7 ms·

The kids who used AI and studied for a similar amount of time as the non-AI high performers apparently had similar (slightly higher) performance. The kids who u

by GPerson 2mo ago

The kids who used AI and studied for a similar amount of time as the non-AI high performers apparently had similar (slightly higher) performance. The kids who used AI and did poorly used the AI to do the homework for them (this is what the article says). I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good. I’m cynical about the world and assume it will be used more for bad than good, but I don’t doubt some of the best people in every field will be using AI to amplify their work in good ways.

the_real_cher 2mo ago
This is my thoughts as well! It makes smarter people smarter and dumb people dumber!
- doctorwho42 2mo ago
  All at the cost of ... {List of negatives regarding the construction and powering of AI data centers }
  - dan_ggggg 2mo ago
    The social costs are worse.
    - doctorwho42 2mo ago
      I dunno, concentrating the environmental impact of 20GW of gas based power generation would be the equivalent of 6-9 Million cars running... All in the space of a corner of a small city
      - dan_ggggg 2mo ago
        That sounds much worse than I had expected. Is this enough consumption to significantly affect the local price of gasoline? Edit: Why don't they have lower-emission power sources?
        doctorwho42 2mo ago
        We do have lower emission alternatives, but not at the cost point... Remember these are corporations trying to make the largest profit possible
  - wredcoll 2mo ago
    If you added up the negative effect of every single "ai data center" you'd end up with less than a single coal mine. It's good to think about second order impacts but this is not useful.
    - doctorwho42 2mo ago
      Citation needed, Just one 20 GW AI data center which is being built with gas powered turbine generator power plant, will be the largest fossil fuel power plant in the world... How exactly is that the same as one coal mine
- mrguyorama 2mo ago
  It helps smart people be barely more effective and helps dumb (more importantly, people who do not value effort, people who are lazy, people who are self absorbed) people shit out endless streams of worthless tokens that can swamp out everything. Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, which we were already doing terrible at. I use Claude every single day, but this is such a bad tradeoff. Maybe it will help me standup a quick fix when that is needed. Maybe it can help me dig through documentation to find relevant bits and figure out the unstated assumptions underlying it. Maybe it helps me generate test cases. Meanwhile, my day to day life is now noise. All social media is noise. All content is noise. Slop pours onto me from all directions. Writing more test cases isn't helping me. Am I smart? Am I dumb? I don't care, right now I'm deafened
  - suburban_strike 2mo ago
    All I've noticed is AI creating a perverse incentive to make everything as complicated and bureaucratic as possible, so only the people that know how to leverage AI to cut through it ever succeed. I'm using Claude at work myself and am impressed with the product, but notice that this is the only reason I need to use it at all. Our product pages were shit to begin with, now they're AI-generated and somehow even worse. Our procedures are incomprehensible spaghetti with enough arbitrary context switching to give a sadistic Soviet municipal administrator an erection at the thought of watching anyone try to actually follow them. Use AI to create inefficiencies, then use AI to bypass them. Those who can't do the latter will struggle to survive.
  - altairprime 2mo ago
    > Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, which we were already doing terrible at. Clarification: to value “smart” people, which we were already doing terrible at.
  - wizzwizz4 2mo ago
    > Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, It does give us a new heuristic, though: people who are willing to completely cut generative AI out of their lives (cold-turkey, if you ever started using it) are a much smaller group of, predominantly thoughtful, people. You do have to give up Claude to be part of this group, but from what you say, that's no great loss, and no longer being deafened is worth it. This has considerable advantages over conventional elitism, because the barrier-to-entry is negative in almost all cases. The one exception I've found is assistive tech, where the state-of-the-art is so poor that vibecoded slop is genuinely an improvement over the state-of-the-art, and in many cases the tooling simply isn't available to make your own assistive tech (unless you want to bootstrap an entire networked computing environment, which isn't very helpful when you want to do your online banking and do not, in fact, work at your bank). But there are not many principled exceptions where you could seriously argue that the trade-off is worth it. Take mathematics, for example, which we often see touted as a "good use-case" of generative AI. The primary advantage of generative AI in mathematics is being able to search though a vast corpus of ivory towers and inconsistent terminology (without proper attribution) to locate and connect ideas that can help solve