“If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI.
You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history.
With it you need no armies of typists and artists to spread your propaganda. It can enable mass surveillance and thereby put shackles on those who seek to resist you.
Its lethal autonomous weapons systems can perfect and normalise remote killing.
It will turbocharge inequality; it is already facilitating a breathtaking shift of power and wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of a tiny number of men who – to put it in terms for which I can’t be sued – seem to hold dangerously damaged views about the value and dignity of human life.”
And before anyone starts screaming, take the time to read the entire article. The author then goes onto list things that are fantastic uses for AI.
However, if society doesn’t take the time to sort out the best uses for this or any other tool - and it is a tool as pointed out by number of users - put in stringent guard rails as necessary and get out o the tools we already have are better suited for the intended purpose then when is society going to going to do so?
Ten years from now? Fifty years from now?
When the mantra of a particular industry is “go fast and break things” maybe now would be better than later.
> You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history.
It's sentences like this that dishearten me about these articles. It's nuts that in the land of Murdoch, AI is identified as the fascist's best friend.
And then yeah it can enable mass surveillance, but that's only if your government keep pretending there's a public safety emergency every week and you believe to them.
Ditto for "normalizing remote killing", as if trump or netanyahu hadn't already normalized murder to begin with.
> The author then goes onto list things that are fantastic uses for AI.
Which are pretty much besides the point. I agree that there should be an absolute ban for younger kids, and even in high school there should be a presumptive one unless somehow clearing a high bar (idk teaching how to code with copilot?) but this is because people should learn how to think for themselves before they can even begin to try offloading that task to an assistant.
And this should be a call to arms for pedagogy.. but rather than somehow wonder how to stimulate and engage students in the classroom* (e.g. in italy we use to have a lot of oral test/questioning during the year) she almost seems concerned rote learning died.
The author simply pointed out that most authoritarians would appreciate a tool that could accomplish those things. Mostly the article is about how problematic LLMs can be in education.
Edit to respond to your expansion(thanks!): I didn’t take these points to advocate for rote learning:
*”…
large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini have thrown a grenade into thousands of years of teaching and learning: the way they threaten to upend our ability to think with the robust clarity that is needed in emergencies of justice.”
“…
I’ve seen, at the same time, how it has thrown stark and urgent light on how fundamental books and reading are to our shared understanding of who we are, and to our democracy.”
“…
Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. One found that after just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it”. An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”. We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.”
I don’t think rote learning assists anyone in developing critical thinking skills. Rote learning was why I hated history when I was a kid. But I guess having to memorize the date the Magna Carta was signed is still better than having to use ChatGPT because a student doesn’t know how to think for themself.
Personally, I’m neutral on AI in general. It is a great tool for some situations, but I don’t think it’s a very good tool for teaching kids to learn. People, especially children, learn best by doing not by having a tool do their thinking it for them.
Most people have the wrong idea of what technological singularity means. It's the point at which technological growth outpaces our ability to understand and control it.
This isn't something to look forward to. It's a warning.
Oxford Fellow and children's author Katherine Rundell writes about the effects of AI on children's education and the development of young people's intellectual capacities.
The author makes it sound like AI is reducing critical thinking skills; but these skills were already in decline due to internet, screens, social media and low attention spans. She wants more human education but leaves out the 30-35 child classroom, the real bane of the school experience, or homework which is nothing more than repetition. If you’re a teacher who has to grade 30 essays what are the odds that you can engage with them on a real level and not just correct the basic thesis and then spelling and grammar.
The issues facing education is far more entrenched. AI will not help, and I agree with her assessment that it will further complicate education for those less advantaged. But to blame it on AI and offer close to no solutions for educators, parents, or society is kinda crazy. Like a teacher who now faces 30 AI written essays does what? How can you assign polynomial homework when AI can do it instantly (not like computers couldn’t do it before, easily)? The hard questions are around how we evaluate students, how we reduce class sizes, and how we provide broader educations that aren’t just the standard curriculum. That takes time, but it also takes money, a lot of money.
I worry about the future education for my kid. But my worries are about a boy who will sit in a classroom for 7 hours a day, be asked to memorize facts and figures, or worse blend into the background and not be noticed by a teacher that has more than 120 students across a school year.
> but these skills were already in decline due to internet, screens, social media and low attention spans.
No, that's what right-wingers like Haidt want you to believe. That's happening because critical thinking isn't taught in schools, and the social fabric is getting always more and more undone.
Also all the other pretty mundane aspects about how schools are run, that you then go on to list.
> The author makes it sound like AI is reducing critical thinking skills
This said, I would contend this is also happening with adults. Just think to all those apes quoting grok.
Interesting, I didn’t realize that this was a right wing talking point. I think I’ve seen this notion repeated so many times; Gen Z being less effective in the work place, lower attention spans, poorer reasoning amongst young people.
Not sure if there’s any sourcing to your claim. Seems like my claim on the above is weaker than I believed in a quick search. Although screen us is slightly correlated to lower test results based on some studies.
All that being said, and this is not a hand wave away to your criticism that genuinely is making me rethink part of my statement; I think a lot of the issues in education are ‘meat and potatoes’ classes are too big, teachers need more support, education need more investment. But my point remains that I don’t think AI will be this destructive force for students.
I'm very skeptical about AI (maybe because I was good in school and I can think and write for myself), even though I also feel like most criticism against it is misplaced and misinformed.
But I very firmly believe that it would be super disastrous to have in elementary school. Like, just try to apply those "I don't need math when calculators exist" train of thoughts that I always heard from the laziest and most unimaginative students to justify themselves, but applied to literally everything. Hell, you aren't even compromising the single courses, but even study strategies themselves if not even the need of any education.
> Interesting, I didn’t realize that this was a right wing talking point.
It's not strictly speaking, and somehow it was the labour governments (always and especially in the freaking anglosphere for some reason) in the uk and australia to make it policy first.
But once you put aside those that might "think to the children" legitimately in their dear conscience (and you know they may be gullible and not def hypocritical, because the rest of the time they don't do big cuts to education or to social security with a big laugh) it's kinda a galaxy of snakeoil salesmen that make of cherry picking datasets their profession.
> That's happening because critical thinking isn't taught in schools
This seems incredibly weird to me; America has reified "critical thinking". In other countries they do not teach "critical thinking" but they do not have problems producing people who think critically for themselves. It is not a single skill that can be taught but is a quality of the pople living in the culture. It is very basic to human interactions. We just call it common sense.
It’s an article not War and Peace. If you want to know more about her suggestions beyond the ones that she names, then you probably just want to read her book.
I agree with you that LLMs are not the entire problem, but that doesn’t mean they are not a problem in the context the author provided. There can be more than one that one issue in a complex problem.
I asked a contact who is the president of a billion-dollar tech enterprise, what would you teach your sons? He said he wouldn’t teach his children to use AI, because it will prepare them for nothing. He would teach them the humanities. Teach them who we are, who we have been, what we can make. The FT’s Gillian Tett reported that a senior financier’s New York firm now seeks out humanities students, because “AI-native” Stem graduates are entering the job market with “alarmingly shallow ideas”.
Rundell’s article is a deeply biased exercise in technophobia.
Framing generative language models as an existential threat to democracy and human dignity is not serious analysis, it is Luddite alarmism that substitutes emotion for evidence.
This level of hysteria is characteristic of historical technological panics. Every major leap in information technology was met with identical prophecies of doom regarding the collapse of human intellect.
