AI is extremely dangerous for students and needs to be used intentionally, so I don't blame people for just going to "ban it" when it comes to their kids.

Our university is slowly stumbling towards "AI Literacy" being a skill we teach, but, frankly, most faculty here don't have the expertise and students often understand the tools better than teachers.

I think there will be a painful adjustment period, I am trying to make it as painless as possible for my students (and sharing my approach and experience with my department) but I am just a lowly instructor.

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subhobroto an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> AI is extremely dangerous for students and needs to be used intentionally

Can you expound on both points in more details please, ideally with some examples?

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softwaredoug 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly defining what to teach is hard

People need to learn to do research with LLMs, code with LLMs, how to evaluate artifacts created by AI. They need to learn how agents work at a high level, the limitations on context, that they hallucinate and become sycophantic. How they need guardrails and strict feedback mechanisms if let loose. AI Safety connecting to external systems etc etc.

You're right that few high school educators would have any sense of all that.

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WalterBright 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I don't know anyone who learned arithmetic from a calculator.

I do know people who would get egregiously wrong answers from misusing a calculator and insisted it couldn't be wrong.

	▲	softwaredoug 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes but I was also taught to use a calculator, and particular the advanced graphing calculators. Not to mention programming is a meta skill on top of “calculators”

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ndriscoll 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The sycophancy is an artifact of how they RLHF train the popular chat models to appeal to normies, not fundamental to the tool. I can't remember encountering it at all since I've started using codex, and in fact it regularly fills in gaps in my knowledge/corrects areas that I misunderstand. The professional tool has a vastly more professional demeanor. None of the "that's the key insight!" crap.