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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

#501

Post by cuvert »

theptip wrote: post #241
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…

> 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;…

I understand the first part, but I don't understand the second one. It's probably my ignorance for not having children and being out of touch with schooling. When I was in school very little grading was based on homework, mostly was grading by testing in class. For example math, I'm absolutely sure it was 100% a few grading tests every semester. You could cheat by copying the homework of your classmates, it was the same set of problems for, but with 0 understanding, you would not pass.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#503

Post by QuesnayJr »

runarberg wrote: post #279
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;…

> and the best technology ever invented for learning. This has been tested, many times over, and I have yet to see convincing evidence this is the case. In fact, despite this industry being on the scale of trillions of dollars, I bet you have also not seen convincing evidence of your statement. Because those trillions of dollars aren’t going into research (well they are, but not into good research) it goes into propa…

Dude, just use it to learn something. It's obviously true.

Everyone uses AI all the time now. People's impressions are not mediated by marketing.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#504

Post by tgv »

0xpgm wrote: post #330
nunez wrote: post #155

Spend a few minutes on the teacher subreddits: /r/teachers and /r/professors, specifically. AI has been a disaster for student outcomes and educator performance, more or less across the board. It should be banned in education, but there's no way to enforce that without increasing educator workload substantially (eliminating homework and re-working lesson plans around that; moving tests and projects back into the clas…

> without increasing educator workload substantially Isn't this a good thing, employing more educators, building more schools? Any sane society will always invest more into its future well being and incentivize investments into education.

That used to be the case, but it no longer is. Not only are budgets limited, only a few choose for a career in education, leaving schools already understaffed. Expansion is not feasible in the short run.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#505

Post by amelius »

theptip wrote: post #241
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…

> 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;…

It's the same old argument about knives and technology. But we don't give children knives.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#506

Post by QuesnayJr »

cornholio wrote: post #391
truncate wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree! For anyone who still thinks kids should use AI, another argument to make is we are still figuring out AI (hence the constant debate on it, hype, uncertainty, boundaries of its capabilities etc etc). I don't think anyone with right mind can disagree with that. Keeping that mind, wouldn't it make sense to at-the-very-least tread with caution when it comes to kids.

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…

Isn't that a straightforward argument for preserving the status quo as much as possible in learning? We know how to get people to learn without AI, so we should keep doing it until someone figures out how to use AI effectively.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#507

Post by IshKebab »

VorpalWay wrote: post #498
IshKebab wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ex…

In what countries were the exams only once a year? When I grew up in the 90s in Sweden we would have tests and exams frequently, usually at the end of each module. This continued all the way through university. I think we had 3 separate exams for the first math course (which lasted a quarter of a year, so roughly one exam per month). (Though they didn't give formal grades for the first several years of elementary sch…

In the UK. In high school (age ~11 to 16) the only exams that mattered were SATs at ages 7, 11 and 14 (though I just checked and apparently they've scrapped the 14 year old ones for some reason), and GCSEs at 16. After that you have A-levels for two years (age 17 and 18) where IIRC it was just one big group of exams at the end of each year, and then university where I guess maybe it varies but at least at Cambridge it was one big group of 3-hour long exams at the end of each year.

Though Cambridge does have "tutorials" which are 1:2 tutoring sessions where you probably couldn't completely rely on AI.

Your way definitely sounds better to me.

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#508

Post by Moomoomoo309 »

simonw wrote: post #92
irishcoffee wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8. I don’t even like LLMs and I’m against this mess. Imagine having regulations rolled out when we were 8 saying “you can’t use the internet!” And I was running my own websites by 10 years old. Let’s stop pretending this tech is as interesting as we wish it was. If we want to ban models in school, ban laptops/chromebooks with internet. I don’t see the difference at this po…

> Kids can read, write, and comprehend text at 8 A sizable portion of the US adult population effectively can't read, write and comprehend text. https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/2023/national_results.asp for 2023: > Between 2017 and 2023, there were increases in the percentages of adults performing at the lowest proficiency level (Level 1 or below) in both literacy and numeracy: in literacy this percentage increased…

A notable effect that skews those numbers a bit is that the test for literacy is often given in English only, meaning any people in the US who can read and write Spanish but not English are counted as illiterate. (It's slightly more complex than this, some states let you take it in Spanish, some have the option but still usually give it in English most of the time, but the effect is the same)

Re: Norway imposes near ban on AI in elementary school

#509

Post by belorn »

JimsonYang wrote: post #236
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…

> Facing a broad decline in education test scores, the government in 2024 banned smartphones from schools and has given teachers back more powers to enforce discipline in the classroom. I remember seeing an nyt article where there was mixed results on cell phone bans. While they increased socialization among students, the school didnt see better test scores. We'll have to see if a ban on AI can improve test scores-I…

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20556365241270394

Looking at that meta study, the conclusions seems to be that this kind of studies on children take a lot of time and generally lack any control group, thus conclusions are going to be weak.

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