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.
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.
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."
Depends who's using it. Like many tools the force multiplier depends on the operator.
I'm confident it's an amplifier for people who know how learning works and already do a lot of it, successfully. However the level of "learning fluency" I'm talking about isn't reached for many until late college or grad school, and sometimes not at all. So I'm not surprised by the quoted results for 12-18 year olds.
And people who want to learn. Most teenagers lack agency in their studies. They aren't in high school because they love it but because they have no choice.
It would be good to see the effect of access to AI during preparation on those who previously achieved top 10% points in exams of similar topics before. I suspect they would benefit further.
My apologies for coming off as over-enthusiastic, I am currently obsessed with this study. Here is another quote:
"The negative learning effects are larger for students with higher initial achievement. The differences in the estimated full (6-10 month average) effects are substantial, with a 50% gap between the most negative effect (-24 percent) for the highest tercile and the least negative (-16 percent) for the lowest tercile. "
Not top 10% as you asked, but the closest to what you asked. My working hypothesis is that top performance is highly correlated with willingness to work hard, and AI decreases the motivation to work hard.
Interesting. Top academic performance is mostly correlated with conscientiousness (willingness to work hard and keeping track of things) and intelligence. And I'd add motivation and interest to that too.
I think if you take a physics class where the student is intelligent and intrinsically motivated through their own interest (I admit this is rare) then AI probably helps.
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.
The fact that exam scores are correlated with how much you study is not the same as exams only reflect how much you study. Two students who study the same amount could have very different exam scores. The reason that there still is a strong correlation between exam score and time of study is because if all other things being equal, students who studies more have higher exam scores.
at least in my experience in university - i didn't really ask this question, since it is obvious to me, but some students have asked it during lecture, or some instructors have volunteered the answer ahead of time - if you ask how to perform better on the exam, usually the instructors say, "here's what you should study." they never say, "know more." the thing i am talking about is consistent with the paper. really, your takeaway should be, exams can't see how much you know!
Because "know more" isn't actionable. Knowing more is achieved by studying but not necessarily more time spent studying, but well spent effort. Staring at the page for hours and saying "I don't understand" doesn't help. Solve exercise problems, explain the material to fellow students, discuss it with them, make mind maps, bullet point summaries, work through derivations step by step, etc. There are many techniques.
At the end of the day though what matters is what you know. Furthermore, if it's a serious subject, it shouldn't matter whether you learned it from this teacher or from another school and teacher, as long as your knowledge is correct. Knowing the idiosyncracies of this particular teacher should not factor into the grade. A serious subject can be learned on one continent and examined on another. Bullshit courses are all about learning pet peeves and hobby horses of a particular teacher.
I would usually say something along the lines of “everything we covered is on the table” or “everything we covered since the last exam is on the table” depending on the nature of the test. That’s the same message as “know more” but I think it sounds politer.
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.
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.
> 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?
Citation needed? I have no clue where you got this from. I hadn't even heard of it as a conjecture, let alone as something anyone accepted, let alone as gene rally accepted...
How do you expect students to learn anything when:
1. They don't do any homework.
2. All the in-class time is split between the teacher babysitting and playing social worker to problem students, and lecturing, with little to no opportunity to actually practice what they've learned?
I understand that some students don't have home environments that are conductive to doing homework well. I understand that some students are enrolled in five hours a day of extracurricular university-application-padding activities. I understand that some students have incredibly poor screen discipline and impulse control.
But I don't understand that anyone has magically figured out how to teach complicated things to students, and have it stick without them spending a lot of time practicing what they are learning.
As anyone who has tried to do something hard knows, the first step to being good at something is to spend a lot of time being pretty shit at it.
A student who has written and received feedback on 500,000 written words is going to be way better at writing than that same student who wrote 50,000, just like someone who has put 5,000 hours of focused practice into playing the piano is going to be better than my dumb ass, who has only put 100 hours in.
(If you found the solution to get good at stuff without practicing it, I'd love to get good at piano without putting any homework in on it.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Smart people know LLMs confabulate and tell them they’re Absolutely Right! Smart people don’t want to be embarrassed by trusting the hallucination machine and revealing their gullibility to others.
Why would a smart person go to an LLM for an answer they cannot judge or test, be succeptible to flattery and sycophancy rather than picking up on the emotional manipulation and being suspicious/sceptical of the interaction, or looking for support from an echo chamber rather than a Socratic opponent?
All of those sound like flaws and defects of dumb people?
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
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.
> 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&...):
> 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_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 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.
All AI did here is exposed an old problem in education. Kids are expected to get everything perfectly for the first time but a lot of them don't so the class gets easier next year to keep up pass rates.
We need to restructure the system to treat failure as a signal instead of a disaster. Grades should come from hard randomized exams with unlimited retakes so one bad day won't hurt you. Homework should be optional material for self study, evaluated by teachers if you choose to do it but never forced.
Hold back students for individual classes instead of a whole grade so failing one can't ruin your social life and teachers are more willing to do it. F students will realize they have to study, start actually learning and then pass on the second time. No big deal. It happened to my friends in college, no reason they can't do it in high schools.
Discipline is a skill and it's one you have to get from experience. If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.
> Homework should be optional material for self study
At Caltech, homework was assigned but had no bearing on your grade. The grades were based on the midterm and final exams.
But not mastering the homework usually resulted in flunking the exams. There were "retch" sessions after each homework assignment that was staffed by a grad student, and the purpose was to help the students understand the homework problems. I knew only one person (Hal Finney) who was so smart he didn't need to do the homework.
I learned the hard way that the path to success was:
1. never miss a lecture, no matter what
2. take notes by hand during lecture
3. do the homework on time, and make sure you understand every problem. Take advantage of the retch sessions.
Naval Nuclear Power School had (maybe still does) this model 20 years ago as well. Pass rate for my class cohort was 28% over the entire 2 year pipeline.
We didn't call them retch sessions, and they were taught by the instructors though. We also were encouraged to peer tutor and since we were all restricted to one building the homework was always group work allowed.
Also had badges to track time spent in the building for required study hours, though some people gave up and just slept at their desks when they started sliding down the grade scale and the hours racked up.
Generally I think I did 30 hours of studying/homework (went up and down depending on what was being taught, but was around that) a week (for 12-15 hours of actual lecturing), with some of my friends putting in 50% more. Generally the only day we weren't there was Saturdays. Most of the day Sunday was usually spent in class preparing for the next week.
I'll add one more thing to this, given that my experience as a math major at SIU was that each hour of lecture was expected to carry four hours of studying: read and summarize the course's texts (additionally, for math courses, attempt the problems) before lecture.
I found that (1) I didn't need to take anywhere near as many notes during lecture and (2) I could ask way, way, way more relevant questions.
This also helped tremendously when it came to studying for the actuarial exams.