A central flaw in Rundell’s argument is her habit of blaming AI for behavioural and structural issues that existed long before ChatGPT was launched. By treating AI as the source of long-standing pedagogical challenges, Rundell scapegoats a new tool rather than examining deeper issues in curriculum design, student engagement, and digital literacy.
Perhaps the most telling display of bias in the article is the way Rundell handles the positive applications of AI. She concedes in a single, dismissive paragraph that AI could speed the cure of cancer, assist disabled people, democratise legal access, and predict natural disasters only to instantly declare these outcomes "completely irrelevant" if the technology is abused.
Rinse and repeat. First it was tv, then video games, then memes, now it's ai.
Sure, it's a problem, but the tragic thing is it's better to adapt to the shift in social climate than expect people to behave like the old generations.
Socrates had a similar argument against people learning to read:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html Plato wrote that Socrates said this in phaedrus.
"for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
Humans are apprehensive about all technology, almost surely as much as they are completely besotted by it.
So your reasoning is this: Socrates was concerned about one kind of cognitive offloading (one which facilitated transmission of ideas and acquisition of knowledge) and therefore we shouldn’t be concerned about a new kind of cognitive offloading (one which appears to supplant learning and thinking). Socrates might have called this the “historical reassurance fallacy”.
Yes, and he was right: before literacy, people memorized entire sagas like the Odyssey and knew them by heart. In Eastern European villages, you could watch this fade away in a generation of literacy.
Same with radio: before then, people sang and made music themselves. Before TV, people put on plays for fun for their friends. Who does that anymore? Everything authentic and social gets coopted to the machine.
I wasn't saying we should allow people to rot, but we need to adapt on how we educate them. Modern education is failing them and being stubborn and ignoring the obvious for the sake of historical quotes that somewhat sound familiar isn't an excuse to not adapt.
Oh, I completely agree. I was just pointing out this is about how we as humans relate to technology in general, and that it’s not in any way new. I mean - most educators these days are all in agreement that learning to read is good :)
None of those observations are unique to AI except the intellectual laziness thing. Which is ironic as hell as this was really lazy in it's observations. Every school needs to go back to ink and paper for everything. Shame she only brought up Sweden and Norway. The screens are a huge problem. The AI is making it worse. However it's foolish to put all of her conclusions on software.
>There are many things I hate unequivocally about AI. I hate that it can make counterfeit people;
Ma'am...Ma'am... You digitally make counterfeit people all the time. You're a children's book author. AI did not invent the pseudonym or..ya know..lying.
>Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. One found that after just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it”
Fair criticism. Really wish the whole article was about learned helplessness. Certainly a bigger problem now than ever as people aren't even googling how to solve the problems they've created.
>Those who work in ed tech promise that it will liberate teachers and create one-to-one learning experiences for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Yes. For the kids that aren't getting enough instruction or have special needs. Hell even just translating things into languages not spoken in the class room. If you are assuming the worst from this, assume the worst from the schooling not software.
>AI, we’re told, will make learning more efficient. But is that what we dream of for our kids – an efficient childhood? To write an efficient story, sing an efficient song?
I don't think she wrote this on a typewriter. I don't think she is making illuminated manuscripts of her children's books.
>But we can no longer guarantee that the work students give us is the product of their own minds.
so...plagiarism. Your problem is plagiarism not AI. Trust me when I was in school we didn't need AI to plagiarize.
>A friend who teaches maths at a London university told me his students are handing in essays without deleting AI’s jaunty “Happy to help!” at the start
Man, what math are they teaching in the UK?
There are tons of legitimate gripes that you can have with foisting LLMs on children. It's a shame she spent more time complaining about data centers then focusing on that. Really glad that the Guardian doesn't use a data center and mailed me her article.
It’s pretty disingenuous (or maybe just ignorant) to conflate the types of datacenters used to support non-AI web operations and those for AI training and inference. The scale (and corresponding disruption) of AI datacenters is FAR greater. Additionally, people generally appreciate and value the outputs of traditional datacenters, while there is very strong negative sentiment surrounding AI as it exists today.
I think you’re also misunderstanding what the author means by “counterfeit people” if you believe a fictional character created by an author in a contained piece of media is comparable to social media personas that can act more-or-less on their own with plausible-sounding opinions that dilute real human voices on the web.
You also appear to be misrepresenting or misunderstanding what the author means by “efficient childhood” and why it would be bad. Your comparison of AI to a typewriter/word processor is way off the mark. A word processor is a digital substitute for a physical process, enabling a writer to enact their will more easily and with less risk of an unfixable error. The writer must still choose every word. AI for creative works is different: it replaces the creative and mental work/expression with a digital facsimile. The resulting work is not the product of a child’s mind, and they did not grow from asking a machine to produce it for them,
nor did they acquire skill or proficiency.
I also think you’re being flippant about plagiarism. When you were in school, you didn’t have access to a world class plagiarism machine which could generate difficult-to-detect (if you expend any effort) plagiarized material on literally any topic at the click of a button.
The scale is the problem not the technology. You can run LLMs on your own computer. China is doing this shit left right and center. The Google data center running google searches is the same one running Gemini. Scale cuts both ways. Your problem is capitalism, the speculation of American finance, and not software. The AI folding proteins and making targeted medicine has a bit more value than the ones bitcoin mining a rack over. You don't need to tell me that there is negative sentiment about AI. That is obvious enough here on Reddit where I can tell people that I am using my home computer to help find cures for obscure diseases and I get flamed to shit.
I was being flip about the counterfeit people thing. She can pretend to be someone else online. It's a department in several intelligence agencies at the national level. They do that all the time. Now it's just faster.
Your reply to my comment about the efficient childhood thing reads like all you read was my quote and quip. She made a Luddite argument in the article about how things being more laborious is the point. Feel free to reply to this with the two parts of London she mentioned so I know you actually read the article.
You are right about the plagiarism thing. It would have taken several buttons and google searches. My education would have suffered just the same.
Thanks for engaging with the complimentary things I said about the piece and ideas you agreed with instead of grinding an axe.
“There are tons of legitimate gripes that you can have with foisting LLMs on children. It's a shame she spent more time complaining about data centers then focusing on that.”
blink
This is a long form essay, and I am not quite sure how one small paragraph referring to data centers suddenly became a focus when multiple paragraphs were dedicated to the issues and consequences of foisting LLMs on children.
This is pretty much all that was said about data centers:
“ I hate …the yearly electrical demand of AI-optimised data centres is predicted, by the end of this decade, to exceed that of the whole of Japan.”
On the other hand, this is how she begins the discussion regarding foisting LLMs on children which is the actual focus of the piece:
“
Most of all, if you were a would-be autocrat, you would love the way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini have thrown a grenade into thousands of years of teaching and learning:
the way they threaten to upend our ability to think with the robust clarity that is needed in emergencies of justice.
I write fiction for children and I hold a fellowship at Oxford University, so I spend a lot of time working with, and for, young people.
I’ve seen first-hand the way that generative AI has already infiltrated young people’s lives.
I’ve seen, at the same time, how it has thrown stark and urgent light on how fundamental books and reading are to our shared understanding of who we are, and to our democracy.” because it’s a long form article. There is considerably more than that on the issues regarding LLM’s being foisted on children.”
Not the use. The foisting. I was very specific about it.
You don't want your kids to use it? Cool. You don't want your school district to use it? Cool.
We don't want the foisting. And there will be local AI on all the computers in the computer lab. No data center necessary. However their will be tons of foisting.
