It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System

NGL, it’s really f*cking depressing when you give students 30m to create something of their own imagination, and they do it in the first minute with chatGPT and spend the other 29m playing games the phone and asking to “go to the bathroom” whenever they notice someone in the hallway.

The excuses you hear when you do something so oppressive as to request they keep their phones in their own backpacks for the duration of the task.

I was uninterested in school because nothing was ever done to make me interested, even at home.
Later in life I was diagnosed with ADHD and now I’m a software developer. Sadly school isn’t for everybody and I just thought I was stupid and lazy, it turns out I was fine I just needed the right help.
Edit: Votes don’t matter but I’d love to know the reasoning for the 5 downvotes on this. Like why don’t you put across your opposition.
- The “evan at home” part is 100% more important than the school part. Making sure your kid gets educated at school is a parent’s job.
Ngl. I bought a signal jammer for my wife to use in her classroom (after all, it said “for educational purposes only”) and the kids could never figure out why the signal sucked so bad in her classroom during class times. She never got caught using it and never had to worry about them being on their phones.
If there was an emergency, people would just call the front office and they could always reach her on the land line in the classroom.
- (after all, it said “for educational purposes only”)
  The FCC hates this one simple trick
- Violating federal laws is awesome, everyone should do it.
- Fuck YES (says a middle school teacher)
One proposed Florida law I actually agree with is: phones off during school - all of school, including between classes and recess. Possible exception for lunchtime. Definite exception for when the teacher is specifically using the phones as a fully engaged teaching tool, which should be no more than 20% of overall classroom time, but definitely could be used as a way to "grab attention."
I get wanting to be able to track little Ginny and make sure she got to school O.K. and know when to go meet the bus to pick her up.
There should definitely be "Cybersafety" education in our schools, and the phone as a teaching tool definitely makes sense there.
Having AI write the first draft of your assignment can be a good lesson too, but the remaining 28 minutes should be spent understanding and refining what the AI has given you.
Can't you just make them turn off the computers/phones and do it by hand?
- This gives me flashbacks. I had to take Java exams with pen and paper. They took 6+ hours. The reason? Not enough computers for everyone and our teacher wasn't willing to make 2 different exams, like every other fucking teacher does.
- When I need them to, I do, but then suddenly everyone starts needing to go to the bathroom way more frequently.
If your school is not supporting teachers with a cell phone policy you should try to find another place to teach and tell them exactly why when you leave.
Edit: this is also something your union should be pushing for. I'm surprised parents haven't demanded it.
- I don’t care that much. I live on an island and most of my “students” are actually just tourists pretending they’re there for educational purposes.
You gave them a task, they used their imagination to apply it, in a different way than you expected, by using a new tool which is a non traditional method you asked for but the task still got completed. They still loosely completed the task 30 times ahead of schedule by using their imagination on how to constructively solve your problem, utilizing a tool in their imaginary bag.
I don't think it's wrecking the system as long as the LLMs could be trained and ensure strict accuracy (yes I know they can be inaccurate but again so is any tool in its infancy), the system fails people everyday as a whole. I think it's changing the traditional paradigm. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Time will tell. I think ChatGPT is a tool in its infancy. It's changing the way minds think fundamentally like for isntance critical thinking skills decline by relying on "AI" but it frees up the mind to grow in other ways to adjust to the new paradigm.
I think the true point here is fear from breaking traditional values. Humans have never accelerated faster with current technology thats with or without LLM usage.
- Holy fuck, we are so cooked.
  This is such a concavebrained take. The point of exercises handed out in schools isn't the accomplishment of the set tasks; it's that students internalise the processes necessary to do the task themselves and thereby learn those skills.
  Thus, giving away a task to a LLM is only "using their imagination on how to constructively solve the problem, utilising a tool in their imaginary bag" in the same way that bullying a nerd into doing the work for them used to be.
  I think it's changing the traditional paradigm. Maybe for the better, maybe not. Time will tell. I think ChatGPT is a tool in its infancy. It's changing the way minds think fundamentally like for isntance critical thinking skills decline by relying on "AI" but it frees up the mind to grow in other ways to adjust to the new paradigm.
  This is so obviously for the worse. Losing the ability to think critically isn't "freeing up the mind to grow in other ways:" basic critical thought is a foundational prerequisite to fully developing as a person capable of participating in society in the current age in much the same way as basic literacy is. It's limiting the mind from growing in any meaningful way.
  And don't get it twisted, you're just saying this shit to be contrarian. I doubt you actually believe this development could be a good thing. Like come the fuck on, let's say in ten years' time you get into some kinda accident and need surgery. There is no way you'd would want your surgeon to be someone who 'did' most of their assessments in med school with a fucking chatbot. Who are you kidding???
- You’re not wrong, but the difference is that they came up with a creative solution to avoid the task, not a creative solution to engage the task. If I ask them follow up questions to explain their thoughts and reasoning behind their own work, I get deer in the headlights.
  Now, I think the tide is rising with AI and it’s sink or swim if you’re a teacher, so it’s better to just learn what AI is and how to leverage it no matter what people think of it, or if I’m even getting paid for my effort.
  A different approach I’m considering is embracing AI for teenage groups and changing the format of the course entirely so there’s more interaction (incorporating AI) than production. I’ll be the first at my school to do it, but I’m also the only person there who could tell you what the fediverse is.
Is there not a way to plan the assignment so that it's not doable in 1m with ChatGPT?
- It’s possible, but it takes time and effort to prepare, and I’m not getting paid at home, so I’m reluctant to do it.
  You could offer the students a choice: no AI and a 5 slide presentation, or allow AI but with a 15 slide presentation, then let them decide. AI makes work more efficient for us, so if we can be 3x more productive, I should expect 3x more product.
  I taught an ESL group once. One of the girls, around 15-17, plastered a bunch of ChatGPT text on the slide and sat the whole period on her phone. When it was her group’s turn, she quickly realized the position she put herself in as she was now in at the front of the class trying to sound out a wall of high-level English words she’d never heard before. I gave her the standard score because, even though she failed the task, she tried really hard to read out all those difficult words and I thought that was probably more work than anyone else had done.
- • Require students to cite their sources
  • Require students to show their working
  • Ask students questions related to the process of a given task during class
  • For things like media analysis, require them to do it with a pencil and paper without the use of computers where possible
  • Treat the use of LLMs as an act of academic plagiarism
  All of these are things that schools should already be doing holy shit
Because school is boring, that's why.
Most people don't need to learn beyond the fourth grade, especially because calculators and now GPT exist for instant answers.
And I say this as someone who wasted his time all the way up to a Master's degree just to show society I too followed the beaten path. It's time I'll never get back.
- Good god, if you went through an entire education and don't realize how fucked of a take that is I don't know what to say. Go try again at a different school maybe?
Dunno Yeah I disagree with AI. I grew up without phones but they should not be used in schools.
- I actually sometimes as my students to use their phones to produce presentations and such (AI permitted). I just think the rule needs to be no phones in sight otherwise, and the phone stays if you go to the bathroom.

