21–30 of 244 posts
No one who understands ai can rely on it to help us learn. I provided one with 100 citations I wanted to standardize and it deleted 10 and made up 10 to replace them. Can’t imagine this being used to replace a textbook or even explain a textbook.
I've had very good luck using LLMs to do this. I paste the part of the book that I don't understand and ask questions about it.
How much of this is cutesy animations and how much is really valuable?
This feels at first glance like another instance of an AI tool doing something humans already enjoy doing, rather than replacing work we'd like to avoid. The teachers and professor I've known have always loved adapting their lessons to suit the interests of their students - I think that's a core educational instruction skill. I'm open to hearing disagreements, but reading through the usages and evaluations does not l…
All the people at the forefront of AI really loved and thrived in highly academic settings from kindergarden to PhDs, their own lived experience doesn't match up with this product at all. Why are they making it? EdTech has the worst returns of any industry in venture capital. Why? There are no teachers who say that technology has generally improved experiences in classrooms, even if some specific technology-driven ex…
You know what really motivates studying though? The promise of being completely useless when you finish studying since everything will be done by AI! What a motivator!
Everywhere you look in education there are problems. There isn't going to be some stylized answer.
These Google guys - and a lot of other people who write comments online - go and promote something they think is a world view or theory, and is really just a bunch of stereotypes and projections of their own college-aged vengances. VC likes these kind of people! These Google guys fit that mold. I can agree with the broad strokes of techno-utopia, but that also means you need space to say that your app is bad, your art is ugly, and your text is long and boring.
These Google guys do not have space for criticism. They are Enterprise Sales. If the district asks for tasteless Corporate Memphis art, that's the art they're going to get - I'm going to focus on the art because I know something about art, and the text that appeared in the demo was so horrifically boring that I didn't read it. Have you opened a children's book? None of it looks like fucking Corporate Memphis!
One thing I am certain of is that these Google guys do have taste, they are smart people. Their problem is Enterprise Sales. Don't get me wrong. If you are narrowly focused on giving people what they want, your creative product will fail.
No AI you ever create will get a kid to choose learning how math works over doing basically anything else with their time. The point of school is not to teach, it is to discipline children to participate in education. Otherwise, why have it at all? Kids can find extensive information and guides for basically any topic they want on the internet right now.
The entire "AI education" thing misses this.
I looked at the example for computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in food. Explanations include: "a list can be used for a recipe" "a set can be used to list all the unique ingredients you need to buy for a week's meals" "a map can be used for a cookbook" "a priority queue can be used to manage orders in a busy restaurant kitchen" "a food-pairing graph can show which ingredients taste good together" May…
I don't think the failure mode here is really "7th graders will see through the superficiality of this really quick". I think the failure mode here will be:
> Explain computer science basics for a 7th grader interested in poop and butt-sniffing
Although who knows... maybe this will unleash a generation of memes of the likes we have never seen before. And if the side-effect is more people are at least conversant in more topics, well, maybe that's not a failure mode at all
I wish instead Google would instead find a good way to have exercise books, with: 1) well-thought out exercises (covering all cases, whether in math or Spanish) 2) CORRECT solutions (just saying because even ChatGPT gets it wrong even for high school math) 3) that you can enter them using pen (if need be on an iPad) Just a way to make zillions of exercises if I want to. And for my kids, the problem is these days teac…
Looking forward to my copy of "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" a la Diamond Age
Shameless plug but I made a similar tool called asXiv[1] which allows you to "ask" arXiv.org papers questions. It also recommends questions on initial load that can help understand or explore the paper, here's a demo[2] from the popular Attention Is All You Need paper. The code is all opensource[3], it uses the google 2.5 flash lite model to keep costs down (it's completely free atm), but that can be changed via env…
No one who understands ai can rely on it to help us learn. I provided one with 100 citations I wanted to standardize and it deleted 10 and made up 10 to replace them. Can’t imagine this being used to replace a textbook or even explain a textbook.
> explain a textbook I've had very good luck using LLMs to do this. I paste the part of the book that I don't understand and ask questions about it.