generally should be reading or study-type work and not exceed about 20 minutes. Starting from junior high - students are expected to study one-half to one hour per school night.
- johnisgood 4mo ago
  What do you mean there is not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7? We had a fuckton of homework at every grade, here in Hungary.
- froggit 4mo ago
  I remember that whole "expect 30 to 60 min a night" nonsense. I always assumed that was a scare tactic or something. I mean, in high school i was awake until around 4 am playing games every night so I'd wind up using half of each school day compensating with well-timed napping. Even then, the only homework i had to actually take home was the stuff meant to be turned in a few weeks later like tests and projects. Sure, we had daily "homework" assigned; there was also more than enough time during lectures to finish it. The only students that i really ever saw complain about having tons of homework were the ones that didn't put any effort into learning stuff at school to begin with.
hyperpallium2 4mo ago
Bloom's 2 sigma problem solved at last! But that's overestimating LLMs, our zeitgeist. AI can't detect AI, not because AI undetectable, but because it lacks judgment. Its shtick is random generation; the proverbial monkey on a typewriter.

by theptip 4mo ago

wffurr 4mo ago

There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.

tacomagick 4mo ago
LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.
- rwmj 4mo ago
  It's far from clear that this helps you to learn anything. More likely it's a way for most people to avoid having to think or learn.
  - tacomagick 4mo ago
    I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.
    - hparadiz 4mo ago
      I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those books.
      - KittenInABox 4mo ago
        The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?
        hparadiz 4mo ago
        My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.
        beepbooptheory 4mo ago
        Yeah but the teacher says you're wrong even if you're right. The AI tells you you're right either way. The former can facilitate an important lesson, the latter doesn't ever give you the chance to.
        hparadiz 4mo ago

alexashka 4mo ago

Stupid people never have the appetite or ability to 'tackle' anything. It's their defining characteristic. It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow. AI changes nothing.

20k 4mo ago

AI is a terrible teacher though. It makes stuff up all the time, and for some subjects it has a remarkably low accuracy rate

tacomagick 4mo ago
I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.
- runarberg 4mo ago
  It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger. Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.
  - tacomagick 4mo ago
    I have never claimed it to be good enough to replace a qualified educator, however for self learning it is a good tool with no hustle. You also consider how qualified some educators are...
    - hparadiz 4mo ago
      It's far superior in many cases. Teachers get tired, lose patience, etc.
      - froggit 4mo ago
        I'd prefer a grumpy teacher over one that cheerfully gaslights me.
    - runarberg 4mo ago

BobbyTables2 4mo ago

Learning is also impacted when homework/test questions are created and graded by AI. The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map… Why have teachers? The AI might as well grade itself.

tacomagick 4mo ago
Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.

runarberg 4mo ago

> and the best technology ever invented for learning. This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement. Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.

QuesnayJr 4mo ago
Dude, just use it to learn something. It's obviously true. Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.
- mike_hock 4mo ago
  > Ask a question. > Ask two follow-up questions. > Ask about a seeming contradiction between the original answer and the answer to the second follow-up question. > Get congratulated for raising such a great point and get parroted back your objection as a "correction." Useful as a learning aid if applied cautiously but maybe not the "best thing ever."
  - runarberg 4mo ago
    Useful as in “better than nothing” but lacking as in “inferior to almost anything else”.
  - theptip 4mo ago
    I thought the dichotomy would make this clear, but the claim was not that however you use AI, it’s the best thing ever. To be more explicit: _used correctly_ and to the fullest of its capabilities, AI is the best technology ever invented for learning. If you don’t believe this as a technical HN person at the epicenter of this technology’s capability set, I probably can’t persuade you. But you can do a lot better than your transcript. Used in the default mode, or with a desire to take shortcuts, or a desire to minimize what is perceived (often correctly in the case of many school curriculae) as BS fake work, it is the best technology ever invented to avoid learning.

