God this first paragraph made me want to throw my computer across the room:<p>> Remember when people were furious about kids using ChatGPT to cheat on their homework? If I may be so bold as to psychoanalyze the United States of America, it’s possible the hysteria was not entirely about homework but also the speed with which artificial intelligence was infiltrating our daily lives. How else do you explain so many people defending the sanctity of a thing none of them ever wanted to do?<p>"When you were 13 years old you <i>wanted</i> to cheat on your homework, did you not? But now that you're 45 and your son is using ChatGPT to cheat on his homework, suddenly you're upset. Curious. Perhaps the issue is your own discomfort with technology your feeble brain can't understand?"
> and never coughs up answers.<p>I have fought this my whole life, and only in my adulthood, and self guided learning, have I found the freedom to accept it: I learn better from being given the answer and working backwards. (Even literally reading textbooks “backwards”)<p>I hope there’s more nuance to this than this quote suggests, because I shudder to imagine a student experiencing what I did but now with a tireless unempathetic agent refusing to just tell a struggling student the answer and instead continually looping on suggestions to “look at it from another angle” in every way but the one “angle” I’m explicitly asking for.<p>Aligning digital teachers with our broken education system that thinks “answers” are the important part of education is a terrible terrible idea.<p>That quote should have read ~“the agent has been designed to work tirelessly to do anything to ensure the student understands the material well enough to wield it”
It struggles with basic math:
<a href="https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-tutoring-students-but-still-struggles-with-basic-math-694e76d3?st=606ux1exuaxyk3j" rel="nofollow">https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-tutoring-students-but-stil...</a>
I'm seeing a lot of conflicting claims about the factual accuracy this thing is able to achieve. If companies really are able to wrangle it into not making up random bullshit, then consider me impressed and my mind changed. If not, then it's a little concerning how it's already being rolled out to teach kids (but not <i>that</i> concerning, since the bar for American public education is already pretty close to the floor).<p>Maybe blocking the AI from doing math itself and just redirecting those queries to a normal calculator is enough to get the accuracy acceptably high, at least for grade school topics that it's been extensively trained on. At the very least, I'm newly convinced that the whole thing isn't <i>necessarily</i> a doomed idea.
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AI for improved education is noble, but what's the point of learning when AIs are going to do everything better than us in a few years?<p>I already struggle with some intellectual laziness after subscribing to GPT4, which is fairly out of character for me. Why should I expend the mental energy on something when it can do the task for me? Now imagine GPT5, 6, and so on.<p>People who "learn" are going to become a rarity.
Glad to hear about an AI made just to help you learn things that can be a 100% positive tool for kids. I'm sort of interested in using it myself to try and learn some maths subjects
I don't know the proper term for whatever style of writing articles like these use, but I'm so happy I stopped reading them.<p>Am I just old? Is this what getting old and curmudgeonly feels like?
I think the people who automatically had a negative view of AI didn't think it through, when ChatGPT came out in Nov 2022, the realization was that something like this tutor friendly AI would be on the horizon.<p>Personally, I am looking forward to AI enabled healthcare, my sister has been dealing with health problems and she has to wait up to a month between appointments. At the very least AI can be used to speed up all the paperwork that doctors have to complete.