problems. The deficiency this is addressing is elitism, inadequate communication, and inadequate indexing within academic mathematics. This problem is entirely created by the academic mathematicians, and has been known for nearly a century (per https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&oldid=1369772998 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&...): > Bourbaki was founded in response to the effects of the First World War which caused the death of a generation of French mathematicians; as a result, young university instructors were forced to use dated texts. While teaching at the University of Strasbourg, Henri Cartan complained to his colleague André Weil of the inadequacy of available course material, which prompted Weil to propose a meeting with others in Paris to collectively write a modern analysis textbook. To my knowledge, this is the only organised project to clean up and improve mathematical communication. Everything else (Metamath, Mizar, AFP, Lean) is yet another ivory tower. The Wikipedia article on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_knowledge_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_knowledge_managem...) risks deletion as non-notable, that's how little anyone's actually trying. They made their own bed, and generative AI will only provide a brief respite from having to lie in it. (I was surprised how many other "compelling" use-cases evaporated when I applied this razor to them: the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392265 points out one such.) Vibe-coding assistive tech which doesn't yet exist, as a temporary scaffold to improve the quality-of-life of yourself and others in a social world dominated by non-essential access barriers is, to my knowledge, the only exception to this principle that can be justified. If you treat people who make other excuses, or who don't even bother with excuses, as not worth listening to, you lose little – and doubly-so, if you make your stance clear, so that others know the "cost" of gaining your attention.
- stevecoalbear 2mo ago
  Most importantly, it makes investors think dumb people are smart.
- grey-area 2mo ago
  There is zero evidence for this. LLMs make significant mistakes frequently and smart people have no way of judging those mistakes outside their domain expertise. They are also sycophantic and great at being an echo chamber which makes people feel smart even if they are not. So I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that they somehow amplify intelligence, it seems highly unlikely.
  - ndriscoll 2mo ago
    Most domains have some kind of internal consistency/theory building you can do. A smart person can certainly notice inconsistencies when trying to learn something. In fact they're likely to be points of confusion that the smart person will dive into just to try to make sense of things, even if they don't suspect the LLM is at fault.
    - grey-area 2mo ago
      People who think they are smart often think they can get by in any domain without knowledge and context, but at a certain point this fails and knowledge is required, not just intelligence.
      - skydhash 2mo ago
        Pretty much this. With the internet and my websearch-fu, I can find some facts on a lots of things. And while I do for some questions I have, I try to never interject answers when I don’t have a modicum of mastery in the domain. Mastery is the formation of an internal model that guide your actions and thinking. It’s not merely knowledge and intelligence.
        grey-area 2mo ago
        Yes sorry for the shorthand, an internal model is a good way to describe mastery. It’s something LLMs don’t have and can’t transmit.
      - ndriscoll 2mo ago
- bsder 2mo ago
  AI does not make me "smarter" in the important thing I am working on. In software particularly, what AI does do is give me back my time from the drudge work that I don't care about. Keeping my build system configured and my tests up to date and my documentation synchronized is a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works".
  - chrisjj 2mo ago
    > ... a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works". This is "AI"s forte. Producing more bad work at lower cost.
- chrisjj 2mo ago
  Unfortunately this results in overwhelming net dumbing because the dumb are the ones lacking the smarts to avoid the "AI".
elictronic 2mo ago
You aren’t being cynical, you’re arguing with disingenuous entities with money on the line. We already know it’s used primarily for the negative case. Everyone who ever intended High School or College knows this.
- shimman 2mo ago
  Definitely had a sheltered public school experience, took AP stats my senior year and realized all the top students were sharing answers from an earlier period through text messages. After figuring this out I too joined in on the action, then shortly after I quickly deskilled. Suppose it's good to learn how elastic the brain is, in both directions, at a young age where it doesn't matter.
  - dan_ggggg 2mo ago
    > at a young age where it doesn't matter. Doesn't it matter the most at a young age?
    - shimman 2mo ago
      Not really. I would rather not find out later in life, with way more responsibilities, that when you purposely neglect mental skills they atrophy quite fast. People already have a hard time noticing that they age, being able to truly self asses is a skill that few, including myself here, possess.
