OpenAI wants teachers and profs to foist their work off on ChatGPT In the face of an epidemic of AI-enabled cheating and research suggesting its products hamper learning, OpenAI is doing the sensible thing and pushing more AI on students and teachers. Wait, did I say sensible? My mistake. The House of Altman announced a trio of new education-focused offerings on Tuesday: one for K-12 teachers …
Totally agree.
It will never happen though. The Powers That Be are way too happy with the way things are.
Compliant sheeple slurping up bullshit and going in whatever direction the latest Instagram post points them are a lot easier to control than an unruly mob of citizens who actually use their vote wisely.
The problem is that it will bite "someone" on the arse, not necessarily (in fact very unlikely) the person who actually made the error of using AI to generate whatever they purported to be their own work.
Humans (almost) never learn from the mistakes of others, they have to be bitten themselves (and for preference, immediately after the mistake, if the lesson is to be learnt).
There is no way of avoiding this. Even if the best teachers in the world will try and teach students how to think with their brain, students will say "fuck off" and offload all the work to AI. There is no way a teacher can change this. The only way to make school work again would be to make schools into maximum security prisons. You enter it and get excluded from internet access for 5 years, 24/7. You will get "internet time" only in a controlled way.
At least in the medical line I am not too keen even on those who qualified post 2000.
I have encountered medicos that made me wonder how many of their patients ever made old bones. If the next generation depend on dodgy AI/LLM versions of lightly warmed over expert systems for diagnoses and treatment, investing in businesses of undertakers (funeral directors) might pay dividends.
"What did gramps die from ?" "Iatrogenic cardiomyopathy." "Oh! Those iatrogenics are nasty buggers."
Maybe ... then again, in this day and age istm folks could be declared dead repeatedly in their actual lifetimes, with each such occasion leading potentially to a profitable ceremony for undertaking entreprises ... AI (so-called) could right make this a mere frictionless formality too [ https://www.theregister.com/software/2016/11/11/mark-zuckerberg-is-dead-facebook-confirmed/1156264 ][ https://www.theregister.com/security/2015/08/08/its-incredibly-easy-to-bump-someone-off-online-and-heres-how-to-do-it-infosec-bod/1232005 ].
And even for those who do actually kick the bucket for real, funerals may end-up being performed multiple times, once for the original event, and again for every time one of their AI resuscitation deathbots BSODs, Borks, or gets upgraded ... [ https://www.theregister.com/software/2024/11/29/panasonic-brings-its-founder-back-to-life-as-an-ai/1238400 ][ https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93wjywz5p5o ].
So yeah, in the old days, it was perty much YOLO and then a sole inhumation whatnot for the grave digging businesses afaik, but nowadays ... ka-ching! ;)
Purloining the title of Dorothy L Sayers' 1947 essay†, the increasing uncritical use of IT in pedagogy culminating in the over·enthusiastic, hasty and haphazard adoption of AI into the classroom portend not only the furthur loss but the burying beyond retrieval of the tools of learning. This dummification affects the teacher as much as the pupil if not more.
I am fairly convinced that the most valuable parts of my primary and secondary schooling were learning to read critically and to reread to understand material; to write reasonably coherently in a number of formats - notably the précis and the essay; to evaluate and form valid arguments and to identify common fallacies; to understand basic mathematics including plane geometry and elementary probability. Concurrently studying a foreign language would almost make that list too.
I recall that reading and the resources of the school library were a major part of my secondary education. Learning to access information (library card catalogue), to extract and to condense information were learnt as basics skills for most subjects. These skills transfer powerfully into the electronic domain but the reverse is not true — today, show a student a card catalogue…
We may soon have reason, like Prof. Digory Kirke, to "wonder what they do teach them at these schools."
† "The Lost Tools of Learning" pdf epub. Worth the short read even if, and especially if, you don't agree with her arguments.
"learning to read critically and to reread to understand material"
In the UK we had the 11+ test to stream pupils into different schools. A great many years ago I took it. One component was Comprehension. There was a short text and questions about it. I couldn't see the point - there were the answers to the questions, sitting there in plain sight. It took many decades and acquaintance with Usenet before I discovered there were people who could fail it.
I would have scored poorly on a Wechsler primary school intelligence test.
Cartoon pic of a see-saw angled at about forty degrees with a child sitting on the side furthest from the ground and the other end without an occupant.
What is missing from the picture?
Apparently, gravity was not the answer.
I answered in a similar vein for the rest of the questions.
School headmaster had me resit it and stop messing about.