I literally quoted you complaining that putting one paragraph in a long form essay about data centers shifted the focus away from the entire theme of the article which literally focuses on the issues involved when LLMs are forced on children.
I then quoted several paragraphs from the article detailing the issues with foisting LLM’s on children.
If you look at the context surrounding the paragraph about data centers, it was part of a relatively small section of things the author also considers problematic about AI in addition to the consequences of foisting LLMs on children.
I think you will find that many people consider AI to be problematic in a number of various ways. Not just when they are forced on children. Environmental degradation is but one of the other issues involved.
I'm feeling frustrated that we are seeing yet another of these stupid pieces engaging morons for updoots. The current 2 minute hate.
Again....and I need you to work with me here....the foisting.
Not the kids using it. Not anything else about it. She spent more time talking about the hardware instead of the lack of agency in parents or children. The foisting.
AI is a form of universal punishment for the human race. Because they deny eachother and war with eachother the universe has gifted them plague after plague.
Edit:
There's little point in engaging with people who are addicted to AI. The companies designed their product to be addictive. There are some success stories, but if you try to get through to a meth addict they will often become verbally abusive and even physically violent in their attempts to maintain access to their addiction.
It is so strange, that any discussion about AI on this platforms feels like it is taken over by crazy people, like discussions about US politics was some time ago.
I think it's the typical 10/80/10 kind of breakdown, with a vocal handful of pro/anti AI people and a big middle ground of people who really don't care. Trouble is the pro group are convinced that AI is flawless and amazing, and the anti group consider any and all AI usage to be equally morally abhorrent.
Reddit generally is quite anti-AI, but it's gone way beyond "here are some arguments against it" and instead is becoming its own sort of groupthink, black and white, "you're with us or you're against us" mentality. Assuming that anyone who uses AI for anything has lost all their critical thinking skills, that an overworked teacher using it to crank out some fliers is a soulless monster, etc. It's bizarre. Yes the pro AI groups have their own weirdness going on, they're just not as prevalent. I swear some people are so devoted to upvotes from expressing anti AI sentiment, or the desire to feel like the "in group" that the rhetoric has become wholly unreasonable.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone replies to this acting like I'm on the rapidly pro-AI side of things, which I'm not at all, but it'll prove my point. Coupled with a general increasing lack of literacy and nuance. But then that's the internet for you.
I think you make a very good point. AI is a tool. So is a hammer. I can build a house with it or I can bash your brains in with it. The problem is when the indifferent group in the middle suddenly starts noticing when everything‘s gone to bleep it may be too late to stop and think about what parts of the tool are productive, and which parts are not. Better to address the issues now than later which is what the author of this article did. She notes what works and what doesn’t work in her professional estimation and why.
But you aren’t wrong that many people just start screaming before they start thinking.
Fair point about the indifferent group in the middle, but that's also where the rabidly anti-AI crowd need to realise that trying to paint it all with the same brush isn't going to convince anyone. There are very serious discussions that need to be had about regulation, safety, and dozens of other aspects. But too many people are blowing straight past that and into some version of "if you use AI for anything you're basically the antichrist", and that's going to turn so many people away from them.
The other day there was someone on another subreddit, non-English speaker, saying he'd written a book and had used AI to help him fix some typos and grammar - that was it, not "polishing the writing" or anything else. People piled onto him like he'd got AI to write the whole book for him, attacking his character, etc. It was insane. Of course those people are the minority, but it's like a form of reverse AI psychosis or something. Some people can't separate clearly distinct scenarios or use cases, they just hear that someone's used AI and the red mist comes down.
There's little point in engaging with people who are addicted to AI. The companies designed their product to be addictive. There are some success stories, but if you try to get through to a meth addict they will often become verbally abusive and even physically violent in their attempts to maintain access to their addiction.
Seek help. Not trying to be mean and I know, like the meth addict, you'll only lash out in violence to protect your addiction. But maybe someday when you're strung out and unable to care for yourself you'll remember this. Seek help.
Pretty nice to ask it for help with organizing info, writing coding scripts, learn the basics of a topic without good info about it online, answering academic questions, helping with cooking questions no one will answer, googling things without being useless, asking about legal matters, translating from/to other languages, answering questions about other languages no one will answer, well that but for a ton of topics, helping with home repairs, help finding papers, help finding resources, help finding niche things. Some people don't have individual access to it though, so they're only punished by others' hands instead of their own.
I am often baffled by the AI discussions going on. AI being a problem about water use, AI being a problem about social security/correct tax levels, AI being a problem about school children here.
Everyone seems to be using the existence of modern AI as a stage, to discuss whatever (surely important!) problem that exists in their sphere.
Now this thoughtful piece feels to be basically about discussions that probably happened in the 70s about calculators and math classes, the 80s with teaching by pupils passively watching VHS tapes, and the late 2010s about even more screen time for young people by the way of mobile social apps.
An educator's job is to teach how to think. So any tool that takes over the thinking or any teaching method that puts pupils in a passive role, like video, is something to be avoided. That isn't hard or complicated or new. There are tools today that are as good at essays, or any exercise imaginable really, as calulators were and are at multiplication tables. If you want to teach these things, you have to make sure, the students don't use these tools.
Stop conflating the neccessary discussion about AI with stuff like this. Whatever the outcome of humanity's latest Icarus flight to the sun, education is still the same as it always was.
Nothing ever changes is always such an interesting worldview., often unfalsifiable in the ways people will hold it.
Things do change, though, and education is not the same as it always have been. The raw material of human children start out the same as they used to, but the environment is far different now than it used to be, and there are new struggles for the education system to contend with as a result.
An AI that can write essays is not the same as a calculator, and the impact of each is likewise very different.
> An AI that can write essays is not the same as a calculator, and the impact of each is likewise very different.
I think that it is very different in a lot of dimensions. Modern and AI and everything that comes with it is probably the on the same level as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, concentrated in a singele decade.
But not when it comes to educate little humans. You teach thinking. They will have to interface with social structures, technology and whatever at some point, but that should not be the point of primary education.
We don't. We don't know how. We use what we have to prepare them for our current world as best we can, but it only rarely and accidentally involves "thinking". And the results are shaped by the current social structures, technology, and whatever, and so the results have changed over time. And AI will change it tremendously, as did the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
At least I know I can always go to the comments at the bottom for pushback against this alarmist moral panic bullshit.
I swear the Manufactured Consent is people seeing ridiculous low hanging fruit in engagement. Just find a talking head. Incentivize a reason to roll out the same talking points. Watch it spread and get the same comments under the same articles. Wait for next weeks deadlines, find the right talking heads.
It's fuckin' Madlibs. AI Is hurting the _____(noun) with the hidden cost that is ____(verb) leading them to be _____(Adjective).
No one has any idea that AI can fit on home computers or phones or is making revolutionary software for medical research and things. Its like in 2022 someone told them that AI is just a Deepfake machine that runs on coal fired steam that needs your water specifically.
> An educator's job is to teach how to think. So any tool that takes over the thinking or any teaching method that puts pupils in a passive role, like video, is something to be avoided.
It's nice that you said avoided rather than excluded. I agree that generally avoiding them is good. But students should also get used to using these passive tools, ideally they free the brain to actively engage with some larger task delegating minutia to the tool. The examples for calculators are obvious, the examples for videos, I'm not sure what that would be.