TBH, I'd AI can screw up the education system so fast then it is the fault in the education system. AI is bad, but our education system is not good either.

This 100%.
The education system was not OK, and has not been for a while. Its main goal is limiting liability, not educating kids.
- I will take limiting liability and running with it. Not just the schools, but the kids and parents too no one wants to be responsible and step up to fix the problem.
- Sounds kinda similar to how Wikipedia was approached by instructors. I remember an English teacher proudly proclaiming she had participated in a "Kill Wikipedia" seminar at a convention. Just a few years later, they're instructing students on how to properly use Wikipedia as a starting point and not a primary source.
I’m literally teaching a course to teachers on how to use AI in the classroom so that the students don’t use it as their magical answer dispenser.
- What are the headline recommendations?

Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?

Came here to say that. If AI has the leeway to affect things in a negative way, then we're not focusing on the right things to begin with. If kids are graded sometimes for the amount of (not necessarily coherent and sound) text they're able to spit out, this is what you get.
- Not US but I still remember printing off a full page of text, teacher looked at it for less than 5 seconds before giving it a tick. This is all meaningless, no one is reading it, no one cares, nothing matters.
The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.
Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.
- ISD
  Imperial Star Destroyer?
Well, here's how you figure that out - think about it with your brain. Should children and young adults be given materials and assignments that require them to use thinking and develop their brains, or should they be given machines to do their thinking for them so that it's easier to complete schoolwork?
One route develops valuable brain skills that can be useful for life, and the other teaches dependency on fancy machines to accomplish the same.