That only works with competent lecturers. I can speak for my experience at a more mid university, where that would apply to about two thirds of the classes. For the remaining third, going to the lectures felt genuinely counterproductive and you could actually feel yourself losing braincells listening to the confused nonsense or classes held in English for Erasmus students by someone who could barely speak it coherently. It was just a complete waste of already little available time.
So the endgame was figuring out what the tests in previous years looked like (cause it was likely gonna be a copy paste affair), do a targeted study run for those exercises and 9/10 you would pass.
As a student of a top-tier French Master's degree, I consulted with a teacher to deal with exhaustion and to ask for a class rescheduling for my case. Explaining my situation, the teacher looks at me and interjected:
—Waitwaitwait. You... you went to all lectures!?
And he was right. Rather than following the curriculum, I should have developed my taste for various engineering topics and only used the classes as entertainment.
I think the first semester, or at least half of that, you should go to every lecture until you develop taste for what's useful. By the time you do your master's you should have a good sense for what classes are serious and have useful lectures and where you can just cram last minute because it's a bullshit class and where you're better off studying from a textbook.
When I was there, a long time ago, exams were timed and were usually open book open note. Blue books were filled in. You were trusted to adhere by those rules, and most students did their exams in their dorm rooms.
The evidence that the students honored the rules was some exams resulted in a 50% failure rate.
As for me, I went there because I wanted to learn the material. I did not care about getting a diploma. (Mine is in the basement somewhere.) I did not take any "easy A" classes, because I wanted a return on my time and tuition investment. (Though, easy A classes were hard to find at Caltech.) I wasn't even going to attend graduation, but my parents showed up and I attended to please them.
The classes, year by year, were dependent on mastering the previous year's classes. So if you cheat with AI, you're digging yourself into a bigger and bigger hole. Caltech rewires your brain. If you don't learn the stuff, you're going to be one of those EEs who carries around a card with V=A*R, V/A=R, V/R=A printed on it.
Unlimited retakes would be an enormous amount of work for professors/TAs/teachers.
Optional homework is often a disaster. At best, students would do it right before an exam and the goal of education is not to just pass exams. They’d probably still get a lower score than if they did the homework when they were supposed to.
What I think is better is to have a due date, but just make the maximum 10% each day it is late. So after 2 days, the highest score you could receive would be 80%.
I liked that system because it gave some flexibility with deadlines while still encouraging you to turn things in on time.
What you described about exams is like how I approach most certification exams: go through a test bank of questions until I get 80% then take the real test.
The study was done in China, where making the class easier to improve pass rates isn't really a thing, as the Gaokao operates more like a stack ranking where it doesn't matter much how well you did in an absolute sense, only that not too many others who did better than you are competing for the same spot. Unlimited retakes are possible in theory, except each costs you a year of your life and except for some extreme cases of repeat test-takers, most people are going to give up after just one or two bad results. Homework is definitely not optional, but going home from school is. (Due to the hukou system, children often have to go to school far from where their parents work, so boarding schools with teacher-supervised self-study are common.) I don't see how holding back for individual classes is supposed to work considering scheduling conflicts.
It's all cute but naively glances over what this all boils to - competition.
Education system, contrary to popular belief/name, isn't tailored to educate but to select winners and losers which then will be picked on the job market.
That's why it seems absurd when you think about it as an institution that aims to educate. That's because that isn't the real purpose of it. The purpose is to stratify and classify early.
Schools do not operate in a vacuum; they serve as credentialing gatekeepers for a hyper-competitive capitalist job market. If everyone could easily retake exams until they got an A, grades would lose their primary utility for employers and universities: differentiation. Society relies on schools to provide a neat hierarchy of candidates that for one reason or another thrived in difficult environment of adolescent schooling.
The system often prioritizes compliance, endurance of boredom, and social maneuvering over actual critical thinking precisely because those traits align with corporate hierarchies.
> If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.
this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.
I could be mistaken but my interpretation is that "studying for your own good" is being contrasted with "studying so you don't fail". If you actually fail students, they'll have a second motivation beyond trusting some authority figure's advice. Namely consequences.
You are missing the point. Getting a certificate for all of the programs you passed and still graduating could completely change the course of a person’s life. Community college has certificates and associates degrees to let people start working when they reach a practical limit in their general education.
Moneyshot: "The results are eye-opening. After six months, pupils using ai saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on ai’s help. Homework scores once predicted exam performance; now those who score highest are, perversely, more likely to do worse in exams."
Study design: "David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where ai adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group."
As with most training the journey is the point, not the destination.
That said, I think smart use of AI could help. It could explain concepts in a way that might help you understand better, it could probe your knowledge in a more dynamic way by tailoring questions, and so on. This requires the AI be restrained by some harness, not free to write down the answers for you.
When I was in college, we had office hours with the prof and the TAs, we had group study sessions, and private tutors. Or you could ask your friends. All of those required going somewhere at a specific place and time and asking someone else to give up their time for you.
AI gives you a way to get the same help without asking another human. Say of that what you will, but not everyone was comfortable asking other humans for help even back then.
Back when I was studying there were topics which I had a really hard time grasping. Having a personal tutor that I could ask specific questions and have a back and forth with would have helped a lot I think. At least the few times I did have such an opportunity that was definitely the case.
Kids are, by and large, lazy however. Hell, adults are lazy, this isn't even an indictment on kids or even people in general, I think our bodies & brains are simply wired to seek the path of least resistance from an evolutionary POV.
Kids won't be using LLM tooling as a personal tutor following some sort of Socratic method, they'll ask it to solve their home/coursework for them and blindly copy/paste the answer. Hell, they'll just manually copy down what's on their screen if copy/pasting isn't possible for whatever reason.
Obviously exceptions exist, but I'd wager from being an ex-kid myself the type of kid who would genuinely use these tools for actual proper self-tutoring would be an extreme rarity.
For some of the classes my kids were in, the lessons and homework time were reversed.
Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.
Flipped classroom was a popular method when I was teaching math. Some students found it very helpful. The trouble was getting the students to do the reading before class. If students came in unprepared they struggled to keep up.
I did this for the last college programming course I taught (2025) as an anti-LLM measure. Every class started with a very short closed-book auto-graded multiple-choice test on the reading. I was careful to specify which was the core reading needed to learn the material (on the quiz) and which was extra (not on the quiz - I think many professors assign this extra reading to everyone, thinking of their strongest students). I think this developed an expectation in the students that doing the reading was easier than finding a way not to.
It's especially hard when multiple subjects try to do it, because it can add enormous amounts of home-time expectations. And many families can't dedicate that much time.
I do like it though, and I like that college generally leaned that way more (and was better balanced, as it had substantially less time in classrooms, so you could study during the day).
Popular yes; based on good quality research… no, not really. It’s really pretty unfortunate timing with the AI boom, because the field of education research is not very high on the science quality totem pole. And the field as a whole was and is also slow to incorporate neuroscience findings, too.
This is typical at the college/university level - when I attended 20-25 years ago, we were expected to learn the material through readings outside of class, and then class time was spent on discussion, application, questions, and working through problems.