Every generation has its "think of the children" woes. TV, telephones, video games, computers, internet, social media, smart phones....all of these things were feared. AI is just the latest fad.
And every generation also has woes which do significant damage without us realizing. Asbestos, Lead in paint and gasoline, CFCs, White Phosphorus, Radium....all of these things should have been feared but weren't until millions of lives were hurt. Is AI the latest of these?
except AI literally thinks writes and creates for you if you let it. It’s not the same as a calculator - how many kids should we fail as a society before we protect them?
What adults? Some adults? Like what percentage of adults are experiencing adverse effects due to these things? And how do we know this is the cause? Do we know these people’s personal lives enough to know for sure that’s the reason? Surely for some it is, no doubt. Should we stop the presses to tend to the issues 1 in 100,000 have? What else should we ban because some small percentage of people are allergic to the thing?
Arguments in this thread seem to follow reasoning similar to this: Previous generations of children were exposed to lead in paint, lead in gasoline, second-hand smoke, and asbestos, and humanity survived. Every generation worries about some new environmental threat. Therefore, children exposed to harmful substances today will be fine.
Who is “we”? Some imaginary lost generation the media had you convinced of? People read more than ever. People have the capacity to create more than ever.
You may not approve of what is read or created but that part is particularly irrelevant to everyone else but you.
Not as a whole. That’s the huge leap you’re taking. Some people? Sure.
Society as a whole will be fine. Maybe not you. Or a friend. Maybe not some random person. But society is a different organism and operates under different set of forces. You’re projecting an individual’s experience to society and that is the fallacy in your reasoning.
As somebody who reads and creates quite regularly, prior to AI and now sometimes with AI, a new tool to play with for that has only given me a new joy for what I was getting bored of after a full decade of turning it into my job.
I don't even see why it's considered a necessary good thing to do those things, they're more of a destructive compulsion for me than a positive I feel a lot of the time. The starving artist cliche exists for a reason.
I mean, when I was a kid, using a Gameboy during class was banned. Now that I have my own kids, I make sure my school board and state ban smartphones in class.
These are both good bans that help with learning. Banning AI in class also sounds like a good thing too.
Banning AI in class will be the surest way your kids won’t succeed in the new economy. You don’t have to agree with what the future holds. The past is the past. We can lament that society does not reflect the way we grew up. And your kids will repeat that cycle soon enough and lament the things they are experiencing now will have changed. Round and round it goes. But one thing is for certain. Like 100% certain.
Believe me, I use AI every day at my job. But that makes me even more aware of its limitations (most of which will not be overcome in the next 10 years, despite what the companies claim). Kids can use it after they have mastered the basics.
I think they introduce Chromebooks too soon as well, but that's another rant.
You tell me. Would you do it because you have a genuine passion for it or so one day you can impress your friends with how committed and talented you are? Would you still learn to play an instrument if you were the last person in the world? For whose enjoyment are you making the time commitment? Did you even build the instrument with your own hands or take a shortcut purchasing one?
Would you stop raising horses because we have cars? Did paint and canvas go away with the advent of Photoshop? Why watch a movie when you can go see humans perform live at a play? Why listen to a song recording?
So you really think someone with no experience in these domains is going to crank out a masterpiece with no effort using AI? AI raises the floor, not the ceiling.
Some kid with no experience is not going to crank out the same level of quality writing enterprise software as me who has been doing it for 26 years. They are not a threat to me. A principal engineer using AI is my competition.
Well, there's not really a great way I can explain it to you. How the act of creation - writing, music, drawing, art in general - is a means of expression who you, specifically, are. Communicating thoughts and feelings in a way that directly telling someone isn't sufficient for doing.
I hope you get to feel that one day. It's a purely human feeling.
You're wrong, and I've been alive long enough to witness multiple paradigm shifts personally. This is not the same thing, nor are the issues people have with the extreme centralisation of control and plagiarism involved
All of these are still complained about except TV, back in the day people complained about the corrupting effects on the young of comics, books and bycicles
I think you are absolutely right, where kids are concerned. That is not about them. Protecting or maybe overprotecting them from whatever new thing just got invented is a worthy discussion to have (and will probably land on overprotection looking back).
Here I feel like they discuss 5th grade physics education in the context of physics based ICBMs existing. That is a ridiculous discussion.
horseradishstalker | 16 days ago
“If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI.
You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history.
With it you need no armies of typists and artists to spread your propaganda. It can enable mass surveillance and thereby put shackles on those who seek to resist you.
Its lethal autonomous weapons systems can perfect and normalise remote killing.
It will turbocharge inequality; it is already facilitating a breathtaking shift of power and wealth from the hands of the many to the hands of a tiny number of men who – to put it in terms for which I can’t be sued – seem to hold dangerously damaged views about the value and dignity of human life.”
And before anyone starts screaming, take the time to read the entire article. The author then goes onto list things that are fantastic uses for AI.
However, if society doesn’t take the time to sort out the best uses for this or any other tool - and it is a tool as pointed out by number of users - put in stringent guard rails as necessary and get out o the tools we already have are better suited for the intended purpose then when is society going to going to do so?
Ten years from now? Fifty years from now?
When the mantra of a particular industry is “go fast and break things” maybe now would be better than later.
mirh | 16 days ago
> You would cherish it for its ability to destabilise our shared reality and its creation of disinformation on a scale unprecedented in human history.
It's sentences like this that dishearten me about these articles. It's nuts that in the land of Murdoch, AI is identified as the fascist's best friend.
And then yeah it can enable mass surveillance, but that's only if your government keep pretending there's a public safety emergency every week and you believe to them.
Ditto for "normalizing remote killing", as if trump or netanyahu hadn't already normalized murder to begin with.
> The author then goes onto list things that are fantastic uses for AI.
Which are pretty much besides the point. I agree that there should be an absolute ban for younger kids, and even in high school there should be a presumptive one unless somehow clearing a high bar (idk teaching how to code with copilot?) but this is because people should learn how to think for themselves before they can even begin to try offloading that task to an assistant.
And this should be a call to arms for pedagogy.. but rather than somehow wonder how to stimulate and engage students in the classroom* (e.g. in italy we use to have a lot of oral test/questioning during the year) she almost seems concerned rote learning died.
^^*obviously ^^in ^^grade ^^school, ^^in ^^college ^^classes ^^are ^^too ^^big ^^and ^^infrequent ^^for ^^anything ^^like ^^this
horseradishstalker | 16 days ago
The author simply pointed out that most authoritarians would appreciate a tool that could accomplish those things. Mostly the article is about how problematic LLMs can be in education.
Edit to respond to your expansion(thanks!): I didn’t take these points to advocate for rote learning:
*”… large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini have thrown a grenade into thousands of years of teaching and learning: the way they threaten to upend our ability to think with the robust clarity that is needed in emergencies of justice.”
“… I’ve seen, at the same time, how it has thrown stark and urgent light on how fundamental books and reading are to our shared understanding of who we are, and to our democracy.”
“… Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. One found that after just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it”. An MIT study showed that test groups who used ChatGPT had the lowest brain activity and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioural levels”. We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.”
I don’t think rote learning assists anyone in developing critical thinking skills. Rote learning was why I hated history when I was a kid. But I guess having to memorize the date the Magna Carta was signed is still better than having to use ChatGPT because a student doesn’t know how to think for themself.
Personally, I’m neutral on AI in general. It is a great tool for some situations, but I don’t think it’s a very good tool for teaching kids to learn. People, especially children, learn best by doing not by having a tool do their thinking it for them.
mirh | 16 days ago
I expanded my reply, sorry.