nerevarthelame 2mo ago
The scary thing is that 81% of AI users in this study were determined to be "outsourcing" their homework to the LLMs - and the rate increases the more exposure they had to LLMs. The "slightly higher" performance is based on statistically insignificant samples (between 4 and 20 students, depending on the context, out of the total population of 26,000): https://bsky.app/profile/benjaminjriley.bsky.social/post/3mtj7fc5oas2o https://bsky.app/profile/benjaminjriley.bsky.social/post/3mt...
- moffkalast 2mo ago
  I thought that it was generally accepted by now that homework in the volumes that it is being assigned in the modern day was not found to be beneficial in any significant way in the first place? Maybe once all students start outsourcing it to AI it might finally die like it deserves to. People these days grow up with almost no free time for themselves, it's all school, sports/extracurriculars or homework nonstop. All worker drone and no play makes for an increasingly dysfunctional society.
  - idiotsecant 2mo ago
    All play and no work makes for an even more dysfunctional society. Kids need to do their homework, both to train their minds but also to develop integrity and work ethic. Being able to diligently work toward a distant goal is not something you're born with.
    - j4yav 2mo ago
      But I keep reading here on HN about the brave future where everyone carries around a little box that you put coins in whenever you need to know how to compose a song, solve a problem, write some code, etc, and it will give you your answer you can take credit for without actually wasting time on learning or work ethic.
    - yoz-y 2mo ago
      I think there are better ways to teach this particular skill than homework. But I agree that practicing is very important. In hindsight I think that the concept of TD (classes where you only do exercises and have a teacher guide you if needed) in France is really good. (This is not the same thing as lab classes)
kzz102 2mo ago
It's not so clear that AI is an amplifier.. The paper has some fascinating analysis on this topic: "At the other end of the distribution, AI students who spend more than 65 minutes on their homework receive homework and exam scores similar to those of non-AI students, suggesting that these students do not use generative AI for homework assignments. However, this group consists entirely of students who adopted generative AI no more than Öve months. Six months after adoption, no AI student spends more than 65 minutes completing their homework (see Figure A5). This is consistent with the gradual process of learning how to use AI tools. It also suggests that AI crowds out the highest level of e§ort." "Interestingly, in the range of 50-65 minutes, the median and the interquartile range of exam scores of AI and non-AI students are similar. This implies that, in the range where AI students and non-AI students have overlapping homework times, students who spend the same amount of time completing homework on average receive similar exam scores." "This pattern shows that students who spend the same amount of time on homework learn similarly, with or without generative AI. In other words, generative AI reduces time spent learning for the majority of AI students but not learning efficiency for those who spend the same time studying as the non-AI students."
- GPerson 2mo ago
  Right I was not clear enough about separating my opinion from the findings.
- doctorpangloss 2mo ago
  well most university exams are designed to measure how much you study. so we didn't really need a study to tell us, "Exams continue to measure what they are designed to measure." they're not designed to measure general aptitude, or function as admissions criteria, or screen for job applications, or any other numerous things they are used for. there can be many questions of pedagogy. one of them is, what do our exams measure and how do we use them? professors who say, "My exam is designed to measure who studies, not be used for all these other purposes that they are actually used for" - I don't buy it. It's the same as late night comedians saying they are not responsible for solutions, even when spending 90% of their air time making political jokes. THIS is the pedagogical issue, that pedagogy has NEVER caught up with the scope of responsibilities. This is acute in STEM - I mean, the humanities departments are generally pretty well run, all things considered, in this regard. Generative AI is accelerating that pre-existing crisis.
BrenBarn 2mo ago
