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It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System
53 prawn 53 5/20/2025, 4:08:50 AM gizmodo.com ↗
Creativity is not a tap that you turn on and off. Sometimes it is hard to be creative, even if you enjoy it. Even if you are good at it.
When a student feels pressure to perform, and they have an LLM to fall back on, they can poison the well of their creativity. LLMs are that tap that they can always turn on.
Then soon enough they no longer want to put in the effort. Why, when an LLM can do it perfectly right now?
The suckers who actually want to learn will get even more badly screwed in such a system unless the assessment is balanced to favour actual knowledge. And not only at final assessment but from start to end because if you get screwed in the short term because your low marks while you get to grips with the subject gets you penalised, it takes a lot of foresight and fortitude not to buckle and just spam for points. Doing it "right" requires more teacher engagement, more parental engagement and generally more autonomy, effort and money all round. And even then you have the ever present problem of which group do you spend each marginal unit if effort on: the stronger or weaker students?
That's not a misalignment. That's your "ambitious student" is being unwise and stupid. To this day, I have gaps in my knowledge and skills that I regret because I avoided things that I, in my childishness, did not consider "important" or "interesting." AI is going to make that far worse.
If AI makes their kids miscalculate and end up failing in a revamped AI-resistant educational system that actually requires learning to pass, I'll laugh.
I think it very likely AI is the chisel which opened up one or many of the cracks but the cracks have existed for a very long time.
I think "what is the education system" is a great open-ended pub discussion topic.
The article makes a very good claim that for people with freedom to chose expensive ivy league education, actual knowledge acquisition is the last thing on many of their minds.
Brand new teachers design a lesson plan using two sentences and AI, students answer it using a screenshot and AI. I'm struggling to see who learned what there.
All we do is end up with teachers that don't know how to teach, and students that learn little.
Personally I feel there is a step change towards a poorer education, but others may not. I think it's worth debating this particular topic. Or tackle education as a whole...but that feels intractable.
I recall it being pretty obvious for a large number of years of my time in the education system which kids were cheating their way through, because they'd be able to parrot crap in writing or do perfectly on take-home things, but mysteriously be crap if you required them to reason about it in the moment.
I imagine we've all met people in our professional careers who could sell you a heater on the beach but can't reason their way out of a paper bag, as well - it's the same problem.
It was not uncommon for a kindly, well-meaning Sister to slightly nudge a struggling student toward a correct answer, though it never happened to me personally. Yes that's right -- when you standardize testing, the teachers become the cheaters, because they have a vested interest in seeing students excel and driving up their institution's own rankings.
In fact my very recent student career was rather dismaying, because I encountered more than one teacher who was more than willing to cross a line and help a student into a better grade than what they could earn on their own. I didn't think it was fair, that I worked my ass off for grades and teachers would just basically join in the cheating. In fact, I tanked a grade in one class because I was incensed about the teacher's behavior. I blew up some important coursework and I directly, sternly told him not to fix up my grade. It was only a "B" but I was so pissed, at that point!
In the end, all our cards were sent off, literally to Iowa, I guess, and fed into giant A.I. machines and graded without human intervention. But our results were very human indeed. I have no reason to believe that our digital overlords failed to grade our S.A.T.s in the same manner, but the regime was slightly looser as we progressed through high school.
In a way, you can say that I lost my job to A.I. in 2024, because indeed I was tasked with grading student submissions, and by the time I was resigning about half of our workload was turned over to auto-testing multiple-choice quizzes and such that would be scored in the LMS itself.
While I personally rarely determined blatant A.I. usage to solve our homeworks, plagiarism was rampant and students were constantly copying from a very small pool of solved homeworks that were publicly posted. Some more savvy students paid a subscription for a cheating website that would provide even more content to them.
But indeed, if educators have relied so heavily on A.I. to produce and grade materials on our end, I suppose it was only a matter of time before turnabout is fair play.
It took me several seconds to recognize this acronym for a test I took decades ago but haven’t thought about since.