IMHO there's a lot to recommend this style. A lot of students learn better when they can wrestle with the material at their own pace, on their own time, in their own setting. It quells a lot of anxiety about "I'm not following what the teacher is saying, am I stuped, will I look bad in front of all my peers?" And then class time can be spent identifying holes in your knowledge and getting instant feedback from an expert, which is where they are most useful.
Although obvious, I think it's worth stating that this method mostly (only?) makes sense for higher education, where students are conscious, involved and engaged in their curriculum.
I think it makes sense as soon as students have the fundamentals down. You have to be able to read, listen, make connections, think critically, devote sustained attention to a task, and manage your time effectively. Some students develop these skills in elementary school, and then starting in middle school, the flipped classroom approach can work. Some adults never develop these skills. Although arguably, people that never develop these skills will likely be sitting there zoning out in a traditional classroom lecture and not actually learn anything.
What do you think about it? I think that the ability to study by yourself is probably the most valuable thing one could get from school and most kids usually don't. Your setup would suggest that demanding that a kids know how to study by themselves is going mainstream...?
Your answer - middle school - I find it extremely young for this, which is extra interesting.
IMHO, my kid was assigned way too much homework. One year I eventually told her to do some amount per class (I think it was 45 minutes) and then be done with it so that she would have time for sports and family stuff. She was spending 4 or 5 hours every night on homework and this was in 4th grade.
That year I sent an email to her teacher to let them know that I'm the one responsible for her not doing all the work and if that's a problem, we need to talk. It wasn't a problem.
The one class that was flipped was a relief because she could breeze through the lesson much faster than would normally be spent on it in class and the amount of time on exercises was limited to the class time slot.
If you structure learning in such a way that makes learning just a means to some end, and overindex on that end being the ultimate goal, that's what you get.
This is a pedagogical problem that AI merely exposed. Educators need to figure out How to make students choose the scenic route instead of having them optimize for the most efficient completion of a task.
School has always been about creating compliant workers, not educating people. They will double down on "performing the right things" and "morals" while the economy will continue on its K shaped path as AI gets more capable.
Yea, also the programs are too different. My psychology bachelor felt like a tea party. My computer science master was 60 hours per week during the hardest courses (which were supposed to go for 20 hours per week - so I could only do one course if it was at this level). My game design master felt more like we were dumped into an art school masquerading as a psychology/CS master but it really was art school. My information science bachelor felt like the only "normal" study program.
All of this was at university of which 3 of them were at the same university.
Especially the artsy game design program definitely did not feel like it was preparing me to be a cog in some giant corporate wheel.
Education sustem is not about the actual knowledge, but about training various aspects of the brain during kids development.
So even memorizing literature have benefits, even though it doesn't bring any career use.
If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.
I see this as a memorize-vs-understand fallacy many repeat.
It is really a combination: you need to memorize a large corpus of information to operationalize knowledge — understanding a bunch of theorems in mathematics does not help much (even if you are able to prove them when you see them) if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
Or having good understanding of foreign language grammar won't help you if you do not memorize words that you need to express your thoughts.
Good literature will show you some of life's challenges and potentially let you think through them in a non-stressful situation (other than "I've got to finish the last 200 pages by Monday" ;)).
> if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
At the outskirts of one's knowledge this is inevitably the case. My impression it is still useful to know that a certain implication is possible - and one can look up the exact conditions.
Maybe. As the nature of assistive tools changes, so does pedagogy. Calculators are the easy example since most of us are (still) familiar. But there are others that were just as pronounced -- e.g. log tables and slide rules were transformational and instrumental at one time, and you've (probably) never used them. If you had used slide rules to solve your homework problems then were excluded from using them on exams, you'd see a similar effect.
AI is a big change; pedagogy is going to change too.
I mean, does it? The way I see it, the best LLMs have to offer is infinite patience (until they inevitably and unpredictably start to confabulate, which should be a gigantic red flag, anyhow), I don't see how LLMs can be used to explore teaching paradigms that haven't been explored before. We know pretty well from centuries of empirical experimentation how children's brains develop under different stimuli. It's not exactly something the software industry needed to "hack".
Using the forklift as a spotter and to assist in loading weights increased gains. Then again, a human can do all those things, and provide real human connection.
Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
I find people’s on the spot reasoning abilities considerable worse than even cheap LLMs. This “fast” mentality is what causes stupid decisions because we need to “keep moving” (To where? Wrong meeting!) Answers, answers, decisions, decisions, quick, quick! next quarter In hindsight we need to do things differently. Answers, answer, quick quick! Time is of the essence! If you don’t start producing sound within 5 seconds we will all spontaneously combust!
People can also ask questions that it is unreasonable to expect people to know on the spot too and after a while the role of the questioner in the meeting can be questioned. :)
I prefer to share a video, ask people to watch it, and have them send me questions. That way I can spend time preparing answers to those questions, and then then meeting can be about discussion, not information delivery or recall.
Asking people to be conclusive on the spot is a recipe for acting on bad data. There are too many biases related to stature, they interfere with accuracy.
I can see that. Personally, I use that for people who like to go down tedious rabbit holes and want to free up the rest of the attendees to go back to work.
True, but only for things that that your colleagues don't expect you to know already. Remember the "I'll circle back" meme about Jen Psaki? This response can only be used sparingly before it's seen as a sign of underpreparedness/inability to do back-of-the-envelope thinking.
The answer is "accepted", in the sense that it won't get you fired. But the meeting plows on, and decisions are made in absence of the answer to the question! — and never revisited once the answer is known.
And like 90% of the time it comes up, it's because the data contradicts the decision.
Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.
Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
When you lower the barrier to taking the shortcut, you get more people to take it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. If cheating becomes incredibly easy, lots of students who would have otherwise been honest take the easy way out. Moral conviction gets harder to keep as doing the right thing becomes less rational.
> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
And yet if nobody likes you your career is going to stall. If you’re annoying, if you smell bad, if you dress poorly, if you’re fat and ugly, just like in school you’re going to have worse career outcomes.
And I could also call most of those things assignments instead of exams and nobody would bat an eye.
Your analogy was both thoughtless and stands up to no scrutiny
Your employers want those assignments done. That’s why they pay you. School assignments belong in the trash can and you pay for someone to look at them before throwing them away.
Even if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
When you get out into the real world, what will matter is how effectively you use AI. When you are done with school, you can take the "exam" using AI. The problem is that teaching is trying to teach skills that are no longer relevant and is always behind what the latest going on in the industry. Every time without fail you got interns, who after two years at stanford would learn more in the 3 months on a google internship than in those two years at stanford. They learn useless shit.
My own experience is that college is fun. You can spend the time wisely, but school stuff, is not what makes you money.
Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and make colleges under write them. The problem will get solved quickly.
Way before AI, the problem was very similar - universities do not teach practically useful stuff. Its been a permanent complaint about the education system, really, at least for the last 50 years.