The dangerous thing about amplifying is that bad people are often more willing to amplify their activities, because they don't care about the negative effects. We are seeing this now as AI companies (and large companies of all kinds) rush to secure whatever advantages they can, regardless of the negative externalities. Meanwhile people who actually care about doing the right thing get trampled. We need to shift the incentives by adding ruinous penalties for things that are currently quite commonplace if they are done by large players. Some dude training his own AI on his own computer can scrape and train. The fine for OpenAI or Meta using a single copyrighted book without permission should be in the tens or hundreds of millions. What we're seeing currently in our society is a "loophole inversion" where the rules have an effect mainly via their loopholes. The most profitable activity is to find loopholes and exploit them as frenetically as possible to gain as much advantage as you can before the loophole is closed, or get people hooked on the loophole so it's retroactively legalized. Entities that are big enough to do this are big enough because they have lots of money behind them. Entities doing the same kinds of things without lots of money are not really doing much harm. So the best approach is to adopt a "sliding scale" in which even tiny violations by wealthy actors result in penalties enormously greater than fairly large violations by small players.
- visarga 2mo ago
  > they don't care about the negative effects [...] rush to secure whatever advantages they can, regardless of the negative externalities I think we don't yet know the long term view - what is harmful or damaging in the long run. Too early to tell and pass judgements. Every new technology from writing to internet had its detractors and they all pointed out negative externalities, as they seemed to appear at the moment.
ambicapter 2mo ago
> I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good. Same can be said of technology in general tbh.
jknoepfler 2mo ago
It's a familiar story. If you copy/paste Wikipedia and turn it in, you learn nothing. If you skim Wikipedia, hit up the references, the consult other sources, then synthesize your own thought, you probably get farther faster than you would without it. We could probably cook up thousands of examples of the same problem (YouTube DIY tutorials, GPS navigation, etc.)
throwyawayyyy 2mo ago
This is kind of damning, isn't it? "Similar or slightly higher" for spending the _same time_ means it's not, in fact, helping. At the same time as being extremely damaging to a significant number of students who, of course, use the AI to cheat. Because everything about it makes cheating easy.
- 20k 2mo ago
  Yes, it strongly suggests that AI as a learning tool is at best pretty much useless, but on average its strongly detrimental to most people exposed to it as it makes it too easy to cheat
intended 2mo ago
There’s been multiple articles at this point about AI’s impact on education. It’s alarming how near universally AI has been a cataclysm in class rooms. On homework the short answer is is that we give kids home work exercises. AI helps learners reduce the effort expended to exercise and get results. This is making homework moot.
thomasahle 2mo ago
> had similar (slightly higher) performance. The data point around 80 minutes seems like noise to me. Looks like there isn't enough data/students who spend that much time and also used AI. It would be nice if AI was a force for good as well as bad, but the data here doesn't support it
HlessClaudesman 2mo ago
Intelligence and perseverance are two different traits. Smart + hard working kids will be fine. The problem is smart and lazy kids will find the easiest path, which in a world of AI leads to little actual learning. Maybe it was ever thus, but I fear the currently dwindling endangered book + teacher approach was better at getting slack asses to learn and eventually gain skills and knowledge for themselves.
iwontberude 2mo ago
[dead]
epgui 2mo ago
If you use AI to outsource your thinking, then AI is not “just an amplifier” at all. A huge proportion of people who use AI use it to outsource their thinking.
- GPerson 2mo ago
  That’s why I said it will be used more for bad than good. Maybe I should have said, “it will be used for far more bad than good for the purpose of human intellectual flourishing”. It can be used for good for this purpose. You can use it to find primary source information. You can use it to generate challenges for you. You can use it to critique your work when there’s nobody else available. Etc etc.
conartist6 2mo ago
Yeah the single thing it makes easiest is to think "i neither need nor want to do this because it is hard" Evidently the AI users think hard things are beneath them. They want to win without doing any work. Sympathy, I have not.
freehorse 2mo ago
What AI definitely is as an amplifier (in my interpretation of the article) is an amplifier of "laziness": students spending less time studying, getting by with the homework with the less possible effort, and finally achieving worse results. And the longer one uses AI for, the "lazier" they get (the more they rely on it for homework, and study less). If it is an amplifier of "good" vs "bad", I don't know, and I do not know what that means exactly. I do not think some students are just "bad" or "lazy" by character and that explains all. I think that their environment has a big role in shaping their actions. I don't think that AI cannot be used beneficially (and the articles talks about some attempts that maybe worked well), but it requires careful considerations, guidance and intentionality from educational institutions themselves. The same goes with all kinds of technology, and AI is nothing new in that sense, but often new technologies are introduced in education without careful considerations or evidence based policies. Which is why imo articles like this are very important.