And I'm very much hating on using AI for anything serious and that you couldn't cross-check yourself.
Away-Marionberry9365 | 15 days ago
Most people have the wrong idea of what technological singularity means. It's the point at which technological growth outpaces our ability to understand and control it.
This isn't something to look forward to. It's a warning.
[OP] CCDemille | 16 days ago
Oxford Fellow and children's author Katherine Rundell writes about the effects of AI on children's education and the development of young people's intellectual capacities.
blueleonardo | 16 days ago
The author makes it sound like AI is reducing critical thinking skills; but these skills were already in decline due to internet, screens, social media and low attention spans. She wants more human education but leaves out the 30-35 child classroom, the real bane of the school experience, or homework which is nothing more than repetition. If you’re a teacher who has to grade 30 essays what are the odds that you can engage with them on a real level and not just correct the basic thesis and then spelling and grammar.
The issues facing education is far more entrenched. AI will not help, and I agree with her assessment that it will further complicate education for those less advantaged. But to blame it on AI and offer close to no solutions for educators, parents, or society is kinda crazy. Like a teacher who now faces 30 AI written essays does what? How can you assign polynomial homework when AI can do it instantly (not like computers couldn’t do it before, easily)? The hard questions are around how we evaluate students, how we reduce class sizes, and how we provide broader educations that aren’t just the standard curriculum. That takes time, but it also takes money, a lot of money.
I worry about the future education for my kid. But my worries are about a boy who will sit in a classroom for 7 hours a day, be asked to memorize facts and figures, or worse blend into the background and not be noticed by a teacher that has more than 120 students across a school year.
mirh | 16 days ago
> but these skills were already in decline due to internet, screens, social media and low attention spans.
No, that's what right-wingers like Haidt want you to believe. That's happening because critical thinking isn't taught in schools, and the social fabric is getting always more and more undone.
Also all the other pretty mundane aspects about how schools are run, that you then go on to list.
> The author makes it sound like AI is reducing critical thinking skills
This said, I would contend this is also happening with adults. Just think to all those apes quoting grok.
blueleonardo | 16 days ago
Interesting, I didn’t realize that this was a right wing talking point. I think I’ve seen this notion repeated so many times; Gen Z being less effective in the work place, lower attention spans, poorer reasoning amongst young people.
Not sure if there’s any sourcing to your claim. Seems like my claim on the above is weaker than I believed in a quick search. Although screen us is slightly correlated to lower test results based on some studies.
All that being said, and this is not a hand wave away to your criticism that genuinely is making me rethink part of my statement; I think a lot of the issues in education are ‘meat and potatoes’ classes are too big, teachers need more support, education need more investment. But my point remains that I don’t think AI will be this destructive force for students.
mirh | 16 days ago
I'm very skeptical about AI (maybe because I was good in school and I can think and write for myself), even though I also feel like most criticism against it is misplaced and misinformed.
But I very firmly believe that it would be super disastrous to have in elementary school. Like, just try to apply those "I don't need math when calculators exist" train of thoughts that I always heard from the laziest and most unimaginative students to justify themselves, but applied to literally everything. Hell, you aren't even compromising the single courses, but even study strategies themselves if not even the need of any education.
> Interesting, I didn’t realize that this was a right wing talking point.
It's not strictly speaking, and somehow it was the labour governments (always and especially in the freaking anglosphere for some reason) in the uk and australia to make it policy first.
But once you put aside those that might "think to the children" legitimately in their dear conscience (and you know they may be gullible and not def hypocritical, because the rest of the time they don't do big cuts to education or to social security with a big laugh) it's kinda a galaxy of snakeoil salesmen that make of cherry picking datasets their profession.
flodereisen | 15 days ago
No, you are right. Northern countries are moving away from digitalisation, back to handwriting and books. The experiment was a failure.
horseradishstalker | 16 days ago
Very few complex issues are just one problem. They have tendency to amplify each other.
flodereisen | 15 days ago
> That's happening because critical thinking isn't taught in schools
This seems incredibly weird to me; America has reified "critical thinking". In other countries they do not teach "critical thinking" but they do not have problems producing people who think critically for themselves. It is not a single skill that can be taught but is a quality of the pople living in the culture. It is very basic to human interactions. We just call it common sense.
horseradishstalker | 16 days ago
It’s an article not War and Peace. If you want to know more about her suggestions beyond the ones that she names, then you probably just want to read her book.
I agree with you that LLMs are not the entire problem, but that doesn’t mean they are not a problem in the context the author provided. There can be more than one that one issue in a complex problem.
andersonb47 | 16 days ago
Complains about the decline of critical thinking but also can’t understand that the scope of an article can be limited lmao
Countercurrent123 | 15 days ago
https://open.substack.com/pub/mikemales/p/no-screens-are-not-making-gen-z-dumber?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=69w1l9
clean-links | 15 days ago
Cleaned link: https://open.substack.com/pub/mikemales/p/no-screens-are-not-making-gen-z-dumber?r=69w1l9
Tracking parameters were removed from the original URL(s).
antihostile | 15 days ago
I asked a contact who is the president of a billion-dollar tech enterprise, what would you teach your sons? He said he wouldn’t teach his children to use AI, because it will prepare them for nothing. He would teach them the humanities. Teach them who we are, who we have been, what we can make. The FT’s Gillian Tett reported that a senior financier’s New York firm now seeks out humanities students, because “AI-native” Stem graduates are entering the job market with “alarmingly shallow ideas”.
yogiphenomenology | 15 days ago
Rundell’s article is a deeply biased exercise in technophobia.
Framing generative language models as an existential threat to democracy and human dignity is not serious analysis, it is Luddite alarmism that substitutes emotion for evidence.
This level of hysteria is characteristic of historical technological panics. Every major leap in information technology was met with identical prophecies of doom regarding the collapse of human intellect.
A central flaw in Rundell’s argument is her habit of blaming AI for behavioural and structural issues that existed long before ChatGPT was launched. By treating AI as the source of long-standing pedagogical challenges, Rundell scapegoats a new tool rather than examining deeper issues in curriculum design, student engagement, and digital literacy.
Perhaps the most telling display of bias in the article is the way Rundell handles the positive applications of AI. She concedes in a single, dismissive paragraph that AI could speed the cure of cancer, assist disabled people, democratise legal access, and predict natural disasters only to instantly declare these outcomes "completely irrelevant" if the technology is abused.
RexDraco | 16 days ago
Rinse and repeat. First it was tv, then video games, then memes, now it's ai.
Sure, it's a problem, but the tragic thing is it's better to adapt to the shift in social climate than expect people to behave like the old generations.
andersonb47 | 16 days ago
AI is so different from those things though. You can’t outsource all of your thinking with video games.
goodgord | 16 days ago
Socrates had a similar argument against people learning to read:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedrus.html Plato wrote that Socrates said this in phaedrus.
"for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
Humans are apprehensive about all technology, almost surely as much as they are completely besotted by it.
nevereverreddit | 16 days ago
So your reasoning is this: Socrates was concerned about one kind of cognitive offloading (one which facilitated transmission of ideas and acquisition of knowledge) and therefore we shouldn’t be concerned about a new kind of cognitive offloading (one which appears to supplant learning and thinking). Socrates might have called this the “historical reassurance fallacy”.
goodgord | 15 days ago
I’m not trying to reason anything, happy to leave that to the philosophers - just pointing out that new technology has always been contentious.
flodereisen | 15 days ago
Yes, and he was right: before literacy, people memorized entire sagas like the Odyssey and knew them by heart. In Eastern European villages, you could watch this fade away in a generation of literacy.
