A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom

And I think social has showed us that most people are lazy and swayed to the easiest approach.

Ergo, making AI easy to abuse, at the cost of learning, is detrimental to societies as a whole.

AI will, like previous technologies, enable some of us to become more productive. In fact, it raises the bar on productivity, since an experienced programmer can now create much more code. (An inexperienced one can create much more mess, so you might not see it in aggregate statistics).

When it comes to the classroom, we should do the same. We raise the bar so that in fact, you cannot do anything without using AI. Much as you would run out of time if you didn't have a spreadsheet in a stats course 20 years ago, or pandas 10 years ago. The new tech enables more work to get done in the form of learning more high level things, while relegating lower level things to just building blocks that can be understood in the same way we understand reference texts, ie "I've seen the principal once, and I can find it again if I get to that level of abstraction".

Teaching needs to change. Perhaps the thing to do is have an Oxford tutorial rather than traditional class. For those who didn't attend, a tutorial is basically two students and a professor in a room, talking. You can't hide. You can prepare however you like, and you should spend quite a lot of hours if you're sparring with a politics or math professor. But once you're in the room, it becomes painfully obvious if you are unprepared. This is a way to get accountability.

At the moment, we have this high school system testing that is a factory. Every test is done as a thing that is easily marked. Multiple choice, or short answer, or short essay. It encourages superficial learning when you know you can dance around the important topics and just pick up the easy points, as well as simply avoiding silly errors. You can also win by simply learning the likely questions, and aping the answers.

Have a weekly small-group session with an expert, and they can find your limits. Yes, it will cost money.

It's part of the job of education to instill some common culture. (Which common culture varies, but not all that much outside political topics.) For students, questions about that culture are new issues. LLMs have digested a huge amount of existing material on it. LLMs are thus really good at things students are graded upon.

This gives students the impression that LLMs are very smart. Which probably says more about educational practice than LLMs. The big problem is not cheating. It's that the areas schools cover are ones where LLMs are really good.

There's no easy fix for this.

The company was tutoring English Literature as one of its subjects.

They were generating English Literature exam problems - for their users - using the ChatGPT web UI.

They would upload the marking spec, and say: "Give me an excerpt from something that might be on this syllabus, and an appropriate question about it".

Naturally, their users - the high school students - were getting, often, hallucinated excerpts from hallucinated works by existing authors.

I think the kids will be fine - it'll be their world, at some point, and that world will look a lot different to now. Maybe that's too optimistic!

I would hope, in that world, LLM literacy amongst adults has increased.

Because I feel really, really bad for all the kids who are beating themselves up about getting badly marked by ChatGPT (I assume) on an imaginary excerpt of an imaginary Wordsworth poem by their functionally imaginary tutor.

It makes me laugh, and reminds me of one of my favourite jokes, about the inflatable boy who - being of a rebellious nature - takes a safety pin to the inflatable school. Chaos ensues. Afterwards, the inflatable boy's inflatable teacher says:

"You've let me down; you've let the school down, but worst of all, you've let yourself down."

I guess I'm suspicious of the linked article. Call me full of hot air, but is it actually a safety pin? Or is it just designed to look really good on an application for an inflatable college?