by GPerson 2mo ago

the_real_cher 2mo ago

This is my thoughts as well! It makes smarter people smarter and dumb people dumber!

doctorwho42 2mo ago
All at the cost of ... {List of negatives regarding the construction and powering of AI data centers }
- dan_ggggg 2mo ago
  The social costs are worse.
  - doctorwho42 2mo ago
    I dunno, concentrating the environmental impact of 20GW of gas based power generation would be the equivalent of 6-9 Million cars running... All in the space of a corner of a small city
    - dan_ggggg 2mo ago
      That sounds much worse than I had expected. Is this enough consumption to significantly affect the local price of gasoline? Edit: Why don't they have lower-emission power sources?
      - doctorwho42 2mo ago
        We do have lower emission alternatives, but not at the cost point... Remember these are corporations trying to make the largest profit possible
- wredcoll 2mo ago
  If you added up the negative effect of every single "ai data center" you'd end up with less than a single coal mine. It's good to think about second order impacts but this is not useful.
  - doctorwho42 2mo ago
    Citation needed, Just one 20 GW AI data center which is being built with gas powered turbine generator power plant, will be the largest fossil fuel power plant in the world... How exactly is that the same as one coal mine
mrguyorama 2mo ago
It helps smart people be barely more effective and helps dumb (more importantly, people who do not value effort, people who are lazy, people who are self absorbed) people shit out endless streams of worthless tokens that can swamp out everything. Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, which we were already doing terrible at. I use Claude every single day, but this is such a bad tradeoff. Maybe it will help me standup a quick fix when that is needed. Maybe it can help me dig through documentation to find relevant bits and figure out the unstated assumptions underlying it. Maybe it helps me generate test cases. Meanwhile, my day to day life is now noise. All social media is noise. All content is noise. Slop pours onto me from all directions. Writing more test cases isn't helping me. Am I smart? Am I dumb? I don't care, right now I'm deafened
- suburban_strike 2mo ago
  All I've noticed is AI creating a perverse incentive to make everything as complicated and bureaucratic as possible, so only the people that know how to leverage AI to cut through it ever succeed. I'm using Claude at work myself and am impressed with the product, but notice that this is the only reason I need to use it at all. Our product pages were shit to begin with, now they're AI-generated and somehow even worse. Our procedures are incomprehensible spaghetti with enough arbitrary context switching to give a sadistic Soviet municipal administrator an erection at the thought of watching anyone try to actually follow them. Use AI to create inefficiencies, then use AI to bypass them. Those who can't do the latter will struggle to survive.
- altairprime 2mo ago
  > Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, which we were already doing terrible at. Clarification: to value “smart” people, which we were already doing terrible at.
- wizzwizz4 2mo ago
  > Raising the noise floor like this only makes it that much harder to find "Smart" people, It does give us a new heuristic, though: people who are willing to completely cut generative AI out of their lives (cold-turkey, if you ever started using it) are a much smaller group of, predominantly thoughtful, people. You do have to give up Claude to be part of this group, but from what you say, that's no great loss, and no longer being deafened is worth it. This has considerable advantages over conventional elitism, because the barrier-to-entry is negative in almost all cases. The one exception I've found is assistive tech, where the state-of-the-art is so poor that vibecoded slop is genuinely an improvement over the state-of-the-art, and in many cases the tooling simply isn't available to make your own assistive tech (unless you want to bootstrap an entire networked computing environment, which isn't very helpful when you want to do your online banking and do not, in fact, work at your bank). But there are not many principled exceptions where you could seriously argue that the trade-off is worth it. Take mathematics, for example, which we often see touted as a "good use-case" of generative AI. The primary advantage of generative AI in mathematics is being able to search though a vast corpus