I think a lot of schools do understand that and want to teach all those things. That isn't to say that they succeed. Critical thinking, writing clearly, etc was explicitly in my curriculum, and every discussion or proposed update I've seen since has kept or elevated it in their description of what they want students to learn.
If that is true, it makes the problem easier in one way and harder in another. Easier in that we don't have to argue with people about how critical thinking helps, but harder in that we have to figure out why people with the stated intention of teaching it either aren't doing what they say or are but aren't succeeding. I think Sayers has part of this correct when she decries the number of subjects being taught, but it's not quite as easy to solve as that because we expect education to do a lot of things that it didn't historically do. All the preparation we expect when entering adulthood either has to be done by parents or during education, and that makes it harder to cut things.
Back in the 80s the lecturer was often keen to sell copies of their enormously thick book at a princely sum. I declined because (as I later learned is a thing) I knew I didn’t learn by reading. Plus said lecturers were often poor teachers anyway. These days you can subscribe to such books through sites like Perlego, and if I was repeating this situation today I might use AI to help me summarise such a book.
But teachers must never ever forget that their job is not to get students to regurgitate stuff verbatim but to think for themselves.
"I didn’t learn by reading"
How'd that work out for you in the field of, say, theoretical math?
Perhaps my experience is singular, but I always needed to read, and read again, before I tried any of that mathematics stuff on my own. There's a bit in the way of electrical engineering and nuclear physics that I'd think one want to study a book on first too. Or surgery ... or piloting ... or bomb disposal ...
But yeah. The Uni had a student-driven bookstore with huge tomes at fantastic prices. Always wondered about that.
I had the opposite experience. Any professors I had that had written textbooks were all very willing to provide us copies. (More than one told me that the amount they are paid per book wasn't much)
A well written text is very intentional, and I am really suspicious of anyone who thinks they will learn as well by reading summaries. If the book was good, you need to read most of it, and if it is not, then you should find a good one. People do learn differently, but I was in quite a few classes where I can tell you that every single one of us was reading and rereading the text to get at the concepts. I do not know how you learn most upper level sciences without a lot of reading and a lot of doing. I also cannot really imagine many of my texts being a ton shorter, other than maybe removing the blurbs about real world examples / history and those are honestly pretty fun and motivating. I do not believe that anyone is learning thermodynamics from a 20 page summary.
I had one professor who wrote his own book, didn't get as far as publishing it, or correctly editing it*, printed copies himself on the department printers, and required every student to purchase the most recent copy as it was being continuously updated**. That is probably not the normal case, though.
* He was very bad at writing clearly, but when it became obvious that nobody had understood him, he wouldn't try to fix it by rewriting it, he'd just add a footnote to try to patch the problem.
** Nobody could be sure whether there were meaningful changes, but since the class would do assignments from that book and since you probably needed the footnotes to know that you had misunderstood, though not what the right meaning was, old copies mostly ended up added to the recycling at the end of the course. Fortunately, since they were self-printed, it was really easy to spring the pages from the bindings so they probably all did get a nice future as cardboard boxes.
Hi, I’m Joe Bauers. I woke up in the future, and I gotta tell you, things have really improved. Back in my time, teachers and professors had this crazy idea that they should know stuff. They read books, developed lessons, explained complicated ideas, and used something called “judgment.” Pretty wild. Don’t worry, though. They say it’s not replacing educators. It’s just “augmenting” them. Kind of like how a giant inflatable brain strapped to your head would technically be “augmenting” your intelligence, even if nobody knows whether the person underneath is still using theirs.
People often compare AI to tools like calculators. Adopting those technologies has indeed affected how we learn and what we are capable of, but those are pretty intentional trade-offs, and even then we do put restrictions on how people use them. We still make children learn arithmetic, and when I was in school for geochemistry I had to derive equations or manually calculate things at least once before I used any automated tools. Once you get used to the tools, you honestly do lose the ability to easily do it the hard way, but I think the hope is that when you have done it the hard way, you keep an understanding of the process. You automate these parts when you hopefully have a good understanding of them that you can build on.
With LLMs, we see people using the tool to completely offload the thinking portion of the task. People I see using them are not doing the hard work, not even once. They are not struggling with the concepts. I think the core of the issue is that many people are under the impression that school is a thing you just need to get through, or that is done to advance a career. They are not looking at education and understanding as goals on their own merit. There are a lot of reasons for that, and I don't really blame most people who feel that way, but when you view school work as something you just need to get through without intrinsic value, of course you are going to shortcut it as much as is possible. Worse yet, I think you can make an argument that most people will not need math beyond a primary school level. We do all need critical thinking and analysis skills to survive in the modern world, and that is exactly what people are shortcutting now with LLMs.