Teachers are overworked, underpaid, some still using course work that hasn't been updated in years despite what the field has advanced
Students go into college due to the social expectation, some even unsure of what to get into as a career or even a class
Exceeding above the course requirements does nothing for your GPA, an A that got a "110%" and an A that got 90% are the same.
Students failing or passing still rack up debt for this social expectation
Teachers still failing to pay bills for this social need

Yeah AI is the fault here, its not the system at large been fucked over since Reagan.

Well yeah the education system is the burning tire fire and AI is tech bros pouring gasoline all over it
- A fitting description, a big tire fire won't really change with the addition of gasoline, burning rubber has a lot of energy to release.
- Exactly

I teach at a community college. I see a lot of AI nonsense in my assignments.

So much so that I’m considering blue book exams for the fall.

For anyone who is also not from the US:
A blue book exam is a type of test administered at many post-secondary schools in the United States. Blue book exams typically include one or more essays or short-answer questions. Sometimes the instructor will provide students with a list of possible essay topics prior to the test itself and will then choose one or let the student choose from two or more topics that appear on the test.
EDIT, as an extra to solve the mystery:
Butler University in Indianapolis was the first to introduce exam blue books, which first appeared in the late 1920s.[1] They were given a blue color because Butler's school colors are blue and white; therefore they were named "blue books".
- Importantly it is hand written, no computers.
  Biggest issue is that kids’ handwriting often sucks. That’s not a new problem but it’s a problem with handwritten work.
I have a friend who has taught Online university writing for the past 10 years. Her students are now just about 100% using AI - her goal isn't to get them to stop, it's to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn't garbage anymore.
- her goal isn't to get them to stop, it's to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn't garbage anymore.
  Sadly, that may be the best we can hope for.
- I teach Philosophy.
  I need them to think for themselves, which just isn’t happening if they turn in work that isn’t theirs.
  So, I’m pretty harsh on anyone using AI. Even if it’s for a discussion post, I’m reporting it to the Academic Integrity office.
- her goal isn't to get them to stop, it's to get them to recognize what garbage writing is and how to fix it so it isn't garbage anymore.
  I wish English teachers did this instead of... Whatever TF they're doing instead.
  This is something they should've been doing all along. Long before the invention of LLMs or computers.

It's breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.

That's going to be great fun when the AI bubble pops and the subscription prices go up exponentially.

On the other hand, there have been other opinions about education that say it should be about making or researching something. Give a student a goal and let them figure it out using chatbots or whatever.

That sounds like a way to make a generation of students wholly reliant on AI, much to Altman's delight. People are going to still need to know how to do stuff in the future and not just how to request the answers to things from somewhere else.
- (Disclaimer: this is not a fully formed counter-argument to your statement, merely my thought-vomit).
  As a kid growing up in the 90’s you wouldn’t believe the amount of times my parents and teachers vehemently insisted to me that I MUST do dictionary lookup drills because there’s no way I would just always have access to an electronic dictionary in my pocket. I was also told that I absolutely HAD to be fast at paper-based multiplication and long division. It’s not like I would just carry a calculator around with me everywhere I go, that would be insane!

The cynical view of America’s educational system—that it is merely a means by which privileged co-eds can make the right connections, build “social capital,” and get laid—is obviously on full display here.

Cynical? I call that realistic. That's what privileged co-eds have been using it for the past 100 years.

more like 200
- More like 1000
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Bologna

Unpopular opinion:

I am a public school teacher and I support public schools, but there have been a lot of issues with our education system for a long time. Talk to any kid with ADHD who had to sit through 12 years, and they are indicative of a larger problem. Our idea of school now is as a place that teaches kids to behave and mostly follow rote instruction. Wouldn't it be so much better if we were teaching kids to be creative thinkers, work well in groups, problem solve, and think critically about the information they're getting? We know that's what school should be, but maybe now we will be forced to go there. Yes, there will be issues like learned helplessness and certain skills being difficult to teach, but it's kind of exciting too.

