I'd love to see the 'AI as personal tutor' approach. Even incorporating things like spaced repetition or the testing effect, or evaluating free-written responses.

A lot of potential that's currently unrealized. It takes a student to swim upstream to get there. The convenience of cognitive offloading is difficult to say no to. For evidence, I see it everywhere at work, including (at least in some cases) in my own work, for matters I don't care to invest effort in learning because it's a one-off.

The rates of AI use show it far exceeds the rate of good old-fashioned cheating, and not an equivalency between them.

So I am convinced AI will make the ~80% dumber, at least until there are excellent teaching products and changes to teaching practices that end up making that 'AI as a personal tutor' the norm. In the absence of the actual right answer -- actual people as personal tutors with qualified, well-paid teachers and right-sized classrooms -- an AI as personal tutor is extremely scalable and would allow productive 'struggle' learning.

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layer8 42 minutes ago | parent [-]

I don’t think this is likely to happen in the foreseeable future, because learning still requires struggling even under the best of personal tutors. For most of the “80%” it requires some level of compulsion and submitting to authority that would be bad PR for a product, and that people won’t be very accepting of, coming from an automation.

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dboreham 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

I'd say "some learning" -- I've learned how to operate and maintain an excavator from YouTube without significant struggle. otoh it might be difficult to learn linear algebra that way. But otooh an LLM might be far better than YouTube at teaching mathematics, while being orders of magnitude less costly than a real teacher. Even in the USA proper mathematics teachers are unavailable in many areas.

	▲	layer8 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The discussion was about people who right now prefer to use AI for cheating (or for avoiding work) rather than for learning. I don’t think that a “personal tutor” mode would significantly change these dynamics without some form of coercion.