grayhatter 4mo ago

[flagged]

tacomagick 4mo ago
[flagged]

dosisking 4mo ago

AI has existed for decades. The average person has just discovered it / had it forced upon them. And just a small-subset of AI. The average person does not use real AI. And AI is not even well-defined. Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning. AI will be used as a tool as a way of 'shaping' the mind of young people. Similar to using standardized textbooks. AI is too much of a political tool to be useful. AI is a tool for propaganda.

scotty79 4mo ago
> AI is a tool for propaganda. In my experience so far it's less of a propaganda than basically any other medium massively consumed today. It might become it one day though, like all othe media became it.
master-lincoln 4mo ago
> Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning I am curious where you were educated to come to this conclusion. I don't think your statement holds generally true for all education as it is by definition teaching knowledge. Sure, there might be institutions that do teaching and propaganda, but I think it shows a lack of awareness to generalize this to all education.

lelanthran 4mo ago

> AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning. Yeah, right. Did you forget a /s https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5d1 https://chatgpt.com/share/6a363b6d-92ac-83ea-a619-41b2ecd9f5... This is a popular game, still doing sales almost 18 years after release, with dozens of wiki fansites containing all the information, and with hundreds, if not thousands, of reddit postings... and it falls apart on the first answer! No. Kids in school should not be using AI, because: 1. They won't be using the latest models, and 2. They can't tell if the info is accurate

ifwinterco 4mo ago

The obvious way to square this circle is to go back to how things used to be: less emphasis on coursework and more on old-fashioned tests in an examination environment with just pen and paper. You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine

IshKebab 4mo ago
This is definitely what's going to happen. But there is still a problem - people (not just children) are fundamentally lazy and put things off. People always leave assignments until the last minute. I used to smoothly transition from "I've got plenty of time, no need to start" to "there's not enough time to do it, there's no point starting". They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes. So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.
- VorpalWay 4mo ago
  In what countries were the exams only once a year? When I grew up in the 90s in Sweden we would have tests and exams frequently, usually at the end of each module. This continued all the way through university. I think we had 3 separate exams for the first math course (which lasted a quarter of a year, so roughly one exam per month). (Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary school, which I'm not sure was a good idea.)
  - IshKebab 4mo ago
    In the UK. In high school (age ~11 to 16) the only exams that mattered were SATs at ages 7, 11 and 14 (though I just checked and apparently they've scrapped the 14 year old ones for some reason), and GCSEs at 16. After that you have A-levels for two years (age 17 and 18) where IIRC it was just one big group of exams at the end of each year, and then university where I guess maybe it varies but at least at Cambridge it was one big group of 3-hour long exams at the end of each year. Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI. Your way definitely sounds better to me.

habagav 4mo ago

It’s not complex. One must first learn HOW TO LEARN before they can use any tool to help them learn. There’s no substitution for human connection (social media) and there’s no substitution for traditional learning (robot teachers). Everyone who wants to “disrupt” this fundamental human quality is chasing delusion. If you want to help, pay teachers a couple billion from the hundreds-of-billions going into AI maybe?

theptip 4mo ago
I agree that the human touch is valuable. I disagree that humans are required to bootstrap meta-learning; I think it is quite deeply wired into the human brain and there is no reason that we can’t create digital gyms that give opportunities to learn the same insights. I also disagree with the essentialist position that the best education possible must be pure-human provided. Maybe if cost is no object and you have a 24/7 human tutor on speed dial for each kid, that would be superior to any AI-assisted form. But it seems pretty obvious to me that human+ai could deliver better results than human alone, in the same way that AI is very clearly enabling GPs to broaden their diagnostic ability, spend more time connecting with patients, and reduce their paperwork toil, when deployed with care.
- habagav 4mo ago
  Well, what we’re seeing in society is the opposite effect. Kids with phones and AI bots are doing, on average, terrible in school compared to folks who didn’t have those growing up. University professors will likely agree that AI makes students worse at learning overall. No need to cite this there are articles all over the place. So whatever solution you’re talking about, even when purpose-built, should be replaced by higher paid teachers. Ultimately the AI-First model is about moving money into mega-corps and paying teachers less.
  - theptip 4mo ago
    I agree that we are seeing the negative effects of AI-done-wrong. (The best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, as I said.) I don’t agree that this means all potential or current uses of AI are harmful. I also don’t agree that simply paying teachers more is a solution. This lever has always existed and as a society we fail to pull it. So for the majority of people who use public schools, improving quality at current spend levels would be a major win, and we should explore the obvious possibilities here. I’m also pretty skeptical about your culture-war assertion that this is about wealth transfer to mega-corps. This can easily be a sovereign AI product. (I also never proposed “AI first” FWIW, I am a proponent of humans augmented by AI for this and most use-cases. Banning AI entirely operates at the margin of forbidding mostly-human use-cases from using any AI.)