Same with radio: before then, people sang and made music themselves. Before TV, people put on plays for fun for their friends. Who does that anymore? Everything authentic and social gets coopted to the machine.
RexDraco | 16 days ago
I wasn't saying we should allow people to rot, but we need to adapt on how we educate them. Modern education is failing them and being stubborn and ignoring the obvious for the sake of historical quotes that somewhat sound familiar isn't an excuse to not adapt.
goodgord | 16 days ago
Oh, I completely agree. I was just pointing out this is about how we as humans relate to technology in general, and that it’s not in any way new. I mean - most educators these days are all in agreement that learning to read is good :)
DHFranklin | 16 days ago
None of those observations are unique to AI except the intellectual laziness thing. Which is ironic as hell as this was really lazy in it's observations. Every school needs to go back to ink and paper for everything. Shame she only brought up Sweden and Norway. The screens are a huge problem. The AI is making it worse. However it's foolish to put all of her conclusions on software.
>There are many things I hate unequivocally about AI. I hate that it can make counterfeit people;
Ma'am...Ma'am... You digitally make counterfeit people all the time. You're a children's book author. AI did not invent the pseudonym or..ya know..lying.
>Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. One found that after just “10 minutes of AI-assisted problem-solving, people who lost access to the AI performed worse and gave up more frequently than those who never used it”
Fair criticism. Really wish the whole article was about learned helplessness. Certainly a bigger problem now than ever as people aren't even googling how to solve the problems they've created.
>Those who work in ed tech promise that it will liberate teachers and create one-to-one learning experiences for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Yes. For the kids that aren't getting enough instruction or have special needs. Hell even just translating things into languages not spoken in the class room. If you are assuming the worst from this, assume the worst from the schooling not software.
>AI, we’re told, will make learning more efficient. But is that what we dream of for our kids – an efficient childhood? To write an efficient story, sing an efficient song?
I don't think she wrote this on a typewriter. I don't think she is making illuminated manuscripts of her children's books.
>But we can no longer guarantee that the work students give us is the product of their own minds.
so...plagiarism. Your problem is plagiarism not AI. Trust me when I was in school we didn't need AI to plagiarize.
>A friend who teaches maths at a London university told me his students are handing in essays without deleting AI’s jaunty “Happy to help!” at the start
Man, what math are they teaching in the UK?
There are tons of legitimate gripes that you can have with foisting LLMs on children. It's a shame she spent more time complaining about data centers then focusing on that. Really glad that the Guardian doesn't use a data center and mailed me her article.
Outside_Knowledge_24 | 16 days ago
It’s pretty disingenuous (or maybe just ignorant) to conflate the types of datacenters used to support non-AI web operations and those for AI training and inference. The scale (and corresponding disruption) of AI datacenters is FAR greater. Additionally, people generally appreciate and value the outputs of traditional datacenters, while there is very strong negative sentiment surrounding AI as it exists today.
I think you’re also misunderstanding what the author means by “counterfeit people” if you believe a fictional character created by an author in a contained piece of media is comparable to social media personas that can act more-or-less on their own with plausible-sounding opinions that dilute real human voices on the web.
You also appear to be misrepresenting or misunderstanding what the author means by “efficient childhood” and why it would be bad. Your comparison of AI to a typewriter/word processor is way off the mark. A word processor is a digital substitute for a physical process, enabling a writer to enact their will more easily and with less risk of an unfixable error. The writer must still choose every word. AI for creative works is different: it replaces the creative and mental work/expression with a digital facsimile. The resulting work is not the product of a child’s mind, and they did not grow from asking a machine to produce it for them, nor did they acquire skill or proficiency.
I also think you’re being flippant about plagiarism. When you were in school, you didn’t have access to a world class plagiarism machine which could generate difficult-to-detect (if you expend any effort) plagiarized material on literally any topic at the click of a button.
DHFranklin | 16 days ago
The scale is the problem not the technology. You can run LLMs on your own computer. China is doing this shit left right and center. The Google data center running google searches is the same one running Gemini. Scale cuts both ways. Your problem is capitalism, the speculation of American finance, and not software. The AI folding proteins and making targeted medicine has a bit more value than the ones bitcoin mining a rack over. You don't need to tell me that there is negative sentiment about AI. That is obvious enough here on Reddit where I can tell people that I am using my home computer to help find cures for obscure diseases and I get flamed to shit.
I was being flip about the counterfeit people thing. She can pretend to be someone else online. It's a department in several intelligence agencies at the national level. They do that all the time. Now it's just faster.
Your reply to my comment about the efficient childhood thing reads like all you read was my quote and quip. She made a Luddite argument in the article about how things being more laborious is the point. Feel free to reply to this with the two parts of London she mentioned so I know you actually read the article.
You are right about the plagiarism thing. It would have taken several buttons and google searches. My education would have suffered just the same.
Thanks for engaging with the complimentary things I said about the piece and ideas you agreed with instead of grinding an axe.
oh wait...
horseradishstalker | 16 days ago
“There are tons of legitimate gripes that you can have with foisting LLMs on children. It's a shame she spent more time complaining about data centers then focusing on that.”
blink This is a long form essay, and I am not quite sure how one small paragraph referring to data centers suddenly became a focus when multiple paragraphs were dedicated to the issues and consequences of foisting LLMs on children.
This is pretty much all that was said about data centers:
“ I hate …the yearly electrical demand of AI-optimised data centres is predicted, by the end of this decade, to exceed that of the whole of Japan.”
On the other hand, this is how she begins the discussion regarding foisting LLMs on children which is the actual focus of the piece:
“ Most of all, if you were a would-be autocrat, you would love the way that large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude and Google’s Gemini have thrown a grenade into thousands of years of teaching and learning:
the way they threaten to upend our ability to think with the robust clarity that is needed in emergencies of justice.
I write fiction for children and I hold a fellowship at Oxford University, so I spend a lot of time working with, and for, young people. I’ve seen first-hand the way that generative AI has already infiltrated young people’s lives.
I’ve seen, at the same time, how it has thrown stark and urgent light on how fundamental books and reading are to our shared understanding of who we are, and to our democracy.” because it’s a long form article. There is considerably more than that on the issues regarding LLM’s being foisted on children.”
DHFranklin | 16 days ago
Not the use. The foisting. I was very specific about it.
You don't want your kids to use it? Cool. You don't want your school district to use it? Cool.
We don't want the foisting. And there will be local AI on all the computers in the computer lab. No data center necessary. However their will be tons of foisting.
horseradishstalker | 16 days ago
I literally quoted you complaining that putting one paragraph in a long form essay about data centers shifted the focus away from the entire theme of the article which literally focuses on the issues involved when LLMs are forced on children.
I then quoted several paragraphs from the article detailing the issues with foisting LLM’s on children.
If you look at the context surrounding the paragraph about data centers, it was part of a relatively small section of things the author also considers problematic about AI in addition to the consequences of foisting LLMs on children.
I think you will find that many people consider AI to be problematic in a number of various ways. Not just when they are forced on children. Environmental degradation is but one of the other issues involved.
Are you feeling okay?
DHFranklin | 16 days ago
I'm feeling frustrated that we are seeing yet another of these stupid pieces engaging morons for updoots. The current 2 minute hate.