of ivory towers and inconsistent terminology (without proper attribution) to locate and connect ideas that can help solve problems. The deficiency this is addressing is elitism, inadequate communication, and inadequate indexing within academic mathematics. This problem is entirely created by the academic mathematicians, and has been known for nearly a century (per https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&oldid=1369772998 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nicolas_Bourbaki&...): > Bourbaki was founded in response to the effects of the First World War which caused the death of a generation of French mathematicians; as a result, young university instructors were forced to use dated texts. While teaching at the University of Strasbourg, Henri Cartan complained to his colleague André Weil of the inadequacy of available course material, which prompted Weil to propose a meeting with others in Paris to collectively write a modern analysis textbook. To my knowledge, this is the only organised project to clean up and improve mathematical communication. Everything else (Metamath, Mizar, AFP, Lean) is yet another ivory tower. The Wikipedia article on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_knowledge_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_knowledge_managem...) risks deletion as non-notable, that's how little anyone's actually trying. They made their own bed, and generative AI will only provide a brief respite from having to lie in it. (I was surprised how many other "compelling" use-cases evaporated when I applied this razor to them: the sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392265 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49392265 points out one such.) Vibe-coding assistive tech which doesn't yet exist, as a temporary scaffold to improve the quality-of-life of yourself and others in a social world dominated by non-essential access barriers is, to my knowledge, the only exception to this principle that can be justified. If you treat people who make other excuses, or who don't even bother with excuses, as not worth listening to, you lose little – and doubly-so, if you make your stance clear, so that others know the "cost" of gaining your attention.
stevecoalbear 2mo ago
Most importantly, it makes investors think dumb people are smart.
grey-area 2mo ago
There is zero evidence for this. LLMs make significant mistakes frequently and smart people have no way of judging those mistakes outside their domain expertise. They are also sycophantic and great at being an echo chamber which makes people feel smart even if they are not. So I think the burden of proof is on you to prove that they somehow amplify intelligence, it seems highly unlikely.
- ndriscoll 2mo ago
  Most domains have some kind of internal consistency/theory building you can do. A smart person can certainly notice inconsistencies when trying to learn something. In fact they're likely to be points of confusion that the smart person will dive into just to try to make sense of things, even if they don't suspect the LLM is at fault.
  - grey-area 2mo ago
    People who think they are smart often think they can get by in any domain without knowledge and context, but at a certain point this fails and knowledge is required, not just intelligence.
    - skydhash 2mo ago
      Pretty much this. With the internet and my websearch-fu, I can find some facts on a lots of things. And while I do for some questions I have, I try to never interject answers when I don’t have a modicum of mastery in the domain. Mastery is the formation of an internal model that guide your actions and thinking. It’s not merely knowledge and intelligence.
      - grey-area 2mo ago
        Yes sorry for the shorthand, an internal model is a good way to describe mastery. It’s something LLMs don’t have and can’t transmit.
    - ndriscoll 2mo ago
bsder 2mo ago
AI does not make me "smarter" in the important thing I am working on. In software particularly, what AI does do is give me back my time from the drudge work that I don't care about. Keeping my build system configured and my tests up to date and my documentation synchronized is a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works".
- chrisjj 2mo ago
  > ... a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works". This is "AI"s forte. Producing more bad work at lower cost.
chrisjj 2mo ago
Unfortunately this results in overwhelming net dumbing because the dumb are the ones lacking the smarts to avoid the "AI".