Though it's also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated... can we not, please?

only the wealthy kids will be well-educated
You could argue we’re already way too far down this road. Quality of education is very dependent on location. Some of it is rich districts but also richer states. Whatever level of granularity you want, there’s always sone more willing or more able to spend money on better educating their children.
For all its faults, Department of Education was at least trying to set minimum standards for those areas unwilling to invest in a good education system and minimum investments for those unable. We desperately needed to raise this bar, not remove it
Anyhow my kids school leaned into ai a bit and taught the kids some valuable lessons about how it works, where it helps, and especially its limitations. There’s nothing wrong with ai as a tool, as by long as you don’t treat it as a magical thing that can think for you
Man, I am 38. When I was in highschool I was in an alternative curriculum Math program called IMP, and it is/was literally what your talking about.
Instead of memorizing equations we were instead given a hypothetical situation and learned to solve it socratically both through conversations as a class with the teacher, and in small groups to try and figure out how to solve it. It made me love math so much I almost made it my life, it was literally everything I needed as a severely ADHD teen. Everything was a puzzle to be solved, and when you solved it you gained not just knowledge, but the perspective to know where the knowledge applies.
- OpenSciEd is a model that teaches science like that. There’s been a ton of pushback from conservatives.
- This is me with coding. Learn the rules. See a problem. Code a solution.
I wouldn't call it unpopular because how the education system works in America and several other countries has been a very obvious problem for decades. What we should be teaching is more barometer question
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question
The student admitted that he knew the expected “conventional” answer, but was fed up with the professor's "teaching him how to think ... rather than teaching him the structure of the subject.
"Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?"
Trump and Republicans would like nothing more than to turn this country into another Russia where your kids have to pay through the nose go abroad to get a decent education.
- I work with special needs kids in a school district and the amount of access kids with even mild symptoms is atrocious. It's a huge problem.

Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.

These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.

This was true before AI, it's just going to be 10x worse with AI

Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?

If we're going to claim that education is being destroyed (and show we're better than our great^n grandparents complaining about the printing press), I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers. Every other technology that the kids were using had think-pieces and anecdata.

As far as I can tell, the strongest data is wrt literacy and numeracy, and both of those are dropping linearly with previous downward trends from before AI, am I wrong? We're also still seeing kids from lockdown, which seems like a much more obvious 'oh that's a problem' than the AI stuff.
Honest question: how do we measure critical thinking and creativity in students?
The only serious method of evaluating critical thinking and creativity is through peer evaluation. But that's a subjective scale thick with implicit bias, not a clean and logical discrete answer. It's also not something you can really see in the moment, because true creativity and critical thinking will inevitably produce heterodox views and beliefs.
Only by individuals challenging and outperforming the status quo to you see the fruits of a critical and creative labor force. In the moment, these folks just look like they're outliers who haven't absorbed the received orthodoxy. And a lot of them are. You'll get your share of Elizabeth Holmes-es and Sam Altmans alongside your Vincent Van Goghs and Nikolai Teslas.
I think we should try to have actual data instead of these think-pieces and anecdata from teachers.
I agree that we're flush with think-pieces. Incidentally, the NYT Op-Ed section has doubled in size over the last few years.
But that's sort of the rub. You can't get a well-defined answer to the question "Is Our Children Creative-ing?" because we only properly know it by the fruits of the system. Comically easy to walk into a school with a creative writing course and scream about how this or that student is doing creativity wrong. Comically easy to claim a school is Marxist or Fascist or too Pro/Anti-Religion or too banal and mainstream by singling out a few anecdotes in order to curtail the whole system.
The fundamental argument is that this kind of liberal arts education is wasteful. The output isn't steady and measureable. The quality of the work isn't easily defined as above or below the median. It doesn't yield real consistent tangible economic value. So we need to abolish it in order to become more efficient.
And that's what we're creating. A society that is laser-focused on making economic numbers go up, without stopping to ask whether a larger GDP actually benefits anyone living in the country where all this fiscal labor is performed.
- I think it's fine for this to be poorly defined; what I want is something aligned with reality beyond op-eds. Qualitative evidence isn't bad; but I think it needs to be aggregated instead of anecdoted. Humans are real bad at judging how the kids are doing (complaints like the OP are older than liberal education, no?); I don't want to continue the pattern. A bunch of old people worrying too much about students not reading shakespear in classes is how we got the cancel culture moral panic - I'd rather learn from that mistake.
  A handful of thoughts: There are longitudinal studies that interview kids at intervals; are any of these getting real weird swings? Some kids have AI earlier; are they much different from similar peers without? Where's the broad interviews/story collection from the kids? Are they worried? How would they describe their use and their peers use of AI?