Again....and I need you to work with me here....the foisting.
Not the kids using it. Not anything else about it. She spent more time talking about the hardware instead of the lack of agency in parents or children. The foisting.
Brucacumble | 16 days ago
AI is a form of universal punishment for the human race. Because they deny eachother and war with eachother the universe has gifted them plague after plague.
Edit: There's little point in engaging with people who are addicted to AI. The companies designed their product to be addictive. There are some success stories, but if you try to get through to a meth addict they will often become verbally abusive and even physically violent in their attempts to maintain access to their addiction.
Trackpoint | 16 days ago
It is so strange, that any discussion about AI on this platforms feels like it is taken over by crazy people, like discussions about US politics was some time ago.
fightmaxmaster | 16 days ago
I think it's the typical 10/80/10 kind of breakdown, with a vocal handful of pro/anti AI people and a big middle ground of people who really don't care. Trouble is the pro group are convinced that AI is flawless and amazing, and the anti group consider any and all AI usage to be equally morally abhorrent.
Reddit generally is quite anti-AI, but it's gone way beyond "here are some arguments against it" and instead is becoming its own sort of groupthink, black and white, "you're with us or you're against us" mentality. Assuming that anyone who uses AI for anything has lost all their critical thinking skills, that an overworked teacher using it to crank out some fliers is a soulless monster, etc. It's bizarre. Yes the pro AI groups have their own weirdness going on, they're just not as prevalent. I swear some people are so devoted to upvotes from expressing anti AI sentiment, or the desire to feel like the "in group" that the rhetoric has become wholly unreasonable.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone replies to this acting like I'm on the rapidly pro-AI side of things, which I'm not at all, but it'll prove my point. Coupled with a general increasing lack of literacy and nuance. But then that's the internet for you.
horseradishstalker | 16 days ago
I think you make a very good point. AI is a tool. So is a hammer. I can build a house with it or I can bash your brains in with it. The problem is when the indifferent group in the middle suddenly starts noticing when everything‘s gone to bleep it may be too late to stop and think about what parts of the tool are productive, and which parts are not. Better to address the issues now than later which is what the author of this article did. She notes what works and what doesn’t work in her professional estimation and why.
But you aren’t wrong that many people just start screaming before they start thinking.
fightmaxmaster | 16 days ago
Fair point about the indifferent group in the middle, but that's also where the rabidly anti-AI crowd need to realise that trying to paint it all with the same brush isn't going to convince anyone. There are very serious discussions that need to be had about regulation, safety, and dozens of other aspects. But too many people are blowing straight past that and into some version of "if you use AI for anything you're basically the antichrist", and that's going to turn so many people away from them.
The other day there was someone on another subreddit, non-English speaker, saying he'd written a book and had used AI to help him fix some typos and grammar - that was it, not "polishing the writing" or anything else. People piled onto him like he'd got AI to write the whole book for him, attacking his character, etc. It was insane. Of course those people are the minority, but it's like a form of reverse AI psychosis or something. Some people can't separate clearly distinct scenarios or use cases, they just hear that someone's used AI and the red mist comes down.
horseradishstalker | 16 days ago
I 100% agree.
Brucacumble | 16 days ago
There's little point in engaging with people who are addicted to AI. The companies designed their product to be addictive. There are some success stories, but if you try to get through to a meth addict they will often become verbally abusive and even physically violent in their attempts to maintain access to their addiction.
Seek help. Not trying to be mean and I know, like the meth addict, you'll only lash out in violence to protect your addiction. But maybe someday when you're strung out and unable to care for yourself you'll remember this. Seek help.
SuppaDumDum | 16 days ago
Pretty nice to ask it for help with organizing info, writing coding scripts, learn the basics of a topic without good info about it online, answering academic questions, helping with cooking questions no one will answer, googling things without being useless, asking about legal matters, translating from/to other languages, answering questions about other languages no one will answer, well that but for a ton of topics, helping with home repairs, help finding papers, help finding resources, help finding niche things. Some people don't have individual access to it though, so they're only punished by others' hands instead of their own.
Trackpoint | 16 days ago
I am often baffled by the AI discussions going on. AI being a problem about water use, AI being a problem about social security/correct tax levels, AI being a problem about school children here.
Everyone seems to be using the existence of modern AI as a stage, to discuss whatever (surely important!) problem that exists in their sphere.
Now this thoughtful piece feels to be basically about discussions that probably happened in the 70s about calculators and math classes, the 80s with teaching by pupils passively watching VHS tapes, and the late 2010s about even more screen time for young people by the way of mobile social apps.
An educator's job is to teach how to think. So any tool that takes over the thinking or any teaching method that puts pupils in a passive role, like video, is something to be avoided. That isn't hard or complicated or new. There are tools today that are as good at essays, or any exercise imaginable really, as calulators were and are at multiplication tables. If you want to teach these things, you have to make sure, the students don't use these tools.
Stop conflating the neccessary discussion about AI with stuff like this. Whatever the outcome of humanity's latest Icarus flight to the sun, education is still the same as it always was.
hippydipster | 16 days ago
>education is still the same as it always was
Nothing ever changes is always such an interesting worldview., often unfalsifiable in the ways people will hold it.
Things do change, though, and education is not the same as it always have been. The raw material of human children start out the same as they used to, but the environment is far different now than it used to be, and there are new struggles for the education system to contend with as a result.
An AI that can write essays is not the same as a calculator, and the impact of each is likewise very different.
Trackpoint | 16 days ago
> An AI that can write essays is not the same as a calculator, and the impact of each is likewise very different.
I think that it is very different in a lot of dimensions. Modern and AI and everything that comes with it is probably the on the same level as the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, concentrated in a singele decade.
But not when it comes to educate little humans. You teach thinking. They will have to interface with social structures, technology and whatever at some point, but that should not be the point of primary education.
hippydipster | 16 days ago
> You teach thinking.
We don't. We don't know how. We use what we have to prepare them for our current world as best we can, but it only rarely and accidentally involves "thinking". And the results are shaped by the current social structures, technology, and whatever, and so the results have changed over time. And AI will change it tremendously, as did the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.
DHFranklin | 16 days ago
At least I know I can always go to the comments at the bottom for pushback against this alarmist moral panic bullshit.
I swear the Manufactured Consent is people seeing ridiculous low hanging fruit in engagement. Just find a talking head. Incentivize a reason to roll out the same talking points. Watch it spread and get the same comments under the same articles. Wait for next weeks deadlines, find the right talking heads.
It's fuckin' Madlibs. AI Is hurting the _____(noun) with the hidden cost that is ____(verb) leading them to be _____(Adjective).
No one has any idea that AI can fit on home computers or phones or is making revolutionary software for medical research and things. Its like in 2022 someone told them that AI is just a Deepfake machine that runs on coal fired steam that needs your water specifically.
It's getting so aggravating.
SuppaDumDum | 16 days ago
> An educator's job is to teach how to think. So any tool that takes over the thinking or any teaching method that puts pupils in a passive role, like video, is something to be avoided.
It's nice that you said avoided rather than excluded. I agree that generally avoiding them is good. But students should also get used to using these passive tools, ideally they free the brain to actively engage with some larger task delegating minutia to the tool. The examples for calculators are obvious, the examples for videos, I'm not sure what that would be.
