> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills.

I think it's more complex than this.

AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning.

The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair; they have well-known false-positive weaknesses that disproportionately disadvantage ESL students. The status quo is not viable, I just don't see it as being workable to ban AI at home. (If they just mean that kids shouldn't be using ChatGPT during class I can get behind that I suppose.)

On the other hand I believe that if we figure out how to teach AI to be a better tutor, we can get the equivalent of 1:1 personalized education for everyone. The potential is huge. Unfortunately this requires a complete rethink of how the curriculum is structured, and my read is that the public school systems (both teachers and government agencies) mostly don't have the resources or appetite to tackle this.

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wffurr an hour ago | parent | next [-]

There is no universe where an LLM helps one learn to read. You need to be able to read first to use one, and worse yet, you need to be able to think critically about the outputs, not just decode and sound out the letters.

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tacomagick an hour ago | parent [-]

LLMs are able to talk for a very long while now. Have you ever used Gemini as an assistant? It can even put in related images about your query and while it can use an improvement it can spell more or less.

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rwmj 28 minutes ago | parent [-]

It's far from clear that this helps you to learn anything. More likely it's a way for most people to avoid having to think or learn.

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tacomagick 18 minutes ago | parent [-]

I think it heavily depends on person, generalizing it as a tool that avoids thinking and learning is also wrong because I have personally used it to tacke some subjects myself and it helped me learn quite well.

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hparadiz 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

I'm honestly jealous of the kids. When I was 13 I was looking at books in the school library from the late 70s and early 80s about astronomy. They had beautiful shots from Voyager 1 and 2 and lots of illustrations but ultimately there was very little math in there and not too much hard science besides some basic statistics. I would have loved to have a conversation with those book.

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KittenInABox 7 minutes ago | parent [-]

The thing I think is underspoken in this space is that LLMs will always hallucinate a bit. How will you know as a 13 year old that an LLM is not conversing truth at you?

	▲	hparadiz 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My teachers were frequently wrong too and spoke with authority on subjects in hindsight they were frankly ill equipped to teach. Part of learning is understanding how to reason through these types of issues. It's a common problem solving problem in the work place just the same.

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BobbyTables2 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Learning is also impacted when homework/test questions are created and graded by AI.

The line of 90 degrees north latitude shouldn’t be visible on a map…

Why have teachers?

The AI might as well grade itself.

	▲	tacomagick 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Hard agree. AI generated questions should be absolutely forbidden. In our university I helped a instructor set up a custom Gemini Gem to let students grade themselves in recording because we did not have time to read the final scores in time, It was a nightmare to restrict or get consistent results.

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20k an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

AI is a terrible teacher though. It makes stuff up all the time, and for some subjects it has a remarkably low accuracy rate

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tacomagick an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I would argue it has gotten way better. Depending on the subject it can be really helpful and some tools even have a learning mode built in now that can generate questions and tests. They are often way too easy to solve but it does not demotivate i guess.

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runarberg 37 minutes ago | parent [-]

It has always gotten better, just like how self-driving cars have gotten better, and how the case for bitcoin is always getting stronger.

Many people have stopped believing this lie. Yes AI has gotten better by some metric which AI companies are pushing. It has not gotten good enough to be a qualified teacher, and it never will.

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tacomagick 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

I have never claimed it to be good enough to replace a qualified educator, however for self learning it is a good tool with no hustle. You also consider how qualified some educators are...

	▲	hparadiz 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's far superior in many cases. Teachers get tired, lose patience, etc.

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enraged_camel 39 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

>> It makes stuff up all the time

There are a few reasons AI is not the best teacher, but this is not one of them because teachers are also frequently wrong. I say that as someone who comes from a family of teachers, ranging from kindergarten to PhD.

And here is the problem: unlike AI, a lot of teachers don’t like being questioned or challenged. If your teacher doesn’t know a subject well, and you realize this, your options as a student are pretty limited. This is especially true at lower grades.

I don’t believe that AI can replace teachers. But, if used well, it can supplement them. I think Norway is making the right call here with elementary schools, but I wouldn’t support this kind of policy at higher grades where levels.

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runarberg 41 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> and the best technology ever invented for learning.

This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement.

Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propaganda, and this is one of the lies the industry tells people. The industry tells this lie so often that many people have started to believe it, just because they herd it so often it must be true.

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alexashka an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Stupid people never have the appetite or ability to 'tackle' anything. It's their defining characteristic.

It's not more complex than stupid people in charge, stupid results follow. Smart people with integrity in charge, good things follow.

AI changes nothing.