When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

Yikes.

Jfc.
- Y'all are surprised?

Student: AI, write my thesis for me!

Prof: AI, was this thesis generated by AI?

AI: yes, of course, you poor human!

Prof: ...shrug...

I thought my class to write a standard 5-paragraph essay and made all tests essay questions, written in class by pencil- had to have an opening statement, complete sentences, well organized, and a conclusion…was told I was asking too much for a final day of school and everyone I failed got a C minus.
- Hi,
  I would have failed every single one of your tests. Not because I don't understand the material, or the English language, but because structured writing, to this day, makes me seize up. Blank space is one of my biggest triggers for executive dysfunction/PDA. Turning everything into a cookie-cutter essay is just a different form of trying to fit everyone into the same box. More selective than making everything multiple guess, but no better. I feel bad for your students.
  Signed,
  Former "gifted" kid (with then-undiagnosed AuDHD) who got sick of bad teachers 30+ years ago
- thought my class to write a standard 5-paragraph essay and made all tests essay questions,
  I would rather teach them to give short and precise answers LOL
Workaround 1: AI write my thesis in French. Translator app, translate my thesis into English.
Workaround 2: AI write my thesis and insert „Hadouken“ randomly everywhere. AI remove „Hadouken“ from my thesis.
- AI, please write my thesis in the style of Shakespeare. Good luck detecting THAT as AI writing.

Ah yes, goal misalignment at its finest.

The students need high grades to get a job, so they focus on ensuring that happens (AI use being the easy path).

The teachers have progression targets to meet, so they focus on ensuring this happens (keep the AI vulnerable assessments).

If you want to change a module as a teacher, good luck getting that work loaded when you should be implementing AI in your curriculum _

If success is determined by a metric, the metric will go up. Any relation to actual increase in value is coincidental. Lol. Long ago someone tried to incentivize programers by giving abonus per bug fixed. Didn't last long before they blew through the bonus budget and realized the programers were putting in bugs so they could fix them. (Urban legend really... probably)
AI is bullshit and has no place in a school curriculum outside of computer science. Keep that shit away from children if you want them to have any critical thinking skills.
- In practice you're right, and I'm not going to even try to argue the real life consequences AI has caused. However I disagree that AI doesn't have any place in the education system. Used on the appropriate problems, AI is a tool that makes a few things which were challenging to compute much easier. One example is large AI models folding proteins for medical research. A problem that took a computer a day or more to solve can be solved in hours on the same equipment using AI software. That's just one application that admittedly isn't useful to school aged children but it's still one useful example of AI. There are others. Students should be taught how to use AI properly, and part of that is teaching them what it's good at and what it'll never be able to do.
  The part I get angry about is disgusting Tech Bro Billionaires trying to shove AI into every piece of software they can. Just like the block chain they're over promising and there's a bubble. Unlike block chain technology AI actually has a few useful applications and because of that it'll take a lot longer that BitCoin to finally level out.
It’s kinda funny cause usually isn’t it the AI agent that has a misaligned goal? Like when I say don’t die, and it discovers that pausing Tetris technical means you never die. But now it’s students that have been given the wrong goal: pass the test by whatever means (e.g. use AI).
- That's the real joke behind it all, the use of AI is such a problem because we're turning education into a stamp dispenser - everyone needs an A* to get anywhere.
  AI has given every student a path to this - however if industry stopped demanding that universities train their damn staff for them, and instead insist we teach their future staff how to be trained (as well as giving them subject specific knowledge), then we'd see the misalignment vanish. Once the need for an A* to land a good job is gone, then so is the misalignment.

I work in higher education making online courses. It’s really stressing everyone out.