Parents evaluate the quality of private schools based on NAPLAN results.
for example: if you had repetitive busywork for homework assignments, it doesnt make sense to spend a lot of time on it, once you have proven to yourself that you know how to do it anyway.
Wow, time to move them.
1) Parents that walk their kids through the homework have more stress not better performing students
2) individualized learning programs exist since the 70s, they were not a substitute - you have to explain something to somebody to fully grasps something - I do not see how anybody wants to explan something to an ai
3) Nearly everybody has been to a school so everybody is an expert
One of the strong areas of school is the in-person-interaction part of learning that can not be easily replaced by ai.
No. AI can be very helpful when trying to understand new topics. The author does not seem to understand that a technology is good or bad, nor in itself, but in how it is used.
The real question, which is totally unrelated to AI, is: "Why don't students care about their education?"
The point regarding technology is a given and already understood by any reasonable person. This is not our first encounter with disruptive "technology".
The germinal point is the confluence of behavioral patterns and influences that ultimately determine how technology is used.
OP: >Everybody who uses AI is going to get exponentially stupider, and the stupider they get, the more they’ll need to use AI to be able to do stuff that they were previously able to do with their minds.
This to me is a reasonably probable outcome. It is not the only possible outcome but our record with the internet (the 90s' disruptive technology with its own +/- possibilities) is the cautionary tale. Remember voices that very clearly predicted the surveillance society in the 90s?
[p.s. consider auto-correct for spelling. Would you agree with my impression that the generation that has grown up with this (hardly disruptive) tech no longer can spell words of their own language?]
So, going back to the agreed baseline of 'how we use tools' as the critical matter, it seems (based on historic facts) that we should take 'cassandras' seriously from the very onset of introducing disruptive technology at societal scale and take the necessary steps to insure that the incentive to use a technology in the optimal manner is far greater than its misuse.
What is not helpful (at all) is to revert to the baseline and dismiss timely cautionary concerns.
Lock them in a room for 4 hours to 6 hours with a list of carefully crafted questions to answer in writing (rather than ticking boxes) with no access to a computer.
See how AI will help them get out of that one.
And testing student progress on "home" work, give me a break. It has always been broken.
Way before AI existed, all you had to do is hire someone to do the work on your behalf, all the more easy if you're born in a family with money. Nothing new under the sun.
That's a pretty stupid take. A "useful tool" is only useful in a context, and we really only want that tool used to to good. It's not good to have tool used to do bad things. If a school system can be screwed up merely by giving all students free access to guns, maybe is wasn't that great in the first place, amirite?
Essays (for instance) are a means to an end of developing young minds (which is a good thing) by getting them to engage with something. If your "useful tool" makes bypassing that engagement (cheating) simple and easy, those young minds will float through less developed.
There's a lot of hype about LLM tutors, but I don't see that solving much. They'll end up tutoring LLM students, so the real student can invest more effort in playing some addictive video game.
And then that decayed state will become the new normal, and some idiot will declare it's the best because that's what he knows.
The fact that you can cheat in a game does not mean the game itself is flawed.
If you use tools to effectively ghost write your assignments you are not learning.
But now we have AI, which means that these people, who lack appreciation for the value of these classes and consequently don't even really understand what it is they lack, are better able to foist their beliefs in the unimportance of a well-rounded education on the rest of us.
I will say, it was CIS classes in college which got me to expand on my writing, not English classes. In high school, even with English class every year, I tried to do the bare minimum. It wasn’t until the papers were required to be 25-30 pages long that I was forced to really flesh things out into a narrative, rather that what amounted to a bulleted list shoved into a paragraph.
This was a doubled edged sword, as I now find it much more difficult to be concise in my writing, so that takes a focused effort.
There is also a lot to be said for finding the intersection between technology and X. Having a well rounded education can provide more opportunities for people to discover where these intersections can foster new growth or innovation. I often wish I went into a non-computer field, so I could have applied technology to the job, rather than technology feeling like the job itself.