> AI is making this worse, since it’s unleashed an epidemic of cheating and the tool itself is inimical to learning. (Learning is friction. The tool to remove friction also removes learning)

I disagree with this take so strongly. Yes, in practice people are lazy and they're just going to ask for the answer. But the potential for AIs to give targeted answers to specific questions about academic topics is so far ahead of anything I had going through undergrad or my master's program that it would be an epic missed opportunity not to leverage it in the educational process. I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.

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snazz 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Very few people have the discipline to use it in that way rather than as a way to remove friction, just as practically no one with a smartphone doesn’t, at least occasionally, find themselves “sucked in”.

	▲	rpdillon 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> a way to remove friction Hell yeah. Trudging a mile through the snow and ice from West Campus to the Engineering Quad to sit in my TA's office hours so I could hope to ask a question about problem 19 because I don't understand the second half of it is a vastly worse use of time than firing up Gemini and saying "I'm taking partial differential equations, and I'm seeing a problem where I have to..." I would kill to go back through undergrad with an AI by my side as I study, or even in class, so when the professor loses me 10 minutes into an 80-minute lecture, I have a hope of getting back on the train and not having the lecture be a waste.

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intended 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> I disagree with this take so strongly

You are free to disagree, and you are free to have an opinion. I would prefer your position to be the one that dominates, however the data on the ground doesn’t support the position.

If I can make a guess, the issue is that you are looking at the potential for individual learning improvement but I am referring to what is currently happening at scale.

If you remember school, most students didn’t want to be there. Homework exercises are something you would rather avoid.

America and the west, as class mobility became increasingly dependent on education, repeated the patterns in China and India. People went to college not because they wanted to study the subject, but because it got you a decent income when you got out.

In all these situations, you have people who aren’t there for the journey, but there for the outcome. (For that matter, even people who want to study, will take the easy way out.)

Having seen people use AI to study, it can be useful, especially if the underlying text books and notes are bad. However there are already many YouTube videos made by experts covering those topics, so the uplift here isn’t magical.

> I really disagree with you that the technology itself is inimical to learning.

This is a matter of belief, and in a vacuum it’s something most people would agree with. The issue is what the outcomes actually are.

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rpdillon an hour ago | parent [-]

We've only just begun. It's a veritable certainty that LLMs will be critical to education in the coming decades. I'll check back in after a few years!

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intended an hour ago | parent [-]

I have heard that sentiment many times already. It's a statement that is broad enough to capture any benefit and disavow any costs, for some later day when one can choose the nature of their measurement.

How would you estimate actual gains and losses to education for LLMs? What would good look like?

	▲	rpdillon 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The actual gains will be very similar to the gains that I thought would come from projects like Khan Academy (which was also quite hotly contested among teachers when it first came out). I don't agree with your rhetorical statement about the nature of my argument. I'm not trying to disavow any costs. I'm saying that AI represents a unique opportunity in the history of humanity to encapsulate knowledge and carry it through space and time in a highly scalable way. We have an epidemic of schools doing poorly in educating our students with constantly dropping standards, and an unwillingness to raise teachers' salaries. Education is extraordinarily expensive and I anticipate LLMs can be incorporated into a larger automated course load that is not stuck in the rigorous, true/false analysis that other automated systems have been stuck with in the past. LLMs are already excellent at critiquing humans' writing and providing feedback that a talented editor would typically have to be paid to provide. So, to summarize, the gains will be in the average cost of a high school education, the availability of that education across the world, the reliability of the information presented in the course curriculum, and the consistency with which we can educate at scale.