Stressing out in what way? For the viability of your job being lost to this ai bullshit? For the outcomes of students who will just try to chatGPcheaT their way through everything?
- Likely both. I used to be involved in creating educational material for employers. First, voiceover artists were replaced with shockingly low quality AI models. This was about two years ago. Training prices didn't drop and no employers complained.
  The industry experts we'd pay for consultation were increasingly replaced with ChatGPT queries. Information was sometimes wrong but the employers purchasing these trainings would catch and correct it (for free) in the proofing process. Prices stayed the same, employers still didn't complain.
  After launching trainings, we'd monitor engagement. When asking relatively simple questions that anyone who paid attention would be able to answer immediately, the average response time was initially about 2-3 minutes, then about 60-90s for subsequent questions. They were likely finding ChatGPT and using it to answer the questions. We shared these findings and, you guessed it, employers didn't care.

How are other countries handling it? I can't imagine AI being an American only education issue.

It's in France and I guess everywhere else. Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?
I've also seen a few young engineers using ChatGPT to do their job because it's easier than working. When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I'm not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.
We're doomed.
- Students can cheat for free and no longer need to do anything, why would they study anymore?
  In theory, they need to study in order to learn the skills necessary to be gainfully employed. But in practice, the promise of the future is "automate everything", so might as well learn how to maximize the outputs of the Big Grifting Machine while you're still young.
  Why waste time mastering comprehensive writing when there won't be any employers left to read what you wrote? Why waste time developing technical skills when everything gets outsourced to the lowest bidding firm in the South Pacific? Why waste time developing a talent for artistry, music, or cinema when we've decided the future of performative arts is whatever bot-farm best self-promotes AI slop to the top of the most trending Spotify playlist?
  When I told them their code was bad (with mentoring and help, I’m not an asshole), they used another prompt that changed their whole code but it was still full of bugs.
  Why do they care if the code is full of bugs? They'll be changing jobs in another two years anyway, because that's the only way to get a raise. They aren't invested in the success of their current firm, much less the profitablility of the clients they work for (who are, themselves, likely going to be outsourcing this shit to India in another few years). And all this work is just about maximizing the bottom line for private equity anyway, so why does anyone care if the project succeeds? It's not like my quality of life hinges on my ability to do useful productive work.
  And if quality of life declines? Just find someone to blame. Migrants. The Wrong Politicians. China. Lizard People. Fuck, I'll just ask ChatGPT why my life sucks and believe everything it tells me, because... why not? Its not like everyone else isn't lying.
- Apropos of nothing, I read a post claiming that the phonetic pronunciation of "ChatGPT" in France translates to "Cat I farted." So I used Google Translates audio and sure enough, "ChatGPT" and "Chat j'ai pété" sound nearly identical when piped through the app's audio feature.
- Yeah, I figure this isn't going to be an American only problem.
American education isn’t actually about education, but about creating compliant cogs for the machinery of the corporate oligarchy. When the goal is the betterment of individuals and society, the methods with which you teach and assess progress will be dramatically different. This is more of an “American problem” than the rest of the world precisely because of how the American system is designed and implemented. It does not value, measure, reinforce, or reward individual betterment… but rote memorization and how compliant you are under the arbitrary authoritarian structure of the system.
- Despite your wall of text this isn't just a problem in the United States.
- American education isn’t actually about education, but about creating compliant cogs for the machinery of the corporate oligarchy.
  Well, historically that's true.
  But the modern American education system is about Stack Ranking to create the illusion of meritocracy. So the functional purpose of the system is to score better than the rest of your classmates. Since the actual lesson plan doesn't matter and only the honors you get from completing the course are perceived to have value, you either want to cheat the hell out of every course to beat the herd. Or you want to find a degree plan where you can appear to be the Best Kid In Class, either through grade inflation or by participating in a class full of dropouts/fake students.
  It does not value, measure, reinforce, or reward individual betterment… but rote memorization and how compliant you are under the arbitrary authoritarian structure of the system.
  Rote memorization is easy to evaluate, because the answers are discrete and can be fed into a binary grading engine.
  It's also easy to cheat, because you don't need to know how to solve the problems, just how to source the correct pattern of answers.
- How are other countries different?

The story, which involves interviews with a host of current undergraduates, is full of anecdotes like the one that involves Chungin “Roy” Lee, a transfer to Columbia University who used ChatGPT to write the personal essay that got him through the door

Students are turning in work they didn't perform as their own? How novel!