AI just gave the students a way to dodge the slog.
But university was never intended to teach the bleeding edge. That would really be impossible in practice. Pre-phd, it is supposed to teach ways to efficiently attack a problem. you can take a bunch of "play courses", and succeeding at any of those requires pretty much only that one skill.
Nowadays, the challenge they face, is to keep teaching "problem attack methods" in a way that can't be trivialized by AI.
Though fundamentally, if you go to university, and evade learning the one thing you can learn there - thats your loss.
I know this study is focused in China but one thing I'd like to understand is the nuance in what kind of student is likely to always reach for ai for homework help as I think (especially in the US, can't speak for other countries) the varying powers that be that can determine the quality and type of education you can receive (does your country have means to buy textbooks per student or shared, do you have funds to give students ipads to take home or no, what sets the bar on how far curriculums can go, are teacher and faculty pay and incentives simply tied to student pass rates, etc.) and those do more in shaping what "use AI responsibly" will look like and why it's so different.
The article does not relate AI usage for homework to exam score drops.
It tries to link them together with no obvious cause and effect.
The score could have dropped due to worse environment at schools or kids who were stuck at home studying online and now in physical locations could not adapt fast enough (meaning, possibly just temporary drops). We do not yet have enough metrics gathered yet.
This type of article bashing AI for the root of any problems, I find it appalling without any evidence.
I used to skip homework in high school because it was boring and cut into my personal life outside of school (including my job) but I would always do very well on tests.
Then I stopped caring about tests too.
I did the same thing through college. The only reason they passed me and I got a degree is that I built the school’s website and I built personal ecommerce sites for the head of art and his wife to sell their paintings.
I haven’t done shit since like 7th grade.
Worked at Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, same behavior there - did basically nothing for them while making thousands off my games on App Store.
I got graded homework even in a few college courses and thought it was dumb, but then I realized it's always in the low-tier classes where they can't trust the students to study on their own. Those who skip homework hurt themselves by doing poorly on exams, but that's not enough to stop them. This ruins the curve in ways the instructor can't really fix unless they're prepared to fail half the class, which they aren't.
This is the answer. Many (all?) European schools don’t give homework (this is partly because of the way the grad programs work). It’s on the students to study in order to pass the (difficult) exams.
There is no such thing as a European school. Each country is different. And if the country is a federation, each state might be different. And we have homework in most European countries I’m aware of.
Seems this did effectively abolish homework if AI is now doing it all for them. The result seems to be that fewer students pass the exams, not more.
As with any skill, practice is necessary to achieve competence. If homework is no longer a viable way to force students to practice, you'll need to find some replacement, you can't just abolish it and expect there to be no negative consequences.
It is what all my European peers reported to me during grad school, and you should care because it is an example of a system which solves this problem successfully (at the university level).
Oh, university level? The article is about 12-18yo. American grad school already doesn't have graded homework, and undergrad sometimes does or sometimes not.
BTW / Offtopic:
I have read some weeks ago, today if you are hosting a party for your kids birthday, parents are preparing "give away bags" for handing over when leaving the party
The often underworked (most are autograding these days and reading old powerpoints rather than do real curriculum development) and (for the quality) overpaid teachers/professors will mass riot against this because it means they might have to actually teach. We might even get yet more anti-boy treatment than already exists among them as a social class in retaliation.
Please also abolish PowerPoint and force oral exams while you are at it.
Teachers are also luddites as a social class. Math teachers cried about calculators yet everyone of them who refused to adapt did disservice to their students (especially anyone doing statistics). My state's education system is utter trash despite being well off economically because of strong teachers unions keeping them from undergoing even a tiny bit of scrutiny.
They do not deserve the social credit/grace that they get. They are ultimately gatekeepers, whose extremely biased decisions in grading/treatment of their flocks decide which kid grows up on the streets and which kid grows up to eat lobster thermador every day.
Teachers also should not be disciplinarians. Children with discipline problems bad enough to disrupt a whole class should be thrown out of the class room as basically the only thing a teacher does for "discipline". The "right to education for the shit kids means we can't do that" framing is such trash for those who want an education and will inevitably be disrupted by a small minority of terrible students.
Also it's interesting that one of the only other things Max Stirner wrote about besides philosophy was education and his myriad problems with it (given his history as a school teacher).
It’s about having something engaging, not entertaining. As someone with ADHD, the difference between a homework that feels engaging and interesting and one that is a waste of time is massive. I wish I had learned the distinction and got my diagnostic when I was young, but I now see it clearly as I take courses as an adult.
Everytime a student says this—it's because they're procrastinating on their work. The hardest part about anything new is starting it. Once you build some momentum, interest and focus tends to build as well.There certainly are some homework assignments that are boring.
A child today can absolutely be successful at doing their homework if they have time to... sit down and write, or draw, or do crafts or things that require them to focus. It's not like Screens exist, therefore no attention span.
What's happening is people are only fixating on screens, and foregoing these slower forms of media. That's akin to saying all children will be obese now that fast food is around. Of course, obesity rates will sky rocket if all you eat is fast food. But if a kid grows up to have homecooked meals, and eat with their parent(s) then they won't. It's as simple as that.
Homework isn't boring.....its the social media and addictive games that completely are destroying our attention span.
After I detox from online games, I can go back to learning new "boring" stuff. There are nerds(myself included) who find learning fun, and using AI boring because it doesn't scratch the learning itch.
Learning isn't boring. Homework is incredibly boring.
They aren't assigned based on each student's understanding and mastery of the subject. They're assigned based on the lowest common denominator. It's an incredibly discouraging hoop to jump through for students who actively find joy in learning and discovering new things.
Learning how to do "boring" things is probably one of the more important skill a child can learn, most things worth doing tend to be kinda boring at least at some point.
I think we need to accept that AI causes cognitive decline, like Alzheimer's. For an Adult this may be manageable, but in a young brain, this is detrimental.
Comparing it to Alzheimer's is an allegory. The cognitive loss is already well documented. I might also compare it to Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But I think more people understand what Alzheimer's is.
This feels like the calculator debate all over again.
Yes, using a calculator leads to worse outcomes in your learning.
But also, yes, everyone always carries a calculator on their person 24/7 these days and you'll never be as fast and as accurate as a calculator.
I think it would have been kinda cool if you could have unlocked the privilege of using a calculator in school through good grades in math class. Prove you can do what the tool can, then you get to use it. Would have also provided at least one incentive for students to get good grades in at least one class.
Yeah, obviously. We also don't know how to use flint and steel to start fires any more. You wouldn't outlift a crane, why would you want to outhomework an AI? And you can't even argue that this toil is going to help in the workplace, because the workplace is now AI-native, and you can offload everything to AI.
The important thing is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.
If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).
We could also drop school altogether and just make sure every kid has an LLM-connected device that's voice driven. They wouldn't even need to learn to read and write -- that's old school.
These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.
Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.
Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.