LocoMod | 16 days ago
Every generation has its "think of the children" woes. TV, telephones, video games, computers, internet, social media, smart phones....all of these things were feared. AI is just the latest fad.
xavier10101 | 16 days ago
And every generation also has woes which do significant damage without us realizing. Asbestos, Lead in paint and gasoline, CFCs, White Phosphorus, Radium....all of these things should have been feared but weren't until millions of lives were hurt. Is AI the latest of these?
d4electro | 16 days ago
All of those are poisonous chemical substances, or have deleterious chemical effects
flammenwerfer | 16 days ago
except AI literally thinks writes and creates for you if you let it. It’s not the same as a calculator - how many kids should we fail as a society before we protect them?
Regdit-is-Unbearable | 16 days ago
Tbf that’s what’s everyone said about the calculator, and the cell phone, and the PC
Mommy_Fortuna_ | 16 days ago
They were never wrong about the cell phones. They truly have degraded the attention spans of many people.
DHFranklin | 16 days ago
Maybe these people shouldn't rely on the public education system to raise their damn kids?
You don't want kids using AI to cheat on their homework? That's on you.
LocoMod | 16 days ago
Consuming TV and social media is also a passive mindless act for the most part.
The kids will be fine.
papasan_mamasan | 16 days ago
A lot of the adults who grew up on TV and social media are not fine.
It’s ok to stop, assess, and make changes. We don’t have to trudge forward with jamming tech in classrooms just because investors need us to.
It’s ok to legislate regulations on social media, TV, and AI for the betterment of present and future generations.
NoCoolNameMatt | 16 days ago
Yeah, I've seen tiktok and FB Reels destroy a few adults. Bodies and minds.
gottastayfresh3 | 16 days ago
The adults who use it are experiencing adverse effects. What makes you think the children won't?
LocoMod | 16 days ago
What adults? Some adults? Like what percentage of adults are experiencing adverse effects due to these things? And how do we know this is the cause? Do we know these people’s personal lives enough to know for sure that’s the reason? Surely for some it is, no doubt. Should we stop the presses to tend to the issues 1 in 100,000 have? What else should we ban because some small percentage of people are allergic to the thing?
papasan_mamasan | 16 days ago
Well something certainly seems off with your ability to have a nuanced good faith discussion, so perhaps it’s time you put the computer down.
LocoMod | 16 days ago
Yes because your comment had a lot of substance to it. Enlighten us Mr. Ad Hominem.
nevereverreddit | 16 days ago
Arguments in this thread seem to follow reasoning similar to this: Previous generations of children were exposed to lead in paint, lead in gasoline, second-hand smoke, and asbestos, and humanity survived. Every generation worries about some new environmental threat. Therefore, children exposed to harmful substances today will be fine.
gottastayfresh3 | 16 days ago
And we've become less likely to read, create, and enjoy.
Maybe they were on to something...
LocoMod | 16 days ago
Who is “we”? Some imaginary lost generation the media had you convinced of? People read more than ever. People have the capacity to create more than ever.
You may not approve of what is read or created but that part is particularly irrelevant to everyone else but you.
gottastayfresh3 | 16 days ago
Who are "people"? Some specific person like you that the media has convinced is the sole determiner of what is good or bad?
You may find value in what you read, write, create via AI, but that doesn't negate the effects of AI on society as a whole.
LocoMod | 16 days ago
Not as a whole. That’s the huge leap you’re taking. Some people? Sure.
Society as a whole will be fine. Maybe not you. Or a friend. Maybe not some random person. But society is a different organism and operates under different set of forces. You’re projecting an individual’s experience to society and that is the fallacy in your reasoning.
AnOnlineHandle | 16 days ago
As somebody who reads and creates quite regularly, prior to AI and now sometimes with AI, a new tool to play with for that has only given me a new joy for what I was getting bored of after a full decade of turning it into my job.
I don't even see why it's considered a necessary good thing to do those things, they're more of a destructive compulsion for me than a positive I feel a lot of the time. The starving artist cliche exists for a reason.
SilverMedal4Life | 15 days ago
How will AI tools make artists starve less? I'm not trying to be hyperbolic here, I genuinely do not understand how it would actually help.
EmeraldHawk | 16 days ago
I mean, when I was a kid, using a Gameboy during class was banned. Now that I have my own kids, I make sure my school board and state ban smartphones in class.
These are both good bans that help with learning. Banning AI in class also sounds like a good thing too.
DHFranklin | 16 days ago
The good thing is that you are an active parent. It ain't for the school board to raise anyone's kids.
If they get new software foisted on them, they'll use it. Yeah, you and the PTA have to get the board of ed to push back on them.
In their computer science classes from here on out they're going to need to know how the technology works
LocoMod | 16 days ago
Banning AI in class will be the surest way your kids won’t succeed in the new economy. You don’t have to agree with what the future holds. The past is the past. We can lament that society does not reflect the way we grew up. And your kids will repeat that cycle soon enough and lament the things they are experiencing now will have changed. Round and round it goes. But one thing is for certain. Like 100% certain.
Change is the only constant.
EmeraldHawk | 16 days ago
Believe me, I use AI every day at my job. But that makes me even more aware of its limitations (most of which will not be overcome in the next 10 years, despite what the companies claim). Kids can use it after they have mastered the basics.
I think they introduce Chromebooks too soon as well, but that's another rant.
LocoMod | 16 days ago
Make sure you teach your kids how rub sticks to create fire before they learn how to use a lighter. Just in case they ever have to do it by hand.
SilverMedal4Life | 15 days ago
I'm asking this as a genuine good-faith discussion.
What is the point in learning how to play an instrument, which takes years of practice to do, when I can ask a computer to compose a song for me?
LocoMod | 15 days ago
You tell me. Would you do it because you have a genuine passion for it or so one day you can impress your friends with how committed and talented you are? Would you still learn to play an instrument if you were the last person in the world? For whose enjoyment are you making the time commitment? Did you even build the instrument with your own hands or take a shortcut purchasing one?
Would you stop raising horses because we have cars? Did paint and canvas go away with the advent of Photoshop? Why watch a movie when you can go see humans perform live at a play? Why listen to a song recording?
So you really think someone with no experience in these domains is going to crank out a masterpiece with no effort using AI? AI raises the floor, not the ceiling.
Some kid with no experience is not going to crank out the same level of quality writing enterprise software as me who has been doing it for 26 years. They are not a threat to me. A principal engineer using AI is my competition.
SilverMedal4Life | 15 days ago
Ah, so your answer is "there is no point."
Well, there's not really a great way I can explain it to you. How the act of creation - writing, music, drawing, art in general - is a means of expression who you, specifically, are. Communicating thoughts and feelings in a way that directly telling someone isn't sufficient for doing.
I hope you get to feel that one day. It's a purely human feeling.
SquidAxis | 16 days ago
You're wrong, and I've been alive long enough to witness multiple paradigm shifts personally. This is not the same thing, nor are the issues people have with the extreme centralisation of control and plagiarism involved
d4electro | 16 days ago
All of these are still complained about except TV, back in the day people complained about the corrupting effects on the young of comics, books and bycicles
hippydipster | 16 days ago
All those things had impact. AI will too, and probably a larger one.
Trackpoint | 16 days ago
I think you are absolutely right, where kids are concerned. That is not about them. Protecting or maybe overprotecting them from whatever new thing just got invented is a worthy discussion to have (and will probably land on overprotection looking back).
Here I feel like they discuss 5th grade physics education in the context of physics based ICBMs existing. That is a ridiculous discussion.