elictronic 2mo ago

You aren’t being cynical, you’re arguing with disingenuous entities with money on the line. We already know it’s used primarily for the negative case. Everyone who ever intended High School or College knows this.

shimman 2mo ago
Definitely had a sheltered public school experience, took AP stats my senior year and realized all the top students were sharing answers from an earlier period through text messages. After figuring this out I too joined in on the action, then shortly after I quickly deskilled. Suppose it's good to learn how elastic the brain is, in both directions, at a young age where it doesn't matter.
- dan_ggggg 2mo ago
  > at a young age where it doesn't matter. Doesn't it matter the most at a young age?
  - shimman 2mo ago
    Not really. I would rather not find out later in life, with way more responsibilities, that when you purposely neglect mental skills they atrophy quite fast. People already have a hard time noticing that they age, being able to truly self asses is a skill that few, including myself here, possess.

nerevarthelame 2mo ago

The scary thing is that 81% of AI users in this study were determined to be "outsourcing" their homework to the LLMs - and the rate increases the more exposure they had to LLMs. The "slightly higher" performance is based on statistically insignificant samples (between 4 and 20 students, depending on the context, out of the total population of 26,000): https://bsky.app/profile/benjaminjriley.bsky.social/post/3mtj7fc5oas2o https://bsky.app/profile/benjaminjriley.bsky.social/post/3mt...

moffkalast 2mo ago
I thought that it was generally accepted by now that homework in the volumes that it is being assigned in the modern day was not found to be beneficial in any significant way in the first place? Maybe once all students start outsourcing it to AI it might finally die like it deserves to. People these days grow up with almost no free time for themselves, it's all school, sports/extracurriculars or homework nonstop. All worker drone and no play makes for an increasingly dysfunctional society.
- idiotsecant 2mo ago
  All play and no work makes for an even more dysfunctional society. Kids need to do their homework, both to train their minds but also to develop integrity and work ethic. Being able to diligently work toward a distant goal is not something you're born with.
  - j4yav 2mo ago
    But I keep reading here on HN about the brave future where everyone carries around a little box that you put coins in whenever you need to know how to compose a song, solve a problem, write some code, etc, and it will give you your answer you can take credit for without actually wasting time on learning or work ethic.
  - yoz-y 2mo ago
    I think there are better ways to teach this particular skill than homework. But I agree that practicing is very important. In hindsight I think that the concept of TD (classes where you only do exercises and have a teacher guide you if needed) in France is really good. (This is not the same thing as lab classes)

kzz102 2mo ago

It's not so clear that AI is an amplifier.. The paper has some fascinating analysis on this topic: "At the other end of the distribution, AI students who spend more than 65 minutes on their homework receive homework and exam scores similar to those of non-AI students, suggesting that these students do not use generative AI for homework assignments. However, this group consists entirely of students who adopted generative AI no more than Öve months. Six months after adoption, no AI student spends more than 65 minutes completing their homework (see Figure A5). This is consistent with the gradual process of learning how to use AI tools. It also suggests that AI crowds out the highest level of e§ort." "Interestingly, in the range of 50-65 minutes, the median and the interquartile range of exam scores of AI and non-AI students are similar. This implies that, in the range where AI students and non-AI students have overlapping homework times, students who spend the same amount of time completing homework on average receive similar exam scores." "This pattern shows that students who spend the same amount of time on homework learn similarly, with or without generative AI. In other words, generative AI reduces time spent learning for the majority of AI students but not learning efficiency for those who spend the same time studying as the non-AI students."

GPerson 2mo ago
Right I was not clear enough about separating my opinion from the findings.
doctorpangloss 2mo ago
well most university exams are designed to measure how much you study. so we didn't really need a study to tell us, "Exams continue to measure what they are designed to measure." they're not designed to measure general aptitude, or function as admissions criteria, or screen for job applications, or any other numerous things they are used for. there can be many questions of pedagogy. one of them is, what do our exams measure and how do we use them? professors who say, "My exam is designed to measure who studies, not be used for all these other purposes that they are actually used for" - I don't buy it. It's the same as late night comedians saying they are not responsible for solutions, even when spending 90% of their air time making political jokes. THIS is the pedagogical issue, that pedagogy has NEVER caught up with the scope of responsibilities. This is acute in STEM - I mean, the humanities departments are generally pretty well run, all things considered, in this regard. Generative AI is accelerating that pre-existing crisis.

BrenBarn 2mo ago

The dangerous thing about amplifying is that bad people are often more willing to amplify their activities, because they don't care about the negative effects. We are seeing this now as AI companies (and large companies of all kinds) rush to secure whatever advantages they can, regardless of the negative externalities. Meanwhile people who actually care about doing the right thing get trampled. We need to shift the incentives by adding ruinous penalties for things that are currently quite commonplace if they are done by large players. Some dude training his own AI on his own computer can scrape and train. The fine for OpenAI or Meta using a single copyrighted book without permission should be in the tens or hundreds of millions. What we're seeing currently in our society is a "loophole inversion" where the rules have an effect mainly via their loopholes. The most profitable activity is to find loopholes and exploit them as frenetically as possible to gain as much advantage as you can before the loophole is closed, or get people hooked on the loophole so it's retroactively legalized. Entities that are big enough to do this are big enough because they have lots of money behind them. Entities doing the same kinds of things without lots of money are not really doing much harm. So the best approach is to adopt a "sliding scale" in which even tiny violations by wealthy actors result in penalties enormously greater than fairly large violations by small players.

