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Students fight back over course taught by AI

theguardian.com

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Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#131

Post by jjmarr »

palmotea wrote: post #78
jjmarr wrote: post #38

AI will continue to stratify education. The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models. Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support.

> AI will continue to stratify education. > The typical student will get AI generated course content by the cheapest models. > Other children will spend $1000s/month on multimodal AI tutors spinning up Python code to check their math homework. Those students will easily surpass others without individualized support. The better-off children whose parents are "spend[ing] $1000s/month" will get real teachers who are peo…

Technology is still involved.

Good food is refrigerated and bad food is frozen, because it's cheaper to freeze as that preserves food indefinitely. This is true even at a farmer's market.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#132

Post by jfletch321 »

HiroProtagonist wrote: post #108
morkalork wrote: post #8

Tangent: There's a short story I vaguely remember from when I was young about a kid being raised in a bunker after a nuclear war and the big twist was that all his friends he went to school with (virtually on the TV screen) were just AIs to keep him company. I could never find it again though, even when interrogating google or chatgpt I couldn't find it. Anyone else know of this story?

The story you’re recalling is “Just Deserts,” a short story by M. T. Anderson. It appears in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (2011), an anthology edited by Chris Van Allsburg where various authors wrote tales to match Van Allsburg’s mysterious illustrations. In “Just Deserts,” a lone child is raised in a simulated town after an apocalyptic event (implied nuclear war). He attends “school” and interacts with other chi…

This isn't true. You can read Just Deserts here https://readfrom.net/chris-van-allsburg/page,10,143450-the_c... and it isn't at all like your AI response is saying.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#133

Post by morkalork »

jfletch321 wrote: post #132
HiroProtagonist wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The story you’re recalling is “Just Deserts,” a short story by M. T. Anderson. It appears in The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (2011), an anthology edited by Chris Van Allsburg where various authors wrote tales to match Van Allsburg’s mysterious illustrations. In “Just Deserts,” a lone child is raised in a simulated town after an apocalyptic event (implied nuclear war). He attends “school” and interacts with other chi…

This isn't true. You can read Just Deserts here https://readfrom.net/chris-van-allsburg/page,10,143450-the_c... and it isn't at all like your AI response is saying.

It is an AI response... I remember chatgpt telling me the same thing. Except I'm remembering this from the late 90s.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#134

Post by chemotaxis »

jjmarr wrote: post #130
chemotaxis wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I promise you that students from wealthy families will continue to get human tutors for the foreseeable future. And it will have nothing to do with whether an AI can beat a human on a test or not.

I've had human tutors and a well-equipped AI, e.g. Deep Research-like, can often be better. But an AI tutor at that level can be more expensive than humans. An hour of deep research with a SOTA model that has hundreds of thousands of context tokens is going to be much more than $80.

Again, I don't think this is about doing better. This is like arguing that a Casio watch is better than Patek Philippe.

Wealth buys you is access and that's what it's often used for. Personal trainer, personal banker, personal tutor, personal doctor instead of waiting in urgent care. It doesn't matter that YouTube yoga is great, it's still less dignified. It's what poor people do.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#136

Post by recursivecaveat »

beej71 wrote: post #86

Speaking as an instructor, everyone's goal should be to be better than the LLM. This includes teachers. And, yes, that requires work, but that's what we're getting paid for, and it's not particularly difficult to best an LLM in any field. If you can't do it better than an LLM, you have no more value than one to an employer. In short, it's shameful to provide a paid primarily-LLM-based product. People can just make th…

It is crazy to me the amount of people who are auto-completing through their education. "I don't need to learn how to code, the ai will do it for me" etc. If the only value you provide is pressing [ok] on content you don't understand, why do you think someone won't replace you with a bot? To me it's like going to pilot's school and saying you'll just have your copilot fly the plane for you.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#138

Post by j4coh »

marstall wrote: post #99
j4coh wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Next try it on something rare you're an expert in, and be amazed at the low quality.

i quiz it often on aspects of my son's condition that I understand, and it gets things right most of the time, with the occasional glaring bit of misinformation.

It will work better if you try it with something you know really well.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#139

Post by squishington »

recursivecaveat wrote: post #136
beej71 wrote: post #86

Speaking as an instructor, everyone's goal should be to be better than the LLM. This includes teachers. And, yes, that requires work, but that's what we're getting paid for, and it's not particularly difficult to best an LLM in any field. If you can't do it better than an LLM, you have no more value than one to an employer. In short, it's shameful to provide a paid primarily-LLM-based product. People can just make th…

It is crazy to me the amount of people who are auto-completing through their education. "I don't need to learn how to code, the ai will do it for me" etc. If the only value you provide is pressing [ok] on content you don't understand, why do you think someone won't replace you with a bot? To me it's like going to pilot's school and saying you'll just have your copilot fly the plane for you.

I was drawn to engineering by the joy of learning and problem solving. The pain of puzzling over a difficult problem, then the ecstatic release when you figure it out and get it working. I don't understand why someone would want to give that up. It gives meaning to the work.

Re: Students fight back over course taught by AI

#140

Post by graemep »

j45 wrote: post #126
graemep wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

British universities do the same marketing. Seen it there. The problem in the UK has been ridiculous the expansion of universities. if we shut at least half of them down, reduced some of the others in size, there would be a lot more money for the rest. AI teaching is the opposite of what the best universities do, which is things like small group tutorials on top of face to face lectures.

Too many universities and colleges seem to love opening buildings to name them. AI might be a threat because it can't take up as many buildings as students?

They often get donations in return for naming buildings after people. They can name other things after people instead - organisations with the university.
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