You need some baseline knowledge to be able to gauge the correctness of answers you get from AI and to be able to ask the right questions. Removing homework and exams seems very short-sighted.
Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.
(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)
> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.
Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?
1) We're building a tool that can make toil of every kind obsolete. We're not there yet, but I'm watching it happen in real time.
2) The fact that it works so well economically means that it's inevitably going to take over. Humans simply won't be profitably employable, and this will happen sooner than you think.
3) The takeover could lead to a utopia, where nothing is needed of anyone, and you could do what you want when you want it.
4) Humans are likely fuck that up, and it's worth doing what you can to end up in the group that benefits. Sipping wine on the beach isn't mutually exclusive with a great deal going to the winners.
I do not believe that human brains are magical, and I think that they can be surpassed with manufactured brains.
Concerns over equitable the distribution is doesn't affect the value of skills.
I get it, there's a strong anti-AI vibe here because of point 4. I'm somewhat worried, but I'm also really excited about the possiblilities, and I don't think we can avoid going to a fully AI future no matter how anti-AI you are; we can only figure out where to set the dial on how the rewards get shared.
Guess what this is probably fine. AI helps people do their work on a daily basis and probably makes them memorize less things. That’s how the world is moving. You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic. And we shouldn’t organize our society around memorizing things for exams.
What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).
If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.
OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.
I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.
Let me explain.
All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche.
I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-rays wrong, as she did them non-weight bearing, which is useless if there are no fractures.
The specialist was excited to see me, and up to date on all the lisfranc research. I've had a really bad sprain and he said conservative treatment should be sufficient. It took months but I healed up.
I've had quite a few injuries from playing sports and often found doctors to be "wrong" simply because their knowledge was out of date.
I am confused as to how this is an argument for a single source of truth. It seems like you've presented an argument for the opposite. If there were a single source of truth, there would be no point in seeking a second opinion - it would be the same as the first. If the first opinion was correct, excellent. But if the first opinion was incorrect (and no AI model is correct 100% of the time), then you're straight out of luck.
The problem is that the first source is incorrect because she doesn't deal with lisfranc injuries frequently enough and her knowledge is not good enough. I've had to go do my own research to find a guy who specializes in lisfranc. Most patients would not.
However, if you went to an AI agent which has access to medical research, you would get the most up to date research.
Why would I seek a 2nd opinion if the initial doctor knew what to do?
> I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.
We should establish a single practice of care, MedicineGPT. It may be a rough start but over time the gene pool will adapt and the human race will live harmoniously with the machines (sorry, with the GPUs). Plus our insurance premiums should finally go down.
It would be better than most physicians now. It can quickly crunch many pages of medical history and medical research, this something a physician cannot do. They have intuition but sometimes are not equipped to deal with complex problems.
> What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).
Ironically I had a friend who went to med school and in his own words roughly 90% or more of the students there are heavily relying on GPT. They even had a few instances where people were using it to cheat during exams. And supposedly during the clinical years of uni if they don't know something they literally just go to a separate room and start asking GPT for answers. Make of that what you will.
This is too simplistic. There are disciplines, like Anatomy, where you're basically just memorizing bones, glands, and other parts of the human body. For organic chemistry, students need to memorize most of the krebs cycle diagram for their exams (because doing so and drawing it lets them reference it later).
Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.
Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.
Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.
>Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
As somebody that read every mandatory reading book, I wish I had had the critical thinking skills to not read them. In retrospect, they were a waste of time and made me absolutely hate reading.
How do you differentiate between mastery of a topic and mastery of using an AI in an exam setting?
Open book tests and allowed cheat sheets already solve the memorization-is-not-required gap. It seems like allowing use of AI pushes that closer to thinking-is-not-required. And if no thinking is required, then how can you prove personal mastery?
If no thinking is required, why do you need thinking in the first place. Seems useless. If an ai can do it, why you need a human to be able to do, human should be doing something the ai can't.
You can't play an instrument without muscle memory.
Why are commercial airline pilots required to spend hundreds of hours in simulators? So that when things go wrong they don't have time to think, they just react. And their reaction will be the correct course of action because that's what they have drilled on.
How many times have you gone "Oh, this new thing I have just encountered reminds me of this other thing?". How can you make such leaps without knowing that other thing?
How do you show mastery of a topic where you neither understand fundamentals nor have skills to do a task without help?
Mastery is about demonstrating skills. Skills take practice, hands down.
AI can help us build better tools, provide tutoring, answer broad ranging questions, help relate concepts, and do reasoning for us. All of those things can be good in that they can help us acquire skills faster, e.g. with better practices and exercises. But it cannot replace actual time spent doing a thing.
Wanna learn knitting? You're going to have to knit some stuff.
I had the privilege of being educated in several countries and cultures. This might come across as "your education system sucks", and that's essentially what it boils down to, but on the upside I'm truly sorry for you and will oppose a comment to your cynicism. Good exams test your ability to express coherent thoughts about the concepts you learned, and let you generalize upon them by having you use and combine them to solve cases and problems that were not those seen in the teaching material. You can even teach and test history that way, and make it much more insightful and captivating than a laundry list of dates and events (as I suppose was your case?)
Same, but all the exams I ever took mostly tested your memory more than anything else. I don't think it's possible to test people at scale any other way.
A lot of expertise is actually knowing things about the domain. You can't make a good judgement call on a topic without getting relevant knowledge in your head to make that decision. You can't even lookup the relevant knowledge without knowing what knowledge is important to make the decision, so reference material is not enough.
Memorizing stuff is good for understanding. Of course memorizing without understanding doesn't really help, which is what a lot of student last-minute "cramming" boils down to. But without concrete and memorized knowledge, any abstract reasoning skills become quickly impossible.
Wrong. Memorizing without understanding is pointless. And I'd argue that rote memorization does nothing to guide ones understanding. Because if you actually understand a subject deeply enough you can literally derive almost anything that would need to be memorized on the fly, and if you can't (say constants, or spec information, or anything else) you can simply surgically look it up online (or via an LLM).
> Wrong. Memorizing without understanding is pointless.
GP said exactly the same thing.
I agree with GP’s broader point, which is that you cannot have understanding without a specific set of baseline facts. The student studying only those facts and never achieving the understanding they are meant to support is a tragedy of our education system.
There are people who need to understand microbiology at a specific level and they cannot derive it all on the fly. They can achieve better memorization through understanding but I personally have found rote memorization can be an essential first step in some disciplines.
A good analogy to caching and memory lookups. You store in your head only the most valuable immediately necessary information, the rest can be outsourced.
This is not, in fact, fine. The point of education is to learn things, and these results show that kids are not learning things as effectively when they use LLMs.
> You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic.
Yes, you do need to memorize and know things about the subject in order to be a master of it. What is the definition of "mastery" that you are using? What are the Things being memorized?
It's critical to understand the fundamentals on your own and that is different from AI being used in public. Sure school doesn't have as much value as it used to but it was always more about social credit or a certification that you took the time and effort to understand the world under pressure (obviously not true for all disciplines) or goals attached preferably in group settings.