cuvert 4mo ago

I understand the first part, but I don't understand the second one. It's probably my ignorance for not having children and being out of touch with schooling. When I was in school very little grading was based on homework, mostly was grading by testing in class. For example math, I'm absolutely sure it was 100% a few grading tests every semester. You could cheat by copying the homework of your classmates, it was the same set of problems for, but with 0 understanding, you would not pass.

amelius 4mo ago

It's the same old argument about knives and technology. But we don't give children knives.

theptip 4mo ago
But we do give them bicycles, so the lesson would be “give them technology that is safe to use”. And then we are back to the discussion at hand none the wiser; what forms of AI are safe to use for kids?
- jplusequalt 4mo ago
  The kind that doesn't allow a child to anthropomorphize it, or rely on it for learning.

blitzar 4mo ago

I presume kids still learn to add 1 and 1, do their multiplication tables and long division before being given a calculator ?

kakacik 4mo ago

This is what schools enforce, second, even more important part is what parents do/allow/pay for at home. Every single household I've seen benevolent use of phones/tablets/tv/computer/consoles (quite often all of it), kids were unruly, had shitty grades, living empty lives without good role models and very little passions or hobbies, and overall were more depressed than happy. I do get why - its supremely easier to just throw tech at them and let them drown in endless cheap dopamine content, triple that for already-addicted parents. The whole principle of active screen itself is so overpowering and addictive compared to good old physical toys, drawing, paint, reading etc. As a parent of young kids, its much harder to come up, continuously, with good motivating program out there, or even indoors, ie climbing. But - I didn't get kids to have easiest possible life, coursing through our short lives deep in comfort zone is a failure IMHO, thats not life well lived, that's life avoided. I am not kind to such parents - its the biggest achievement, or failure, in one's life, biggest challenges bring biggest rewards. Rather few people put in corresponding effort continuously, compared to careers, relaxing and other aspects of adult lives. And then folks wonder why so many old people are sour, seeing in more life-successful others all the stuff one could/should have done if not so lazy is deeply depressing, usually amounts to biggest life regrets.

fouc 4mo ago

> take-home essay assignments Typically there's not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7 anyways. Homework levels between elementary school and start of junior might look something like this: Division I / early elementary - no formal assignments should be made, though 5–10 minutes of systematic study or reading was recommended. Division II / upper elementary - formal homework could be assigned at the teacher’s discretion, but generally should be reading or study-type work and not exceed about 20 minutes. Starting from junior high - students are expected to study one-half to one hour per school night.

johnisgood 4mo ago
What do you mean there is not a whole lot of homework prior to Grade 7? We had a fuckton of homework at every grade, here in Hungary.
froggit 4mo ago
I remember that whole "expect 30 to 60 min a night" nonsense. I always assumed that was a scare tactic or something. I mean, in high school i was awake until around 4 am playing games every night so I'd wind up using half of each school day compensating with well-timed napping. Even then, the only homework i had to actually take home was the stuff meant to be turned in a few weeks later like tests and projects. Sure, we had daily "homework" assigned; there was also more than enough time during lectures to finish it. The only students that i really ever saw complain about having tons of homework were the ones that didn't put any effort into learning stuff at school to begin with.

hyperpallium2 4mo ago

Bloom's 2 sigma problem solved at last! But that's overestimating LLMs, our zeitgeist. AI can't detect AI, not because AI undetectable, but because it lacks judgment. Its shtick is random generation; the proverbial monkey on a typewriter.