Learn Your Way: Reimagining Textbooks with Generative AI

> The personalization pipeline

All of this hurts. GenAI cannot replace people grounded in reality. Especially not teachers and mentors. The effects will be nauseating to anyone who cherishes the development of human beings and minds in general.

Teaching and mentoring is a two-sided thing. The mentor, if adequately tutored or capable himself, learns more than the student. I understand that this is something "we" hope to achieve for AI but it's so insanely dumb to do it this early, it almost makes me angry. Almost. These people are just doing their jobs. So, as usual, I'm calling their bosses dumb fucking pathetic shitheads of idiot trash who fucking cost our kind sooooooo much fucking potential it almost makes me angry.

Sorry, gotta keep the anger at "almost", max. Can't be angry at lack of levels of consciousness or awareness. It's beyond genetic, a decision of "culture" and conformity; back to topic:

Teaching is one of those mythical edges that hone themselves. And I don't mean just the skill, I mean the entire category, the concept, the inter-generational action that happens on absolutely all levels. GenAI in education, applied anything below "correctly" on the scale of civilization, in any interval/integral, is taking XP points off a higher dimension that is exclusive to us in the kingdom of animals.

Don't fuck this up. Don't listen to your bosses. Quit. Found your own companies. I can't put it in words, yet. I don't have the peace of mind. But it's too damn important not to mention it. Every dimwit with access to drugs and hookers can make fuck-you money. For himself and others. FUCK THAT.

Personalized learning pre-LLMs has been a lot of hand waving and not really supporting instructors or instructional evolution.

I think your mileage will vary by subject and level.

If you’re a complete novice reading a niche graduate level textbook on Tolstoy’s critique of the Russian war effort in War and Peace, you’re going to get some wild hallucinations, and you’ll have no idea how to determine fact from fiction.

If you’re reading a high school textbook about the history of pre-revolution Russia, the models will have pretty comprehensive coverage of every concept you’re likely to come across.

I don’t have a firm opinion one way or another about that idea that a “great teacher can teach any subject” but it does bring to my mind the other idea that teachers are increasingly becoming “learning coaches” who aren’t only transferring knowledge into the students, but who are rather encouraging them to develop self-awareness about their own learning.

Cultural obituaries are often premature, and the one for literacy is no exception. A nascent contrary impulse is emerging: readers deliberately turning to long-form works as a form of intellectual resistance. I’ve been working through Norman Lewis’s Word Power Made Easy and Tom Heehler’s The Well-Spoken Thesaurus, not just to expand vocabulary but to restore the sinew of productive speech.

That project led me to conscript AI as a private tutor. With custom instructions, ChatGPT and Gemini now surface new words and nudge my prose toward clarity, turning a vague fear of erosion into conviction. A dedicated subset of users will inevitably harness such tools to strengthen their expressive range and communicative precision.

Until recently, my writing rarely left emails and journals. Now, with AI as scaffold and sparring partner, I draft short stories from my own life and recast them in the voices of authors I admire. This feels less like a technology poised to supplant teachers, and more like the substrate for a renaissance in autodidactic education.