This is something that AI cannot replace. Viewing things as memorizing is the wrong take.
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.
"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."
I'm confident it's an amplifier for people who know how learning works and already do a lot of it, successfully. However the level of "learning fluency" I'm talking about isn't reached for many until late college or grad school, and sometimes not at all. So I'm not surprised by the quoted results for 12-18 year olds.
"The negative learning effects are larger for students with higher initial achievement. The differences in the estimated full (6-10 month average) effects are substantial, with a 50% gap between the most negative effect (-24 percent) for the highest tercile and the least negative (-16 percent) for the lowest tercile. "
Not top 10% as you asked, but the closest to what you asked. My working hypothesis is that top performance is highly correlated with willingness to work hard, and AI decreases the motivation to work hard.
I think if you take a physics class where the student is intelligent and intrinsically motivated through their own interest (I admit this is rare) then AI probably helps.
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.
Huh? They're designed to measure how much you know. They can't see how much you study, nor would they have reason to be interested.
At the end of the day though what matters is what you know. Furthermore, if it's a serious subject, it shouldn't matter whether you learned it from this teacher or from another school and teacher, as long as your knowledge is correct. Knowing the idiosyncracies of this particular teacher should not factor into the grade. A serious subject can be learned on one continent and examined on another. Bullshit courses are all about learning pet peeves and hobby horses of a particular teacher.
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/3mt...
Citation needed? I have no clue where you got this from. I hadn't even heard of it as a conjecture, let alone as something anyone accepted, let alone as gene rally accepted...
1. They don't do any homework.
2. All the in-class time is split between the teacher babysitting and playing social worker to problem students, and lecturing, with little to no opportunity to actually practice what they've learned?
I understand that some students don't have home environments that are conductive to doing homework well. I understand that some students are enrolled in five hours a day of extracurricular university-application-padding activities. I understand that some students have incredibly poor screen discipline and impulse control.
But I don't understand that anyone has magically figured out how to teach complicated things to students, and have it stick without them spending a lot of time practicing what they are learning.
As anyone who has tried to do something hard knows, the first step to being good at something is to spend a lot of time being pretty shit at it.
A student who has written and received feedback on 500,000 written words is going to be way better at writing than that same student who wrote 50,000, just like someone who has put 5,000 hours of focused practice into playing the piano is going to be better than my dumb ass, who has only put 100 hours in.
(If you found the solution to get good at stuff without practicing it, I'd love to get good at piano without putting any homework in on it.)
We could probably cook up thousands of examples of the same problem (YouTube DIY tutorials, GPS navigation, etc.)
Same can be said of technology in general tbh.
Suppose it's good to learn how elastic the brain is, in both directions, at a young age where it doesn't matter.
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.
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.
Smart people know LLMs confabulate and tell them they’re Absolutely Right! Smart people don’t want to be embarrassed by trusting the hallucination machine and revealing their gullibility to others.
All of those sound like flaws and defects of dumb people?
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
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.
Clarification: to value “smart” people, which we were already doing terrible at.
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&...):
> 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_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 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.
We need to restructure the system to treat failure as a signal instead of a disaster. Grades should come from hard randomized exams with unlimited retakes so one bad day won't hurt you. Homework should be optional material for self study, evaluated by teachers if you choose to do it but never forced.
Hold back students for individual classes instead of a whole grade so failing one can't ruin your social life and teachers are more willing to do it. F students will realize they have to study, start actually learning and then pass on the second time. No big deal. It happened to my friends in college, no reason they can't do it in high schools.
Discipline is a skill and it's one you have to get from experience. If you try and force kids to study when they don't want to "for their own good" you're not actually helping them. Everyone needs to find their own path. Let people fail.
At Caltech, homework was assigned but had no bearing on your grade. The grades were based on the midterm and final exams.
But not mastering the homework usually resulted in flunking the exams. There were "retch" sessions after each homework assignment that was staffed by a grad student, and the purpose was to help the students understand the homework problems. I knew only one person (Hal Finney) who was so smart he didn't need to do the homework.
I learned the hard way that the path to success was:
1. never miss a lecture, no matter what
2. take notes by hand during lecture
3. do the homework on time, and make sure you understand every problem. Take advantage of the retch sessions.
And that worked for me.
We didn't call them retch sessions, and they were taught by the instructors though. We also were encouraged to peer tutor and since we were all restricted to one building the homework was always group work allowed.
Also had badges to track time spent in the building for required study hours, though some people gave up and just slept at their desks when they started sliding down the grade scale and the hours racked up.
Generally I think I did 30 hours of studying/homework (went up and down depending on what was being taught, but was around that) a week (for 12-15 hours of actual lecturing), with some of my friends putting in 50% more. Generally the only day we weren't there was Saturdays. Most of the day Sunday was usually spent in class preparing for the next week.
The general pattern at Caltech was 2 hours of study for every hour of lecture. Which was quite a shock to me.
I found that (1) I didn't need to take anywhere near as many notes during lecture and (2) I could ask way, way, way more relevant questions.
This also helped tremendously when it came to studying for the actuarial exams.
So the endgame was figuring out what the tests in previous years looked like (cause it was likely gonna be a copy paste affair), do a targeted study run for those exercises and 9/10 you would pass.
As a student of a top-tier French Master's degree, I consulted with a teacher to deal with exhaustion and to ask for a class rescheduling for my case. Explaining my situation, the teacher looks at me and interjected:
—Waitwaitwait. You... you went to all lectures!?
And he was right. Rather than following the curriculum, I should have developed my taste for various engineering topics and only used the classes as entertainment.
When I was there, a long time ago, exams were timed and were usually open book open note. Blue books were filled in. You were trusted to adhere by those rules, and most students did their exams in their dorm rooms.
The evidence that the students honored the rules was some exams resulted in a 50% failure rate.
As for me, I went there because I wanted to learn the material. I did not care about getting a diploma. (Mine is in the basement somewhere.) I did not take any "easy A" classes, because I wanted a return on my time and tuition investment. (Though, easy A classes were hard to find at Caltech.) I wasn't even going to attend graduation, but my parents showed up and I attended to please them.
The classes, year by year, were dependent on mastering the previous year's classes. So if you cheat with AI, you're digging yourself into a bigger and bigger hole. Caltech rewires your brain. If you don't learn the stuff, you're going to be one of those EEs who carries around a card with V=A*R, V/A=R, V/R=A printed on it.
Optional homework is often a disaster. At best, students would do it right before an exam and the goal of education is not to just pass exams. They’d probably still get a lower score than if they did the homework when they were supposed to.
What I think is better is to have a due date, but just make the maximum 10% each day it is late. So after 2 days, the highest score you could receive would be 80%.
I liked that system because it gave some flexibility with deadlines while still encouraging you to turn things in on time.
Do you have evidence for this beyond your friends (who were accepted into college)?
