This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Well obviously. AI is a bubble, which is mostly vaporware. The point was always to sell it, and what better place than a school? The administration will force it on the teachers and students, and that's that.
The technology itself is simply irrelevant. All you need to know is that it's a bubble and the purchasers don't care what the users think, and then failure is guaranteed.
"May be doing more harm than good" but, honest question, is there evidence it's doing any good in schools? I know I'm probably not going to get a balanced opinion here, but is the bad outweighed by good, or is the bad outweighed by neutral at best?
Well, now you're asking a definitional question. What counts as "AI"? If I use OCR to help grade multiple choice tests, I've saved hours. That's AI, isn't it? What about spaced repetition for flashcards or dynamic question selection for quizzes? Do they count? ... So then we're back to the same old story. People want to sell weird fancy useless shit (that counts as AI), so you ask if AI has value, and then they reply by giving you more traditional examples (that also count as AI), and then the whole conversation leads nowhere.
Anyway, let's focus it. Let's go with ChatGPT as a generative tool. Then still there are some real gains that can be made. Small but real.
Just wait until you find out how many teachers are relying on it
The real problem is that teachers aren’t being paid enough to give a fuck.
doesn't stop them from giving a fuck though.
my wife was at a school where no one in her grade used the llms. like, they already had established curriculum. they didn't need to. she moved last year. now her principal uses claude to read and respond to all her emails. who knows what else. it's obvious and infuriating. the whole damn school is struggling because of it. i want to tell the principal "you know, the district hired you, not the openAI. keep using the AIs and the district will wonder why they hired you" but it would cost my wife her job come pink slip time.
so it really depends on the district and the school.
I wish there were more teachers like your wife. I also wish I could afford to become a teacher myself, but could never afford the pay cut.
it was a pay raise for us. my wife was a school district interpreter. they make about half what teachers do
I've been interviewing software engineers for many years, and this was the first year the "AI natives" started graduating and applying for jobs.
Never had such a high rate of people completely unable to write one line of code in a language that appears on their CV, it's been about 50% in the last few months where I had to end the interview during the warmup question.
Headline within the decade:
Study says AI ~~in schools may~~ be doing ~~more~~ harm ~~than good~~
Because why would removing all creative and high paying proletariat jobs leaving only the worst and lowest paying ones, offloading all critical thought to shitty machines based in drought stricken areas that are destroying water availability, and eliminating online discourse, ever possibly backfire for the proletariat.
It's important to have these studies, even though the result is predictable. People who want to move toward restricting AI in schools need something more than anecdotes to point to as justification.
Well, no shit.
When I was in year 12 of high school last year, some students attempted to use ChatGPT to write their practice exams for them. Mind you, these practice exams are the same as proper state mandated exams, where there are to be zero electronics used whatsoever unless it’s a disability aid, but the practice ones are also just that, to practice your skills, not to write it off as some worthless obligation.
There were actually heaps more of these students who entirely used LLMs for their assignments, would be made to rewrite them because it’s AI written, then proceed to have ChatGPT write it again and pass it through a ‘humaniser’ which just made it unreadable. It’s alarming that these people are willing to stop using their mind at all just because some service from half way across the world wrote an essay better than they could before.
Off topic, but it's kinda cool to know younger folks are on the Feddiverse! Thought lemmy was just a bunch of old people like me haha
Grok is that true?
You mean the computer program that removes the critical thinking aspect of school instruction is having detrimental effects on americas children and their excecutive functions? Say it ain't so.
Now now, there is no real proof that getting something or someone else to do things for you would stop you from learning how to do it!!
Look at me, I got someone to pass my driving test and I've only had 22 accidents this year. Way down on last year!!
It's as if some notable proportion of humanity suddenly switched to eating nothing but vaguely food-shaped plastic, then a study concluded that that might have negative effects nutritionally.
No shit?
Fork found in kitchen
Yes! lol.
And wait until the confirmation study of the water in the kitchen sink comes back! Initial findings strongly imply it may be wet!
My grade 4 teacher let us cheat on multiplication tables which still has me screwed up for doing multiplication and division in my head
no shit!
No shit, Sherlock.
Didn't even have to type it out you took care of it already.
The way I see it, AI is just another log on the fire, although it is indeed a big log. The use of laptops and the prevalence of smartphones all damaged kids’ attention spans, then came the advent of short form content which further degraded their ability to stay focused and now we have AI slop summarizing what we see with our own eyes and taking agency away from their very brains. Somewhere along the line we convinced ourselves that more tech is good for education, and I think that needs to be rethought. We need to get kids back to reading and writing the old school way. There’s neuropsychological benefits to it that you just don’t get from typing or scrolling on computers. And this problem exists even outside of the classroom or kids. It’s a problem with all generations. I’m noticing just as much mental decline in older populations as younger ones.
If your kid becomes dependent on you to continue wiping his ass well into his 30s, thats a failure of the parent. We are raising a generation of students who are dependent on machine statistics, not reason, to decide whats correct and right. God help us all.
You’re on to something here. I raised my kids to use technology as a tool, not as a babysitter. They didn’t have smartphones with SIMs until after they’d learned to drive. But they knew how to count in binary on their fingers by the time they were three. They’re really good at recognizing when something was LLM-generated, and only use LLMs when it’s required.
I think there’s quite a few kids like them out there, but they aren’t the ones you hear about.
AI is not a substitute for experience. Too many people assume that it can be.
In other news, death is inevitable and the sky is blue.
"May"
We already have studies outside of AI on how bad not doing the critical thinking for oneself is. It is literally impossible for this to not be detrimental.
We already have studies outside of AI on how bad not doing the critical thinking for oneself is.
Yup, we built an entire country for that study, it's turning 250 and does not compute all too well.
don't let Ken hear you say that
"may?"
Vague meaningless hypothesis -> Vague meaningless result
Replace “school” with any place that ai is used and this headline holds true.
Edit: spelling
I mean, the problem is LLMs. If I were to replace "school" with "biomedicine" or "protein folding," then that would be clearly wrong. However, the AI used in those fields are machine learning models, not LLMs
Shocked pikachu meme...
Study says sky is blue. Study says eating food is necessary for survival. Study says your mom is smokin'. More on this and other shit we already knew at 11.
I use AI to my advantage, as long as it's still at the "free until you're addicted" stage. I found that it's particularly good as a language teacher - learning new languages is one of my hobbies.
However, i am over 70 and will not fall into the "let AI tell me what to think and then think it" trap; i can see through it. This ability should be taught first at school, before the kids can use the useful side of the tool. But most teachers themselves are used to make the kids think what they want them to think, so I doubt that it will work.