Produce army of people that rely on corporate products to stay alive. What can go wrong ?

I reckon we have reached that state for a long time.
The vast majority of people would have a pretty hard time without food logistics, utilities, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals. The list goes on.
All of which are provided by corporations of some form or another.
Something something about civilization being 5 warm meals away from collapse.

Unfortunately, I think many kids could easily approach AI the same way older generations thought of math, calculators, and the infamous “you won’t have a calculator with you everywhere.” If I was a kid today and I knew I didn’t have to know everything because I could just look it up, instantly; I too would become quite lazy. Even if the AI now can’t do it, they are smart enough to know AI in 10 years will. I’m not saying this is right, but I see how many kids would end up there.

This could be complete bullshit because im not an expert but i sometimes think that we could have a future where without testing and nurturing peoples critical thinking skills we end up with people who dont know how to create a rational argument or assess information they are given for its accuracy and authenticity, or to know when they are being deceived by malicious actors.
English writing assignments as simple as a book report require you to take different views and angles on something to understand it better and the nuances of the whole, but tell a LLM to write it for you and you are not developing that part of your own mind where you may learn to do things like see the whole story above the individual events noise, see things from others perspective/feelings and understand alternate world views. These are critical for having empathy for others and understanding the world around you.
And that is just one small example i came up with.
- We are already there. Just look at the state of society right now and observe the critical thinking and media literacy skills of the average person.
  In the words of cyberpunk author Wiilam Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“
- I always think about the Time Machine and the Eloi people. I really think that is the world we are headed towards. Basically creating a class of cattle brained people, and a class of super humans.
- Brave New World? No, the rulers aren't that benevolent.
  1984? Still no, they aren't that competent.
  We are heading for fareinheit 451.
know AI in 10 years will.
That kind of the main problem: there is no indication that it will. I know one thing: current way LLM works, the chances that the problem of "lying" and "hallucinations", will even be solved are slim to none. There could be some mechanism that works in tandem with the bullshit generator machine to keep it in check, but it doesn't exist yet.
So most likely either we will collectively learn this fact and stop relying on this bullshit, which means there is a generation of kids who essentially skipped a learning phase, or we don't learn this fact, and there will be a society of mindless zombies that are fed lies and random bullshit on a second-to-second basis.
Both cases are bleak, but the second one is nightmarish.
- but we already have Fox News
- It’s all based off of predictions, it has no concept of the physical world or the ability to understand facts. Its goal is to please the user, not parse the entirety of human knowledge and provide an insightful complete thought.

I can confirm this is not just in the land of burgers. Back in the war from October to December, I fleed to Germany and went to school there, and the stuff I saw where absolutely disgusting: kids were using ipads (ibads) given to them by the school, the computers ran windows on them, and every time even a single task came up, they would directly resort to artificial unintelligence. When the "ceasefire" started and I finally went back to Lebanon, most of the kids were using Artificial unintelligence to write their essays as well. I don't blame these kids, they don't know better, they don't know how artificial unintelligence is trained from the stolen work of the people, they don't know what non-free software is, and they don't know how these devices/software are tracking their every move. It's up to the school's to teach them such and schools are doing a terrible job both in America and internationally.

Capitalism went so hard it fucked up its future workforce

We’ve been needing to rework education for years now anyway. At least this will force the teachers to change & adapt, whether they like it or not.

Teachers are generally quite adaptable. We have asjustes for AI in our classrooms. We have adjuated to not teaching up to standards because we would be fined by our states for pushing some imaginary agenda. We have changed our entire curriculum the week before classes start because the County curriculum specialist had a bright idea.
The reality is that we have to navigate arbitrary law, we have to not do what's best for our classroom and teaching style because someone who hardly spent any time in a classroom thinks they know better. We have to do all this while being blamed for the behavior of students when their parents block the school phone numbers.
- I’m not saying there aren’t great teachers, but I have family in education and know a lot of teachers, and I would not describe most of them as adaptable.
The key concern with reforming social programs like public education is that they are ongoing concerns with impacts that extend decades into the future. "Creative destruction" in public education is liable to cause far more harm than good if the transition is not handled with knowledge and care.
- I think doing nothing, while this emerging tech obliterates the functioning of existing methods, is much more dangerous.
What teachers?