Education system, contrary to popular belief/name, isn't tailored to educate but to select winners and losers which then will be picked on the job market.
That's why it seems absurd when you think about it as an institution that aims to educate. That's because that isn't the real purpose of it. The purpose is to stratify and classify early.
Schools do not operate in a vacuum; they serve as credentialing gatekeepers for a hyper-competitive capitalist job market. If everyone could easily retake exams until they got an A, grades would lose their primary utility for employers and universities: differentiation. Society relies on schools to provide a neat hierarchy of candidates that for one reason or another thrived in difficult environment of adolescent schooling.
The system often prioritizes compliance, endurance of boredom, and social maneuvering over actual critical thinking precisely because those traits align with corporate hierarchies.
this rhetoric is pretending to be an alternative to coercion. IMO the ideas you are talking about are well trodden and are still coercion nonetheless.
Study design: "David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where ai adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group."
As with most training the journey is the point, not the destination.
That said, I think smart use of AI could help. It could explain concepts in a way that might help you understand better, it could probe your knowledge in a more dynamic way by tailoring questions, and so on. This requires the AI be restrained by some harness, not free to write down the answers for you.
People say that all the time, but does anyone really think a lack of good explanations for things is a limiting factor in 2026? Or even 2010?
AI gives you a way to get the same help without asking another human. Say of that what you will, but not everyone was comfortable asking other humans for help even back then.
Kids won't be using LLM tooling as a personal tutor following some sort of Socratic method, they'll ask it to solve their home/coursework for them and blindly copy/paste the answer. Hell, they'll just manually copy down what's on their screen if copy/pasting isn't possible for whatever reason.
Obviously exceptions exist, but I'd wager from being an ex-kid myself the type of kid who would genuinely use these tools for actual proper self-tutoring would be an extreme rarity.
How would this magic harness look like and why would anyone use it?
Put that in your agents.md.
Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.
I do like it though, and I like that college generally leaned that way more (and was better balanced, as it had substantially less time in classrooms, so you could study during the day).
IMHO there's a lot to recommend this style. A lot of students learn better when they can wrestle with the material at their own pace, on their own time, in their own setting. It quells a lot of anxiety about "I'm not following what the teacher is saying, am I stuped, will I look bad in front of all my peers?" And then class time can be spent identifying holes in your knowledge and getting instant feedback from an expert, which is where they are most useful.
Your answer - middle school - I find it extremely young for this, which is extra interesting.
That year I sent an email to her teacher to let them know that I'm the one responsible for her not doing all the work and if that's a problem, we need to talk. It wasn't a problem.
The one class that was flipped was a relief because she could breeze through the lesson much faster than would normally be spent on it in class and the amount of time on exercises was limited to the class time slot.
This is a pedagogical problem that AI merely exposed. Educators need to figure out How to make students choose the scenic route instead of having them optimize for the most efficient completion of a task.
All of this was at university of which 3 of them were at the same university.
Especially the artsy game design program definitely did not feel like it was preparing me to be a cog in some giant corporate wheel.
If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.
It is really a combination: you need to memorize a large corpus of information to operationalize knowledge — understanding a bunch of theorems in mathematics does not help much (even if you are able to prove them when you see them) if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
Or having good understanding of foreign language grammar won't help you if you do not memorize words that you need to express your thoughts.
Good literature will show you some of life's challenges and potentially let you think through them in a non-stressful situation (other than "I've got to finish the last 200 pages by Monday" ;)).
At the outskirts of one's knowledge this is inevitably the case. My impression it is still useful to know that a certain implication is possible - and one can look up the exact conditions.
AI is a big change; pedagogy is going to change too.
I mean, does it? The way I see it, the best LLMs have to offer is infinite patience (until they inevitably and unpredictably start to confabulate, which should be a gigantic red flag, anyhow), I don't see how LLMs can be used to explore teaching paradigms that haven't been explored before. We know pretty well from centuries of empirical experimentation how children's brains develop under different stimuli. It's not exactly something the software industry needed to "hack".
Using the forklift as a spotter and to assist in loading weights increased gains. Then again, a human can do all those things, and provide real human connection.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
Is an acceptable answer.
Asking people to be conclusive on the spot is a recipe for acting on bad data. There are too many biases related to stature, they interfere with accuracy.
The answer is "accepted", in the sense that it won't get you fired. But the meeting plows on, and decisions are made in absence of the answer to the question! — and never revisited once the answer is known.
And like 90% of the time it comes up, it's because the data contradicts the decision.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
Somehow, civilization has managed to survive.
Career exams tend to be a mix but a lot less ideology.
Your career is more akin to the totality of school than it is to any specific facet of it imo.
The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
And I could also call most of those things assignments instead of exams and nobody would bat an eye.
Your analogy was both thoughtless and stands up to no scrutiny
unless you're just blindly passing it on for someone else to deal with
In the case of some management, is causing them to unlearn, forgetting about proper review and maintenance practices.
When the signal is removed, this is what you get.
My own experience is that college is fun. You can spend the time wisely, but school stuff, is not what makes you money.
Make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy and make colleges under write them. The problem will get solved quickly.
AI just gave the students a way to dodge the slog.
But university was never intended to teach the bleeding edge. That would really be impossible in practice. Pre-phd, it is supposed to teach ways to efficiently attack a problem. you can take a bunch of "play courses", and succeeding at any of those requires pretty much only that one skill.
Nowadays, the challenge they face, is to keep teaching "problem attack methods" in a way that can't be trivialized by AI.
Though fundamentally, if you go to university, and evade learning the one thing you can learn there - thats your loss.
It tries to link them together with no obvious cause and effect.
The score could have dropped due to worse environment at schools or kids who were stuck at home studying online and now in physical locations could not adapt fast enough (meaning, possibly just temporary drops). We do not yet have enough metrics gathered yet.
This type of article bashing AI for the root of any problems, I find it appalling without any evidence.
It's nothing but a conjecture.
Then I stopped caring about tests too.
I did the same thing through college. The only reason they passed me and I got a degree is that I built the school’s website and I built personal ecommerce sites for the head of art and his wife to sell their paintings.
I haven’t done shit since like 7th grade.
Worked at Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, same behavior there - did basically nothing for them while making thousands off my games on App Store.
Fuck authority
What are you basing that claim on?
As with any skill, practice is necessary to achieve competence. If homework is no longer a viable way to force students to practice, you'll need to find some replacement, you can't just abolish it and expect there to be no negative consequences.
By what means? Have you got a magic wand that will turn 3rd graders into mature functional adults who will study on their own without homework?
> The study followed 27,000 pupils aged 12 to 18
(Third grade is 9-10 years old I believe.)
This sounds really strange, never heard of.
BTW / Offtopic: I have read some weeks ago, today if you are hosting a party for your kids birthday, parents are preparing "give away bags" for handing over when leaving the party
Really well thought out goodie bags are a treat, they follow the theme of the party and they have memorable (even if low priced) gifts.