visarga 2mo ago
> they don't care about the negative effects [...] rush to secure whatever advantages they can, regardless of the negative externalities I think we don't yet know the long term view - what is harmful or damaging in the long run. Too early to tell and pass judgements. Every new technology from writing to internet had its detractors and they all pointed out negative externalities, as they seemed to appear at the moment.

ambicapter 2mo ago

> I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good. Same can be said of technology in general tbh.

jknoepfler 2mo ago

It's a familiar story. If you copy/paste Wikipedia and turn it in, you learn nothing. If you skim Wikipedia, hit up the references, the consult other sources, then synthesize your own thought, you probably get farther faster than you would without it. We could probably cook up thousands of examples of the same problem (YouTube DIY tutorials, GPS navigation, etc.)

throwyawayyyy 2mo ago

This is kind of damning, isn't it? "Similar or slightly higher" for spending the _same time_ means it's not, in fact, helping. At the same time as being extremely damaging to a significant number of students who, of course, use the AI to cheat. Because everything about it makes cheating easy.

20k 2mo ago
Yes, it strongly suggests that AI as a learning tool is at best pretty much useless, but on average its strongly detrimental to most people exposed to it as it makes it too easy to cheat

intended 2mo ago

There’s been multiple articles at this point about AI’s impact on education. It’s alarming how near universally AI has been a cataclysm in class rooms. On homework the short answer is is that we give kids home work exercises. AI helps learners reduce the effort expended to exercise and get results. This is making homework moot.

thomasahle 2mo ago

> had similar (slightly higher) performance. The data point around 80 minutes seems like noise to me. Looks like there isn't enough data/students who spend that much time and also used AI. It would be nice if AI was a force for good as well as bad, but the data here doesn't support it

HlessClaudesman 2mo ago

Intelligence and perseverance are two different traits. Smart + hard working kids will be fine. The problem is smart and lazy kids will find the easiest path, which in a world of AI leads to little actual learning. Maybe it was ever thus, but I fear the currently dwindling endangered book + teacher approach was better at getting slack asses to learn and eventually gain skills and knowledge for themselves.

iwontberude 2mo ago

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epgui 2mo ago

If you use AI to outsource your thinking, then AI is not “just an amplifier” at all. A huge proportion of people who use AI use it to outsource their thinking.

GPerson 2mo ago
That’s why I said it will be used more for bad than good. Maybe I should have said, “it will be used for far more bad than good for the purpose of human intellectual flourishing”. It can be used for good for this purpose. You can use it to find primary source information. You can use it to generate challenges for you. You can use it to critique your work when there’s nobody else available. Etc etc.

conartist6 2mo ago

Yeah the single thing it makes easiest is to think "i neither need nor want to do this because it is hard" Evidently the AI users think hard things are beneath them. They want to win without doing any work. Sympathy, I have not.

freehorse 2mo ago

What AI definitely is as an amplifier (in my interpretation of the article) is an amplifier of "laziness": students spending less time studying, getting by with the homework with the less possible effort, and finally achieving worse results. And the longer one uses AI for, the "lazier" they get (the more they rely on it for homework, and study less). If it is an amplifier of "good" vs "bad", I don't know, and I do not know what that means exactly. I do not think some students are just "bad" or "lazy" by character and that explains all. I think that their environment has a big role in shaping their actions. I don't think that AI cannot be used beneficially (and the articles talks about some attempts that maybe worked well), but it requires careful considerations, guidance and intentionality from educational institutions themselves. The same goes with all kinds of technology, and AI is nothing new in that sense, but often new technologies are introduced in education without careful considerations or evidence based policies. Which is why imo articles like this are very important.