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Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

reuters.com

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Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#471

Post by master-lincoln »

guyomes wrote: post #466
simonw wrote: post #56

> Pupils from first through seventh grade, aged 6 to 13, should as a general rule not be using AI, while those in lower secondary school, aged 14 to 16, can cautiously adopt tools under teachers' supervision, the government said. Sounds right to me. Kids under 13 need to learn to read, write and comprehend text. Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills. They can play with AI at home, and after 13 the…

> They can play with AI at home Actually, in Europe, Gemini is officially not available for kids even at home [1]. In some countries like Germany, the restriction applies until 16 [2]. I find unsettling that even for supervised account, parents are forbidden to let their kids learn how to use Gemini, even between 14 and 16 yo. Note that this restriction does not seem to appear from other AI company. So from outside,…

lol

> unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices.

They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do. Why don't you get a similar product from a different company for your kids?

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#472

Post by IshKebab »

ifwinterco wrote: post #460
theptip wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills. I think it's more complex than this. AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning. The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair;…

The obvious way to square this circle is to go back to how things used to be: less emphasis on coursework and more on old-fashioned tests in an examination environment with just pen and paper. You can cheat on your homework all you like, but you'll completely fail the exams. On the other hand, students who use LLMs to augment their learning will do fine

This is definitely what's going to happen. But there is still a problem - people (not just children) are fundamentally lazy and put things off. People always leave assignments until the last minute. I used to smoothly transition from "I've got plenty of time, no need to start" to "there's not enough time to do it, there's no point starting".

They will 100% just use AI for the whole year and then panic and fail the exam when the time comes.

So I think not only will we see more invigilated exams, but they'll become more frequent and shorter. Which I would say is a good thing anyway. I always hated learning a whole year of stuff for a 3 hour exam.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#473

Post by master-lincoln »

dosisking wrote: post #377
theptip wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Generative AI is not going to help them with those skills. I think it's more complex than this. AI is both the best technology ever invented for avoiding learning, and the best technology ever invented for learning. The cat is out of the bag. If teachers are asking for take-home essay assignments in 2026 then students are going to use AI and learn nothing. "AI detectors" are nowhere near reliable enough to be fair;…

AI has existed for decades. The average person has just discovered it / had it forced upon them. And just a small-subset of AI. The average person does not use real AI. And AI is not even well-defined. Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning. AI will be used as a tool as a way of 'shaping' the mind of young people. Similar to using standardized textbooks. AI is too much of a political…

> Education is more about indoctrination, than it is about actual learning

I am curious where you were educated to come to this conclusion. I don't think your statement holds generally true for all education as it is by definition teaching knowledge.

Sure, there might be institutions that do teaching and propaganda, but I think it shows a lack of awareness to generalize this to all education.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#474

Post by toasty228 »

galkk wrote: post #435

Completely understandable. My 6yo kiddo recently realized that smart speaker (Google home) can not only play her favorite songs, but answer her homework questions. And it was something not that trivial, like “which animal from the list changes color of its fur when seasons change: tiger, arctic fox, something else”. And now I need to either disable everything or figure out how to turn that off for her.

Teach them right and yeet the surveillance device altogether

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#475

Post by guyomes »

master-lincoln wrote: post #471
guyomes wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can play with AI at home Actually, in Europe, Gemini is officially not available for kids even at home [1]. In some countries like Germany, the restriction applies until 16 [2]. I find unsettling that even for supervised account, parents are forbidden to let their kids learn how to use Gemini, even between 14 and 16 yo. Note that this restriction does not seem to appear from other AI company. So from outside,…

lol > unsolicited interference from Google in the parental education choices. They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do. Why don't you get a similar product from a different company for your kids?

> They are a company offering a product and they decided not to offer it to kids. It's not like they are telling you as a parent what you need to do.

Fair enough! Indeed that would be a true issue only if the company had a monopoly.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#476

Post by ben_w »

alchemism wrote: post #370
Nux wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Return to pen and paper, particularly for testing. Extend school time for doing supervised "homework" that doesn't involve the Internet. Like that?

Yes, make the teachers on $25-35K annual salaries do /more/ work for no extra money. I'm sure that will fix education.

That's a straw man.

That pay range is roughly what teachers get in former-USSR/Warsaw Pact eastern Europe, and in those countries it's a comfortable income.

Also, going back to what they did a few years ago isn't "more work". May actually be less, given how often people look at AI output, roll their eyes, and say "ugh, slop".

Also also, questions of pay are obviously after society decides what it wants the role of a teacher to be and finds out how much it needs to spend to hire enough people who will do whatever that job turns out to be.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#477

Post by master-lincoln »

ifwinterco wrote: post #457
cornholio wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The counterargument is that kids will live in a world different from our own. For example, in many countries children lost the ability to write cursive; that used to be a critical skill comparable to literacy itself. But in our current society, that's no longer the case and you can be very successful without it, but there are other skills, such as using technology, that became critical. Any definitive claim to know w…

From a UK perspective it's very weird that kids in America don't learn to write joined-up. How can you write sufficiently fast in an English or History exam (where you have to write a whole essay in limited time) if you're writing one letter at a time like a 6 year old?

If your history exam grade hinges on your "typing speed", you had a bad teacher. It's not like you can not write sufficiently quickly using block letters.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#478

Post by master-lincoln »

mattnewton wrote: post #269
testfrequency wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this the most upvoted comment, yet when the UK repents teens form social media it’s met with “aDulTs arE bEiNg monItoRed”. I agree with Norway here, and it’s slightly exhausting to see people attack any country that’s trying to protect kids as somehow coming for everyone’s supposed sovereignty. I care about the youth and know they are in the midst of a culture war with adults, leave them out of it until we fig…

Because banning smartphones in schools doesn’t affect adults not in those schools, whereas age verification does? How you implement these protections matter.

Age verification does not affect adults. But often when they say age verification they want to make you give out more data than "i am over 18"

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#479

Post by master-lincoln »

somenameforme wrote: post #420
dpkirchner wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do adults declare themselves as adults without teenagers claiming to be adults also? It's pretty much impossible, so we should stop trying. It's exhausting seeing politicians et al continue to push for age verification despite it being impossible to be even remotely effective. (I hedge because technically we could demand photo ID for every HTTP request, I guess, but I don't think that's ever going to happen.) T…

In real life everything from porn to alcohol to cigarettes, and even movies all require ID. And it's super easy to bypass in endless ways, but those efforts have nonetheless been overwhelmingly successful. And I don't really understand the issue people have with social media and ID. You're already required to link your phone which is a massive invasion of privacy, and the sites themselves not entirely infrequently de…

The digital world is not like the real one. When you show your ID once all it's details are saved and can be searched across. When showing your ID to the cigarette vendor they will not notice most data and will have forgotten it a while later. So we need to be more careful with the data we give out digitally.

No ID is needed, just proof that you are above a certain age. There are technological solutions to just give out that data, but politicians seem to not want to go that way. This is the real issue, not age checking. The fear that age-checking means tracking...

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