Most goodie bags are filled with disposable toys that break after a few minutes of play.
Please also abolish PowerPoint and force oral exams while you are at it.
Teachers are also luddites as a social class. Math teachers cried about calculators yet everyone of them who refused to adapt did disservice to their students (especially anyone doing statistics). My state's education system is utter trash despite being well off economically because of strong teachers unions keeping them from undergoing even a tiny bit of scrutiny.
They do not deserve the social credit/grace that they get. They are ultimately gatekeepers, whose extremely biased decisions in grading/treatment of their flocks decide which kid grows up on the streets and which kid grows up to eat lobster thermador every day.
Teachers also should not be disciplinarians. Children with discipline problems bad enough to disrupt a whole class should be thrown out of the class room as basically the only thing a teacher does for "discipline". The "right to education for the shit kids means we can't do that" framing is such trash for those who want an education and will inevitably be disrupted by a small minority of terrible students.
Also it's interesting that one of the only other things Max Stirner wrote about besides philosophy was education and his myriad problems with it (given his history as a school teacher).
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-fals...
The point is to train the brain via repitition and iteration.
If your goal is entertainment, I'm not sure what you are looking for.
A child today can absolutely be successful at doing their homework if they have time to... sit down and write, or draw, or do crafts or things that require them to focus. It's not like Screens exist, therefore no attention span.
What's happening is people are only fixating on screens, and foregoing these slower forms of media. That's akin to saying all children will be obese now that fast food is around. Of course, obesity rates will sky rocket if all you eat is fast food. But if a kid grows up to have homecooked meals, and eat with their parent(s) then they won't. It's as simple as that.
After I detox from online games, I can go back to learning new "boring" stuff. There are nerds(myself included) who find learning fun, and using AI boring because it doesn't scratch the learning itch.
They aren't assigned based on each student's understanding and mastery of the subject. They're assigned based on the lowest common denominator. It's an incredibly discouraging hoop to jump through for students who actively find joy in learning and discovering new things.
Don't make any commentary on my intelligence or I'll get you banned.
Pretty sure the way social media is designed contributes more to short attention spans and atrophy of the cerebral cortex.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240517-the-human-brai...
Yes, using a calculator leads to worse outcomes in your learning. But also, yes, everyone always carries a calculator on their person 24/7 these days and you'll never be as fast and as accurate as a calculator.
I think it would have been kinda cool if you could have unlocked the privilege of using a calculator in school through good grades in math class. Prove you can do what the tool can, then you get to use it. Would have also provided at least one incentive for students to get good grades in at least one class.
Does it? https://www.jstor.org/stable/749255
If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).
It’s the exposure to feeling under pressure, creativity of the mind etc - the less you expose a human to ‘suffering’ the more useless they become.
Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.
Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.
(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)
Tell me you weren't a Boy Scout without telling me you weren't a Boy Scout.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363319
> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.
Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366313
You gotta pick a lane with your rah-rah-ism.
1) We're building a tool that can make toil of every kind obsolete. We're not there yet, but I'm watching it happen in real time.
2) The fact that it works so well economically means that it's inevitably going to take over. Humans simply won't be profitably employable, and this will happen sooner than you think.
3) The takeover could lead to a utopia, where nothing is needed of anyone, and you could do what you want when you want it.
4) Humans are likely fuck that up, and it's worth doing what you can to end up in the group that benefits. Sipping wine on the beach isn't mutually exclusive with a great deal going to the winners.
I do not believe that human brains are magical, and I think that they can be surpassed with manufactured brains.
Concerns over equitable the distribution is doesn't affect the value of skills.
I get it, there's a strong anti-AI vibe here because of point 4. I'm somewhat worried, but I'm also really excited about the possiblilities, and I don't think we can avoid going to a fully AI future no matter how anti-AI you are; we can only figure out where to set the dial on how the rewards get shared.
If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.
OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.
All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche.
I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-rays wrong, as she did them non-weight bearing, which is useless if there are no fractures.
The specialist was excited to see me, and up to date on all the lisfranc research. I've had a really bad sprain and he said conservative treatment should be sufficient. It took months but I healed up.
I've had quite a few injuries from playing sports and often found doctors to be "wrong" simply because their knowledge was out of date.
However, if you went to an AI agent which has access to medical research, you would get the most up to date research.
Why would I seek a 2nd opinion if the initial doctor knew what to do?
We should establish a single practice of care, MedicineGPT. It may be a rough start but over time the gene pool will adapt and the human race will live harmoniously with the machines (sorry, with the GPUs). Plus our insurance premiums should finally go down.
Ironically I had a friend who went to med school and in his own words roughly 90% or more of the students there are heavily relying on GPT. They even had a few instances where people were using it to cheat during exams. And supposedly during the clinical years of uni if they don't know something they literally just go to a separate room and start asking GPT for answers. Make of that what you will.
Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.
Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.
Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.
As somebody that read every mandatory reading book, I wish I had had the critical thinking skills to not read them. In retrospect, they were a waste of time and made me absolutely hate reading.
Open book tests and allowed cheat sheets already solve the memorization-is-not-required gap. It seems like allowing use of AI pushes that closer to thinking-is-not-required. And if no thinking is required, then how can you prove personal mastery?
You can't play an instrument without muscle memory.
Why are commercial airline pilots required to spend hundreds of hours in simulators? So that when things go wrong they don't have time to think, they just react. And their reaction will be the correct course of action because that's what they have drilled on.
How many times have you gone "Oh, this new thing I have just encountered reminds me of this other thing?". How can you make such leaps without knowing that other thing?
How do you show mastery of a topic where you neither understand fundamentals nor have skills to do a task without help?
Mastery is about demonstrating skills. Skills take practice, hands down.
AI can help us build better tools, provide tutoring, answer broad ranging questions, help relate concepts, and do reasoning for us. All of those things can be good in that they can help us acquire skills faster, e.g. with better practices and exercises. But it cannot replace actual time spent doing a thing.
Wanna learn knitting? You're going to have to knit some stuff.
Absolute waste of time getting babies to walk now that we have cars and electric scooters!
GP said exactly the same thing.
I agree with GP’s broader point, which is that you cannot have understanding without a specific set of baseline facts. The student studying only those facts and never achieving the understanding they are meant to support is a tragedy of our education system.
There are people who need to understand microbiology at a specific level and they cannot derive it all on the fly. They can achieve better memorization through understanding but I personally have found rote memorization can be an essential first step in some disciplines.
"Wax on. Wax off" -- memorization and repetition are the basis for understanding.
How useful it is to remember useless information that one day turns out to not be so useless after all.
Yes you do???
Yes, you do need to memorize and know things about the subject in order to be a master of it. What is the definition of "mastery" that you are using? What are the Things being memorized?
These people have fallen into OpenAI and Anthropic's trap and are illiterate without the assistance of coin-operated slop generators.
Thank god for china!
This is something that AI cannot replace. Viewing things as memorizing is the wrong take.