The fact people can't even use their own common sense on Twitter without using AI for context shows we are in a scary place. AI is not some all knowing magic 8 ball and puts out a ton of misinformation.

This has always seemed overblown to me. If students want to cheat on their coursework, who cares? As long as exams are given in a controlled environment, it's going to be painfully obvious who actually studied the material and who had ChatGPT do it for them. Re-taking a course is not going to be fun or cheap.

Maybe I'm oversimplifying this, but it feels like proctored testing solves the entire problem.

Problem is, by the time they've failed the test, the opportunity for them to learn the content is largely passed.
The purpose of school is to educate and teach thinking skills. Tests are just a way to assess how effectively you and your students are achieving that goal. If something (in this case easy access to AI tools in the classroom) is disrupting that teaching/learning process, sure it's useful to detect that through testing, but I'd doesn't do anything really to solve the problem. Some fraction of kids are disciplined enough to recognize that skating by on classwork will lead to poor test results and possibly retaking classes, but generally those aren't the kids you need to worry about anyway.
Who would you rather have as a surgeon? The one who did all their coursework by hand and graduated with Bs or the straight-A superstar who got a full ride to John Hopkins by using ChatGPT and just hiding their tracks better than the rest of the class? I'm not saying those are the only two options, but there's definitely a reason we shouldn't be so cavalier with cheating

Oh no, maybe teachers will have to put effort into their students beyond assigning homework that an AI can do.

Oh, do your regional school districts let teachers design their own curriculum?
- My point exactly. You won't find good teachers in public education.
Do you believe that the point of such assignments is because the teacher desires to read a couple dozen nigh-identical essays on the topic at hand?
- This is my point exactly. They don't desire that. Nor should they. And so they shouldn't do that.

AI is not your enemy. It IS the future whether you like it or not. Your kids will benefit from AI in ways you cannot even imagine.

Of course AI isn’t the enemy. The enemy is their corporate ownership.
But no doubt AI will be huge in the future, in the sense that “AI” basically means “much better computing capabilities than we have now.”
Yes, but like mental math, it didn't go away when we introduced calculators, and there's a correlation between people who have those skills and income levels (which I'm using as a proxy for "usefulness"). The education system needs to adapt to assignments that students can't just paste into ChatGPT and call it a day- students need to keep spending effort learning.
True but a downvote magnet on Lemmy. But I would dispute the "benefit" part... What exactly is the benefit in not having to learn anything? Why would I even want to exist if not to be good at something and create something? It just seems like we're building towards stuff that's better than us at doing what WE want to do as a society. Thinking about chess here: why would I care about the best Stockfish moves in every line of my favorite opening if no one will ever be able to explain them?

AI is probably the worst invention sense the atom bomb.

Prelude to the society Vonnegut wrote about in 'Player Piano' and Bradbury in 'Farenheit 451'

And Isaac Asimov's The Feeling of Power, a short story about a man who can do mathematics in his head, a skill long forgotten after computers do all calculations for humanity.
basically idiocracy, in idiocracy, it was the AI supercomputer that was running the whole society for the 500years, it was assigning jobs, or removing jobs, or doing other stuff.

Maybe the best headline that's come out of the recent LLM explosion

Honestly, just erase all graded homework, papers included. All of it. It wasn't even good at anything to begin with and we would just cheat off each other, but now it's even worse.

lol , piret getting robbed kind of situation we are in

I love that this guy is in an Ivy League school to meet his 'co-founder', when it's hard to believe that someone that knows nothing and is intellectually incurious could ever found anything of value.

If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I'm supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I'm here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we'd have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don't waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.

The teacher uses PowerPoint and multiple choice tests to depict fake effort at teaching, the students use AI to depict fake effort at learning. I see nothing wrong here.

😮‍💨😮‍💨

My point is that it's a somewhat outdated skill, and these kids have enough to figure out without the encumbrance of a paper dictionary. Most of my kids have never used one before, and yes, I can show them how to use it, but it's not a functional testing accommodation. Testing accommodations should not include learning skills that are only tangentially related, especially not when there is a reasonable alternative.